Session 128: Individual Papers: Women and Femininity in Modern Japan

Organizer and Chair: Gregory J. Kasza, Indiana University

Kitagawa Chiyo: A Forgotten Shōjo Story Writer

Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase, Vassar College

Shōjo Bunka (girls’ culture) of the prewar era has recently become a focus of academic attention. Girls’ magazine stories of this era have been enthusiastically reprinted, and many forgotten writers have been rediscovered because of the uniqueness of their narratives. However, in the current scholastic literature, much information is still lacking and the images associated with girls’ stories are simplistic; the bourgeois taste and flowery fantasy represent most people’s understanding of Japanese girls’ magazine stories.

Girls’ prewar literature is in fact more diversified. One of the most interesting writers is Kitagawa Chiyo, who is now forgotten but was as popular as Yoshiya Nobuko (a leading figure in Japanese girls’ magazine story culture) at the time. Interestingly, Kitagawa was an active member of Sekirankai (the Red Flag Society), an anarchist organization, and its influence is obvious in her works. She pays attention to girls of the working class, and her heroines are usually factory workers and servants; this is very different from the girl characters that Yoshiya depicts—upper middle class schoolgirls. Kitagawa’s works are realistic and poignant, and she accuses capitalist society by employing the perspective of poor girls, the social weak.

In my presentation, I would like to discuss Kitagawa’s girls’ stories in comparison to those of Yoshiya and to examine how tactically she delivers her political messages using the idea of "girl" and girls’ media. Kitagawa’s literature can provide a new discussion of the idea of Japanese Shōjo Bunka.

The Feminist Magazine Nyonin Geijutsu and Its Contribution to the Japanese Feminist Movement

Sreedevi Reddy, University of Tsukuba

Hasegawa Shigure, well-known woman playwright of Kabuki, revived the title Nyonin Geijutsu (Women’s Arts) to launch the second most influential feminist journal after Seito, with the intention of unearthing and nurturing new women writers. It ran from July 1928 to June 1932, with a total of forty-eight issues. Out of them three issues were banned for publishing "objectionable" articles. Hasegawa had attempted to include a diverse collection of forms, styles, and themes, encouraging writers to try new approaches

Nyonin Geijutsu was a feminist magazine with the policy "of women, for women, by women". Innumerable women writers debuted to literary world through the pages of Nyonin Geijutsu, such as Hayashi Fumiko, Enchi Fumiko, Nakamoto Takako, Tsujiyama Haruko, and Matsuda Tokiko, to name a few in the long list.

Nyonin Geijutsu employed elaborate public relations campaigns, held parties with the press in attendance, and adopted Zadankai (roundtable discussions) formats of discussions with serious current themes. In this presentation, I shall show how these Zadankais contributed to the women’s movement as a strategic means of providing information to ordinary women. There are more than twenty-three Zadankais conducted and published in the journal. I would argue, Round Table Discussions provided multi-sided views and approaches on the issues to the reader. Readers could identify themselves with the discussions in Zadankais, due to their informal conversation style, unlike the articles with stuffy ideological jargon. I would like to state that Zadankai was an effective strategy and style employed by the journal in order to spread the women’s movement to the masses.

Girl Terrors (Shôjo Terô): Japan’s Cute/Pop Culture Modified for Girl Consumption

Katherine Mezur, University of California, Berkeley

In this essay I examine the transmigration of Japanese "little girl" culture and "little girl" iconography in contemporary Japanese performance and media art. I analyze the work of several women performers (Sunayama) and visual artists (Yanagi) who take the "little girl" to extremes, revealing an arena of mutability and agency. I will consider the exportation of this "little girl" in its myriad forms in the global marketplace and her "exported" and "local" identities. While researching the "little girl" as an "export" icon, I found the critique of the J-pop culture "little girl" to be complex and deeply conflicting. The manipulation of "cute" (kawaii) aesthetics pushed my query forward: the little girl appears to have just the right amount of polyphonic attraction; and safety and danger are proportioned so that the little girl’s sweetness is cut by terror of abjection, the "other" side of "girl culture." Longing and terror for the "little girl" saturates all "her" stories, representations, and products. The little girls of new media art, comics, and performance terrorize and delight. She is doubly desired for her sweetness and her darkness. I suggest that the "little girl" can be a radical "other" for young women in Japan and another "other" in her exported form. Japanese women artists have begun to exploit the "little girl’s" darker story of nostalgia, longing, and self-annihilation, raising questions concerning power, subjection, and abjection. Turning little girl culture into a transformative space, they go beyond Nara Yoshimoto’s little girls who smile and "cut with a knife."

Pragmatic Singles: Resistance and Compromise in the Lives of Unmarried Japanese Women

Tamiko Ortega Noll, University of Pittsburgh

The concept of an unmarried Japanese woman carries a variety of changing meanings for both women and men. In the past unmarried Japanese women were viewed as a conceptual anomaly vis-à-vis the dominant rhetoric of universal marriage. In contemporary Japan women are marrying later or even choosing not to marry at all. Demographers view the personal actions by unmarried women as cumulatively accounting for a large component of the declining birth rate. In this paper I explore how unmarried Japanese women create and sustain their identities despite a public rhetoric that marginalizes or degrades their existence as a social category. Unmarried Japanese women are not "parasite singles," the homogenous entity that the Japanese government and media have portrayed them to be. Nor are they a part of an explicit, organized feminist revolution. Based on ethnographic data collected in a city in rural Japan, I argue that unmarried Japanese women are responding to a specific set of economic, political, and social conditions in which they find themselves. The cultural dialogue associated with "being unmarried" exposes how the government naturalizes and rationalizes the marital union to support its interests in maintaining productivity of the core (male) workforce, and the reproduction of future Japanese citizens. Unmarried Japanese women are positioned as key players in the maintenance of latent cultural logics regarding the family, work, nation, and reproduction. Even so, through their everyday enactments of "being unmarried," through resistance and compromise, unmarried women force and enforce change in the social landscape of contemporary Japan.

Male Speakers of Japanese Women’s Language in Media: Genderized Performance and Femininity

Setsu Kawada, University of Colorado, Boulder

In Japanese language, "feminine" and "masculine" expressions have changed concurrently with the emergence of ideological gender representations. Many sociolinguistic studies have characterized the linguistic shift as "neutralization" or "defeminization" from the women’s perspective. However, genderized language use by Japanese men has visibly emerged as a trend of men’s gender representations.

Japanese women’s language, Yamanote-kotoba, has been considered a tool to enforce the political and gender hierarchy in modern Japanese society. The effectiveness of this tool, however, has been decreasing due to the transformation of the "femininity" concept especially among young women. Interestingly, some Japanese men have adopted a derivative of Yamanote-kotoba, called Onê-kotoba. Although those who speak Onê-kotoba are limited, they have achieved a high media profile as Onê-kei.

The speakers of Onê-kotoba, regardless of whether or not they are transsexuals, have made a confident choice to establish a unique and appealing identity that is not necessarily characterized as okama, or Japanese gay people, but surpasses gender dichotomy. While the sense of femininity has shifted, the sense of masculinity has been in a process of ramification.

I examined questions about the use of Japanese "women’s language" by men in media representations, their gender performances, and also the social acceptance in current Japanese society. The answers reveal how the perceptions of gender identity are associated with the use of the language, and how the gender context remains and evolves with visual performances of the Japanese sense of femininity.