Organizer and Chair: Robert J. Pekkanen, University of Washington
Ki-young Shin, Seoul National University
This paper examines the construction of gendered citizenship in postwar Japan.
While Japanese constitution declared legal equality between sexes, family
was rendered as an arena where those constitutional principles do not always
apply. Family law postulated division of the private and public spheres in which
men and women assumed different roles and unequal relations; women's citizenship
was associated with the private sphere through their roles as mothers and
wives. However, last two decades witnessed great changes in women's economic
and educational status, and such changes came to challenge a gendered division
of the private and public spheres. One example is women's demands for the family
law revision in recent years. They sought to redress the social inequality of
the family laws such as women’s family name, discrimination against children born
out of wedlock, and the recognition of the legitimacy of children. However,
such demands stirred strong conservative oppositions who obstructed any revisions
of the family law as it would invite the crisis of the family and the Japanese
nation. By analyzing various recent debates and public discourses on family
law issues that are undergoing now, this paper argues, first, family law has
become once again a site of struggle for women’s citizenship by re-associating
women to their roles in the private sphere and, second, such women's positions
in the family consolidates gendered citizenship of women by preventing women’s
participation in Japanese society as equal citizens to Japanese men.
Akihiro Ogawa, Stockholm University
This paper provides an ethnographic account of the concept of peace in contemporary
Japanese society, focusing on the ongoing political agenda—Japan’s
constitutional revision. I primarily observe the attempts to revise Article
9, which distinctively articulates Japan’s pacifism and the renunciation
of war in the post-World War II political discourse. Article 9 is a culturally
embedded norm defining Japanese political life over the past half-century.
The law shapes Japanese individual and group identities, social relations and
practices, and the meaning of cultural symbols. But all of these things also
shape the law itself by changing what is socially desirable. With sixty years
having passed, conservative politicians, major political figures in Japanese
politics, have come to believe that there are provisions within the constitution
such as Article 9 that no longer fit the reality of international relations
following the end of the Cold War. In May 2007, Japan's parliament passed a
bill to set referendum procedures for constitutional amendments; it established
a legal framework for rewriting the pacifist constitution. The bill's passage
initiates a step to boost national debates. Meanwhile, dynamic social movements
against the revision are emerging at the grassroots level across the country
and beyond. This paper presents how Japanese grassroots reconstruct the concept
of peace amid the revision process, providing narratives on their war experiences
and memories in their own words. My ethnography confirms fundamental conflicts
on the political environment surrounding the discourse on Article 9 between
policy makers and ordinary grassroots.
Yasuhiro Makimura, Iona College
The cotton industry became one of the driving forces in nineteenth-century
Japanese economic development. In the first few years after the Meiji Restoration,
the home-grown cotton industry was destroyed by the import of cheap cotton fabrics
from Britain. But starting in the 1880s, numerous companies emerged in the Osaka
region to turn imported raw cotton into cotton threads. By the 1900s, established
and new companies took those cotton threads and made them into cotton fabrics.
This development of the cotton industry is a well known story that emphasizes
the bottom-up nature of economic development in western Japan (as opposed to
some of the high profile top-down projects of heavy industry).
This paper seeks to turn the spotlight onto the consumers of the cotton.
Who bought the imported shirts in the years after the Restoration? When the
home grown cotton industry died, what happened to the producers of Japanese
raw cotton? Japan did not export cotton threads until the late 1890s; it was
only in the early 1900s that cotton thread exports finally beat cotton thread
imports. Who was buying the cotton threads and later the cotton fabrics inside
Japan from the 1880s to the 1900s? How much did those people buy? Where did
they get the money? Without the consumers, the story of development still remains
a mystery.
As a scholar currently researching this topic in Japan on a one-year grant,
I hope to have answers to these questions and discuss the broader picture of
Japanese economic development.
Karen Lee Callahan, University of Alaska, Fairbanks
In the spring of 1922, Margaret Sanger, the famous American birth control
activist, visited Japan. Soon thereafter, a movement for birth control was
organized in Japan, and over the next fifteen years, advocates worked to publicize
information about the methods of birth control available at the time. Yet even
before Sanger’s
arrival in Japan, the subject of birth control had already received quite a
bit of attention in the Japanese press. One of the people who had first introduced
Sanger’s ideas to Japan — in the pages of both general-interest
and women’s magazines — was Yamakawa Kikue (1890-1980). By then
already well known for her socialist and feminist views, Yamakawa had written
about birth control as early as 1920, had translated some of Sanger’s
writings in 1921, and would continue to write about birth control throughout
the 1920s and the early 1930s. When Yamakawa’s writings are compared with
those of her contemporaries, her arguments are remarkable for their strong emphasis
on women’s reproductive rights. Unlike many Japanese birth control advocates
of the time, she did not emphasize birth control’s benefits “for
the nation”, nor did she dismiss birth control as merely a “bourgeois” issue,
as many of her socialist comrades were inclined to do. Yamakawa’s arguments
for birth control stand out among her contemporaries and complicate our views
of the history of feminism and socialism in early twentieth-century Japan.
Brenda R. Jenike, Lawrence University
Japanese of all ages are well aware of the demographic reality that they
are living in a rapidly aging society: the elderly population in Japan is burgeoning,
while the youth population needed to support it is shrinking. To deal with this
demographic and elder care crisis, the Japanese state replaced the social welfare
system that had provided elder care services in the 1990s with a national long-term
care insurance program in April, 2000. A mandatory program without the stigma
of welfare, LTCI has essentially transformed elder care in Japan from a morally-based,
family-centered welfare system to a consumer-driven entitlement system of supportive
and institutional long-term community care. A range of residential care options,
adult day care centers, and a plethora of home and respite services, as well
as some high-tech creativity, are providing new cultural spaces for the growing
numbers of Japanese seniors to experience late life. Drawing from extensive
fieldwork in Tokyo in the late 1990s, with follow-up fieldwork in 2005, this
paper examines the impact of the move to community care under LTCI (a profound
change in practices) on the meanings of care, filial piety, and old age itself.
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