Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan 9781472526991, 9781474211192, 9781472525666

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Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan

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SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan Series Editor: Christopher Gerteis, SOAS, University of London (UK) Series Editorial Board: Steve Dodd, SOAS, University of London (UK) Andrew Gerstle, SOAS, University of London (UK) Janet Hunter, London School of Economics and Political Science (UK) Helen Macnaughtan, SOAS, University of London (UK) Timon Screech, SOAS, University of London (UK) Naoko Shimazu, Birkbeck, University of London (UK) Published in association with the Japan Research Centre at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK. SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan features scholarly books on modern and contemporary Japan, showcasing new research monographs as well as translations of scholarship not previously available in English. Its goal is to ensure that current, high quality research on Japan, its history, politics and culture, is made available to an English speaking audience. The series is made possible in part by generous grants from the Nippon Foundation and the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation. Forthcoming: Christianity and Imperialism in Modern Japan, Emily Anderson (2014) The Self-Defense Forces and Civil Society in Postwar Japan, Tomoyuki Sasaki (2015) Contemporary Sino-Japanese Relations on Screen, Griseldis Kirsch (2015) The China Problem in Postwar Japan, Robert Hoppens (2015) Media, Propaganda and Politics in 20th Century Japan, The Asahi Shimbun Company (translated by Barak Kushner) (2015) Politics and Power in 20th Century Japan, Mikuriya Takashi and Nakamura Takafusa (translated by Timothy S. George) (2015) Japan as a Maritime Power, Masataka Kousaka (translated by Paul Midford) (2015) Japanese Taiwan, Andrew Morris (2015)

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Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan Jan Bardsley

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 Paperback edition first published 2015 © Jan Bardsley, 2014 Jan Bardsley has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-2699-1 PB: 978-1-4742-6927-8 ePDF: 978-1-4725-2566-6 ePub: 978-1-4725-3381-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bardsley, Jan. Women and democracy in cold war Japan / Jan Bardsley. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4725-2699-1 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-4725-2566-6 (epdf) – ISBN 978-1-4725-3381-4 (epub) 1. Women–Japan–Social conditions–20th century. 2. Housewives–Japan–Social conditions–20th century. 3. Japan–Social conditions–1945–4. Japan–Civilization–1945– I. Title. HQ1762.B375 2014 305.40952–dc3 2013050285 Series: SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain

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For Phil

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Contents List of Illustrations List of Tables Acknowledgments

viii ix x

1

Introduction

2

Dueling Etiquettes: Mrs Mogi Takes on the Occupationnaires

21

3

The Housewife Debate of 1955

45

4

What Women Want: The Postwar Appetite

75

5

Fashioning the People’s Princess: Shōda Michiko and the Royal Wedding of 1959

109

6

Japan’s Miss Universe: Beauty Contests and Postwar Democracy

139

7

From the Housewife’s Kitchen to the Witches’ Den: Fantasies of Female Power in Enchi Fumiko’s Masks

165

Notes Bibliography Index

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1

183 213 229

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List of Illustrations 1.1 “Japanese Women: New Freedoms Amid Old Customs,” March 23, 1959 2.1 “Teruko Mogi,” Asahi Shimbun, November 1949 3.1 “New Kitchen in 1954,” Asahi Shimbun, 1954 4.1 “Fifties Fashionista,” Fujin kōron fashion section, February 1955 4.2 “Apron Husband,” 1931 4.3 “Opportunities are given equally,” December 1956 4.4 “Washing Machine Husband,” December 1956 5.1 “Crown Prince Akihito and Shōda Michiko on the tennis court,” December 1958 5.2 “Crown Princess Michiko in her palace kitchen on her 27th birthday,” October 1961 5.3 Opinions on the imperial household from various individuals 6.1 “Miss Universe 1960, Kojima Akiko,” July 24, 1959 6.2 “Miss Universe Kojima Akiko and Cadet Kenneth Gifford, Coronation Ball, Long Beach,” July 25, 1959 6.3 “General Douglas MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito,” September 27, 1945 7.1 Nō Mask of the Fukai Type

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xiv 20 44 74 103 104 105 108 123 133 138 151 152 164

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List of Tables 4.1 4.2 4.3

Please name two things that you most want, but do not have now. In what sorts of activities would you like to find your future purpose in life and your happiness? Please give two responses. When a man came into her life whom she liked, Ms A proposed to him; Ms B waited for him to propose; Ms C relied on a third person to intercede for her. Which person do you have the most favorable impression of?

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87 88

91

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Acknowledgments This book became a reality thanks in many ways to Christopher Gerteis, friend and editor of the SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan series, who encouraged me to submit the initial proposal. Chris and his partner Jen Anderson have long supported this project with creative ideas and good cheer. It has been a pleasure to work with Editor Claire Lipscomb of Bloomsbury Academic Press and her editorial assistant, Emma Goode. I am grateful for the financial support that made research and publication possible. The Triangle Center for Japanese Studies, funded by the Japan Foundation, provided a generous subvention grant for image purchase. Three grants from the University Research Council at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a Merrill Faculty Excellence Fund award supported my research travel to Japan. The Chapman Family Faculty Fellowship for Distinguished Teaching enabled me to spend fall 1998 at the UNC Institute for Arts and Humanities and to do much of the early work on this book. I would like to thank the following for kindly giving permission to use images: Asahi Shimbun Photo Archives, Kyodo News Service, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Sankei Shimbun, and Time Life Pictures/Getty Images. I appreciate the assistance provided by the editors of the magazine, Fujin kōron (Ladies Review). I thank Okabe Rika for giving me permission to reprint two cartoons by her talented father, Okabe Fuyuhiko. I made every effort to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint images and would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not hereby acknowledged and promise to rectify any errors or omissions in proper credit in future editions of the book. U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal has been a vibrant academic home for me for many years. I have been fortunate to have Sally A. Hastings, a long-time editorin-chief of USJWJ, as a friendly mentor and colleague. Her encouragement and advice have been crucial. I benefitted from the support, too, of Josai University Chancellor Noriko Mizuta, an editor-in-chief of U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal and leader in the field of Japanese women’s studies for many years, and I thank the Chancellor and Josai University for permission to publish revised versions of

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Acknowledgments

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three USJWJ articles: “Discourse on Women in Postwar Japan: The Housewife Debate of 1955,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, English Supplement (1999), no. 16: 3–47; “What Women Want: Fujin kōron Tells All in 1956,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, English Supplement (2000), no. 19: 7–48; and “Fashioning the People’s Princess: Women’s Magazines, Shōda Michiko, and the Royal Wedding of 1959,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, English Supplement (2004), no. 23: 57–91. I thank Michael Barr, Editor-in-Chief, Asian Studies Review, for permission to reprint material originally published in my article, “Girl Royalty: The 1959 Coronation of Japan’s First Miss Universe,” Asian Studies Review, vol. 32 (September 2008): 375–91. Experts at libraries in the United States and Japan offered substantial support with kindness and speed. Kristina Troost, Head of International Area Studies and Japanese Studies Librarian at Perkins Library at Duke University, has located figures and sources over several years and been an encouraging friend and colleague. Hsi-chu Bolick, East Asian Studies Librarian at Davis Library, UNC Chapel Hill, has also provided much friendly help, too. Librarians at the Shufu no Tomo Library associated with Ochanomizu University and at the Tokyo Women’s Plaza guided me to magazines, newspapers, and unique sources, taking me beyond what I could find on my own. Librarians at the Hikone City Library in Shiga Prefecture and at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, helped locate postwar Japanese magazines for me. Amy Wasserstrom, manager of the Gordon W. Prange Collection at the University of Maryland, has long guided me to materials there. I have appreciated the opportunity to present much of the work in this book at special conferences and several colleges and universities, including Doshisha University, Eastern Carolina University, Emory University, Florida International University, Guilford College, Harvard Center for European Studies, Berlin, Ochanomizu Women’s University, Salem College, San Diego State University, Seikei University, University of British Columbia, University of Cambridge, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and Flint, University of Minnesota, University of Mississippi, University of Missouri, St. Louis, University of Oregon, University of Queensland, Washington and Lee University, and Western Michigan University. For these and other invitations, and for their friendly encouragement, I thank Tomoko Aoyama, Sonja Arntzen, Dottie Borei, Janice Brown, Julia Bullock, Gavin James Campbell, Cheryl Crowley, Alisa Freedman, Penny Griffin, Roy Hanashiro, Hiroko Hirakawa, Yoshiko Higurashi, Keiko Ikeda, Maki Isaka, Gretchen Jones, Eleanor Kerkham,

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xii

Acknowledgments

Gavin James Campbell, Steven Heine, Mary Knighton, Ryuko Kubota, Robin LeBlanc, Christine Marran, Marlene Mayo, Laura Miller, Joshua Mostow, Sharalyn Orbaugh, Uta Poiger, Rika Saito, Kazue Sakamoto, Brigitte Steger, John Tucker, and Noel Howell Wilson. Friends and family cheered on this project. I will never forget taking a break from the Association for Asian Studies Conference in Honolulu in 2011 to drive by the seashore with Rebecca Copeland, Laura Hein, Laura Miller, and Christine Yano. Belting out Golden Oldies, we made quite the girl band. Coediting books and organizing panels with Laura Miller has taught me a great deal about scholarship and about having fun in the process. Thanks to Inger Brodey, Rebecca Copeland, Sally Hastings, Joanne Hershfield, Hiroko Hirakawa, Aki Hirota, S. Yumiko Hulvey, Mire Koikari, Laura Miller, and Nadia Yaqub for reading and commenting on chapters in this book, and many thanks to Laura Hein and Barbara Molony for sage advice on shaping the manuscript. For help with writing letters and reading in Japanese, I thank Yuki Aratake, Sayoko Bardwell, Shoko Fukuya, Makiko Humphreys, and Yuko Kato. Conversations about this book with Lori Harris and Pat Maroney, managers of the Department of Asian Studies, provided much insight, and I thank Pat for making the connection between the cartoon styles of Okabe Fuyuhiko and James Thurber. Working in the Triangle area of North Carolina, I have enjoyed the friendship of my colleagues in Japanese Studies at Carolina, Duke University, and North Carolina State University. The Bridges family— my sister Cy Bridges, my cousins and their children—offer a constant source of encouragement. A very special thanks to Jim Oliver for his advice on images. My aunt, Marjorie Johnson, piqued my childhood interest in Japan. With my uncle, Leroy Johnson, she lived in Japan from January 1949 to June 1951, becoming involved in life there, and making many friends as she took lessons in oil and water-color painting, flower arranging, tailoring, and patternmaking. When visiting her house by the lake in Minnesota, I enjoy seeing her paintings and the books, photographs, and other souvenirs of her life in Japan. The winner of over 1,000 blue ribbons for baking at the Minnesota State Fair, Marjorie has become a celebrity, making guest appearances on television shows to teach how to make all kinds of festive baked goods. Her sense of adventure, endless curiosity, and phenomenal energy will always inspire me.

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Acknowledgments

xiii

Phil Bardsley, lifetime partner and best friend, has supported every step of this project, from copying magazine pages at the Library of Congress and reading drafts to making the best comfort food and home brew ever. With much love and the deepest thanks, I dedicate this book to him. Jan Bardsley Chapel Hill, North Carolina 2013

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Figure 1.1 “Japanese Women: New Freedoms Amid Old Customs.” Cover of Time Magazine, March 23, 1959, featuring Shōda Michiko, fiancé of the Crown Prince. Courtesy of Time Life Pictures Getty Images.

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Introduction

In March 1959, Time magazine dazzled readers with a cheerful progress report on the American emancipation of Japanese women. Sixteen color photos captured the astonishing diversity of Japanese women’s occupations—pictures of a geisha, a fortune-teller, and a rural farmer might fit readers’ expectations of Japan, but many were no doubt surprised to see photos of an atomic scientist, a courtroom judge, a famous author, and even a speedboat racer included, too. Titled “Japanese Women: New Freedoms Amid Old Customs,” the feature focused on the upcoming wedding of commoner Shōda Michiko to Crown Prince Akihito, but extended to taking stock of the status of all women in Japan. Readers learn that Japanese housewives are now PTA enthusiasts, volunteers, vocal in their anti-war sentiment, and not shy to join picket lines on issues important to them. According to Time, Japanese women, and especially young women, are embracing the new opportunities opened to them after the war—to the regret of the Japanese man, who “remains one enormous roadblock on the path of female emancipation.”1 Rather, it is American men who have come to the rescue. Time credits Japanese women’s progress as “the direct result” of the US defeat of Japan, the American-led occupation (1945–52), and “the new constitution established by the conqueror, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur.”2 The image of Shōda Michiko on the Time cover, though set against an enormous, decorative Japanese fan, presents a modern young woman in Western dress whose gaze directly meets the viewer’s own (Figure 1.1). Shōda’s conservative demeanor gives no clue of the frenzied attention her Cinderella wedding is generating at home, particularly among women. After her wedding, she will take up residence in the palace, striving to become both a proper royal and a homemaker. Despite her formal duties, she will enjoy cooking in her small kitchen there and making a “sweet home” (suīto hōmu) with the Prince. In just a few years, she will be admired for insisting on raising the couple’s children herself rather than following the imperial custom of letting others do this. As Princess

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Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan

Michiko, she will also gain the public’s sympathy for enduring the hidebound etiquette of the palace and the harassment of those, including her in-laws, who believe a commoner misses the mark. In love, committed to each other, their children, and their royal duties, Michiko and Akihito embody the romantic new ideology of the nuclear family as a site of nurturance, consumption, and social stability known as mai-hōmushugi (My-homeism). This becomes the model, if not the reality, for families across postwar Japan.3 Despite their royal status, the couple emblemize the new “middle-class consciousness” that papers over the reality of economic disparities in Japan. At the same time, they lend glamour to a gendered division of labor—Akihito, as symbolic representative of Japan, and Michiko, as the fashionable but deferential homemaker.4 Captivated by Michiko’s example and new modes of home life hailed in magazines, women from many walks of life will dream of becoming a “kitchen princess,” too. Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan explores the figure of the postwar Japanese housewife as a controversial representation of democratic progress, economic recovery, and modern domesticity in the 1950s. To the extent that many, including the Time magazine reporters, viewed the Japanese housewife as a creation of the United States and a symbol of Japan’s alliance with the United States, her story is a narrative of the early Cold War as well. Examining the shifting personae of the housewife, especially in the appealing texts of women’s magazines and in newspaper sections favored by women, reveals the diverse possibilities of postwar democracy as they were embedded in media directed toward and purchased by women. Representations range from housewives as socially active and politically vocal to the romantic domesticity of the kitchen princess as embodied by Princess Michiko. Exploring the intersections between American and Japanese housewives and the home as a Cold War “contact zone” broadens our view, revealing competing domesticities. In the end, we find the narrative of American rescue and the idealization of the professional housewife (sengyō shufu) firmly embedded in 1950s discourse, but we also see how Japanese women tried to open up definitions of the housewife’s role, both in emulation of American women and, at other times, by criticizing the “American housewife” as a stereotype that ignored the diversity of race and class in the United States or by upholding women in the Soviet Union as models. Organized as a chronology of controversies, this book takes up five contentious moments in the cultural life of Japanese housewives that occurred between late 1949 and late 1959. Each chapter explores the contours of a single debate or controversial figure, drawing on newspaper reportage and women’s magazines. The controversies begin with (Chapter 2) analysis of a 1949–50 “kitchen

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Introduction

3

debate” in the English-language Nippon Times newspaper that threatened to upset the hierarchical relationship between Japanese and American housewives in occupied Japan. Chapter 3 investigates the 1955 Housewife Debate over the meaning of the housewife’s role in an age when appliances and ready-made products were allegedly making housework easy. In 1956—the year in which a government white paper declared that the postwar was over—an investigation into “women’s desires” (Chapter 4) takes up a debate that often turns satirical, yet draws attention to fears that democratic reforms have unleashed monstrous female appetites for sex, adventure, and material comforts. Two events that generated excitement and debate occurred in 1959, the year of the “consumer revolution” in Japan—the royal wedding that transformed Shōda Michiko into the “people’s princess” and model housewife (Chapter 5) and the crowning of fashion model Kojima Akiko as Japan’s—and corporate America’s—Miss Universe (Chapter 6).5 Associated with democratic progress and postwar chic, both the princess and the beauty queen became role models of modern femininity and lightning rods for debate over how they represented the nation. As a radical counterpoint to the narratives of these chapters, I conclude by interpreting the well-known novel of 1958, Onnamen (Masks) by Enchi Fumiko, as a critique of the dominant themes shaping postwar womanhood and housewifery in Japan as she shifts our focus from the modern, appliance-filled realm of the kitchen princess to the ahistorical and erotically charged space of the witches’ den. This exploration of housewife in postwar Japan has much in common with studies of other icons of Japanese womanhood that have marked women’s history in twentieth-century Japan—girl students (jogakusei), New Women (atarashii onna), Modern Girls (modan gāru), and the shōjo maiden of fame in recent decades.6 Briefly describing these figures serves for productive comparison with icons of the 1950s elaborated in this book. Scholarship on the girl students of the Meiji era (1868–1912), the first young women to attend modern schools, for example, traces how they figured in fiction, fashion, and early magazines, and stirred public curiosity and concern about emerging roles for middle-class women as educated individuals. Research on the intellectual New Women of the 1910s such as the founders of the women’s literary journal, Seitō (Bluestockings), examines how newly educated women earned notoriety for speaking up and against the establishment, inciting debate on the Woman Question (fujin mondai). The Modern Girl has inspired wide-ranging scholarship as a global figure with local inflections. Debuting in Japan in the 1920s, the Modern Girl captured media attention for her allegedly free-wheeling consumerism, bobbed hair and short skirts, and appetite for sex and urban adventure; this extraordinary

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Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan

persona often overshadowed actual changes taking place in women’s lives from their move into new kinds of work to protests by working women. At the close of the twentieth century, it was the shōjo, a young girl, who came to the fore in the popular culture of manga, anime, and the novels of Yoshimoto Banana, that gave new meanings to consumerism and the advent of “cute” (kawaii) culture in Japan. Grounded in a certain reality of new ideas and practices, and expanded through, at times, truly fantastic fiction and reportage, these female icons have served as a moral compass of Japanese modernity at home and abroad. The belief in the genuine newness of the postwar (sengo), however, is what makes the moment under discussion in this book different. The narrative dominant in the Japanese media of the 1950s characterized Japan as radically reborn by the defeat of 1945. As discussed in Chapter 4, this belief has often obscured obvious comparisons to the past, to transwar continuities, and to the constructions of female icons as reflections of change. Consequently, the characters we shall meet in this book, whether the confident beauty queen or the socially active housewife, are portrayed in the contemporary media as types “never seen before” in Japan. Perusing Japanese magazine and newspaper reports on women in the 1950s, I periodically find charts documenting “how far women have come” since 1945. One even refers to Kojima Akiko’s 1959 Miss Universe victory as the event of “postwar year 14.” Although there was a boom of interest in writing Japanese women’s history, supported by occupation authorities, the discourse of these debates values history only as it aids in moving women ahead. Many of the essays discussed here voice hopes for Japan to become a peaceful country of culture (bunka kuni) that has shed “feudalism.”7 What it means to go forward and how the housewife will embody the positive nature of her culture nation are the major questions igniting debate. These debates discussed in this book rarely imagine a different role for Japanese men, despite the changes in men’s lives over the century. Texts analyzed here focusing on women almost uniformly code men as mired in tradition, as either unable or unwilling to change, and often report that observation in the same satirical tone as employed by Time magazine in 1959. This humorous view of men as the losers or the recalcitrants when women gain in power is nothing new, but was evident in Japan and the Euro-American West, for example, in the early twentieth century in role-reversal cartoons of fearsome New Women dominating trembling husbands.8 This sort of humor demonstrates how the entrenchment of gender roles narrows visions of women’s rights and forecloses investigation of the function of gender codes.

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Introduction

5

This book draws on sources as diverse as cartoons, defiant letters to the editor, and romantic tales of princess weddings. My approach relies on close textual analysis and translation, recreating the theater of the disputes. All five controversies discussed connect in some way with the highbrow magazine Fujin kōron (Ladies Review) that regularly carried essays on current issues such as US bases in Japan and juvenile delinquency along with photo layouts of high fashion and travel, and fiction by famous writers of the day. I also draw on newspaper reportage in Japan and the United States, and in the case of the royal wedding of 1959, consider several women’s magazines. Notably, it is the determined belief in the postwar as a new era in Japanese history that colors all the reportage examined for this book. Everything from women’s fashions to their strongest beliefs are coded as postwar and different from their mothers’. Yet, as Lonny Carlile and Ann Sherif have shown, investigating this period in Japan only from the standpoint of sengo fails to account for Japan’s location in Cold War politics.9 Throughout the book, I tack back and forth between postwar and Cold War perspectives. I frame this investigation by focusing on the decade of the 1950s since this was the era when, as Vera Mackie states, “the housewife became the archetypal figure of womanhood, in the same way that the salaryman became the archetypal figure of masculinity.”10 This did not occur only by media promotion of the royal couple and the temptations of consumer culture but also through corporate-centered campaigns instituted on a national scale. As Andrew Gordon has observed, corporate and government interests, intertwined in the “New Life Movement,” did much to embed assumptions about proper gender roles in the workplace and larger society in the 1950s, naturalizing the belief that “women of all social strata managed the home, while their men managed the workplace.”11 As the controversies discussed here illustrate, the direction this womanly housewife should take—and the direction in which she pointed the family and nation—were the source of hope and anxiety. In fact, the Cold War lasted until 1989, and many would argue that the postwar continues since issues about Japan’s wartime past remain unresolved. Limiting this investigation to the 1950s, however, enables close examination of gender roles at a time when they could take several paths, but became naturalized in the housewife-salaryman model as complementary but divided spheres of labor and influence. To set the stage for the debates, this essay briefly introduces topics that have been extensively researched by others: the housewife in Japan and the United States in the 1950s, with a concentration on media stereotypes; and the interactions of American and Japanese women—in actuality and figuratively—

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6

Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan

in the contact zone of early postwar Japan and popular culture in both countries. I close with a view from the twenty-first century, catching up with the icons discussed here by considering the contemporary status of housewives, beauty queens, and royal women in Japan. Following East Asian practice, all Japanese names are listed with surname first (e.g. Kojima Akiko) except in citations of authors publishing in English or in quotes from English-language sources where the order is reversed (Akiko Kojima).

Japanese housewives in the 1950s: Debate amid the reality gap Building on fascination with April’s royal nuptials, Fujin gahō (Women’s Pictorial) devoted its May 1959 issue to the new fashions and customs of weddings and honeymoons. One section of the magazine features a lengthy article by historian Murakami Shigeyoshi on how the housewife’s work has changed over the past five decades, and includes a pictorial comparison titled, “Gojūnen-mae to kyō no wakaki tsuma no ichinichi no kurashi” (“A Day in the Life of a Young Wife Fifty Years Ago and Today”).12 In 1910, as the reader sees, Fujin gahō had published a bilingual English-Japanese description of the life of a privileged young housewife who wore a lovely kimono and formal hairstyle as she went about her day’s activities. In the morning, she sees off her husband “who is brave in the activities of the world” while she will “strive in the house business.” She cleans, cooks, takes a light lunch with her maidservant, and spends time calling on a friend: “The happiness of their school days and the sweetness of the present marriage lives coming on their conversation.” The merry tone of this 1910 depiction of the wife’s daily life, however, is at odds with the narrative of progress in the main text of the 1959 article. Murakami declares that the old marriage of the husband giving orders to a submissive wife has given way to marriages of “equality of status and cooperation” (taitō to kyōryoku). Echoing arguments that ignited the Housewife Debate of 1955, he states that the housewife’s work has not simply been eased by new appliances, but has been radically reformed such that she has been “liberated from the home.”13 Liberation means that housewives will soon join their husbands in socially meaningful careers outside the home, but most importantly, in order for “ordinary housewives to embrace this progress as their own,” they must awaken to their own role in the public sphere, developing social consciousness (shakai-teki jikaku).14 Like the 1910 article, Murakami, too, imagines the housewife as a privileged, married woman, and ignores the labor

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Introduction

7

performed by the majority of Japanese women both outside and inside the home, and as house-heads themselves. He appears oblivious of the institutional forces constraining women’s roles in the workplace. His view also erases minorities in Japan—Koreans, Okinawans, members of the former outcaste Burakumin, and the Ainu in Hokkaido—from this picture of liberation. What kind of couple embodies the ideal marriage of 1959? Although the 1910 Fujin gahō story focused almost exclusively on the wife, the 1959 one emphasizes a couple’s togetherness in their “sweet home.” The reader meets Hirakobari Shōji, who works in the Ginza office of the “K” spinning firm, and his wife, a former actress and now full-time housewife. Unnamed, the wife is referenced throughout the feature as okusan, an old term for the “lady of the house,” that had become the common, respectful form of address for all married women over the course of the 1950s. The article describes every facet of this okusan’s life by explaining how much better it is than the housewife’s life of old, and indeed, Mr and Mrs Hirakobari enjoy a wondrous life. The couple is pictured in front of their modern, high-rise apartment, which is only 10 minutes by car from Shōji’s office. Since their home is a form of public housing, the rent is economical (only 10,000 yen per month; likely about 25 to 30 percent of Mr Hirakobari’s monthly salary), yet the apartment is nicely appointed.15 It has the new style “living roomkitchen,” bath facilities, and two tatami rooms. Photos of their apartment show the young couple living with their baby and puppy dog amid the new electronic goods that have been purchased by the husband’s “effort, with help from the wife’s own family.” These include the most sought-after equipment of the era: a television, a washing machine, and a refrigerator.16 Since Ginza is nearby, the couple can easily leave their apartment for all kinds of fun, and on Sundays, they go to the movie theater, but follow their separate interests: the husband sees Westerns, the wife goes for popular thrillers. They like it this way, having fun telling each other about the plots and their reactions to their respective films afterward. They share some of the housework: Shōji takes pleasure from tidying up their place in the morning while his wife prepares breakfast and he picks up food items on the way home from work. The couple does not entrust their child to a maid, but joins in parenting (though no details are given on this). Unlike the housewife of former days who could not leave her old-style house for fear of fire and because of her mountain of housework, this modern wife “simply locks her door and walks to the Ginza as often as three times a day.” The wife’s leisure relative to her husband and the introduction of the TV enables her to become acquainted with current events and take initiatives for her family. (What these initiatives might be is not indicated.) In the evenings, she and her husband read

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and discuss the newspaper and reports from other media. The article concludes by asking readers to consider what has made this dramatic change in Japanese marriages and the housewife’s daily life—human kindness, the social order, the convenience of appliances? The Fujin gahō article, for all its romance, does indicate some of the tangible changes in Japanese women’s lives in the postwar. The gradual road to recovery, the advent of labor-saving devices, and even new fashions helped code the postwar as a time of progress and the housewife as its symbol. In this case, Fujin gahō idealizes the trend of living as a nuclear family free from the gaze of in-laws and the old customs that go with musty old homes. Since this homemaker has only one child, she and her husband may be following the new trend of practicing birth control. Should she want an abortion, she could easily and legally obtain one, though the stigma attached to this would likely send her to a clinic outside her neighborhood.17 The 1947 constitution has accorded this woman the right to vote and to run for public office, to initiate marriage and divorce, and to inherit equally with her brother. It has also promised her equality with men in Japan, but along with many other women (if not the Fujin gahō author), she may well notice the “reality gap” between this promise and the limited opportunities in education and work open to her.18 Although she may read newspaper reports of Japanese women claiming a public voice in consumer protests, anti-American-base demonstrations, and union activism, such concern for politics do not seem to intrude into her home except as current events that she and her husband discuss. Yet, as Sheldon Garon argues, it was women like this homemaker who, “as housewives and mothers . . . gradually emerged as the state’s primary intermediaries in managing society” through PTA activity, taking social education and “mothers’ classes,” campaigns to promote national savings and other projects in the public interest.19 Except for her smaller home and her greater access to reproductive choice, this Japanese woman seems to have achieved the domestic bliss of the muchcelebrated American housewife. In fact, mid-1950s cartoons drawn by Okabe Fuyuhiko and published in Fujin kōron poking fun at the modern Japanese housewife (see Figures 4.3 and 4.4) and those of James Thurber drawn in 1948 satirizing her American counterpart bear a striking resemblance. Apparently, Okabe, who was a fan of Thurber’s work, felt only the need to add house-slippers to make his Anglo-looking wife Japanese. To his mind, both obsessed over their appearance and keeping up with fashion, could be prostrated with ennui, and were so fiercely connected to the home that their husbands were mere items of

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convenience. Okabe’s cartoons, however, also depict the Japanese housewife as in a rush to keep up with all the new activities open to her in the postwar.20

The American housewife in the Cold War The image of the housewife most associated with late 1950s popular culture in the United States is June Cleaver, the “kitchen princess” of the 1957–63 television show, “Leave It to Beaver” played by actress Barbara Billingsley. June Cleaver, in pearls, high heels, and neat shirtwaist dress, personified the perfect suburban Anglo housewife. In fact, the connection between June Cleaver and idealized housewifery is so strong that even today books in the United States refer to her in such passionate titles as: I Killed June Cleaver: Modern Moms Shatter the Myth of Perfect Parenting, Even June Cleaver Would Forget the Juice Box, and June Cleaver was a Feminist!21 Media representations of the American housewife such as embodied by June Cleaver were influential in depicting American home life domestically and abroad. Among studies on housewives in the United States in the early Cold War, Elaine Tyler May’s 1988 Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era stands out as a ground-breaking work of the “nuclear family in the nuclear age” that ties foreign policy aimed at containing communism to domestic containment that kept subversive individuals at bay to create security at home.22 Against fears of communism and nuclear war in this period, the home emerged as a safe haven, one imbued with “a vision of abundance and fulfillment” and depended on the housewife’s skill to remain that way.23 Departing from the challenge to gender roles seen in US families during the Great Depression and the war, postwar couples embraced the notion of men as breadwinners, and women as homemakers. Employment and career opportunities narrowed for women, and while their rates of college entrance rose, their likelihood of graduation declined. As in Japan in the 1950s, the idea of womanhood—for those who could afford it—merged with full-time housework, smart shopping, and family nurturance. The average age for first marriage and the birth of the first child dropped, divorce rates were low, extra-marital sex and homosexuality were taboo, and the baby boom took off. May argues that the stereotypical suburban family life was a new form that represented “the first wholehearted effort to create a home that would fulfill virtually all its members’ personal needs through an energized and expressive personal life.”24 Like studies of the salary

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man and the professional housewife in Japan, May’s work, too, focuses on a certain segment of the middle class that stood for the norm, while recognizing the decade’s persistent inequities and discrimination. Later work on women in the United States in the Cold War, by scholars such as Joanne Meyerowitz and Stephanie Coontz, reveals how narrow representations of the housewife-asJune-Cleaver were, how many kinds of difference among women were left out, and how Americans today can be nostalgic for a time that never was.25 For our purposes, it is the meaning of the American housewife as representative of American democracy abroad in the Cold War that is most significant here. At international exhibits and trade shows, the image of the wellgroomed housewife in her modern labor-saving kitchen promoted American technology and capitalism as the key to material happiness and the containment of communism.26 Fashion models were employed to play the housewives of the exhibit kitchens, lending chic to the picture. Ruth Oldenziel notes in Cold War Kitchen, “The iconography of modern women posing in high-tech kitchens figured prominently in the export of American mass culture.”27 Indeed, this image was at the heart of one of the defining moments of the early Cold War, the July 1959 “kitchen debate” between Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon in a model kitchen in the American National Exhibition in Moscow. For Nixon, the housewife’s ability to choose from a number of appliance brands and designs signaled technological progress and individual freedom; Khrushchev saw this as bourgeois redundancy, and rather than appreciating the time-saving potential of appliances, asked if Americans had a “machine that puts food in the mouth and pushes it down?”28 Since the Japanese debates discussed in this book—on kitchens, democracy, and postwar women—also associate the modern housewife with June Cleaverlike glamour, I am particularly interested in the ways fashion intersected with the Khrushchev-Nixon kitchen debate. Another arena of competition at the exhibit in Moscow was an outdoor Helena Rubenstein salon where fashion models and tour guides received public makeovers “while the Soviet public gawked” at the assorted luxury of salon equipment and products surrounding them.29 The Soviet Union banned the distribution of free Coty lipstick and forbade Russian women from taking part in the free makeovers.30 The Rubenstein beauty salon, in effect, became another arena of debate as American journalists reported on the homeliness of women in Moscow. In contrast, Americans, freed from drudgery by appliances and availed of cosmetics could “become sexually attractive housewives and consumers under the American capitalist system,” an image influential in Japan.31

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Postwar Japan as contact zone: Interactions between American and Japanese women The American housewife, often depicted in Japanese popular culture as a privileged, assertive, and glamorous Anglo woman, plays a crucial role in the 1950s debates discussed in this book, serving alternately as a beacon of hope and a cautionary tale. Her star image in Japan resulted from positive press attention, Hollywood films, and the arrival of American wives and single women associated with the occupation. Several years ago, I had the chance to peruse Japanese women’s magazines published in the early years of the occupation from 1945 to 1948 under the scrutiny of “SCAP” (Supreme Command[er] of Allied Powers; a common term for the occupation).32 I found numerous articles lauding the American housewife’s ability to manage her home scientifically, maintain a companionate life with her husband, and forward democracy through volunteer activities. Articles included interviews with war correspondents, the Ladies Home Journal editor Laura Lou Brookman, and leaders of women’s organizations.33 Anything remotely critical of the United States, such as an article that claimed that Hollywood actresses were not representative of American women or a quote by Pearl Buck deploring segregation, were marked for pre-publication removal by SCAP censors.34 Even the comic figure Blondie, star of the “single most popular comic strip in early occupied Japan,” shaped ideas of the American housewife and the American way of life as replete with “full refrigerators and marvelous household appliances, where wives splurged on fancy hats . . . and even children and the family pets lived free of oppressive patriarchal authority.”35 Blondie’s red lips, curly locks, frilly white apron, and high heels made the life of the American housewife look easy and fashionable. The material reality of her life was on view in Japan, too: Japanese who worked on US bases or as domestics in American homes were taught how to use modern appliances; others learned about American abundance through radio reports and department store exhibits on the American way of life.36 Mary Louise Pratt’s conception of the “contact zone”—“social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power”—is useful to analyzing interchanges between American and Japanese women in postwar Japan.37 Since the contact zone is a dynamic space, no one holds all the cards, and despite the obvious inequities, “subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other.”38 The dynamic established between American and Japanese women in this contact zone resonates with the narrative of progress introduced above in the Time feature. As

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Mire Koikari has argued, representations of “the progressive, emancipated, and thus ‘superior’ American women” required mobilization of the “long-standing Orientalist construction of Japanese women as helpless victims who, until the arrival of American women in 1945, had been incapable of any action.”39 Lisa Yoneyama, observing that reducing Japanese women to passive “victims of a male-dominant military state” occurred near the end of the war in anticipation of the occupation, states that “this gender binary—positing women as a uniform entity universally victimized by patriarchy and male dominance regardless of race, class, age, and other relations—facilitated the representation of Japanese women as objects of liberation under the U.S. occupation and recipients of American liberal feminist tutelage.”40 In her study of interactions between Japanese and American women in the occupation, Koikari observes that despite the status inequities between the two groups, many “developed close working relationships and sometimes strong personal bonds” in ways that could support and subvert the objectives of the occupation.41 Consequently, Japanese women who developed ability in English, took on a public role, wore trendy fashions, or nagged their husbands, were seen, for better or worse, as having moved closer to the American woman’s end of the continuum. By the same token, the American press upheld the continuum, too, although here the American woman sometimes came under attack for being overly masculine and as needing to move closer to the ultrafeminine Japanese woman. For example, in response to the 1959 Time cover story on Japanese women, one reader, Richard J. Lindstrom, formally a naval officer stationed in Japan, wrote to the editors that American women were “domineering, gross cows” and that “in this age of irrationality the ‘liberated’ Japanese girls are now imitating American barbarians.”42 A decade earlier in 1949, Japanese consumers of Reader’s Digest in translation, a best seller in occupied Japan, might have been startled to see this view of the American woman in the article, reprinted from Esquire, “What’s Wrong with American Women?”43 The article describes American women as the world’s most spoiled, vain, aggressive, and spendthrift women, who need to learn from the man-pleasing, domestically savvy woman abroad who has “an acute consciousness that her chief asset is her femininity.”44 Most famously, James Michener’s 1953 novel, Sayonara, translated into Japanese in 1955, offers a scathing critique of the American woman, acknowledging her independence and can-do attitude, but faulting her lack of the Japanese wife’s desire and ability to nurture her husband’s self-esteem.45 Although this book discusses debates over progress and domesticity within 1950s Japan, other scholars have analyzed the flip side of this debate in the United States.46

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The view from the twenty-first century The issues debated in the 1950s still have resonance today and housewives, beauty queens, and princesses continue to stir controversy in ways worthy of a book in itself. To conclude this Introduction, I sketch some of the major developments. Despite the changes in Japan over the past decades, the narrative of Japanese men as a barrier to women’s progress and the need for foreign rescue remains powerful.47 The extent to which women should resort to using foreign pressure (gaiatsu) such as, for example, UN measurements of gender equality, to effect change at home has been controversial among Japanese feminists.48 By the same token, feminist critics in Japan have charged that domestic initiatives to enhance women’s status have only popularized “housewife feminism,” reinforcing rather than critiquing long-standing gender politics.49 Nevertheless, popular guides and women’s magazines show that women still hope for the fulfillment of personal desires, independence, and self-expression, sometimes achieved through consumer choice. Contemporary demographics—concerns over Japan’s low birthrate, the delayed age of first marriage, and the care of its aging population—motivate much of the anxiety over “what women want” now. As we shall see, the newest iteration of the kitchen princess is the “charisma housewife,” beauty queens are in the news more than ever before, and the media continues to scrutinize the lives of royals from Empress Michiko to the youngest princess. Housewives still claim a voice in the public sphere, if not in formal politics, in consumer movements, and more recently, disaster preparedness. Any discussion of the cultural landscape in Japan today must first take account of the triple disasters of March 2011. The Tōhoku (northeastern) region of Japan took the brunt of a magnitude-nine earthquake, the most powerful known in Japan’s history, and a tsunami followed—reaching heights that exceeded all those since Japan began recording them. Over 18,000 people perished. Damage to infrastructure was immense and recovery is not complete. The meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant not only terrified those in Fukushima, but called into question whether Japan should maintain its nuclear energy program, and at the time of this writing, the plant is still leaking radiated water. The full psychological and political effects of the triple disasters are still being assessed. Yet, as Mire Koikari has shown, even disaster recovery efforts produced a particular, nationalistic idea of the Japanese housewife, mobilizing women to prepare their homes and their hearts for disaster prevention in ways that draw them into participation in national affairs while “simultaneously containing them within their own bodies and homes.”50 At a time when men as political leaders

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and managers of technology appear to have failed Japan, women are defined as “the chief agents of ‘crisis management’ (kiki kanri).” The discourse on women’s unique role in crisis management replicates the rhetoric of containment and the home directed toward women in the early Cold War US and Japanese women, too, are urged to adopt “basic lifestyle” practices and attitudes that make their homes safe havens against threats from outside. As Koikari argues, this focus on domestic preparedness attempts to mute discussion of the real threats of nuclear meltdown and radiation contamination. Koikari shows other gendered dimensions of preparedness discourse, observing how the “emergency bags,” packaged in pink, for women to use on the run contain products that aim to help women in “maintaining bodily hygiene, eliminating odors, and caring for one’s complexion.”

The gender gap and the charisma housewife International measures reveal a gender gap in Japan. Despite their high education and overall quality of life, Japanese women are not achieving parity with men in employment or influence in formal politics. Writing in August 2013 in the New York Times, economist Laura D’Andrea Tyson stated that female employment in Japan “is 25 percentage points lower than the rate of men, and ranks among the lowest in developed countries.”51 She cites the 2012 Global Gender Gap Report, published by the World Economic Forum, as showing Japan ranking near the bottom (102) out of 135 countries in terms of “gender parity and women’s economic participation” and also reports that of all countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), with the exception of South Korea, Japan has “the largest gender pay gap.”52 Japan does somewhat better on the Gender Inequality Index (GII), published by the United Nations Development Program. The GII uses three dimensions to measure women’s disadvantage: “reproductive health, empowerment and the labour market.” In 2012, Japan ranked tenth among countries with “very high human development” and ranked twenty-first on the GII.53 Among the reasons for their lack of parity with men in the workplace is the difficulty women face in combining motherhood and careers in Japan. As Leonard Schoppa’s Race for the Exits (2006) shows, women often “exit” the workforce to devote themselves to full-time motherhood or abandon motherhood to pursue full-time careers.54 In 2013, as a move to encourage mothers to stay in the workforce, Prime Minister Abe Shinzō has promised to

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establish 200,000 daycare centers by 2015, and another 200,000 by 2017, and wants to see corporate childcare leave extended to three years.55 He envisions new tax and other policies that could make it easier for mothers to reenter after stopping out to have children.56 Important here will be finding a way to remove what Tyson terms the “motherhood pay penalty,” that is, the decrease in pay women experience because of taking time out of paid employment to bear and raise children; the “penalty” in Japan is worse than any other OECD country, including Korea.57 This raises the question of what kinds of incentives men need to father and raise children, too, and whether they would also have the same options regarding childrearing and work. Another factor could be making parenthood socially acceptable and financially possible for unmarried individuals. Also, as Vera Mackie and Ayako Kano have discussed, there is good reason for skepticism about Abe’s “womeneconomics,” as he terms his plans to carve out a greater role for women in the nation’s economy, given his history of opposition to initiatives that promised to expand opportunities for women in Japan and his pronatalist stance now.58 As in the 1950s, homemaking today also calls to mind pleasurable lifestyles that are plainly at odds with Prime Minister Abe’s plans to keep women in paid employment. According to ethnographic research conducted among housewives in residential areas of northern Osaka Prefecture in the first decade of the new century, Ofra Goldstein-Gidoni explains that there is “an orientation to a new type of housewife” (shin sengyō shufu shikō) characterized by women’s hope to find in marriage “a means for continued self-actualization and pleasure,” and not “a gateway to a life of constraint” as their mothers experienced.59 This view imagines the housewife and mother as provided freedom of choice and leisure supported by a full-time working husband. This expectation, which is reportedly increasing among young women, gives rise to another “reality gap” as fewer men have the employment security to do this. Goldstein-Gidoni argues that the government, corporations, and media continue to influence the notions of the ideal housewife. Over the past decades, women’s magazines have promoted influential and shifting views of the housewife. Beginning in 1995, the “charisma housewife” (karisuma shufu) known for her “special domestic expertise” in areas such as “cooking, baking, or household decoration” emerged as a popular figure in some magazines.60 Kurihara Harumi, nicknamed the “Empress of Domesticity” by the New York Times and the author of several cookbooks, stands out as the ultimate “charisma housewife.”61 At the same time arafō, the popular term referring to women “around 40” whose generation is perceived to have had more options regarding family and careers has been negatively associated

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with women who abandoned motherhood in favor of work, thus driving the nation’s low birthrate.62 Apparently this turn toward domesticity generated a “marriage hunt” (konkatsu) boom around 2009, complete with its own advisors and products, to shepherd young people into marriage.63

Beauty queens on the global stage Despite feminist public protests against beauty contests in the 1970s and continuing through today, beauty pageants are everywhere in millennial Japan. Publicized on the internet, today’s pageant winners attract lots of online comments. Universities and hostess bars alike hold contests, and bimajo (beautiful witch) pageants have been created for women over 35. Local festivals aiming to attract tourists celebrate Miss Akita Komachi, Miss Nikko Maple Blossom Maiden, and Miss Black Ships, to name just a few. A contest in the city of Yoshinogari in Kyushu stakes its claim to being the birthplace of the ancient warrior Himiko with the annual Queen Himiko contest.64 Japan continues to participate in major international competitions: Miss Japan Yoshimatsu Ikumi won the nation’s first Miss International crown in 2012 when Okinawa hosted the pageant, although outcry on the web charged that she had an unfair hometown advantage. Beauty contests are no longer limited to women: Haruna Ai won an international contest for transgendered beauties in Thailand in 2009 becoming a celebrity in Japan and the Miss Universe Japan organization began sponsoring in 2013 a Mr Japan Contest. In 2012, in the wake of the tragedies of 3/11, representing Japan took on a more poignant note—Miss Tōhoku won the Miss Universe Japan crown. Since the Miss Universe competition remains the most visible beauty contest in Japan, I return to this one to catch up with the millennial princess who wins her crown through competition. The revival of the Miss Universe Japan contest in the past 15 years owes primarily to corporate investment at the top. New York real estate mogul and TV reality star Donald Trump purchased the Miss Universe Contest, Inc. in 1996, moving its headquarters to New York and changing its name to the Miss Universe Organization. In 1998, Trump hired Inés Ligron, a French beauty industry expert who was running an international modeling agency in Hong Kong to direct Miss Universe Japan (MUJ). Trump’s charge to Ligron was to make the Japanese contestants more competitive internationally and to raise interest in the contest in Japan.65 Savvy at marketing, Inés Ligron achieved success relatively quickly, producing two runners-up in 2003 (Miyazaki

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Miyako) and 2006 (Kurara Chibana), and a Miss Universe in 2007 (Mori Riyo). Her daring takes on the “native costume,” informed by a fresh remix of risqué manga aesthetics and icons of samurai and Nō masks, made Miss Japan a standout at the Miss Universe contest. In the process of bringing visibility to MUJ, Ligron, too, became a celebrity in Japan, a model for prestigious emulation of French elegance, authoring beauty guides, holding seminars, and giving advice on television.66 Her guides provide the “secret teachings” to beauty for a mass audience. MUJ winners have similarly authored lifestyle and beauty guides. One of the prime differences among MUJ winners today and the beauty queens of the 1950s is the wholehearted encouragement of ambition. Far from displaying the “new wife orientation,” they focus on careers and new adventures. Guides authored by Miss Universe Mori Riyo and Miss Japan Miyazaki Miyako make no apology for their active lives and travel abroad; rather, they elaborate how one envisions success in a new arena and does the skill-building work to achieve it. Mori took rigorous dance training abroad, did a brief stint as a Rockette in New York, and now owns and operates a dance studio with her mother.67 Feminism informs the queens’ platforms: Kurara’s impassioned finalist-speech at the Miss Universe competition proclaimed her desire to eliminate violence against women. The MUJ focus on appearance, however, is even more acute than in the 1950s, exhorting women to be presentable in looks and behavior from all angles and at all times in public. To MUJ’s credit, healthy eating and exercise is emphasized. MUJ Director Ligron has no patience with parents’ conservative concerns to prepare their daughters for marriage, and, shades of the 1959 Time feature, believes that Japanese men are the biggest barrier to Japanese women’s progress—hence, once again, foreign intervention is legitimated.68 It is possible to see the revival of beauty queens, and the addition of contests for beautiful men and transgendered individuals in millennial Japan as a response to economic stagnation and a change in the corporate structure. The rise of outsourcing and temporary labor has made it difficult for young people to establish career paths. Competition for jobs, in Japan as elsewhere, has made a polished appearance a critical asset. As Brenda Weber explains in Makeover Nation (2009), “appearance in the 21st century functions as an indicator of professional competence and ability, and in an increasingly globalized economy where neoliberal subjects circulate the globe, such appearance-based citizenship is critical for business success.”69 Even those more interested in the marriage hunt may find image-improvement guides appealing. Yet, doubts exist. Dystopian literature and manga takes a critical view of contemporary concern for beauty and the surgical lengths that women will go to attain it. Laura Miller’s Beauty

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Up (2006) analyzes the immense reach of the beauty industry at the heart of this literary critique.70 Hyakuta Naoki’s 2010 best-selling novel Monsutā, for example, relates the tale of a young woman bullied as a child for her ugly face who surgically transforms herself into a beauty (the surgery financed by her sex work in Tokyo’s Kabuki-chō) and returns to her hometown—unrecognized— for vengeance.71 Like Masks, this dystopian literature condemns, but ultimately, offers no way out.

Imperial princesses and the succession controversy The imperial institution, and especially the status of its princesses, has been the source of scrutiny and controversy for several years. Michiko and Akihito, now empress and emperor, have most recently been in the news for comforting victims of the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami. Dressed casually, they sit on the floor of relief centers talking with people still housed there, and Michiko is seen hugging children. Admired for her dignity and sheer ability to endure the strictures of a life hemmed in by palace customs, she appears somewhat frail at age 78, her face occasionally resembling the Fukai Nō mask of sorrow. At the same time, recently published pictorials of a youthful Michiko such as Kiyomiya Yumiko’s 2008 Michiko-hi tanjō (The Birth of “Princess Michiko”) pique nostalgia.72 More attention, however, has turned to her daughter-in-law, the former Owada Masako, who married Crown Prince Naruhito in 1993. At the time, Masako’s bridal candidacy sparked excitement since her superb education (Harvard University, Tokyo University, and Oxford University) and her elite career status as a junior member of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs raised expectations that she would be a positive role model for Japanese women and an inspiring representative of Japan abroad. Yet, like Michiko, Masako found her voice and mobility severely limited by her position as a royal and by the surveillance of the Imperial Household Agency (IHA), the arm of the government responsible for overseeing royal affairs and residences. The pressure to produce an heir, and preferably a male, was immense and the birth of her one child—daughter Aiko—in 2001 opened debate on whether Japan should enable women to inherit the throne. In 2004, Masako, suffering from severe depression and “adjustment disorder,” temporarily retreated from the palace and public life. Although Naruhito has brooked convention to speak out forcefully in support of his wife, he, too, appears powerless to make any substantive changes. In December 2012, on the occasion of her forty-ninth birthday, Masako thanked

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her doctors for their care, the nation, for its concern, and apologized for making people worry. Michiko and Masako’s royal stories of foreclosed potential and self-sacrifice have reinvigorated the narrative of Japanese women as in need of rescue. Masako’s marriage drew skepticism early on in the US press as reporters warned of her entering a golden cage.73 In 2006, Australian investigative journalist Ben Hills published Princess Masako: Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne, taking the IHA to task.74 The book was eventually published in Japanese translation and the IHA website currently displays a letter to Hills accusing him of errors.75 In 2008, American novelist and screenwriter John Burnham Schwartz published The Commoner, a roman à clef of Michiko’s troubled life in the palace that ends with her secretly arranging for her daughter-in-law Keiko (Masako) to flee Japan for Hawaii with her daughter.76 The 2006 birth of a son, Prince Hisahito, to Princess Kiko and, Michiko’s second son, Prince Akishino muted debate in Japan over whether Imperial Household Law could be changed to enable Princess Aiko to inherit the throne. The discussion bears some similarity to thinking about beauty contests today. Is it progress to see MUJ welcome men as contestants and a woman take the throne again in Japan, or should we wonder why these anachronistic cultural forms continue in the first place?77 By the same token, one can ask if it is preferable for housewives to have better lives, or men to have equal access to housewifery, or whether the position itself is, like beauty contests and the imperial institution, an anachronism better left behind. Where these debates lead in the twenty-first century is anyone’s guess. As this book demonstrates, the idea of progress among Japanese women took a number of forms in the 1950s that were hotly contested in the framework of democratization, the march to prosperity, and the Cold War. Without those framing devices in the twenty-first century, what will the measures of “progress” be? How will these issues be characterized in the popular literature and cultural forms of this new century?

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Figure 2.1 “Teruko Mogi,” Asahi Shimbun, November 1949. Courtesy of Asahi Shimbun Photo Archives and Getty Images.

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Dueling Etiquettes: Mrs Mogi Takes on the Occupationnaires

But, do you think that there are none of us here who feel real anger and humiliation that American women should be so misrepresented? Mille Johansen, columnist, Nippon Times1 In November 1949, following a serious breech in the etiquette of defeat and occupation, a war of words erupted in the popular English-language newspaper Nippon Times (currently known as Japan Times). The controversy started unexpectedly when the newspaper published a letter from Mrs Teruko Mogi, a Japanese housewife, about her miserable experience visiting the home of her neighbor, an American woman whose husband was stationed in Japan with the occupation forces. Mogi was so offended by her neighbor’s exuberant materialism, lack of sophistication, and poor manners that she wrote to Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl Buck, who had expressed interest in hearing from Japanese about the progress of the occupation. Not only did Pearl Buck write back in support of Mogi, but she also had three other prominent American women—Eleanor Roosevelt, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, and the former coeditor of Ladies Home Journal, Beatrice Blackmar Gould—pen their own responses. The Americans’ letters were translated into Japanese and published in the Asahi newspaper, and soon after, printed in English with Mogi’s in the Nippon Times. Reader reaction to Mogi, especially in the Nippon Times, was swift, contentious, and voluminous, involving Japanese, Americans, and Europeans. In fact, the controversy drew the greatest reader response the Nippon Times had experienced in its entire 50-year history and attracted the most letters ever from women. The affair came to a partial close when the editors of the Nippon Times announced they were ending the debate (close to the eighth anniversary of the

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attack on Pearl Harbor), but holding a forum on etiquette for American and Japanese ladies to improve mutual understanding. The forum affirmed, as the newspaper later reported, that the American woman was the better hostess. This chapter explores this controversial moment in occupation manners by taking a close look at Mrs Mogi’s letter, the famous Americans’ responses, the debate that ensued primarily in the Nippon Times, and finally, the ladies’ forum that the newspaper sponsored. Together, they produce a thorny conversation, one based on individual anecdotes of personal interactions, stereotypes, and beliefs about the goals of the occupation. Located squarely on the housewife’s turf in the home, the controversy does not cast doubt on the American wife’s homemaking skills or her plentiful appliances; it does question her intellect, and by extension, her anointed place in Japan as an ambassador of democracy. The language of etiquette plays an important role here, and although this etiquette is put forward in the spirit of the occupation as a universal good and a component of a democratic culture open to all, its rules are ultimately established and enforced by the Americans. Thus, what began as Mogi’s ill-mannered challenge to the power of American wives in occupied Japan ends in the forum as a lesson in manners for the Japanese and the reinforcement of the American woman’s democratizing mission. The chapter’s conclusion analyzes how the disruption of Mogi’s letter highlighted the inequities threading through relations between occupier and occupied, revealing how definitions of “American woman” and “Japanese woman” were mutually constructed. Equally, we see that the debate pushed Japan’s own recent colonialist history to the surface, implicating Japanese women as ineffective leaders in their own empire and challenging the emerging narrative of their wartime experience as “victimization by Japan’s militarists.” As a controversy over manners, the incident of Mrs Mogi’s letter draws attention to the uses of etiquette as a way to naturalize and even aestheticize hierarchy and the unspoken practices that maintain it.2 As the controversy draws to a close, everyone is enjoined to develop good will by encouraging reciprocity and the orientalist binary of fast-paced Western progress complemented by ahistorical Eastern culture remains in place. The “occupationnaire”—as American women are sometimes called in this debate— will lead Japan into the future by exemplifying democracy, and in turn, Japanese women will help Americans cultivate an appreciation of Japan’s arts heritage.

What Mrs Mogi wrote The controversy of Mrs Mogi’s letter had starting points in two different publications, on November 13, in Japanese in the Asahi newspaper and on

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November 17 in English in the Nippon Times Sunday magazine. Both articles emphasize the response of the famous American women to a Japanese housewife as extraordinary. The Asahi turns this exchange into quite an event, splashing the feature over almost half the newspaper page. The title is, “Amerika hihan ni kotaeru—Nihon no ichi josei e yon-tsū no tayori” (“Answering Criticism of America—Four Letters to One Woman of Japan”). The key points of Mrs Mogi’s letter and her photograph are contained in a sidebar while the American women’s letters are translated in full. For its part, the Nippon Times uses only Mrs Mogi’s photograph, a picture of a youthful, pretty woman. Adopting what many Japanese would interpret as American style, she smiles confidently into the camera, as seen in Figure 2.1. The sideways turn of her head tempers what could otherwise be a direct and confrontational position. Although this is the same photograph that ran in the Asahi newspaper, it is enlarged for Nippon Times readers.3 Rather than using the photographs of the Americans, the Nippon Times simply reproduces portions of the letters that reveal the signatures of three respondents (Buck, Roosevelt, and Smith) as though capturing the unique personality of each. It publishes Mogi’s letter in full and in large print, and displays the American responses in smaller print but contains them in eye-catching insets. The entire feature covers two full magazine pages. The cheery headline makes the responses of the famous four the crucial ingredient. The feature is billed as an “Asahi Shinbun [Newspaper] Special to Nippon Times.” Rather than emphasizing Mogi’s “criticism of America” as the Asahi had, the Nippon Times frames the American letters as gestures of goodwill. Headlines read: AMERICAN GOODWILL AND SYMPATHY SPANS THE BROAD PACIFIC Letters of Reply from Four Outstanding Women Leaders in U.S. to Japanese Housewife Bring Cheer, Hope and Promise of a Brighter Future4

The Nippon Times summarized Mogi’s letter as follows: Mrs. Teru Mogi who lives in Hayama, Kanagawa Prefecture, was a disappointed woman. She had looked upon America as a land of not only material plenty but also intellectual superiority but after a visit to her next-door neighbor, the home of an American Army officer, she was beginning to have her doubts. Insofar as body comforts were concerned her wildest conjectures had been more than confirmed, but try though she would, she had to admit failure when she attempted to lead the mistress of the house on to discussions on subjects of a higher plane.5

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By her own admission, no one was more surprised than Mogi at the attention her letter received. As she later explained in English to Nippon Times readers and in Japanese to the readers of the women’s magazine, Fujin kōron, her inspiration for writing the letter in the first place came from reading an interview with Pearl Buck. In this interview, Buck expressed her wish to learn about Japan and to “receive frank questions from Japan.”6 It was Buck’s decision to copy Mogi’s letter to the other three American women. An article in Fujin kōron (February 1950) reported that Mogi had allowed the Asahi to make these letters public “at their entreaty.”7 She had taken this action because “Japanese should know this America,” the America represented by “the very finest of America’s fine women” who took the time “to send kind responses to an obscure woman of a defeated nation.”8 In the same article, Mogi says that she had no idea that her letter would be reprinted, and in full, by an English-language newspaper for all the Americans in Japan to read.9 Mogi’s long letter offers an unflattering, generalized portrait of the American woman in Japan. She takes what the occupationnaire apparently displays such obvious pride in—her material goods, her femininity, her homemaking abilities, and even her refreshing Coca-Cola—and, turns them inside out, making them look superficial. While retaining a certain loyalty to the occupation hierarchy that casts American women as role models and teachers, Mogi proves that the student is not passive nor without a knowledge of her own to impart. Revising the hierarchy to account for class and “breeding,” and not simply conqueror and conquered, Mogi easily places herself close to the most talented of American women and above the “average” occupationnaire. Missing in Mogi’s description of her American neighbor’s home is any mention of what happened to those who used to live in this home, who were presumably Japanese. As John Dower explains, American life in Japan was a privileged one, marked in one way by requisitioning the best houses from their Japanese owners to house American civilians and officers.10 In a report on life among the formerly privileged in occupied Japan for Saturday Evening Post, journalist Nora Waln records the resentment of one wealthy woman: “What the occupation means to me is having a colonel and his family live in my home while I occupy my servants’ quarters.”11 Likely one of the reasons Mogi’s letter incited resentment from Japanese readers was that so few of them enjoyed her comfortable housing. Mogi’s letter begins with her initial enchantment upon entering the home of her neighbor, an American housewife who has transformed a Japanese house into a sparkling clean space. The walls are painted so white that they shine,

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matching the gleam of the white refrigerator and range. (Later, Mogi speaks of Japanese homes as typically cold and dingy, and without material comforts.) In the dining room, it is the expanse of a snow-white tablecloth with not a spot or a wrinkle that captures Mogi’s eye. Her neighbor’s eyes shine, too, as she claims that even one stain on such a tablecloth would bring great shame to an American homemaker. Though clearly impressed, Mogi cannot help calculating how much soap and electricity, rare resources in Japan at this time, must go toward maintaining this comfort. A glass case displays a pair of cloisonné vases and Japanese porcelain, perhaps evidence of the woman’s shopping trips in Japan. From the pleasures of this American home tour, we follow Mogi’s eye to the abundance of her neighbor’s wardrobe. She guides the reader to see the American woman taking a kind of childlike delight in her possessions as she excitedly describes each new outfit in her closet and the events to which she will wear them. Party clothes appear—a cocktail dress embroidered with gold, another dress for afternoon bridge parties, and an evening gown for the next Saturday’s dance. The neighbor’s American life in Japan is as wondrous and festive as it is excessive. She is a veritable princess. As a “poverty-stricken Japanese,” Mogi finds herself beyond envy, feeling “overwhelmed and aghast.” At one point, the neighbor’s nameless houseboy brings in Coca-Cola and the two women settle down for a chat. Other than elevating the American as a lady with servants to manage, the houseboy earns no special notice since domestic workers were common in many American homes in Japan, and, as readers later learned, also in Mogi’s.12 The focus is on the women’s conversation and this is where the trouble occurs. Mogi grows disappointed when she realizes that her neighbor cannot say anything intelligent about democracy, does not even know the word “feudalism,” and has not the faintest interest in good literature, architecture, or painting. Completely at a loss when Mogi starts to steer the conversation toward such topics, the poor woman can do no more than manage an enthusiastic boast about the size of New York skyscrapers. Mogi plays on her reader’s sympathy, if not her neighbor’s, by showing how valiantly she keeps trying to find a topic suitable for an intelligent conversation. Finally, her patience and the reader’s own are spent. While good manners demand that Mogi not voice her disappointment to her neighbor, Pearl Buck’s request for “frank questions” encourages Mogi to dispense with etiquette in her writing. Buck gives Mogi permission to vent, and vent she does, finding fault with the Americans of occupied Japan on a grand scale. As she explains in her letter to Buck, Mogi takes her neighbor’s intellectual shortcomings as indicative of occupation women as a whole, and uses this

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opportunity to describe what she sees as the fundamental narrowness of most Americans in Japan. Mogi accuses them of confining their interests in her country to the superficial collection of objects such as cloisonné and sights such as Mt Fuji and cherry blossoms, and of closing themselves up in their American homes and their American world in Japan. She complains that they show little interest in inviting Japanese in or venturing out. She wonders why Americans have not progressed in the spiritual and cultural arena as they have in material ways: In my three years experience, the greater part of the Americans who came with the Occupation do not understand Japan and would not try to do so. Certainly these people are not the kind of people who possess high American culture. But it is none-the-less certain that they represent the general American public.13

Mogi, as though in complete ignorance or denial about Japan’s own colonialist history (as a German Nippon Times reader later points out), goes on to promise that if she and her countrywomen represented an occupying power, surely they would treat their subordinates with more grace and adopt a keen interest in their customs. She imagines that such a place might be “in the southern region”—a comment reminiscent of Darwinian racial hierarchies: If we left Japan and went to a country with some lower civilization than ours, in a similar way as the Japanese civilization is lower than the American, for instance to some countries in the southern region, if the natives show good will toward us, we would certainly try to associate with them to understand their customs and their characteristics. . . . But as far as I know, Americans, specially American women would not move a finger to try to understand Japan. Indeed, American women are indifferent to Japan, to Japanese men and to Japanese women, to a degree to be wondered at.14

Physical differences, too, play a role in defining the unequal relationship of American and Japanese women. Mogi imagines that American women feel “nothing but superiority” at the sight of “yellow-skinned Japanese women . . . with short bow legs, their bad-shapes being wrapped up in clumsy, and antedated clothing which is just enough to keep them warm.” Given this comment, it is no wonder that ten years later in 1959, as we see in Chapter 6, it was the long, straight legs of Japan’s Miss Universe that excited pride at home. In 1949, however, Mogi argues that it is the intangible Japanese spiritual qualities that are worthy of admiration. Mogi separates Buck from the common American because she appears to appreciate spirituality. The Good Earth, Mogi believes, proves how well Buck has

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understood the “beautiful virtues of the East,” and the “self-restraint” practiced by Asian women such as exemplified by her character Oran [O-Lan].15 (In aligning herself with O-Lan, the plain, hardworking and self-sacrificing wife, Mogi could imply that the average American woman in Japan is rather like O-Lan’s nemesis, the lovely but superficial concubine Lotus Blossom, who grows ugly and corpulent through self-indulgence as the family fortunes rise.) For Mogi, American women fail to perceive Asian women’s inner virtue; they are no better than Pierre Loti who looked on Japanese as he would “curiously shaped vases of the Orient.”16 Mogi finds American women equally fascinated by the exotic. This remark—as well as mention of her neighbors’ Japanese cloisonné and porcelain on display—captures the way, as Naoko Shibusawa puts it, Americans “began to see Occupied Japan as an exotic tourist locale and souvenir hunter’s paradise.”17 Indeed, Shibusawa explains, they strove to find the Japan portrayed by Loti and other travelogues, that is, “a place to tour and shop for artwork and curios.”18 Despairing over Loti’s and Americans’ consumer view of Japan leads Mogi to argue that Japan and the Japanese have a depth profoundly difficult to comprehend, in particular for the ordinary American stationed with the occupation. Mogi closes by pleading for more from the United States than material charity, and asks for a “spiritual blood transfusion by Americans of intelligence.” This “is bound to encourage and elevate this defeated and frustrated Japan.”19 In her letter to Buck, Mogi does not hesitate to present herself as an educated, independent-minded, cosmopolitan Japanese woman. In effect, she is a woman who has achieved the goals celebrated in the rhetoric of the occupation—she practices free speech and criticizes those in power. Mogi also identifies herself as an Asian woman who embodies a tradition equally worthy of respect. Her “Asian self-restraint” is the implied contrast to her neighbor’s immature American exuberance. Although Mogi finds fault with American women for their orientalism, she employs it herself. Yet Mogi’s use of essentialism here functions strategically, allowing her to claim a position other than that of the vanquished supplicant. Mogi still wants to learn from America, but she asserts the right and the sophistication to choose which America shall be her teacher. Initiating this conversation with Buck also enables Mogi to leap over the ranks of the ordinary occupationnaires, and to diminish their importance in the process, which, as we shall see, is regarded as a calamitous faux pas. Mogi has also breached the etiquette of defeat in another serious way. She has appropriated the classic discourse of colonialism in taking the occupationnaire to task. Reversing the hierarchy of occupier and occupied, Mogi adopts the position of the wise, rational “colonizer” who sees beyond her neighbor, the

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“native,” the childlike, spoiled woman who could obviously benefit from the colonizer’s superior knowledge. Mogi’s public show of “bad manners,” that is, her appropriation of the colonizer’s stance and language, her elevation of essential Japaneseness as equal to Yankee know-how, and her move to outrank the occupationnaire were to provoke many Nippon Times readers.20 Moreover, by describing her neighbor’s material life as pointing to a lack in American culture, Mogi dismisses one of the key selling points of the occupation project that is the celebration of the American woman as the embodiment of democracy, liberation, and abundance. In contrast, Mogi believes that the shallow but wealthy American woman needs to look to the educated Japanese woman to gain a spiritual and intellectual life. Lastly, we should note that Mogi’s aptitude to carry on a conversation in English with her monolingual neighbor increases her status in this interaction; the ability to converse in English has long been considered a decided advantage in Japan. Not only will many readers fault Mogi on all these counts and more, but they will also accuse of her of being ungrateful, and if they are Japanese, of being a snob.

The beautiful life: The occupationnaire in Japanese media Mogi’s letter presents a startling departure from the usual display of the occupationnaire’s good works and beautiful life in Japan found in the Nippon Times and in magazines and educational programs representing American women. Thus, while it was the responses of the famous American women that brought Mogi celebrity, it was the rarity of a Japanese woman openly criticizing the American woman, a venerated star of democracy and progressive womanhood in Japan, as discussed in Chapter 1, which stirred such a response among readers. Here, a brief look at the way the Nippon Times typically displays the occupationnaire helps us understand the audacity of Mogi’s critique and why it ignited such furor. Although American women sometimes appear in front page news stories in the Nippon Times, mainly as the wives of important men, they dominate the kind of “society page” that one most often finds on the last page of the newspaper’s 1949–50 issues, often page 4. Page 4 offers a strange mix of American women’s work for democracy in Japan blended with images of royalty and Hollywood stars. Yet, it is the American women of the occupation—members of the Colonial Women’s Club,21 women involved in charity work22 and cultural exchange,23 women planning social events24—who usually take pride of place on page 4.

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Elegantly turned out, at times in dresses so rich with material that they recall courtly robes, the occupationnaires smile brightly day after day in Nippon Times. Their hair is smartly coifed, their faces tastefully made up, their posture erect—a cynic might say that they look every inch the duchesses of democracy. Referred to as Mrs So and So (unless they are women with military titles of their own), these American women more often appear in the company of other Anglo-American women, or by themselves, than with husband or children, giving them an enviable air of purpose and independence. Race privilege and victory accord these wives status in Japan and their role as emblems of American emancipation also gives them a mission. They have their own work and their own identity. All the evidence of their active lives and sense of involvement in occupied Japan can almost make one forget how confining the space of page 4 is, and how firmly it is separated from the headlines of page 1. These occupationnaires also have their own spokeswomen: regular page four columns on living in Japan by Nancy Echols25 and Millie Johansen had been appearing since 1948. Usually the two critics expound in an amiable, paternalistic manner on what Japanese, and Japanese women, in particular, need to do in order to become more independent, free-thinking, and democratic. The lack of American women’s equity with men in the United States and their own confinement in the realm of page 4 is never mentioned. Japanese women, much less visible on page 4, play quite a different role when they appear on this society page. Most often they act as the beneficiaries of American generosity, American learning, or as guides to kimono or flowerarranging for American women.26 The hierarchy of the gracious American woman, the good-humored, lively and well-meaning lady of charitable works, and the Japanese woman, as eager recipient and student and genial guide to Japan, is ever present.27 Reactions to Mogi’s assertive letter call into question how open the doors to democratic equality were. The American occupationnaire believes that she is doing everything that she can to bring democracy to Japan, and as many, but not all letters from American women show, she remains the arbiter of success and progress.

The famous four respond to Mrs Mogi In 1941 Pearl Buck published Of Women and Men, a book critical of what she saw as young American women’s turn toward domesticity and away from the feminism of an earlier generation that had won the vote. Perhaps it

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is this sentiment that gives Mogi’s letter appeal, for it confirms Buck’s dismay with the postwar emphasis in the United States on women making a career of homemaking. Of the famous four, Pearl Buck responds most sympathetically to Mogi, and welcomes her criticism of Americans. Confirming that Mogi has touched on a problem endemic to American life, Pearl Buck, in effect, accepts Teruko Mogi into a private club of enlightened, international, and intellectual women. Buck agrees that Americans have become far too materialistic, writing that, “We are like children who have discovered how to make wonderful new toys and these toys absorb us so that we have no time or thought for anything else.”28 Buck identifies American education as the culprit in not preparing children to grow up to read books. However, Pearl Buck gives copies of the letter to the other three women so that Mogi will “know some of our best American women.”29 She encourages Mogi to continue to write to her, to report on the occupation, to tell her of Japan, and to consider writing a book herself. Thinking that Mogi has a much harder life than she, in fact, does, Buck also offers to send “food, or clothing or something useful.”30 The responses from Roosevelt and Gould, though validating Mogi’s feelings about her visit, support the occupationnaires. Well known in Japan at the time as an American leader, Eleanor Roosevelt made a much publicized trip to the country in 1953. In this 1949 letter, she sympathizes with Mogi’s disappointment in her neighbor’s materialism, but doubts that the woman is typical of American women in Japan, many of whom surely have more interest in Japan and in intellectual matters. She suggests that the American hostess may actually have been following etiquette, having avoided talking about politics for fear of reminding Mogi of her responsibility along with all the other citizens of Japan for bringing their countries to war. Beatrice Blackmar Gould, whom the Nippon Times also identified in parentheses as Mrs Bruce Gould, coedited Ladies Homes Journal with her husband Bruce Gould from 1935 to 1967, and authored plays and numerous magazine articles. The pair made Ladies Home Journal “arguably the most progressively feminist of any major publication” in the war years.31 Gould understands Mrs Mogi’s frustration but explains that democracy includes many different kinds of people, not all of whom live up to its ideals. She writes “that the vast majority of Americans are hoping that the efforts to establish a Japanese democracy are being furthered by wise, just and kindly persons—that Americans are exercising no more control than needs be, and that those controls are being slackened more and more as the Japanese people bridge the gulf between our civilizations.”32 In a much shorter response, Senator Smith reports being inspired by Mogi’s

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letter, and finds that “the biggest barrier to understanding between nations is language.”33 More important than any particular opinion given in these replies is the fact of the response itself. Despite their sometimes condescending tones, the famous four listened to Mogi and took the time to respond. By earning the attention of these well-respected American women, Mogi won a nationwide audience of Japanese and occupationnaires alike. Her criticisms were heard.

Asahi readers’ attack Mrs Mogi Both the editors of the Asahi newspaper and Nippon Times express surprise, almost bewilderment, at the reader reaction generated by Mrs Mogi’s letter and the responses of the famous four. The Asahi, however, confines the news event to only two articles: the initial splash and a short article one week later commenting on the volume and nature of the responses received. The subject of the occupationnaire and her life in Japan is not staple fare in the Asahi, as it is in the Nippon Times. With the exception of Anglo fashion models’ photographs and the almost daily dose of Blondie comics, images of American women are rare here. It is easy to imagine why many occupationnaires disagreed with Mrs Mogi’s letter, but what explains the disdain expressed by the Japanese readers of Asahi? Judging from the Asahi report, most seem to view Mogi as an elitist, a brash woman who has not only stepped over the ranks of the occupationnaire, but also jumped over almost all other Japanese. Her fine learning, leisure, and privileged Hayama home-ownership separate her from the majority of Japanese, who would be as unlikely to be invited to her house as to the home of an occupationnaire. Apparently, it does not take much for them to imagine Mogi finding their conversation as dull as her hapless neighbor’s. Unwittingly, Mogi has tossed the occupationnaire in with the “ordinary Japanese,” forging an alliance of hurt feelings between the two groups of readers. In contrast, the famous four, especially Buck and Roosevelt, appear to be reaching out equally to all Japanese, refusing to separate the elite from the ordinary. No one questions the qualifications of the famous four to give their opinions on the occupation, even though none has actual experience of it. Yet, Japanese readers plainly scoff at Mogi assuming the position of one who can now talk with America’s powerful women and complain of those less learned. Who is she to hold herself so high and mighty? (Mogi would later dismiss this as the propensity of most Japanese “to flatter authority.”34)

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Interesting in the Asahi attacks on Mogi is that while most readers fault her for generalizing about all American women based on her conversation with one person, they proceed to speak of how “all Japanese women” should feel about this letter and react to it. The Asahi reports on reader reaction as follows: [This] article produced a strong reaction among our readers. Letters to the “Voice” section of our newspaper displayed many cool reflections and warm sentiments. Among these were letters that spoke of being profoundly impressed with the affectionate generosity of Pearl Buck and the understanding born of wisdom shown by Mrs. Roosevelt. What unifies these letters is that each and every writer said something like, “Shouldn’t all Japanese women be ashamed of themselves after reading these letters?,” and “We must understand what important things [these letters from the American women] are teaching us.”35

The Asahi selects letters from four readers to excerpt here.36 The editors remark that many readers fear that Mogi may have given an incorrect impression of the occupationnaire by her reckless generalizing. The first letter excerpted comes from a woman identified as a student in Urawa, who castigates Mogi as foolishly trying to imitate the Americans. The student commands Mogi to look at herself in the mirror to see what a pretentious copycat she is, and to recognize what an American facade she has fashioned for herself. True, Japan should seek criticism from Americans, “our sempai (superiors) in democracy,” and give criticism back, the student argues, but this conversation must be based on a deep understanding of such areas as religion and philosophy. This is what Japanese women need to develop as “cultured people.” Another writer, a man from Tokyo, leaps to the defense of American women by citing their specific good works on behalf of Japanese orphans. Further, he writes that Japanese tend to misinterpret any cheerfulness as a lack of intelligence. Loyal to one of the prime tenets of occupation ideology, the reader further holds that the success of America is due to more than its riches and resources. The accumulated spirit and intelligence of the American people are responsible, too. Another writer, a housewife who says that she is “beneath the ranks of the middle class” takes issue with Mogi being too confident in her own opinion. The writer cautions that Japanese, who are now enduring a time of material deprivation, should study more before they end up nurturing a spirit of defiance. She says that while material development is important, the growth of the heart and soul are also valuable. The housewife is most impressed with Roosevelt, and, like Mogi, finds that Buck shows a keen understanding of Eastern women’s virtues in The Good Earth. “Mrs. Mogi, no, all the women of Japan, must not

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ignore Mrs. Roosevelt’s letter.” The fourth reader/writer, a man, appreciates the warmth of Buck’s letter and the good will of Gould’s message. In the end, this writer, departing from the almost uniform disapproval expressed by other Asahi readers, thanks Mogi for having the courage to tell Americans what she thought for this has opened up a useful conversation that can lead to many more.37

Criticism and support for Mrs Mogi from Nippon Times readers Sparks flew in every direction in the “Readers in Council” section of Nippon Times following the publication of Mogi’s letter. Of course, the Nippon Times editors, like their Asahi counterparts, sifted through many letters to choose the ones they would print. Although they do not state any criteria for making their selections, the differences in expression and the fact that each letter tends to add some new bit of evidence or point of view suggests that the editors were orchestrating the debate for a variation in text and texture. Almost all oppose Mogi, regardless of the writer’s nationality or gender. Indeed, most letters express unrelieved hostility, finding Mogi an arrogant, hypocritical, bad-mannered perpetrator of a deplorable “publicity stunt.” Still, Mogi had her fans—Americans and Japanese, who, though few in number, applauded her daring critique. I will discuss the letters of five readers whose opinions illustrate the diversity of positions in the conversation. First, the letters of Nippon Times columnists Nancy Echols and Millie Johansen that express the outrage reportedly felt by many American women. Second, the letters from a sympathetic occupationnaire, identified as Adelia Wheeler. Third, the letter of Thea TezukaBerger, MD, a German physician married to a Japanese man; she sides with the occupationnaires. Fourth are the letters of Toshy Egawa and Mariko Nitta, who fault Mogi’s manners even while they applaud her courage. Columnists Millie Johansen’s and Nancy Echols’ expressions of anger are among the first responses published by the Nippon Times. Ironically, they see none of their own stereotyping of Japanese in Mogi’s sweeping comments about the occupationnaire. Nor do they recognize any of their own arrogance in her giving advice, even though they write regularly about the faults of all Japanese based on their encounters with a few and commonly advise Japanese on how to become more democratic. Much like the Japanese readers of the Asahi newspaper, they, too, find Mogi presumptuous, elitist, and ignorant. They see themselves as helpfully frank and welcoming.

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Millie Johansen uses her own column, “Matters of Opinion,” to voice her discontent. Johansen is “dreadfully sorry” that Mogi encountered such a neighbor, but advises her “not to judge so many by so few,” assuring her that there are many cultured American women in Japan. Johansen’s ladylike tone changes as she lashes out: But, do you think that there are none of us here who feel real anger and humiliation that American women should be so misrepresented? There are as many of us as there would be of women like you and your friends who, were you occupying America, would be anxious that Japanese women not be misrepresented.38

Challenging Mogi’s elitism, Johansen remarks that she enjoys having Japanese friends “from many different walks of life.” She exclaims that, Truly, I cannot say that I find it more interesting to spend an evening at the home of a charming, well-informed, culturally educated Japanese wife than I do to chat brokenly with the none too clean, mis-shapen, but sweet-faced country women who stop at the edge of a garden to look at the growing things we both love.39

Johansen concludes by saying that she would “feel flattered to have the opportunity” to answer any questions Mogi or her friends have. Yet nearly two weeks later in her column of December 5, subtitled “An American Woman Speaks Frankly,” Johansen takes a different approach. She recounts all the incidents in which Japanese have disappointed her as guests in her home. Up until now, Johansen confesses that she has had to exercise definite endeavor in order not to speak of them as irritatedly as I felt. I exercised the endeavor because I felt friendship and affection toward the Japanese people and thought these things to be in no way representative of their manners. I do not think them typical of the Japanese. They are merely “incidents.”40

Johansen rationalizes her complaining by noting, “I do not any longer feel that there is no time when it is civilly justifiable to speak of ‘incidents.’ The precedent has been set in the press by a Japanese woman for American women to read.”41 Mogi has thus opened the doors for Johansen’s complaints, which are several: Japanese guests wipe greasy fingers on her cushions, come late to dinner, bring unexpected and uninvited guests with them, ask for gifts of books rather than the loan of them, and laugh over a foreigner’s attempts to speak Japanese. Johansen concludes her fault-finding by relating the incident of a man knocking into her in his haste to get ahead in a crowd, and only apologizing once he looked back and realized that she was an American.

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Perhaps it is the controversy that this discussion of manners engenders that prompts the editors to make the unusual move of adding a head note to Johansen’s column. It reads: We do not doubt for a moment that everything Millie Johansen describes in this article actually happened, but we do doubt whether they are typical of the conduct of our people. We do not feel these incidents of which Mrs. Johansen speaks are typical. We may be wrong, of course. If we are, we shall like to be set straight. Have other American women been through similar experiences? The reason for giving this article such prominence is partly due to our joy in having Mrs. Johansen, who has found so much to approve about us, come out frankly and tell us what she disapproves.—Editor42

“But I am an Occupation wife,” writes Mrs Nancy Echols on November 23, asserting her own experience as an actual occupationnaire to question Mogi’s claims. Echols stands by Mogi’s neighbor, asks about her side of the story, and defends America’s offer of material aid to Japan as “the finest expression of democracy.” She reveals that she has requested an interview with Mogi to ask her one question: Does she know that over 70 women are going into the high schools in the Tokyo area alone to teach English conversation with no sort of material remuneration? These women share the cold classrooms with the students as often as they can, for many reasons, none of which is selfish and none with a material motive.43

Echols reports that many of these women have told her that they take on this work precisely because they seek “some connection with Japanese people” and wish to “understand them better.”44 This sentiment, that American women perform many acts of kindness in Japan, is expressed by other occupationnaires and Japanese, too. For example, Tomoko Kasai, MD, from Tokyo, writes: “We Japanese women must learn much from our American sisters. . . . There are thousands of Americans now in Japan who are devoting their efforts to Japan’s reconstruction, and whose names will be inscribed in our future history as the builders of a New Japan.”45 But Echol’s outrage, and the support her position receives, does not stop the conversation at all. By December 8, she is plainly frustrated with the continuing life of the whole controversy. She writes that letters to her from sympathetic Japanese readers of the Nippon Times have heartened her, and the one negative letter she received was so “lacking in calm detachment” that she could not take it seriously. While she believes that there has been “an educational value to the

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discussion” and sees the airing of grievances as a “healthy release,” enough is enough: “If I represent the average American, which I sometimes claim, then we say, ‘An end to l’affaire Mogi!’” [N]ow, in heaven’s name, let us bring to a halt name-calling and mud-slinging. Yes, in heaven’s name,—in the name of the Christian precepts on which our democracy is based, let’s remember the larger issues we are serving. The affair, it seems to me, has been carried ad infinitum and ad nauseum.46

Perhaps it is not coincidental that the Nippon Times editors ran Echols’ letter on the same day that they announced that they were stopping the debate. Perhaps this incident also proves that this was the first time Echols’ finds her own authority questioned in Japan and in print, and this explains her impatience with the debate. Trivializing the conversation Mogi has incited as “L’affaire Mogi,” Echols cannot wait for things to calm down and the hierarchy of occupier and occupied righted. Rather than continue to argue with Mogi as an equal, Echols surely prefers the patronizing stance from which she engages Tokyo from the heights of her column. She titles her column, “Innocence Abroad,” yet it is anything but innocent. Her ethnocentric reference to “our democracy” shows that, like MacArthur, Echols sees her mission in Japan to instill Christian values along with democratic ones. One of the longest letters in the controversy, and one that Mogi later quotes at length in a Fujin kōron article comes from Thea Tezuka-Berger, MD. From other letters to the Nippon Times, it is easy to see that Tezuka-Berger (Mogi and readers ignore the MD and refer to her as “Mrs”) has definite ideas about what separates, in her terms, the “oriental” from the “occidental,” and faults the Americans for not understanding the Japanese psychology as oriental and therefore, intractable. This does not stop her from accusing Mogi of racism: I should like to ask you a question, Mrs. Mogi: How do you think the average Japanese woman, who lived in Manchuria during the Japanese occupation acted? Did she associate with the Chinese? Did she try to understand their mentality and culture, which is so much nearer to hers, being oriental? I doubt it! What about the Japanese in Korea? Did they ever learn the Korean language? Did they regard them as equal and worthy of association socially?47

Mogi promoted “Eastern values” in debating the occupationnaires; now, Tezuka-Berger turns this against her. Moving on, we see Mogi’s strategic use of essentialism has paved the way for an orientalist argument on the need for the Euro-American presence in Japan. Tezuka-Berger picks up the common theme that Japanese need rehabilitating after centuries of being schooled to

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obey authority. Interestingly, it was her comments that were most praised in later letters by Japanese men. She writes: I have often wondered whether the much-talked about self-restraint and selfcontrol of the East are really such desirable virtues—at least for a woman. We know that repressing emotions and sufferings without outlet leads to mental disturbances. When I observe the over sensitivity of the Japanese, their mutual mistrust and insincerity, which they hide behind their extreme politeness and consideration, I ask myself: What distorted mentality can be the cause for such abnormal behavior; I wonder whether being trained for self-control for centuries is a safeguard against insanity?48

The problems with Mogi’s essentialist stance do not end there. She also opens up a kind of conservative support from Japanese men. One Meiji University student, who applauds Mogi’s courage, writes, that: “Japanese women should conserve their good traditions while absorbing good American ways through ‘spiritual blood transfusion’ from Americans of intelligence.”49 Hiroshi Mogi (perhaps a relative?), writes sympathetically that Americans might be having difficulty in dealing with “Japanese women’s rather peculiar psychology that keeps them somewhat cold-minded to the hearts of the Westerners, because of their being too modest, in most cases, to the strangers.”50 In an exasperated tone, Susan J. Dunbar of Tokyo, who describes Mogi’s approach to understanding a mere “publicity stunt” that is “in extremely bad taste,” asks, “Where were the good manners we associate with the Orient?”51 In other words, little in this readers’ exchange in Japanese or English would suggest that Japanese are not essentially different from Americans. The exceptions, however, are angry ones. A person identified as Utagawa writes, “Mrs. Mogi is one of the most flagrant examples of the old pedantic breed that it has ever been my lot to come across.”52 Cranky writer, Robert W. Russell, complains that Mogi’s letter “reeks with hypocrisy, smugness, and self adulation.” He joins a few others in seeing Mrs Mogi as a type and not representative of the whole; yet, he argues, Japanese do not recognize this: The exchange of correspondence was most valuable as an example of how far from genuine democratic thinking and acting certain types of Japanese are. The unfortunate thing is that too often personalities of this type put themselves forward and are accepted as representative democratic leaders by the Japanese.53

Tezuka-Berger joins many writers in supporting Mogi’s hapless American neighbor. Echols hopes the neighbor will answer Mrs Mogi. Utagawa

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extends deepest sympathy to her, for she “got nothing for her pains except what must be to her a very unpleasant publicity.”54 Ann Bradshaw thinks the occupationnaire was probably well prepared to discuss any range of topics but “may have recognized the limitations of her young visitor and wisely kept to non-controversial topics.”55 Susan J. Dunbar admires “the Occupationnaire’s silence.”56 Tezuka-Berger, rather than defending the neighbor’s intellect, asks for a different view of her housekeeping abilities, claiming, “the ability with which she manages her household in such a perfect manner is an expression of her cultural standard. In my opinion, culture does not only consist in the formal knowledge of art, literature, etc., but in many human qualities, such as sincerity, social responsibility, capability of decision and efficiency in daily life.”57 Adelia Wheeler, an occupationnaire herself, takes quite a different stance, and in so doing, says (politely) that she disagrees with Nancy Echols. Wheeler finds that Mogi’s letter is probably an apt description of many American wives, and believes that Americans should reflect on their purpose and actions in Japan: It seems that Mrs. Echols and I do not differ so much in attitude for I am sure that we are both sympathetic toward Mrs. Mogi’s plea for mutual understanding—as we do in what we believe to be the facts.. . . Perhaps Mrs. Echols does know of many, many people who are truly doing everything they can. I don’t. I know a handful who are doing everything they can; I know several who are doing a very great deal; I know or know of a good many who are doing something to try to understand Japan and the Japanese people. But I honestly believe that Mrs. Mogi’s neighbor is all too typical of the majority of Americans in Japan.58

While Wheeler’s experiences with occupationnaires lead her to agree in the main with Mogi, Japanese writers use their experiences to challenge her characterization. Mariko Nitta, for example, writes of working with bright American women in the 1949 Japan-America Student Conference, and argues that it was the Japanese women who could not converse on such a wide range of topics. Unlike American women who did not hesitate to talk with male delegates on weighty issues, not one Japanese woman, she says, joined Economics or Politics discussion groups.59 Much like Mogi, however, Nitta admits to being awestruck by American kitchens. She explains how in the past Japanese housewives were “afraid to make any changes” in their kitchens, meekly following the tastes of their parents-in-law, and now they are too poor to do so.

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Mrs Mogi responds Mogi had become something of a celebrity by December 8 when the Nippon Times ran a short feature titled, “Who Is Mrs. Mogi?” The author was Tsugi Shiraishi, the newspaper’s regular columnist on women’s issues.60 Reporting on her visit with Mogi, Shiraishi described her home in Hayama as “a large Japanesestyle residence, where she lives with her husband, a 13 year-old son and two maids.” She notes that Mogi was born into a well-to-do Tokyo family, enjoyed a comfortable childhood with three siblings, and received an education at the Junior College of Bunka Gakuin where she entered the Department of Fine Arts. Although Mogi claims that she is not rich and has even had occasion to sell her clothes to maintain the family’s “accustomed level,” Shiraishi depicts her as privileged: “As is obvious from the position of her husband who is managingdirector of the Seiko Industrial Company with offices in Marunouchi, Mrs. Mogi belongs to the upper, intelligentsia class.”61 The article summarizes Mogi’s initial critique, but also records that she had not intended to criticize all American women. Also, on December 8, the anniversary in Japan of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Nippon Times called a halt to the debate, stating that “no good purpose will be served by continuing this controversy.” On December 9, however, Mrs Mogi was allowed to have her say. The editors wrote this head note to her article: Although we announced yesterday that no more letters regarding the Mogi affair would be published, we believe that in justice to Mrs. Mogi, we should print this letter which was received after yesterday’s paper was made up.62

Two months later, the February 1950 issue of Fujin kōron also carried comments by Mrs Mogi on the controversy. No comment by Mogi appeared, however, in the Asahi newspaper. In these responses, Mogi expresses surprise over the attention her letter received and special delight at Buck’s response. She promises that she meant no harm, especially to her neighbor, but she does “not repent, nor regret having dispatched that frank letter” and she does not back down from her original argument in any way.63 Interestingly, in the Fujin kōron response, she quotes at length from some of the sharpest criticisms directed against her such as Thea Tezuka-Berger’s remarks on Japanese as colonialists. To her, Mogi, recommends Ruth Benedict’s Chrysanthemum and the Sword—a book that meshed with, and

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perhaps influenced Mogi’s ideas of cultural exceptionalism and also one that shaped American’s concepts of Japan and the mission of the occupation.64 Mogi also acknowledges Nancy Echols’ points about the many occupationnaires volunteering in Japanese high schools. In all, Mogi reaffirms the key points of her letter and emphasizes that in making these criticisms, she was embracing the democratic spirit of free speech. She apologizes for generalizing about all American women in Japan, but avers that she is not the only Japanese woman who has had doubts about American materialism. To her Fujin kōron readers, she explains that her generalizations allowed her to elucidate broad issues in the relations between Japanese and Americans, and that her rhetorical strategies should be understood in this fashion. Mogi continues to see herself on an even plane with the occupationnaire, taking an attitude that she obviously believes puts her above most Japanese, who still seek to “flatter authority.” She apologizes for unintentionally hurting the feelings of American women in Japan, but demands that international friendship enable mutual criticism. Further, she assures her Fujin kōron readers that several American women called or visited her to lend their support, and although they intended to write to the newspaper, everything ended before they had a chance. Even her neighbor, who moved away, harbored no ill feelings, and shook hands with Mogi, agreeing that they had been “good neighbors.” Since one Nippon Times writer had expressed surprise at her sudden ability in English, Mogi admits that her letter had been “perfected with the joint help of a Nisei lady, an American colonel, a Japanese who had lived in Europe for over a dozen years and a person who recently returned from America.”65 In the main, Mogi styles herself as a freedom fighter in both venues. Here, a quote from her letter to the Nippon Times: We remember too well how servile and abject to authority we were during the war. We should never repeat that mistake by being servile and abject again to the Powers that be after the war. The right to criticize should be a part of the individual freedom granted to everyone of us in the New Japan. I defy blind judgment, and I am glad that my bold criticism has become a motive to the very frank exchange of opinions on both sides. I am certainly not ashamed of the letter, as some of the Japanese correspondents suggest that I should be.66

Mogi then thanks everyone for their frank opinions and happily announces that “we are promoting the cause of democracy through our participation.”67 Unlike Echols who tries to maintain her grasp on “our democracy,” Mogi affirms that such contentious, inclusive conversations are democracy.

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The Ladies Forum on etiquette Yet closure, in the Nippon Times, at least, had not been reached. Letters—pro and con—were still coming in regarding Johansen’s complaint of the “incidents” of Japanese bad manners.68 In January 1950, perhaps to bring the dispute more firmly to an end, the newspaper sponsored a forum for American and Japanese women to discuss how Japanese could learn to be better guests in American homes, and printed the forum’s conclusions. Columnist Shiraishi, who organized the forum at the request of the Nippon Times editors, reported the event in her article, “As Others See Us: Eastern Ways through Western Eyes.”69 All met at the home of “Mrs. Marion Echols,” typically known to her readers, as we have seen, as the columnist Nancy Echols. Columnist Millie Johansen was not present (not invited?). Four other American wives participated (only the woman employed by the United States has her given name listed): Mrs Herbert L. Herberts, Mrs Tom Lambert, Mrs Charles B. Overacker, and Mrs Maria Lystad of Special Service. Three Japanese career women, at least two of whom were also married, joined them: Mrs Taka Yamada of the YWCA, Mrs Matsuyo Yamamoto, Chief of the Agriculture-Forestry Ministry’s Rural Life Improvement Section, and journalist Shiraishi. Mrs Mogi was not present, and likely not invited. “As Others See Us” is a very long article that summarizes the ladies’ forum. Japanese women explained various Japanese table manners, though inappropriate at an American table, as being mistakenly transferred from perfectly proper etiquette at a Japanese tea ceremony. Americans were quite critical of Japanese hosts and guests, complaining that the girls giggle in an irritating fashion, the hosts make one feel rushed, and they make disparaging remarks when they serve beautiful food or give gifts. Americans are disconcerted when Japanese guests do not say whether they want coffee or tea, though they are clearly asked their preference. The Japanese women explained the reticence as Japanese etiquette, but everyone agreed that modesty should not be taken to extremes. The article concludes: The American people are recognized as being more straightforward and say only what they believe, while the Japanese are more reserved and accustomed not to say what is on their mind. The American hostess was acknowledged to be the more skilful in entertaining guests and making them feel at ease, while the Japanese emphasize formality and thus create an atmosphere of stiffness.70

The Ladies’ Forum upholds Americans’ informal conversational practices as superior. The asymmetry of the participants’ status in this “contact zone” that

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enables Americans the freedom to be “straightforward” with Japanese is not acknowledged. Nor, it seems, does anyone mention how one Japanese woman’s own “straightforward” letter about American habits caused such a fury of debate that the Nippon Times had to engineer its close. Yet, one more Nippon Times feature article, “Attitude to Japanese,” published on January 20, bears recounting here. Written by an American author identified only as Elizabeth C. Mark, the lengthy article does not refer to the Mogi controversy, but takes issue with “the prevailing tendency among Americans writing articles in Japan today toward criticism of the Japanese people and their way of life.”71 Mark argues that friendship between peoples must be built on appreciation, not mutual criticism. Moreover, she claims that the success of the occupation relies on Americans’ ability to realize “three interlinking purposes”—to be ambassadors of good will who make a good impression and model exemplary conduct; to teach the goodness of democracy and its practical applications; and to unleash their curiosity, venture out, and to open their minds “to the vast storehouse of Oriental lore now made accessible to us.”72 Full of good intentions, Mark’s essay, too, affirms the paternalistic rhetoric of the occupation. Although she encourages Americans to learn from the Japanese, the phrase “storehouse of Oriental lore” suggests the kinds of arts practices and curio-hunting that Americans were already experiencing in occupied Japan. According to Mark and despite Mogi’s bold challenge, the Americans remain firmly in place as democracy’s teachers while Japanese are allowed only the expertise to discuss their aesthetic past.

Conclusion Mrs Mogi’s letter drew numerous women in occupied Japan into a debate where the home emerged as a site for democratic living and the housewife as democracy’s leader. Attention centered on the home as a space that showcased the housewife’s taste and intelligence. It was a space of contradictions—at once democratic and hierarchical, open and exclusive, modern in its appliances and tradition-bound in etiquette, and at its center stood the housewife, a kitchen princess freed and constrained by her domestic life. The debate problematized the home, and especially the modern, Americanized kitchen, as the site of universal opportunity to which all women could aspire. Even though Mogi was more privileged by far than most Japanese, her letter highlighted the disparity in access to energy and other resources required for American-style homemaking.

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The occupation’s “promise of a brighter tomorrow” prompted realization of the inequities in the present and doubts about the future. Mogi’s letter enacted a startling role reversal by challenging the “average American” to improve. As Lucy Herndon Crockett describes in Popcorn on the Ginza, her 1949 memoir of life in occupied Japan, the American woman rarely needed to prove herself in Japan, and many enjoyed a much more privileged status there than at home. Satirically, Crockett creates the character of the “scatterbrained” Miss Lulu Love, “a typical case,” to show how even “a Main Street girl in a $19.95 dress” attained regard when she made friends in Japan, noting “her opinions on the weightiest subjects are accepted as ultimatums from an oracle” by fawning Japanese.73 Mogi’s letter and Pearl Buck’s response attacked that Main Street girl as having a lot to learn. The anger directed to Mogi from Americans may have been motivated by outrage over the role reversal—inspiring them to defend themselves as not average, and certainly not average compared to a Japanese woman. Many Japanese readers did not like being considered average by Mogi either. Mogi’s letter also scolded the Japanese overestimation of Americans that elevated the Main Street girl into an oracle of democracy. Long after mention of Mogi has subsided in the Nippon Times, one can still find letters about differences in American and Japanese manners, but a certain closure to the l’affaire Mogi has been realized by early 1950. The pride of the occupationnaire and her position in the page-4 world of Tokyo high society has been reestablished, at least in the pages of the Nippon Times. Yet many questions remain unanswered: Why did the Nippon Times rein in the controversy? Were they afraid of losing American readers? Did they not want to offend their popular columnist Nancy Echols and her powerful husband Colonel Marion Echols? And why was the Asahi unwilling to carry Mogi’s letter and the American and European responses in its newspaper? Whatever the motivations for editorial control of this controversy, Mogi’s letter had touched on sensitive feelings about the relations of occupier and occupied. If her letter had concentrated on the American neighbor as a unique individual, much less criticism would have ensued. Taking the American as representative of all occupationnaires and emblematic of American culture, and styling herself as qualified to make such judgments in a “straightforward” manner was what provoked the debate. All along, Mogi endured much fair criticism, but also rather unfair charges of being impolite. She had exhibited bad manners at the occupation. She had refused to play lady-in-waiting to democracy’s duchess.

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Figure 3.1 “New Kitchen in 1954,” Asahi Shimbun, 1954. Courtesy of Asahi Shimbun Photo Archives and Getty Images.

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The Housewife Debate of 1955

The Housewife Debate began unexpectedly, sparked by reactions to an article in the February 1955 issue of Fujin kōron, a “Special Issue Devoted to Working Women.” The Fujin kōron reader, who was likely to be fairly educated and who might well have identified herself as a housewife, encountered multiple images of feminism and femininity as she perused this issue. Such features as colorful illustrations of the latest Parisian fashions, gritty black-and-white photos of the jobless waiting pensively at a woman’s employment agency, articles on the lives of women in mining and agriculture, and advertisements for beauty creams produced a montage of competing images of privilege and hardship. Glancing through this issue, many a reader might have skipped the articles altogether, pausing only to take a quick look at the photos or enjoy a laugh at the lighthearted view of working women presented in the section of comics near the end. But if the housewife/reader turned to the essay by journalist Ishigaki Ayako titled, “Shufu to iu dai-ni shokugyō-ron” (“The Secondary Occupation Called the Housewife”), she may well have felt that her own life was being held up to public ridicule and scrutiny, especially when she read that homemaking was turning her brain to mush. Ishigaki’s criticism of the housewife not only riled many Fujin kōron readers in 1955; it ignited one of the longest running of all debates in the history of Japanese feminism.1 Like many other controversies, it began in the pages of a well-known women’s magazine, and upon capturing public attention, fanned out to more general-interest publications with larger circulations. The Housewife Debate (shufu ronsō) encompassed at least 33 major essays written for various publications between 1955 and 1976.2 The sheer length of this debate, as well as its variation and complexity, have prompted feminist scholars in Japan to divide it into three or four separate stages and to examine each stage within the context

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of a changing political economy. Among all the elements of the Debate, I find the Fujin kōron essays of 1955 the richest, both because they include so many women’s essays (later years saw many more by male academics) and because they inspired hundreds of letters to Fujin kōron from women all over Japan. Most interestingly, the Fujin kōron essays express a strong sense that a new position, understood as that of the modern Japanese housewife, had emerged by 1955, and that her presence had much to say about where Japan had been in wartime and where the country was headed in the early postwar. Examining these essays in their chronological order, as we will do in this chapter, illustrates how far the Housewife Debate expanded in a single year and how it moved from emotionally charged claims to equally forceful counter-claims. Although this close reading of the Housewife Debate limits the scope of this investigation into what has, after all, been a decades-long controversy, it also directs attention to the fact that debates are more than the sum of their key ideas. They move in unpredictable ways, taking on new shapes and emotions as they travel, and this texture, too, is an important part of feminist thought. What this exploration of the early Housewife Debate will not reveal is much at all about the lives of actual Japanese housewives in 1955. The essays do not draw from surveys or demographic reports but are wholly based on personal experience, anecdote, random observation, and conjecture. Confident in their own opinions, the essayists in this debate project their personal vision of the Japanese housewife. They also point to highly visible changes such as the introduction of new household appliances, new fashions, and political activism on the part of many housewives (Figure 3.1). What the Housewife Debate dramatizes is how contentiously critics argue about the meaning of these changes and their implications for transforming the everyday lives of married couples and families. Read as cultural history, the Housewife Debate’s construction of the housewife reveals certain assumptions about gendered spaces, the value of work over leisure and paid over unpaid labor, privacy over communality, and Japan’s relationship to the United States that were circulating in popular discourse in the 1950s. Clearly, the labor of this housewife contributed significantly to the creation of Japan’s postwar “economic miracle,” and both her usefulness to corporate Japan as well as the societal and institutional pressures on women to become housewives has been much discussed. Yet, as the Housewife Debate demonstrates, the postwar invention of this “modern Japanese housewife” did not happen quietly—or emerge unchallenged.

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Inciting debate: Ishigaki Ayako and “The Secondary Occupation Called the Housewife” We begin our consideration of the Housewife Debate by returning to the special issue on working women in Fujin kōron and the offending essay by Ishigaki Ayako.3 When working women, especially poor working women, are the topic of any of the other essays in this February 1955 issue, the writer’s tone is invariably sympathetic and respectful. In speaking about and to the housewife in “The Secondary Occupation,” Ishigaki Ayako takes no such admiring stance. She patronizes, chides, cajoles, and even insults her reader. When read against the heroic portraits of female courage lauded in the other articles, Ishigaki’s didactic style and her characterization of modern Japanese housewives as so indolent that “their brains have all turned to mush” stand out as a particularly sharp attack.4 This unflattering characterization offers only a taste of the criticism that Ishigaki directs toward the modern Japanese housewife, whom she views as leading anything but a mature, productive life. Indeed, throughout her essay, Ishigaki paints the modern Japanese housewife as a woman absorbed in concern for the trivial, for the minutiae of home life, fashion, and beauty, and consequently as someone unable to engage in any taxing matters at all. In constructing a composite portrait of the housewife, Ishigaki draws from her random observations of everyday life and her conjectures about what the lives of many Japanese housewives must be. To Ishigaki’s mind, the housewife’s lack of intellectual stimulation has reduced her speech to a mean and infantile state: she gossips, whines, giggles, and babbles.5 And yet—having no boss, no schedule, and no accountability—the housewife flaunts her autonomy and her leisure in unmistakably public ways. As Ishigaki writes: Housewives are forever talking about how busy they are, but their “conferences at the well” are endless. Dangling their shopping baskets as they stroll through town, housewives stop to gossip in the most carefree manner, and are scolded by no one for doing so. People in the workplace, on the other hand, must always think about their boss, and even if their work is tedious, they must focus all their energy on it until quitting time. Housewives have no such constraints. They spend their time in selfish leisure, working whenever they wish, even on a moment’s whim, and for this they receive no criticism whatsoever. If they were in the workplace, however, these housewives would face strict training and competition from their colleagues. But the housewife completely escapes all such pressure. Housewives have almost

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Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan no occasion to worry about whether or not they have adequately accomplished the tasks assigned to them.6

In this way, Ishigaki imagines the housewife’s life as an unconstrained and selfindulgent existence. Such freedom might seem appealing on the face of it, but Ishigaki warns that the reader should look at what happens to those women who give in to it. One has only to hear the housewife speak or watch her move in public, she implies, to recognize the modern housewife’s freedom and be shocked at her abuse of it. It is the very visibility of this housewife’s indolence that most irritates Ishigaki. To her eyes, the housewife cares about making an attractive appearance in only the most superficial of ways, having no idea of how grating her behavior can be to others, especially to others engaged in productive labor. Yet it is not the class disparity evident in the housewife’s access to leisure time that ultimately offends Ishigaki. Rather, it is the housewife’s lack of resistance to the seductive quality of this life and her public display of this happy autonomy that most annoys. Where has this leisure come from? Ishigaki gives a lengthy explanation of how physically demanding and time-consuming housewifery in Japan used to be. In the past, the home was a site of production, she argues, and the housewife its chief producer. Housewives had to do everything from making the soy sauce to gathering firewood to sewing all the family’s clothing by hand. They had ample reason, Ishigaki argues, to be proud of their work. In contrast, Ishigaki finds that the housewife of 1955, while constantly claiming to be busy, now enjoys timesaving appliances and the availability of a wide variety of goods and services that have simplified her job. In postwar Japan, Ishigaki explains, the home has become a site of consumption and the housewife is no more than its chief consumer, a mere “parasite” living on her husband’s income. She finds that, aside from the childrearing performed by young mothers, the housewife has no challenges at all.7 Thus Ishigaki characterizes consumption as a simple, passive activity and the home as an isolated space of female lethargy, trivia, and indulgence. To strengthen her case against the indolent Japanese housewife, Ishigaki points to the active lives of men and of assertive American housewives. When women in the United States realized the extra time produced by modern conveniences and the financial benefit of working, Ishigaki argues, they seized the opportunity to go out to work and thereby inspired an even more rapid rationalization of the home. While Ishigaki assumes that Japanese women will eventually follow this trajectory, she laments how many Japanese housewives refuse to acknowledge how easy housewifery has become. She contrasts this rather childish stubbornness with the lot of men, who have no choice about work in the first place and so develop their character, their confidence, and their

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connection with the larger society through years of labor. With each passing year, Ishigaki argues, men become more accomplished than their passive wives, who find themselves growing restless and dissatisfied. In her references to Japanese men, American housewives, and Japanese housewives, Ishigaki suggests how the different spaces of the home and the workplace affect adults. The workplace, gendered as a male space, serves as a place where men and American women must prove their mettle, becoming mature, responsible adults in the process. They meet challenges, work hard, and grow independent. In the space of the home, gendered as female, Japanese housewives grow predictably soft and simpleminded, their concerns taking on a rather nervous, petty quality.8 The marketplace and other public spaces, also gendered as male, are the site of serious adult work, something that makes the leisured appearance of the housewife and her inconsequential speech stand out all the more because they are so aberrant. The fact, as Ishigaki sees it, that the housewife cares so little about giving this impression warrants the critical tone she adopts in her essay. At one point in her essay, Ishigaki pauses, acknowledging that she understands that “many of you” will be dismayed by her remarks, and gives an example of what her imagined reader’s retort might be—crafting it, however, as a pathetic sort of whine against the workplace unfairness. Then, she answers the retort. Ishigaki does admit that the workplace has not always been conducive to women’s careers, that jobs do not exist for all the women who want to work, and that policies such as the Tōhō film company’s decision in 1954 to force female employees to retire at age 25 are discouraging.9 Still, Ishigaki assigns most of the blame for such discrimination to the young women who so lack ambition that neither they nor their male bosses can imagine them as anything but future housewives. This, Ishigaki asserts, makes it difficult for women who do want careers to oppose such discrimination and be taken seriously. Ishigaki reserves somewhat softer language for the heart of her message to the housewife—the message that, ultimately, she could choose to work for her own self-benefit. Work would cause her to develop spiritually and intellectually, giving her a wider vision of society. Though Ishigaki realizes that many women must work whether or not they are married, she does not emphasize financial gain as the prime reason for the housewife to seek work outside the home. Ishigaki advocates that even women who do not need to work for money take on some occupation outside the home, such as starting a business or doing volunteer work. No woman, moneyed or not, she asserts, should have the “special right” of avoiding useful work. A strongly held assumption underlying Ishigaki’s essay is that work— especially intellectually stimulating or physically demanding work—is good, whereas leisure is suspect. Since Ishigaki defines the modern Japanese housewife

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as the very embodiment of postwar leisure, free time itself takes on a female quality. It is passive, undemanding, and dangerously seductive. Work, in contrast, challenges and builds one’s character, making one more certainly an individual. Like a demanding father, work does not coddle men or women. What the modern Japanese housewife must prove, Ishigaki implies, is that she is an adult, not simply a female. Consequently, the female tasks of the home should be completed with speed, freeing the modern Japanese housewife to have a meaningful life outside the home. Perhaps it is this characterization of the home as a female space that prevents Ishigaki from arguing that men take on housework. Notably, Ishigaki never disassociates the housewife from housework, but refers to even the gainfully employed married woman as shufu. Surprisingly, Ishigaki concludes her essay by embracing the title of housewife herself, asking that women find ways to be useful to society and devote less of their time to housework. Using imagery reminiscent of feminist Hiratsuka Raichō’s 1911 call to Japanese women to uncover their latent creativity, Ishigaki writes: We housewives must once more make an effort to call forth that wonderful energy within us. This does not mean that we should overdo things by putting an inordinate amount of value on domestic labor. Nor does it imply that we should expect men to sympathize with us when we complain of its tedium. It does mean that we should not get caught up in the uselessness of daily, repetitive chores at home. Let’s also quit relaxing with lots of idle chit-chat rather than seeking knowledge.. . . Whether in the workplace or in the home, if women let their spirits degenerate, then how will we ever be liberated? How will we ever achieve equality with men?10

Ishigaki crafts her essay to give her housewife reader a sense that she is being watched and has been found wanting. The scornful quality of much of Ishigaki’s writing implies that the modern Japanese housewife is a child in need of a good scolding that will induce in her a proper sense of shame, motivating her to want to live as an adult. Although Ishigaki suggests that the housewife’s earnings could help the family, her greatest concern is for the housewife’s self-development and its effect on her public image. Ishigaki wants to startle the modern Japanese housewife into seeing her home as a passive space, her activities as mindless consumption, her speech as childish, and her behavior as unequal to that of men and American women. If the housewife can reform, however, she will not only prove herself equal to these others but also gain pride and achieve liberation. In praising this kind of housewife, Ishigaki relinquishes her scorn as well as

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her distance and becomes one with the “truly” modern Japanese housewife—a woman who has nonetheless proven herself to be an adult. Why did Ishigaki feel qualified to launch this attack on Japanese housewives? As far as her Fujin kōron reader knew, Ishigaki Ayako was a magazine writer who also claimed to be a housewife. What the reader likely did not know was that Tokyo-born Ishigaki had traveled to the United States in 1926, at age 23, and had lived here for several years; that she and the man she met and married against her family’s wishes, artist Ishigaki Eitarō, had been part of the intellectual community in New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1930s; and that she had publicly spoken out against Japan’s aggression in China, appearing together with a Chinese woman on many a stage in the United States until 1941. She had also written an autobiography, Restless Wave (published in 1940 in the United States, under the pseudonym of Haru Matsui), in which she denounced Japanese militarism while empathetically describing the common Japanese soldier as a victim of forces beyond his control.11 In 1951 the couple, who had several friendships with China scholars in the United States, found themselves the target of a McCarthyist harassment that ultimately forced their return to Japan. A frequent contributor to Fujin kōron in the 1950s, Ishigaki wrote about the position of women in Japan, both past and present, and while always passionate about this subject, she often employed a much more even tone than one finds in the article discussed here. When thinking more about Ishigaki’s castigation of the modern Japanese housewife, it is revealing to consider her English-language autobiography, Restless Wave. In this volume, Ishigaki writes to an American audience about how harshly her family criticized her as a young adult because she showed no interest in marriage or in leading the sheltered life of a middle-class Tokyo woman. Ishigaki describes how she despaired of finding a job in Tokyo in the early 1920s that would have enabled her to be self-supporting, and how she berated herself for being no more than a parasite on her family. She also writes about how her decision to move to New York and to marry a man of her own choosing brought even harsher criticism, causing her father to sever all ties with her. When Ishigaki attacks the housewife with such force, she is, in effect, fighting the ideal her family had always upheld for her—and the ideal which, in their minds, she had failed to achieve. Upon Ishigaki Ayako’s death on November 12, 1996, at age 93, the Yomiuri newspaper ran a brief article with a photograph of her as an elderly woman. The article mentions that she had been living in a private nursing home in Tokyo and describes her wartime activities in the United States. It also names two of her books and remarks that she was known for writing the essay that ignited debate

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about the professional housewife. The headline and body of the article called her a critic. Nowhere does the article mention that Ishigaki ever considered herself a housewife as well.12

Housewives fight back The April 1955 issue of Fujin kōron, a special issue devoted to housewives, carried two strongly worded rebuttals to Ishigaki’s essay. The first, ‘“Shufu daini shokugyō-ron no mōten” (“The Blind Spots in ‘The Secondary Occupation Called the Housewife’”), was written by Sakanishi Shio [Shiho], a scholar with a doctorate from the University of Michigan and numerous career achievements, who was an active writer and critic in Japan.13 To her Fujin kōron reader, she says only that she is an “ordinary housewife” (heibon na katei no shufu). The other essay, “Shufu no jidai wa hajimatta” (“The Age of the Housewife Has Begun!”) was by Shimizu Keiko, a well-known organizer of housewives’ protests against nuclear proliferation in the early 1950s, who also identifies herself as a housewife but acknowledges her role in the public arena as well. In May 1955, Fujin kōron editors remarked that they had received hundreds of letters from readers all over the country in response to the essays by Ishigaki, Sakanishi, and Shimizu. As Sandra Buckley observes, this “conservative, neotraditionalist” support for women’s place in the home was at odds with the shift from unpaid employment in the family during the occupation to salaried employment in the 1950s and may have reflected the more privileged position of Fujin kōron readers.14 This view may also have indicated readers’ aspirations, if not their actual status. Five readers’ letters were selected as representative of the whole and published in the May issue. Although some of these credit Ishigaki for making them think critically about their lives as housewives, they reportedly favored the strong defense of the postwar Japanese housewife argued by Shimizu, and especially by Sakanishi.15 Confronting every major issue that Ishigaki uses to attack the modern Japanese housewife, Sakanishi and Shimizu recast housewives’ speech, redefine the “female” space of the home and the work housewives do, and like Ishigaki, bring in the examples of women in the United States and of Japanese housewives of the past to bolster their arguments. Also like Ishigaki, both Sakanishi and Shimizu see housewives’ forays into public space as an extension of their identification with the home, although they portray such moves as in themselves democratizing, civilizing gestures. This is especially the case in Shimizu’s essay, where she describes a kind of “domestic feminism” (to borrow a term often used

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for talking about Victorian women’s social improvement efforts) in which the housewife will lead Japan by championing the welfare of children, fighting for consumers, and working toward international peace. Sakanishi and Shimizu frame their essays in a way that takes up Ishigaki’s charge that the housewife is being watched and found wanting. They suggest that those who watch do not “see” and, moreover, that the housewife’s pride in her position makes her fully worthy of claiming a new visibility in public space. Sakanishi begins her essay with the admission that Ishigaki’s harshly worded attack on housewives shook her confidence to the core, making her worry about what kind of job would be appropriate for a woman who had been spending all her time devoted to her family. Given the work experience and qualifications that Sakanishi actually possessed, this self-description seems ludicrous. Yet her adoption of the “ordinary housewife” role certainly won reader approval, especially since Sakanishi quickly moves in her essay to a position of strength, refuting every one of Ishigaki’s criticisms of the Japanese housewife. She fights back by repositioning the housewife as an adult who renders socially useful, even irreplaceable labor in the home. To show that the housewife is certainly no parasite living at the behest of her husband—much less an infantile person luxuriating in leisure—Sakanishi enumerates all that women do in the home, arguing that such work cannot be replaced by machines and that it is of great social value. Such work includes the caregiving required by children, the elderly, and the ill, budget management, building relations within the family and within the neighborhood, and becoming involved with issues that affect society as a whole. The home that Sakanishi constructs remains a female space, but one imbued with care, thought, and tireless effort. It is not dangerously seductive but actively compassionate. Sharing Ishigaki’s belief in the value of work and in the beneficial effect of work on self-cultivation, Sakanishi asserts that homemaking in fact challenges the wife in the same way that work outside the home develops her husband. In so doing, Sakanishi makes every effort to display the modern Japanese housewife and her home as anything but leisured. Like Ishigaki, Sakanishi shows little interest in the money that could accrue to the housewife if she worked outside the home. In fact, she argues that valuing only those who do paid work is a dangerous trend in Japan, and that the “supposedly non-materialistic Japanese” are veering from the modern principles of Americans and Europeans, who “value people equally regardless of position,” by giving so much weight to a person’s wealth. Defiant, Sakanishi warns her audience that housewives themselves believe in what they do, and that they will not stand for being treated shabbily because their labor is unpaid. In making this remark,

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Sakanishi reveals her indignation at the harsh language Ishigaki had directed toward housewives, in effect chastising Ishigaki for her narrow definition of what constitutes valuable work and harking back to an older Japan that supposedly had a much less materialistic bent. The confident voice that Sakanishi employs and the conviction with which she argues suggest that she believes both that Ishigaki’s position has many adherents in Japan and that it needs refuting at all costs. Gradually widening her lens, Sakanishi leads her reader from the Japanese housewife’s work in the home to her valuable caregiving outside the home and, finally, to a comparison with women in the United States. Here Sakanishi employs the example of American women to rebut what she sees as Ishigaki’s argument that financial independence is a prerequisite to equality. In Sakanishi’s view, American women illustrate why housewives belong in the home and not in the workplace. They, too, once thought that financial equality meant social equality, and had “leapt recklessly into the workplace.” What American sociologists and American women themselves realized, Sakanishi asserts, is that this rush to work led to the problems of juvenile delinquency and divorce, and in the end, made women appreciate all the more the work of wives and mothers: Since America is a country always in the forefront, a country which takes various people’s ideas and puts them into practice, it moves ahead at a fast pace. Yet at the same time, Americans really do entrap themselves by being so bent on moving ahead. They do not progress cautiously. They reconsider their moves only after they have already rushed ahead in one direction. Then they ask if perhaps this had not been the proper direction or if they had ended up setting dangerous pitfalls, and so they go back to the beginning and take stock again.16

While other “late developing countries” may follow American ways without considering the lessons that Americans have already learned, Sakanishi advocates that Japanese learn from these mistakes so as not to repeat them. Indeed, she says, Japanese should jump ahead in the process by seeking ways to imitate the high value finally accorded to housewives in the United States. Sakanishi makes frequent references to the United States in other portions of her essay, applauding the way “privileged women abroad” involve themselves in volunteer work and urging young Japanese women to consider starting such a system in Japan. Sakanishi also characterizes young American women as most diligent at their jobs, even when they are planning to leave them for marriage, but sees this praise as no criticism of the young Japanese women who view their jobs as only temporary positions while they wait expectantly for their work as wives and mothers.17

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Sharing Ishigaki’s assumption about the housewife’s affluence and her choice about whether or not to seek employment, Sakanishi states that she does not want to take the kind of inflexible position argued by Ishigaki and thus urge all women to work or not to work. If women want to work outside the home, she says, it is fine for them to do so. In fact, Sakanishi does see employment or volunteer activity as useful training for a future housewife, and suggests that all young women do something like this before marriage. Sakanishi does realize that some women must work for financial reasons, and while she sympathizes with these mothers who must work, she suggests that those without much education may not be able to handle the dual responsibilities of effective childrearing and employment. Sakanishi does not, however, raise any possible solutions to their dilemma. Though Sakanishi at least mentions the idea that not all women can afford to be full-time housewives, like Ishigaki, she directs her attention to the educated women who do have this choice. Sakanishi concludes her essay with an argument for the complementary nature of the jobs of the housewife and her salaried husband.18 She states that if she had to choose between a male and a female applicant for a long-term job, she would have to give this job to the man because his lifelong occupation would be in the workplace, whereas the woman’s would be in the home. Sakanishi argues that this makes it only right to give men priority in promotion, and that this is also the view taken in the United States. She concludes: So how would it be if women discovered a little more of the true significance of working in their own jobs, and stopped uselessly competing with men? Always comparing herself to men makes a woman feel as if she isn’t being treated well or as if her abilities are not being recognized. This kind of thinking not only makes a woman unhappy, but handicaps her as well.19

For Sakanishi, the modern Japanese housewife is not a symbol of indulgence nor a mark of how Japan does not measure up to the United States: She is a woman employing her privilege to work for others, a women who recreates the home as a haven of care and a fountain of goodwill for neighborhood and nation alike. Through this meaningful work, the modern Japanese housewife achieves identity and cultivates herself, and even American women, Sakanishi implies, could learn something from her. Far from being a “secondary occupation,” homemaking is, Sakanishi claims, a “splendid occupation.”20 This suggests that those watching the modern Japanese housewife—that critical public imagined by Ishigaki—should truly “see” all that the housewife does and “look up” to her. Furthermore, neither the Japanese housewife nor those watching should attempt

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to define her in light of either the “male” example or the example of the “hasty, forward-thinking” American woman. The Japanese housewife is, Sakanishi, implies woman-identified and Japanese-identified, and finds this definition liberating, not limiting. To digress from the chronological order of the Debate for a moment, it is interesting to compare how similar Sakanishi’s view of women in the United States is to that of Tanaka Sumiko, who contributed her essay, “Shufu ronsō to Amerika no josei” (“The Housewife Debate and American Women”), to the October 1955 issue of Fujin kōron.21 Referring to writing by Pearl Buck—who, reminiscent of Ishigaki, expresses scorn for younger American women and their thirst for domesticity—Tanaka gives a detailed history of modern American women in the workplace. Notably, Tanaka cautions her Japanese readers not to forget that African-American women and Anglo working-class women do not enjoy the kind of affluent life that Japanese commonly associate with the United States.22 Like Sakanishi, Tanaka states emphatically that Japanese women should not follow the example of American middle-class women who are either reckless and impulsive or stagnating under the weight of their own affluence and privilege. Tanaka further describes their failings by saying that leisure time in the home has made these women lonely, that they worry constantly about their sexuality, and that the “chivalry” of American men has fairly infantilized them.23 Tanaka finds that the most docile and spoiled of all Americans are the young women who take for granted the rights for which their mothers fought so valiantly and who do not wish to work despite the jobs open to them. Compared to these women, Tanaka asserts, the Japanese woman is inspired, energized, and, as this very discussion shows, fully engaged in debating new possibilities. She writes: I would like to take this opportunity to sweep aside the idea that the path which American women have pursued and are continuing to follow is the path which we Japanese women must also tread.24

After giving this long account of problems in the United States, Tanaka comes back to the Housewife Debate in Japan. In a remark directed as a criticism of Ishigaki’s essays, Tanaka claims that Japanese women would certainly have more enthusiasm for working outside the home if their wages were not so low, if working conditions were safer, and if the workplace were more just. As it is now, Tanaka states, working women are far from liberated by their work. Rather, they are putting themselves on the front lines of a fight that is not necessarily of their making. Why do Ishigaki, Sakanishi, and Tanaka feel that the example of the modern American middle-class housewife has such bearing on this Japanese

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controversy? How does her imagined presence figure here? Looking at Fujin kōron in 1955, the reader cannot escape images of the Anglo woman; the stylish fashion illustrations in the section called, “Paris Vogue,” the photo-documentary of French housewives in the April issue, the references to books by American women translated into Japanese, and the photographs of Western experts participating in discussions that are transcribed in the magazine.25 Moreover, the experience of the occupation and the American promotion of civil rights for Japanese women were fresh in public memory. As we saw in the controversy over Mrs Mogi’s letter, although French women tend to represent high-fashion and European sophistication, it is the American woman, imagined as Anglo and middle class, who stands for women’s liberation and gender equality. The Housewife Debate illustrates the power that such imagined liberation exerted on Japanese popular culture in 1955. Indeed, so powerful is this image of the American woman as the liberated woman that it is difficult for Japanese women in the Housewife Debate to discuss women’s roles without some reference to women in the United States. Despite Tanaka’s caution not to forget the racial and class inequalities among American women and their postwar trend toward domesticity, and despite the realities of gender politics in the postwar United States, the modern American housewife repeatedly emerges as affluent, headstrong, and independent, replicating the representations we saw in the occupation newspapers in Chapter 2. Sakanishi and Tanaka may well cite problems in American women’s lives not simply to argue against Ishigaki but to reduce the overwhelming presence of the “liberated American woman” in the Japanese imaginary, thus creating breathing space for Japanese women to reimagine themselves in different ways. To return to the chronological progress of the Housewife Debate, we find that in the third essay, Shimizu Keiko “looks up” to the modern Japanese housewife but concentrates far more than Sakanishi on the housewife’s potential for social activism. Shimizu also embraces the title of housewife, proud of how the term connects her with the “masses” of Japanese women and the important work they do in the home. Anyone who discounts this work because it is unpaid, Shimizu argues, should imagine what would happen to Japan if all housewives were to band together and go on strike. Shimizu admits that some have used such images to provoke humor, but states that she is deadly serious: if 15 million Japanese housewives decided to rise up and rebel against injustice, she argues, they would have considerable influence over those in power. Although Ishigaki refers to the housewife of the past in order to dramatize the contemporary housewife’s leisure, Shimizu links the housewife of the recent

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past and the housewife of the present, viewing them as one and the same person. According to Shimizu’s portrait, the modern housewife has learned from the demanding work she did during the war years and has emerged a better person for it. Shimizu speaks of the modern Japanese housewife as seasoned by trying to provide for her family during a time of overwhelming deprivation. She reminds her readers of how housewives fought fires as bombs dropped, how they worked to keep their families from starving to death, and how they endured the pain of losing relatives to a war “they did not want” any more than did their male relatives on the battlefield.26 By the time the war ended, Shimizu explains, housewives had achieved a new wisdom, a new sense of self-awareness, and had learned how to connect their individual suffering to the broader forces of economics and politics. Characterizing the postwar housewife as empowered and self-aware, Shimizu views the political rights that women received through the postwar constitution as complementing the housewife’s new inner confidence and as providing the means by which she can exercise her new desire to have a voice in public life. The vote—coupled with the many new women’s groups forming all over the country, especially those made up of housewives—has enabled women to practice democracy, Shimizu states. She completes her portrait of the activist, energized housewife by contrasting her with the Japanese man, who is bereft of hope or energy in the aftermath of the war. Now, Shimizu claims with pride, it is the “common, ordinary, simple housewife”—not the female student or the working woman—who has surprised everyone by rising from the “lowest of low positions” to become the driving force of efforts to democratize Japan. Like Ishigaki and Sakanishi, Shimizu also brings in reference to the United States and frames the modern Japanese housewife as someone who is being watched. In this case, however, it is foreigners who notice her achievement, who see her in her true form. Shimizu writes that American educator Otis Cary has praised the Japanese housewife: Professor Otis Cary of Doshisha University has said, “The movement of Japanese women, as wives and mothers, to seek peace and happiness has become the strength of Japan. In a sense, Japan, as a country in which women fully utilize their new position, has become a woman’s country. Clearly, the latest activity of Japanese housewives has made an impression even on foreigners.27

As if anticipating that to some readers’ this may all sound uncomfortably close to the wartime activities of such organizations as the Women’s Patriotic Association, Shimizu declares that whereas those militaristic associations were organized from the “top down,” the new housewives’ associations are grass-roots movements.

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People should not assume, she says, that housewives’ votes can be easily gained or that they will assent to attempts to force women back into old roles. In fact, Shimizu argues, it was housewives who pleaded for peace during the Korean War, who fought for the rights of consumers and children, who were disheartened by the reverse course of the allied occupation, and who in 1954 successfully opposed politicians’ efforts to reinstate the old patriarchal family system. Although Ishigaki’s essay disparages housewives’ language and dismisses the trend of housewives writing essays for newspapers, Shimizu points to housewives’ speech as proof of their proud venture into public life. To Shimizu’s mind, not only does the modern Japanese housewife demand to be “seen,” she also demands to be “heard.” Shimizu explains that housewives are forming study and reading groups, learning how to write for newspapers and how to write essays. “The hand that crushed the miso paste . . . seized the pen,” she writes.28 Although some men may have maligned the housewife columns springing up in every regional paper, and although these columns may not contain weighty discussions of politics and economics, it is in such spaces that housewives are engaging with “difficult issues.” Because of this activity, magazine and newspaper attention to housewives has increased, Shimizu explains, and those who are the targets of housewives’ disapproval now grumble, like one casino boss, that “Nothing in the world is so noisy as housewives.”29 With this example, Shimizu rewrites the concept of women’s speech as excessive or silly. It is only those who fear women’s speech, she implies, that try to trivialize it. Although Ishigaki finds the housewife’s leisure time to be her worst enemy, Shimizu views this time as a valuable resource. It gives the housewife the ability to speak out in ways that others cannot, making her, in fact, obligated to speak for others: Speaking truthfully, those husbands and those of our own sex who work outside the home cannot freely engage in vigorous activism as the housewife can. Housewives have taken on the activism which men and employed women cannot, have enfolded the hopes of everyone in that activism, and are working with all their might to make this a better place to live. Their stance is the new hope of Japan. The housewife class, with but few exceptions, ordinarily has neither the luxury of much free time or money. But even though they do not have these luxuries, housewives manage their own finances, and still go out into the town and village to change the nation. Housewives have taken on the ambitions of Japan, have given impetus to the workings of politics, and have rebelled against injustice. And through this activity, housewives have come to know their own strength. They have matured.30

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Shimizu concludes her essay with a rousing cheer for the modern Japanese housewife, announcing that Japan has indeed entered the “era of the housewife” and that it is housewives who will lead the nation toward “peace and happiness.” In her characterization of this activist housewife, Shimizu stakes out a public role for the housewife but limits her public life at the same time. Shimizu does not go so far as to advocate that women run for public office but does suggest that they exert pressure on those in power. Furthermore, although Shimizu imagines a housewife’s strike, she does not link the full-time housewife with the working woman, especially the blue-collar woman active in labor protests. Shimizu keeps her housewife at one remove: The Japanese housewife’s public activity and her desire to speak out originate in a new confidence and maturity won through years of wartime struggle, so that she now uses her work and interests in the home to argue for peace, consumer rights, and children’s welfare. Absolving the Japanese housewife of all responsibility for the war, Shimizu in effect imagines her as following the democratic way that Americans have helped pave for her, and as saving Japanese men and Japanese working women through her tireless efforts to democratize Japan.31 Shimizu’s essay in the Housewife Debate raises questions about how the image of the Japanese man shifts in this discussion. Ishigaki views him as powerful, confident, and hardworking. Sakanishi does not question that his life should be largely devoted to his work. Shimizu’s Japanese man, however, is markedly smaller, weaker, and in need of female leadership. He has lost the war and been devastated by defeat.32 The Japanese housewife, in contrast—encouraged by the victor, the American man—is taking up the standard to fight for Japanese democracy. This mission empowers Shimizu’s housewife to become highly visible in public life. She will alter traditional gender hierarchies to a certain extent with a newly energized and increasingly informed speech, but will stop short of taking over from the Japanese man. It is clear that Shimizu does not envision the housewife running for office, nor does she imagine her taking over corporations.33 Rather, the Japanese housewife will extend the concerns nurtured by her devotion to her home—the female space—into public life in ways that do not completely transform what largely remains male space.

A Marxist response from Shimazu Chitose Despite the differences in the essays by Ishigaki, Sakanishi, and Shimizu, certain elements unify all three. All three writers, for instance, see housewives as a

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particular group, and no matter how differently they characterize the group, they do not recognize much difference within it. There is a nod toward the fact that many wives and mothers must seek employment for financial reasons, but for these essayists, less advantaged women fall on the margins of the housewives-asa-group. All three women employ emotional, accessible language to create vivid and widely disparate impressions of the housewife—the lazy, happy woman; the hardworking, unfairly disparaged woman; the activist, forward-thinking woman. They look at the modern Japanese housewife by recounting their observations and experiences, but also by looking at her through the imagined eyes of Japanese man, Japanese working women, and American men and women. Ishigaki, Sakanishi, and Shimizu equally value effort and self-cultivation, and none come to the defense of leisure for leisure’s sake—an aspect of the Debate not raised until the 1970s. When journalist and socialist critic Shimazu Chitose enters the Debate in June 1955, with her essay “Kaji rōdō wa shufu no tenshoku de wa nai” (“Housework Is Not a Woman’s Divine Mission”), she pushes the discussion in still other directions. Writing in a dispassionate voice with frequent references to international politics and Marxism, Shimazu takes issue with both Ishigaki and Sakanishi, casting doubt on the way they have framed the housewife as a privileged woman who needs only to take the proper attitude toward her labor. Scrutinizing the nature of housework, Shimazu considers its effect on women both in and out of the workplace, questioning why everyone assumes that it is women who must bear this burden. Like the other essayists, Shimazu also brings in the example of the United States, but she does so in a way that compares what she sees as the exploitation of the modern Japanese housewife to Japan’s own dependency on American power. Shimazu advocates that Japanese housewives achieve true liberation not simply by gaining and employing the vote or their civil freedoms, but by joining the laboring classes to dismantle the private property system. To Shimazu’s way of thinking, Ishigaki romanticizes the workplace while Sakanishi romanticizes the home. Neither one questions why women should do housework in the first place, nor how women have been conditioned to think that they are the ones who should do it. The reason for this blindness, Shimazu argues, is that women fail to see housework as a kind of private labor within the capitalist system that naturalizes and exploits gendered inequality. Rather than asking about the housewife’s attitude toward her work, Shimazu advocates asking how women’s connection with housework benefits capital. Refusing to see housework as anything other than a series of repetitive and menial, albeit necessary, tasks, Shimazu introduces the insightful observation

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that even in the workplace women are still expected to do housework. Burdened with trivial, often interrupted tasks at work and with more housework at home, women do not have the same opportunities, Shimazu argues, that men enjoy both to excel at work and to relax at home. She asks her reader to imagine how differently the careers of a married woman and man develop even if each is hired at the same time by the same company for the same salary: For example, both return home at their respective quitting times. First of all, the man spreads out the evening paper. The woman gets involved in preparing dinner. Even if she does read the paper, it will only be after spending time finishing household chores, so even though she sees the same words in print, she won’t be absorbing them in the same way. More likely, there will be no time to read the paper at all, for she will be busy with washing, mending, ironing, and putting up her hair and such. In cases where women continue to work after marrying and having children, this kind of disparity only increases. People have come to think of the difference created between women and men in this process as in fact a kind of natural, destined thing—in short, a difference in ability determined by sex. Furthermore, because this way of distinguishing working people by sex in the capitalist system profits the capitalist, that kind of thinking is further supported and codified. And that is not all. The capitalist system also brings a kind of work similar to these household chores into the workplace, and adds them to work already performed there. Women must stop making entries on the abacus because of having to make tea or go out to buy lunch or cigarettes for men, and then must verify calculations all over again.34

Shimazu also takes issue with Ishigaki’s characterization of consumption as a passive or pleasant activity. She argues that only a minority of women have the luxury of new appliances because capitalism has not distributed new goods and services equally.35 Many women who do need to work outside the home cannot even find jobs and far from enjoying a mindless leisure, they worry endlessly about how to survive. They have no opportunity whatsoever for intellectual stimulation, but, asks Shimazu, whose fault is this? Shimazu further argues that though the mechanization of labor and the growth of the service sector have created new employment opportunities for women’s white-collar and blue-collar work, these new positions are insecure. Just as Japan depends on the power of the United States so Japanese women in the work force are at the mercy of corporations who pay them poor wages and fire them at whim.

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While Ishigaki, Sakanishi, and Shimizu introduce the example of the United States in their arguments with some respect, Shimazu Chitose attributes the exploitation of Japanese housewives to Japan’s unequal relationship to the United States and to capitalism. Although the new constitution and the civil code gave women rights, Shimazu explains, the continuation of the private property system allowed men to think of wives as a kind of personal property, too—a way of thinking conducive to conservative moves in 1954 to reinstate the old family system. The other reason, Shimazu believes, behind this attempt to revive the family system was the wish to reinstill a respect for authority in Japan that would help remilitarize the nation and further intertwine its interests with those of American defense postures. Japanese capitalists will, according to Shimazu, use feudal ideas of women both to exploit them in the workplace and to “return them home” when their labor is not needed. Yet when Shimazu proposes a solution for ending housewives’ exploitation, international relations drop out of the picture. Shimazu advocates substituting public facilities for the services provided in the home: childcare centers, cooperative laundries, and so forth. By moving most housework out of the realm of private labor, Shimazu argues, the structures maintaining gender inequality will disappear and the remaining minimal work of the home will be performed equally by family members who are bound together by “genuine human love.” Shimazu envisions that this system will create new, beneficial family relations. She gives examples of happy Japanese homes in which household duties are already shared. Freed from the burden of housework, women can fully join the work force—not, however, in order to cultivate themselves as Ishigaki advocates, but rather, Shimazu argues, to become part of the working class actively seeking to overturn capitalist oppression. Departing from the assumptions that Ishigaki, Sakanishi, and Shimazu make about the home, Shimazu refuses to see either the home or the workplace as “female” or “male” spaces. In fact, Shimazu wants to question the process whereby spaces, tasks, and human ability are distinguished as gendered. Shimazu also believes that it is important to “see” the daily life of the housewife for what if often is—a busy, frustrated struggle to find and keep a job while balancing home responsibilities. Even more importantly, Shimazu asks that people look further into how capitalist society and international relations have conspired to create the housewife’s tenuous security and her misguided sense of housework as a “divine mission.” Shimazu sympathizes with the modern Japanese housewife, neither praising nor scorning her, and when she trains attention on the housewife, she does so in a coolly distanced way. Accordingly, the housewife of Shimazu’s essay

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emerges more as a social position than as the colorful, fully imagined composite housewife of the previous three writers’ work.

On personal spaces and social issues: Fukuda Tsuneari, Ishigaki Ayako, and Hiratsuka Raichō Although Ishigaki, Sakanishi, and Shimizu believe in the importance of the modern Japanese housewife cultivating her abilities and her confidence, they evaluate her primarily in the light of her actual or potential contributions to society at large. Taking a somewhat opposite tack, Shimazu sees the housewife’s complete absorption in the working class and an eventual socialist revolution as the keys to her happiness and liberation. Such frameworks leave no room for the possibility of a leisured housewife taking advantage of free time and autonomy for her own pleasure. Essays by two later contributors to the Debate, Fukuda Tsuneari, a Shakespeare scholar and outspoken social critic, and Hiratsuka Raichō, the legendary feminist leader of the Bluestockings (Seitō-sha), do raise the issue of private pleasures in connection with the position of the postwar Japanese housewife. Fukuda Tsuneari contributed to the Housewife Debate in July 1955 with his essay titled, “Ayamareru josei no kaihō-ron” (“A Mistaken Theory of Women’s Liberation”). Dismissive of “women’s concerns” from the outset, Fukuda also casts aspersions on women’s speech, linking the Fujin kōron reader to childish, self-indulgent phrases from popular songs and rejecting all the current writing by and for women. He attacks Ishigaki for celebrating the workplace, for not knowing much about men or family in the first place, and especially for the way she speaks of relations between the sexes as “social issues.” To him, the current and dangerous penchant for viewing gender relations through the prism of social structures obscures the obvious by making matters appear overly complex. At the same time, Fukuda finds that this view makes it possible for critics to write simplistically and thus ends up coddling readers into a certain peace of mind. Eager to set the reader straight, Fukuda argues for the primacy of romantic love as something mysterious and wonderful, and as the source of happiness for both women and men. Adopting an exasperated and arrogant tone, Fukuda begins by deriding women’s magazines, male critics who fake complicity with such magazines in order to earn drinking money, and the whole notion of “women’s issues” (josei no mondai). Rather than imagining how others have regarded the Japanese

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housewife, as the first three essayists do, Fukuda stands farther back to look at those looking at the housewife—and at her female critics in particular. In so doing, he places himself above them and outside the very discussion that he is preparing to join. He writes: When one looks at most ladies’ magazines, one gets the impression that all the problems of this world are nothing but women’s issues. Even those areas of major concern that stare us all in the face are transformed into problems relating to women. No matter how complex a social problem may be, the magazines would have us believe that if only women worked on them, everything could be solved. Novels, dramas, films—all seem to take up this woman-oriented stance, and even the saddest, most painful stories are treated as if they are something affecting only women. Even when these media do not deal with such tragedy, they persist in handling every other kind of story, too, as if it were only something of female interest. One simply does not find problems affecting all people making it into the pages of ladies’ magazines. Rather, they paint everything as a woman’s concern and do so in such a way as to pit women against men.36

Fukuda assures his reader that he realizes that such concern for women’s interests may stem from Japan’s history of male dominance, but also says that he believes this strategy will divorce women from the world of men, ensconcing them in “some newly created, narrow little world of women.” Worst of all, Fukuda argues, these magazines do no more than indulge women by encouraging their inbred habit of staring at themselves in the mirror. Given how much the other essayists have argued over how the Japanese housewife does and should appear to others, Fukuda’s comment about the mirror is striking. What he does not question, however, is why women are trained to have such concern for appearance and how the whole question of the housewife’s visibility figures in the Debate. Certainly, the essays in the Debate create the impression that the entire controversy has arisen in part because people sense that they are “seeing” a new kind of Japanese housewife and wonder how to define her. The hundreds of letters from Fujin kōron readers show how concerned housewives themselves were about popular perceptions of their position. As well, postwar women’s magazines, large-scale women’s protest marches, and housewives writing letters to newspaper editors all promoted the visibility of the housewife, both as an ideal and as a position embodied by real women. And as Sakanishi and Shimizu proudly proclaim, this visibility caused women not only to feel a new confidence about displaying their ideas but also motivated self-reflection and self-criticism, leading them to take more responsibility for

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their lives and their society. Fukuda does not consider how framing this display under a rubric other than “women’s issues” would have reduced the housewife’s visibility, subsuming her within the supposedly gender-neutral category of “people,” which so often is read as “men.” Fukuda argues that broad social action will fail to bring women either happiness or financial independence. Financially dependent housewives should be seen neither as “slaves” to their husbands nor, since women have their own sexual desires, as “prostitutes” to them. According to Fukuda, the housewife has more freedom to argue with her husband than her husband has to argue with his boss. All employment would do for the housewife is deprive her of the benevolence of her husband and abandon her to the “coldness” of the social organization. He writes: What is more important for me than a woman’s financial independence is the issue of romantic love between men and women, husbands and wives, and the issue of their mutual trust. If we close our eyes to this fact, thinking we can use economic and social means to solve all issues facing men and women and the problems of the family, we are just not making sense. And the trend these days to thinking we can solve problems in this way is a dangerous one.37

Fukuda takes particular exception to two ideas offered by Ishigaki Ayako. First, he does not like her characterization of the housewife’s position as an “occupation”—or, rather, he argues, as “no more than an occupation.” Second, he does not see abandoning the home for the workplace as any better than abandoning the workplace for the home. What he does believe is that housework is valuable, that ordinary housewives possess a deserved confidence, and that it is actually Ishigaki and other women’s right activists of her ilk who display an unwarranted inferiority toward men.38 All this focus on finding a good job, he says, is no more than compensation for not having been able to find a good man. The real weakness of Ishigaki’s essay, Fukuda states, stems from the fact Ishigaki’s own work experience is narrowly informed by her work in journalism, so that she has little idea of what work actually entails for most people. According to Fukuda, Ishigaki is “just like some farm girl fantasizing about life in the financial district of Tokyo.”39 Redoubling his efforts to make the housewife/reader understand the importance of romantic love, Fukuda writes: In actuality, there is no need to discuss women’s unhappiness or dissatisfaction in terms of some complex social issue. Isn’t the real crux of the problem that

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these women have not found a good man yet? That they cannot live together with a man whom they respect? If we’re speaking about unhappy men, it’s the same thing: They just have not found the right woman, one whom they can respect.40

Arguing in this way, Fukuda draws the space of the home as female and warm, and the workplace as male and cold. He argues that it is the man’s duty to protect the woman from the coldness of the workplace. Interestingly, however, Fukuda goes beyond this. Differentiating himself from the socialists and arch conservatives whom he views as similarly claiming the family as a social unit that must accomplish certain goals for the good of the larger society, Fukuda prefers to define the family as a private space destined to serve no other purpose than pleasing both husband and wife. To his mind, only a woman lacking in true self-awareness would fail to see the advantages that this creates for her. Fukuda concludes by advising readers to think about the true meaning of romantic love, marriage, and happiness by reviewing a 1915 story, “Old Man, Old Woman,” by Mori Ōgai. He neglects to mention that this is the tale of a wife who loyally waits decades for the return of her husband, who was exiled in his youth for an impetuous action.41 In August 1955, Ishigaki Ayako responded to Fukuda’s essay with another of her own, “Josei kaihō o habamu-mono: Fukuda Tsuneari-shi e no hanron” (“Obstructions to Women’s Liberation: A Response to Mr Fukuda Tsuneari”). In this essay, Ishigaki attempts to appease all the housewife/readers whom she has offended, expressing both her surprise at how much controversy her first essay has generated and her joy over the energy that women all over Japan are devoting to this discussion. She regrets the immoderate language she used but pleads that she meant no disrespect by characterizing housewifery as a “secondary occupation.” This term was not meant to imply a value judgment, she promises, but only to distinguish paid employment from work in the home. She certainly never stated, as Fukuda implies, that housewifery means slavery or prostitution.42 Ishigaki retreats from her initial call for all women to engage in activity outside the home while nevertheless continuing to promote the benefits of such activity to women, men, children, and the larger society in her rebuttal. In this essay, however, financial and social benefits of working take precedence over its possibilities for self-cultivation. The real sting and even comedy of Ishigaki’s essay, as her title indicates, lies in her reply to Fukuda.43 Ishigaki directs the same measure of sarcasm and patronizing language toward him that he aimed at her. She refers to him as “the

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wise Mr. Fukuda Tsuneari” and the “talented figure so favored by journalists these days,” all the while painting him as a naïve young man whose rapid rise in the world has put him completely out of touch with ordinary people and the tough financial straits they face. Ishigaki also faults Fukuda for writing about matters such as women’s financial independence in as fragmented a way as a blind man trying to describe an elephant feeling its trunk. She wonders if his arguments do not express a kind of male inferiority complex, a fear of female economic power. Turning on Fukuda’s dismissal of women’s speech, Ishigaki compares his belief in the powers of love to sentimental old tales of wifely duty and husbandly patronage that one might hear on some weekly radio musicschool broadcast. In a startlingly different tone of voice, Ishigaki states that she has “lost a child” and that in going through the miserable experience of seeing her child die, she fully realized the connection between intimate relations and social systems. Although she was able to provide her child with medical care, many others do not have access to all that modern medicine can offer. What’s more, Ishigaki says, medical advancements in place today could probably have saved her child. While Ishigaki admits that she does not deny the power of love, she thinks it is simply naïve of Fukuda to see love as an all-embracing solution.44 Ishigaki takes particular issues with Fukuda’s argument that husbands should protect their wives from the coldness of the workplace. She retorts that if the notion of husbands working to support wives is such a worthy goal, then all men should receive wages sufficient to accomplish this. Rather than belaboring this point, Ishigaki prefers to lobby for the advantages of wives engaging in paid labor. Working in companionship with husbands, she says, reduces the burden husbands feel, makes their wives sympathetic to them, and produces the funds whereby the entire family may enjoy a happier, more hopeful life. Such a life strengthens the family and the love between husband and wife. One has only to look at the Soviet Union, China, and the United States, Ishigaki reasons, to see the benefits that working women have brought to their families. Ishigaki closes her essay by looking at the housewife in broad social terms. Housewives’ lives are affected dramatically by the employment status of their husbands, she admits, and many have no choice but to work. Yet whether or not one must work, Ishigaki argues, no one should have to suffer poor working conditions. This leads her to surmise that the real reason that certain leaders are calling for women to “return to the home” is because they do not want women pointing out the irrational aspects of the social framework and meddling in politics.

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At the end of her essay, Ishigaki makes a final attack on Fukuda and another plea for gender equality: Although Mr. Fukuda believes that women’s financial independence will destroy the family and lead women to oppose and antagonize men, the women who do labor in the workplace are actually making progress toward an age when men and women cooperate, and this is true whether they come into conflict with men in the workplace or marry after falling in love with men at work, or whether both husband and wife must work out of necessity. The woman of the past who was cared for by a man stands with him now on a level plain of equality. They love each other and are loved by each other. They do not think of a woman’s happiness as separate from a man’s. The liberation of women as human beings means that men, too, have a new partner. It is regrettable that Mr. Fukuda had absolutely no new proposal for how men and women could recognize each other’s mutual value and work for cooperation and harmony as free human beings.45

The last Housewife Debate essay in Fujin kōron in 1955 is written by Hiratsuka Raichō. I refer to her hereafter simply as “Raichō,” using the penname by which she had long been known.46 Famous for her contributions to Seitō (Bluestockings), the New Woman’s literary journal published in Tokyo from 1911 to 1916, Raichō had involved herself in women’s peace activities in the 1950s. She supported the Conference of Mothers and international women’s associations, though ill health prevented her from being as active as she would have liked in the postwar.47 In her October 1955 essay, “Shufu kaihō-ron: Ishigaki, Fukuda Tsuneari shi no fujin-ron o megutte” (“On Women’s Liberation: A Look at Thoughts on Women from Ms Ishigaki and Mr Fukuda”), Raichō takes both Ishigaki and Fukuda to task. Raichō begins by stating that the women’s liberation movement of today is no longer the abstract stuff of intellectual essays but is firmly grounded in the daily and individual experiences of women. Furthermore, the movement does not aim to place men and women in competition with each other but to work for the liberation of all. Referring first to both of Ishigaki’s articles, Raichō affirms her belief that love, marriage, family, and children have a worth that cannot be given an economic value, that they have an indisputable value in themselves. The value of this work is, in fact, Raichō argues, what gives a wife and a mother authority as a human being and makes the life of the home something that must be preserved. Next, Raichō reviews the explanation of how the modern housewife’s new leisure and function as a consumer have been produced. But what Raichō takes most

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exception to is the idea that, in Ishigaki’s eyes, consumption is a somehow less respectable activity than production: Production and consumption are both aspects of human life, and I do not believe there is any reason to place one above the other or to see one as better than the other. That we must produce in order to live hardly means that we live in order to produce. Production has no value if it does not result in consumption. Why should this make the work of the housewife, who assumes as her prime responsibility the consumer side of daily life, silly?48

Raichō further supports the modern Japanese housewife by saying that since she alone is responsible for work in the home, as opposed to the housewife of old, who may well have had servants or the help of others in the household, she does not have the leisure that many assume she had. Like Shimizu Keiko, Raichō finds that the housewife has been toughened and matured by her experiences as a “war victim.” Her vision has widened and she is progressing on all fronts. She certainly does not deserve to be characterized as someone whose “brain has turned to mush.” Raichō affirms that the housewife is not now, nor has she ever been, lazy. Again echoing Shimizu, though never referring specifically to her essay, Raichō defines the housewife in terms of her social networks and usefulness to society. She says that in today’s world all families are joined, and that because the family serves as the basis for all human life, housewives must, whether they like it or not, be involved in all things affecting their own and others’ families, from food and shelter to education, economics, and politics.49 This gives them even broader contact with society than would be the case were they confined in the workplace. Isn’t this proved, she asks, by all the recent organizations of housewives and their political action? Raichō advocates that everyone value the labor of the housewife and the woman working outside the home, and that, similarly, these two groups of women overcome their mutual animosity and learn to value and work with each other for their mutual benefit. Raichō’s essay embodies many contradictions. She wants to value both the housewife and the woman working outside the home, but does not look at what has caused the divide between the two groups. Nor does she question why such work should be assigned exclusively to women. Most glaringly, Raichō does not consider, as Shimazu Chitose argued, that women who work outside the home generally also have the same obligations at home as do full-time housewives. Like Sakanishi, Raichō resents the rebuke of the housewife in Ishigaki’s first essay, and she responds to it by characterizing the value, creativity, and resulting authority

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of the mother as the real glory of the housewife—a point of view that goes as far back as her essays in Seitō.50 Yet she also writes that her own experience has proven how difficult it can be to combine one’s own work with motherhood. Whereas Ishigaki saw the female space of the home, the female quality of leisure, and the female burden of housework as things for the “adult woman” to escape, Raichō attempts to redefine all this, not as any less female, but as representations of an essential female power. It is her belief in this power which impels Raichō, like Shimizu Keiko, to hold high hopes for women’s continued activism at the borders of male power in Japanese society. Like Ishigaki, Sakanishi, and Shimizu, Raichō believes that women need passionate involvements to nurture their own self-development. Even though she recognizes the value of the housewife, Raichō states, she does not believe that young women should simply spend their youth waiting for marriage or engage in an “imitation of the so-called American playgirl.”51 Consequently, in Raichō’s essay as in several others, leisure is suspect. Leisure is not something for a serious woman, whether young or old, housewife or factory worker, to pursue. It is an indulgence, something that appeals to young Americans—who have already been characterized in the other essays in the Debate as impetuous people who follow their desires only to face later regrets. Lastly, Raichō writes that she finds Fukuda to be out of touch with the way women now think about the movement for Japanese women’s liberation. She admits, however, that she does agree with him that too many leaders involved in social movements concentrate overly much on law and system forgetting the beliefs, morals, and feelings that are part of individual lives. Raichō sums this up by saying that “building a better society means creating better human beings.” However, Raichō also states that she would not divorce the personal solution from the social solution as Fukuda does. In conclusion, Raichō says that she believes that the problem of human liberation enfolds the problem of women’s liberation and requires both personal and social solutions.

Conclusion The “modern Japanese housewife” was, in reality, many different women. The essays in the Housewife Debate of 1955, while suggesting something of this difference, tend to oversimplify it as a matter of class difference or individual attitude. They mask the real diversity among postwar women and minimize the institutional forces, such as the government supported 1955 initiative to centrally

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fund the New Life Movement, pressuring women to become housewives.52 Reading the Housewife Debate alone, one might be surprised to learn that there were numerous working-class women who were full-time housewives, or that the much-heralded new washing machine was not terribly efficient, or that major corporations were initiating programs to cultivate pride in housewifery among their male employees’ wives. Nor does one learn anything at all about women’s new reproductive freedom and its consequences in their lives, despite the fact that 1955 marked the postwar high in the abortion rate and that contraception was being widely encouraged. And although the Debate makes many references to women in the United States, it does not allude to the more fanciful images of Western femininity expressed in Japanese popular culture in the mid-1950s: the popularity of Audrey Hepburn’s film Roman Holiday, for example, or the rage for fashion shows of Western-style underwear, or the excitement of seeing a Japanese woman take third place in the Miss Universe pageant of 1953. Consequently, the modern Japanese housewife who does emerge in the Housewife Debate of 1955 serves best as metaphor for debating the moral climate of postwar Japan. In this respect, the shufu recalls the ghosts of other female models in Japanese history, as discussed in Chapter 1. One thinks of that paragon of middle-class, Meiji-era virtue, the “good wife, wise mother,” as well as of her upstart cousins, the intellectual and artistic New Woman of the 1910s, and the free-spending, fast-living Modern Girl of the 1920s. Much more recently, the shōjo (maiden) has received attention as both a symptom of Japanese affluence at the turn of the twenty-first century and evidence of rebellion against the corporate values associated with creating economic prosperity. Although the historical contexts and the constituencies that produced these icons of femininity differ markedly, one can detect a similarity uniting them: all point to a web of transformations and tensions in the social landscape, all oversimplify and personify this complexity in the figure of a woman, and all have a history of provoking some very strong feelings. None of these images can be divorced from changes in the lives of actual women, though they may obscure or warp many of the facts about this change. Whether drawn as idealized figures or cautionary tales, these female icons provide ways to imagine where the country is and where it should be heading. To the extent that these icons affect social policies or influence individual choices, they become much more than gendered comment on the politics of the day. What do the Housewife Debate of 1955 and its widely varied portraits of the modern Japanese housewife tell us about the social landscape of postwar Japan? They give a sense of the weight of the United States, as an imagined place

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and as a military presence, in Japanese popular culture. Not only do we see the power imbalance between the United States and Japan, and the experience of the occupation affecting Japanese constructions of gender, but we also notice that this relationship itself is discussed in gendered terms. Most strikingly, the Debate shows people working to conceptualize a divide between the war years and the postwar period, the old Japan and the new by using the trope of a “traditional housewife” transformed. While this traditional housewife is revered for her hard work on behalf of her family, she is also pitied as a victim of war and of the patriarchal family system. The question of whether her transformation has created a democratic, assertive woman, a leisured, childish one, an able partner complementing a hardworking husband, or even a woman on the cusp of liberation as a member of the working classes lies, as we have seen, at the heart of the Housewife Debate. Although the Housewife Debate explores the value and meaning of work, the idea of leisure circulates throughout many of these essays, occasionally coming to the surface of the discussion. As we have seen, these essays tend to characterize leisure as somewhat suspect and as associated with lazy women in the female space of the home. No one in the Debate advocates that women do not work hard, although they do disagree about what the focus of that work should be. That essayists Sakanishi and Shimizu, for example, argue so strenuously for the housewife’s industriousness underscores the value placed on her work at the expense of leisure time in the popular culture of 1955. The attention, emotion, and imagination invested in debating the identity of the modern Japanese housewife in Fujin kōron in 1955 offered little investigation into the Japanese husband and father. The primacy of his role in paid labor and the hierarchical division of men among class lines remain unquestioned in the Debate. Though the essayists include some comments on men’s lives in the family and on the debilitating effects of the defeat, there is no suggestion in the Housewife Debate of 1955 that the Japanese man might become a metaphor for postwar society—or anything else. Rather, he is the ground against which various possibilities for the housewife are imagined. Consequently, although the Housewife Debate forced questions about Japanese society, it left some of that society’s most fundamental assumptions about gender intact.

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Figure 4.1 “Fifties Fashionista,” Fujin kōron fashion section, February 1955. Courtesy of US Library of Congress and Fujin kōron.

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What Women Want: The Postwar Appetite

What did women want? In 1956, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s racey novel, Kagi (The Key) serialized over some months in Chūō kōron, captured the attention of readers who eagerly awaited each new installment.1 Written in the form of “secret” diaries kept by a middle-aged professor and his proper Kyoto wife Ikuko, The Key takes readers through the couple’s increasingly unconventional and dangerous sex life, a complex series of exploits that involves Ikuko in an affair with a younger man, Kimura, who is also her daughter Toshiko’s fiancé. Long frustrated with her husband, Ikuko finds that the physical acts of her affair, as well as the writing and reading pleasures of recording it, liberate her “strong sexual appetite.” Her husband’s search for sexual satisfaction, however, is fatal; he suffers a stroke after their last bout of lovemaking.2 No wonder women’s desires, sexuality, and the propriety of writing about sexual intimacy became some of the most discussed topics of 1956. In December 1956, when the last installment of The Key appeared, Fujin kōron joined the conversation by publishing a special issue devoted to “Josei no yokubō” (“Women’s Desires”). This December issue makes its debt to Tanizaki clear, placing photographs of the aged author and his essay on his Arashiyama home near the beginning of the magazine, and including a short commentary on The Key by novelist Enchi Fumiko among the feature articles.3 But Fujin kōron definitely has its own take on the subject, one expressly suited to the magazine format of multiple authors, styles, and graphics. Fujin kōron examines the topic of women’s desires from many angles: round-table discussion, survey research, experts’ opinions, and a lengthy article on the marriage of D. H. Lawrence. (The inclusion of an article on Lawrence no doubt recalled the famous 1952 obscenity trial in Japan over Lady Chatterley’s Lover that provided a unique forum for public discussion of

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sexuality as a private matter rather than activity in service of the state).4 Much in the spirit of The Key, satire, playfulness, and a few giggles over talking about the taboo are also evident, and relieve the generally serious tone of most of the Fujin kōron investigation. As Mark McLelland’s pioneering research on discourse on sexuality in postwar Japan has shown, several popular magazines such as Fūfu seikatsu (Conjugal Couple Lifestyle) advised readers on the new ideals for companionate and passionate marriages, and so one more publication on the topic would not be unusual. Fujin kōron stands out, however, for explicitly addressing middle-class women readers and for expanding the conversation past sexual desire to the many things and experiences women wanted. Like The Key, Fujin kōron attempts to plumb the hidden depths of the contemporary woman’s psyche, delighting readers and excavating potential ruptures in gendered power relations. It is this concern over the apparent instability of gender roles that I will explore in examining aspects of Fujin kōron’s presentation of women’s desires, showing how this discussion, in effect, produces a binary of “exceptional” women who embrace desire and a majority of “ordinary” women who would happily settle for a washing machine. One of the most fascinating aspects of Fujin kōron’s 1956 explication of exceptional and ordinary women is how these two personality types frame postwar history. Closely connected with postwar morality, the exceptional type is a woman who gives rein to her desires, whether they are for sexual pleasure, moneymaking, self-assertiveness, public stature, or personal growth. Often young, the exceptional woman seems to have emerged spontaneously with the advent of the postwar. Whether her exceptional quality takes the form of pursuing a career, joining the PTA (Parent-Teacher Association), or even engaging in criminal activity, commentators consistently refer to her as “a type not seen before the postwar.” All in all, this exceptional woman embodies an attitude toward the postwar much like that discussed by Carol Gluck. In her 1993 essay, “The Past in the Present,” Gluck emphasizes how sengo (the “postwar”—a noun that Gluck says “suggests substance”) was constructed as a brand new era, and bore the hope “that history could begin as if anew, just as Japan could be, as it was said, ‘reborn.’”5 As Fujin kōron specifies new types of women and new desires, the magazine plays into this construction of sengo as rebirth. Moreover, as we shall see, the magazine characterizes this rebirth as tinted by the foreign and most visible among women. Given all the occupationera reforms dedicated to improving the status of Japanese women, it is not surprising that postwar morality, and a new kind of desiring woman, marked by foreign influence, would mutually define each other.

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Conversely, the so-called ordinary woman represents sometimes slightly older women who practice restraint, who have not wholeheartedly embraced the opportunities of the postwar, and who still have their feet planted in an older Japan. The tantalizing aspect of Fujin kōron’s presentation on desire surfaces when this ordinary woman seems to be moving toward more self-expression and freedom herself, when she seems inspired and challenged by the exceptional woman or the affections of a younger man. In Tanizaki’s The Key, for example, Ikuko’s transformation from an ordinary though secretly frustrated woman into a sex-addicted man-killer is exaggerated to the point of absurdity. Yet perhaps her character raised questions in 1956 about the sorts of feelings other “ordinary” women might be harboring. Were Japanese wives generally dissatisfied and were they as potentially promiscuous as their American counterparts, whose sex lives had been investigated in the 1953 Kinsey report, a document discussed in the Japanese media and translated into Japanese?6 What would it take to change an ordinary Japanese woman into an exceptional one, especially now that “good morals and manners” (junpū bizoku) had reportedly lost their mooring in the postwar? Concerns—and perhaps a good measure of curiosity and envy— evident in this Fujin kōron issue reveals suspicion that the exceptional woman is out of control, and that increasing numbers of ordinary women are threatening to jump ship and join her. If this were so, what did women’s desire signal about directions for democracy in Japan?

Creating history anew: The debut of the exceptional postwar woman Entertaining tales of exceptional women occur in the first two articles of Fujin kōron’s special issue: noted writer Hirabayashi Taiko’s essay, “Josei no kaihō to yokubō no higeki” (“Women’s Liberation and Desire: A Tragedy”) and the roundtable discussion, “Nihon josei no yokubō no keifu” (“A Genealogy of Japanese Women’s Desire”). Both articles assume that postwar women have greater expectations of realizing romance in their lives than did Japanese women of the past, and that some aim to gain money and position on their own initiative. There is also the sense that, although postwar women are more willing to assume a public life, many still prefer to express their ambitions by pushing their husbands to climb the company ladder. All authors agree that no matter how steadily Japanese women are moving toward greater private and public power, men still hold the reins, and that, with the exception of young men, Japanese

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men are not willing, able, or interested in ceding anything to women. This is a fact of postwar life, Hirabayashi cautions, that even the most idealistic young women should take to heart. The tension between liberated postwar women desiring more love and more money, and the reluctance of men to permit this gives rise to the “exceptional postwar woman.” This is the woman who cannot play by the old rules and whose desires get the best of her, leading her to jump into the murky waters called “postwar morality.” What does it take for any woman to make this leap, and what is the new morality she embraces? Let us consider three anecdotes reported in these articles as “true stories” to find out. The first story, found in the “Genealogy” round-table discussion, relates the case of the nameless young woman whom I will call, “Real Estate Siren.” Leading this round table is critic Ishigaki Ayako, a Fujin kōron regular and instigator of the Housewife Debate (discussed in the previous chapter), who is joined by two men, Waseda University professor Teruoka Yasutaka, and newspaperman Takagi Takeo, second-in-command of the editorial section of the Yomiuri newspaper. Teruoka initiates the conversation by asking if there is any difference between men’s and women’s desires after all. Although Ishigaki affirms that in “the social sense of the term, there is no distinction,” Takagi launches into a defense of an essential, carnal (nikutai-teki) difference between the sexes that is evident, he says, in crime. Women’s crimes tend to be impulsive, whereas men’s are premeditated. Of course, things “are altogether different in the postwar,” Takagi asserts. Teruoka agrees, remarking that more and more women are committing crimes in the way men do. He ascribes this to postwar women having at long last stepped outside their confinement in the home, an assertion with which Ishigaki quickly agrees. This discussion of the postwar transformation of women’s crimes prompts Takagi to relate the case of Real Estate Siren. I translate this story in full here: Takagi: This is something that has already received a good deal of attention in the newspaper, but what a startling case it is. There is a certain college student, about twenty-two or -three, who is on friendly terms with about five or six politicians. In the beginning, she was doing things like building houses, and renting and selling to foreigners. You see, some high-level executive in a very well-known firm took care of lending her the money. Of course, she will never pay this man back. She lived together with her family in an apartment, leading a perfectly ordinary, unremarkable existence.

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While things went on like this, and her assets grew, it soon became clear to the woman that she could not truly make money without gaining some legal expertise. So she took the exam to read law and entered the university. Then, as she pursued her legal studies, she also took up other activities like calligraphy and such, acting quite the young lady involved in her maidenly lessons. The woman had tens of thousands of yen, but when she rode in taxis, she never paid a bit of her own fare, nor did she pay for anything else like that. You see, she was a very lovely woman. Quite tall, too. The first time that she was written up in the newspaper had something to do with a club, a social kind of place for men and women to meet. In fact, the club was raided on suspicion of being a house of prostitution. Even there, she had taken up with at least three men, right? She was prostituting herself. After only a couple of meetings with a man, she’d already been asking him to lend her big sums of money. As she did this, she was able to build some huge apartment building. It is women like this who truly embody the desires of contemporary women. Teruoka:That is certainly a type that we never saw before the war, isn’t it?7

Although no round-table participant has any further comment on Real Estate Siren, it is useful for us to consider why Takagi identifies her as representative of the desiring postwar women, and what her example says about the nature of postwar desire. Strikingly, Takagi observes at the outset that Siren’s tale begins with her contact with foreigners. We can assume the “foreigners” are well-off Westerners who need housing quickly, who can easily afford to pay more for it than most Japanese, and who, given the sexual politics of the day and the theme of Siren’s tale, include men who might enjoy helping a pretty, young woman in return for favors. Given Siren’s beauty and references to her later promiscuity, as well as the stigma attached to Japanese women who trafficked with foreign men, Fujin kōron readers might well have assumed that it was her contact with foreigners that initiated Siren’s greed for riches and sexual pleasure. Takagi makes clear, however, that influential Japanese politicians and businessmen are equally willing to fund Siren’s schemes. Anyone with money can sleep with Siren, but no one ultimately wins her affections. She is a smart developer: her only failure comes from getting caught in the act of prostitution. Her successes are due to her intelligence and business acuity, her ability to see opportunity, and her willingness to take risks. Siren is unabashed about using the old-fashioned method of prostitution to pursue postwar wealth.

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Seeing Real Estate Siren in her family’s neighborhood, no one would suspect either her wealth or her promiscuity. She styles herself as a well-behaved young lady practicing the traditional arts that should prepare her for the good marriage that will seal her future. The reader does not know if Siren disguises herself as an ojōsan (young lady) in order to elude her family, the police or (shades of Itami Jūzo’s films) the tax collector, or whether she truly identifies with this role. What readers do know is that if they were to meet Siren on the street, they would have no idea that she was anything more than an exceptionally pretty but otherwise conventional young woman. Her true desires and talents would remain well hidden. As the “embodiment of contemporary women’s desires,” Siren represents the fire of enormous talent and ambition—fire ignited by foreign men, and kept burning by the desires of powerful Japanese men. The true colors of her personality, however, are willfully shaded that she might better work inside and outside of mainstream society. Teruoka’s remark that Siren is a “type that we never saw before the war” is telling, as well. Although Takagi relates Siren’s case because it is so startling, he uses it as an example of women’s criminal activity in the postwar, implying that even though Siren is unusual, she is hardly alone. By recognizing her as a type, Teruoka, too, sees her as representative of other women who are expressing yet also hiding their subversive talents. While Takagi and Teruoka do not champion the Siren type, neither do they make disparaging remarks about her or feel compelled to expound on the error of her ways. Rather, they seem awed by Siren. Later in the conversation, both men cite examples of ambitious Japanese women of the past who had no choice but to realize their ambitions through their husbands and sons.8 In these historical references, both men seem almost completely unaware of the types of prewar modern women who had stories considered as outrageous as that of Real Estate Siren, such as the Modern Girl of the 1920s or the New Woman of the 1910s. Because of this, the type that Siren exemplifies emerges incorrectly as a first in Japanese women’s history, an aspect of this issue of Fujin kōron to which I return. The image of a ladylike woman strategically using sex work to gain wealth also obscures the reality of thousands of impoverished women forced into prostitution in Japan following the war and those enslaved by the Japanese Imperial Army during the war.9 As the “Genealogy” conversation progresses, the three participants continue to categorize women into postwar types. They concede that although more and more women will be acting on their own initiative in public, making masculine, premeditated crimes committed by women more common, numerous women still fall into the old-fashioned type that tries to satisfy her desires for status

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through her husband’s success. Ishigaki states that this phenomenon has led to many instances of men developing phobias about their hard-driving, covertly ambitious wives. All three participants agree that such pushy wives can be awfully hard on a man’s psyche. By this time, the theme of specifying various types of postwar women is plainly directing the conversation. Takagi suggests that PTA mothers (PTA no okāsan tachi) stand out as another type that has appeared in the postwar. This leads Ishigaki to relate our second true story, that of the “PTA Mother”: Ishigaki: I have a story to tell on that topic. It has to do with a certain letter that I received from a married woman, and sure enough, she was extremely active in the PTA and some regional association, though she considered this activity as a kind of substitute for the love she couldn’t get from her husband. Having been raised as the ojōsan of a middle-class family, her marriage was the usual arranged kind. Her husband had achieved a fairly good position, but the fact was that she could never feel the slightest bit of love in their relationship. She showered all her love on her children, letting herself become completely absorbed in raising them. When she came to the point, however, where her children could be a little more on their own, she tried to dispel her sense of loss through public activity. As a result, people in the area began to speak of this lady as “outstanding.” Yet when she regarded herself, all she saw was a person who had for some reason become constantly dissatisfied and detached. In the midst of all this, she ended up falling in love with a younger man. For the first time in her life, she knew love. Although up until this point she’d had no idea of those kinds of feelings between men and women, now she knew, you see.10

PTA Mother, like Real Estate Siren, leads a double life. Praised by her community as a dedicated leader, PTA Mother embodies the postwar virtues of the democratic life and the effects of occupation-era reforms. As a postwar woman, she directs her energies not to the Japanese-style neighborhood association of old (chōnaikai) but to that American import, the Parent-Teacher Association. Her identity takes on a hybrid quality, combining traditional Japan (as embodied in the word okāsan [mother] written in Japanese script) and the modernizing influence of the United States (as show in “PTA,” always rendered in the roman alphabet). But her virtuous exterior, like that of Real Estate Siren, masks a shadier side—the subversive effects of her foreign-influenced approach to life. So accustomed are people to trusting conventional exteriors that few, if

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any, would guess PTA Mother’s other life. Thus, no one knows the frustrations that PTA mother feels in her marriage, no doubt considering her a lucky woman to be married to a man of good position. Ironically, it is PTA Mother’s virtuous pursuit of a good postwar mother’s interest in her children that has given her the opportunity to get out of the house and meet the younger man. Her dissatisfaction with her cold husband, whom she met through a traditional arrangement, contrasts vividly with the love she feels for the younger man, the man who, like Ikuko’s paramour Kimura, warmly returns her affections. But why does PTA Mother write to Ishigaki Ayako about her secret love life? Perhaps she feels guilty and needs to confess to someone while maintaining anonymity. Perhaps Ishigaki, as a frequent commentator on women’s issues, seems like a sympathetic listener, one who will understand PTA Mother’s situation, and intuit why an “ordinary” woman became an “exceptional” leader and an “exceptional” lover. PTA Mother does not say that she has any intention of putting an end to her love affair or divorcing her husband. She will remain uneasily in the murkiness of postwar morality. The round-table discussants do not have any comment on PTA Mother’s tale, but move to anecdotes from the history of marriage, adultery, and divorce in Japan, with Teruoka using examples from classical literature (Tale of Genji, The Gossamer Diary, Five Women Who Loved Love, and the plays of Chikamatsu). Coming back to their own times, they talk about love, marriage, and the trend toward working couples in the postwar, a theme that reveals the narrowness of their middle-class perspective. Although Teruoka and Takagi realize that there are exceptional women who want to make their own way in the world, they believe that “90 percent of Japanese women” would prefer a happy home life with husband and children to a career, and they assume this has to do with something deeply instinctive in women that could be connected with their hormones and their “mother’s love.” This irks Ishigaki, who had, after all, incited the Housewife Debate by arguing that women ought to work after marriage. Here, too, she brings up the problems women face both in marriage and in divorce when they have become financially dependent on their husbands, and later, in another move away from biological determinism, she argues for “father’s love.” For all their comments to the effect that most women’s desires remain fairly ordinary, Teruoka and Takagi do fear that younger women are changing, and that it is younger men who are helping them to do this. On the subject of divorce, for example, Takagi remarks that “postwar cases of this are numerous, of women leaving husbands they no longer love and going out to work.” Teruoka agrees, finding that young Japanese have lost their sense of sentimentality,

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whereas a man of his generation could not imagine leaving his wife no matter what happened because his ethics and sentiment would not permit him to do so. Invoking the name of the Taiyō-zoku—the young fans of Ishihara Shintarō’s 1955 prize-winning debut novel, Taiyō no kisetsu (Seasons of the Sun)—Ishigaki takes a more positive view of youth, hoping that they will find a way to bring their desires and their new morality in line with each other.11 The conversation ends as Teruoka and Takagi retreat into helplessness and laughter. Although they concede that Japanese men need to change and joke that they are the world’s worst husbands, Teruoka and Takagi also imply that Japanese men are simply set in their ways. When Ishigaki bluntly replies that Japanese men must change, Teruoka ends the conversation by taking refuge in the idea that Japanese men are emotional infants who need women’s nurturing. “A Genealogy of Japanese Women’s Desires” concludes with this statement: Teruoka: Please don’t expect all that much from men. From the vantage point of our experience, there is certainly no man who deserves your whole-hearted love. So we beg you to try to find that little bit of goodness that we might have, and then, nurture that as if we were helpless little babies. (Laughter)12

Hirabayashi Taiko’s essay has little of the humor punctuating “Genealogy,” but several of the same themes: only younger men know how to love women and appreciate their intelligence, so as a result, bright, young wives are bored with their husbands, yet being idealistic women of a new age, they mean to get what they want. Fujin kōron readers may have been aware of Hirabayashi’s novel Sabaku no hana (Desert Flower), serialized from 1955 to 1957 in Shufu no tomo, fiction that drew on her own experience of divorce from an unfaithful husband.13 The main problem women face, as Hirabayashi sees it, is that most men won’t let women have what they want. She relates the story of a young career woman, one who was told that she had the talent to become a manager but who suffered “the silent treatment” from her male coworkers who did not take well to the prospect of a female competitor. (Apparently, younger men were more eager to be welcoming lovers than generous coworkers.) Hirabayashi also narrates in some detail the cautionary tale of another woman she knew, whom I will call “Idealistic Wife.” Idealistic Wife had lots of friends—other young, progressive wives with whom she shared her hopes for a genuinely affectionate marriage. Unlike some of the other husbands, who resented their wives’ communal criticism of them, Idealistic Wife’s husband began to treat her tenderly:

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Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan She began to spend her days fairly content with her life, growing distant from the rest of us. We felt some pangs of regret as we watched her transformation into an ordinary wife (heibon na tsuma). About this time, one of our group told us that, when she had been out walking, she had twice spied the woman’s husband coming out of one of the shops on a certain street full of cafés. We didn’t know whether we should believe the worst of him or not. This was an area of town, fragrant with the scent of women’s cosmetics, that we believed to be a thousand miles away from us. We felt sure that the men we had married were the kind of human beings who would be absolutely opposed to that sort of place, so we laughed over her report and then forgot all about it. However, no sooner had we heard this than we discovered that the woman’s husband had fallen in love with a bar hostess and had fathered her child. Once found out, the man’s way of handling his embarrassment was terrible: “My home is a bed of nails. I can’t relax anywhere there. That’s what I was looking for in the other woman—a place to breathe.” He blathered on and on this way. For reasons we couldn’t understand, his socialist friends tended to side with the husband. I’m deviating a little from the subject of this essay, but, after that, there was still the matter of how the husband was going to part from the other woman. Even here, we made no small mistake in judgment. I guess you could say that we were being dogmatic. We pushed our friend to confront her husband and demand that he leave the other woman. She took our advice. “Please give me just a little more time. This didn’t happen because I don’t love you,” her husband pleaded, heedless of his wife’s threats. This made the wife push her husband even harder, proposing that they themselves should separate. What the wife expected was that this ultimatum would probably shock her husband into reversing his position and make him come back home. We all supported her in this. In fact, I was the only one in the group who had some lingering doubts about what she was doing, but I envied the others’ youthful idealism and figured this was one way to think about the situation. In the meantime, the husband took advantage of his wife’s strategic call for separation. He left her and ended up marrying the other woman. It is certainly ideal for the wife to have true equality with her husband in the home. What I learned from the above experience, however, is that when a wife takes the ideals that had appealed to her before she married, brings them naively into her marriage, and tries to put them directly into practice, she is embarking on one very risky venture.14

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Next, Hirabayashi discusses the case of another young wife who intends to leave her husband, confident that he would pay child support as the law dictates. Hirabayashi counsels the woman to forget the law and accept the facts that it is unlikely her husband will pay support and that she will have a hard time surviving as a divorced woman. In other words, the “tragedy of women’s liberation and women’s desires” is that women’s awareness of what they can and should obtain in love and work is far ahead of most men’s, and beyond women’s financial means to realize on their own. She writes: A fair number of progressive young women get married and, before long, grow disappointed with their marriage. For the children’s sake, at least, they substitute realism for idealism, though if these wives had economic power, this resignation would not proceed so smoothly. On the other hand, if we speak from the husbands’ perspective, they think that there is nothing worse for relaxing than being around a “nagging wife.” While young wives face marriage with the new desire to keep love alive forever—something that wives in the past did not expect—their husbands do not understand this very well at all.15

These three tales of exceptional women—Real Estate Siren, PTA Mother, and Idealistic Wife—exemplify women who are pushing the limits of postwar morality. The most disappointed woman, Idealistic Wife, ruins her marriage by standing up for her rights and confronting her husband as an equal. Siren and PTA Mother manage by trying to keep their desiring life hidden from view. Although Teruoka and Takagi imagine that 90 percent of Japanese women prefer a life in the home, they are alarmed at the growing number of women choosing divorce and hope that women will be more compassionate about Japanese men’s failure to keep up with their desires for love and equality. Hirabayashi assures women that until men do catch up, women should not expect to be treated as equals in marriage or in the workplace. True stories of exceptional women may entertain or shock the reader, providing, like Tanizaki’s characters’ lively diaries, a window to others’ desires and a peek at their boldness in acting on those desires. They also show what happens to women who veer from convention. Read together, these stories raise the questions: Are these women truly exceptional or are they representative of major trends? If their ordinary and even virtuous exteriors disguise their postwar independence, how is anyone to know how many of these women actually exist?

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Desires of the ordinary majority The Fujin kōron editors and publishers may have used the examples of exceptional women to entertain the magazine’s readers, but they also had a vested interest in knowing what the majority of women wanted, especially if they were both to attract advertisers and to entice Japanese women into buying their publication. Survey research provided a handy tool for this. Not only had the magazine just completed its own 6-month survey of 2,500 women, but for this issue the editors published the results of a study conducted by the Social Psychology Research Institute (Shakai Shinri Kenkyūjo) as well. “Ankēto ni miru gendai josei no yokubō” (“Contemporary Women’s Desires as Seen through Questionnaires”) presents the opinions of 200 housewives, 200 Salary Girls (sararii gyaru), and 200 high school girls.16 Its charts give a sweeping view of women’s desires, codified into categories and reified in numbers. Quotes from individual respondents expand on certain attitudes that caught the researchers’ attention. The writers treat the subject of desire from a scientific viewpoint and are less intent on entertaining than on instructing. They begin by explaining desire not as something instinctual or hormonal, as evident in the “Genealogy” discussion, but as a socially and historically contingent phenomenon—something better termed “demand” (yōkyū), they say, in the parlance of contemporary social psychology. They begin by recognizing the complexity and diversity of human emotions: What, indeed, might be the desires that have captured today’s women? How have these taken on tangible, visible form? Even though they are bound by social and historical limitations, the range of what we sum up simply as “desire” is really quite broad. Consequently, it is extremely difficult to ascertain with any accuracy, both in meaning and in content. Nevertheless, we would like to begin in making a tentative study by getting a clear understanding of the variety of desires that drive today’s women.17

The article develops by recording women’s responses to four areas of investigation: (1) things one wants most, (2) life purpose and happiness, (3) means of satisfying desire, and (4) styles of marriage proposals. Read in light of The Key and Real Estate Siren’s tale, the questions seem geared to measure how many women are willing to abandon more prudent courses of action in favor of racing after money, sex, and other pleasures. There is also a keen interest in measuring how many women wish to pursue meaningful lives outside the home, and whether or not they will take the lead in proposing marriage. These

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Table 4.1 Please name two things that you most want, but do not have now. Housewives

Percentage Salary girls

Washing machine House Money

Percentage Students

Percentage

25.2

House

24.75

Car

19.8

24.4 17.1

Money Piano

22.2 14.8

17.8 14.9

12.3 9.9

My own room TV

7.4 6.5

Sweetheart Clothing

Piano Children Refrigerator Free time

6.5 6.5 5.7 4.9

9.9 9.9 7.4 7.4

Remodeled kitchen Sewing machine

4.9

Friend Own room Time Electric phonograph Books

4.9

House Older brother Older sister My own room Friend Clothing Piano Books, magazines Camera

4.9

Car

5.7

4.9

Money

4.8

Younger sister Younger brother TV Lover Electric phonograph Father

4.3

4.9

Employment; a job A bath

4.1

Washing machine Brains

3.3

Wristwatch

7.7

Gas facilities

3.3

3.7

Clothing Camera Health

3.3 3.3 2.4

Sewing machine Father TV Tape recorder

Electric phonograph Friends

2.4

Special skill

3.7 2.5 2.5 2.5

1.6

Mt climbing equipment A job

1.6

Car

2.5

2.5

Someone to confide in Dog

10.6 8.6 8.2 7.7 7.2 6.7 5.7

3.8 3.3 2.8 2.8 2.4 1.9 1.9

themes resonate with expectations for postwar women found frequently in Fujin kōron—namely, that their interests have extended outside the home, that they have great vitality and desire, and that they want equal partnerships with their husbands. As evident in this survey, however, most postwar women believe in setting limits. Table 4.1 begins with one of the most tangible forms of desire for the 600 Japanese women in the survey. For housewives, a washing machine, house, and

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money top the list. The researchers explain that this shows that housewives’ desires are closely connected with the stuff of their everyday lives. Although they see a certain vanity and hope for upward mobility in these desires, the researchers emphasize the modest nature of such wishes. For example, among those who wanted homes were women who had seen their houses destroyed in the war and those living in apartments who wanted to raise their future children in a house. Their housing wishes did not include mansions, vacation homes, or anything especially luxurious. Even their desires for money, the researchers note, remain modest, such as wish for the husband’s income to increase by 10,000 yen a month, or to have some personal spending money. There is no evidence of the Real Estate Siren here. Although Salary Girls wanted a house, too, their images of homes tended to be more romantic, like places “where flowers would bloom all year.” One respondent wanted to create a children’s library in this imaginary home. High school students were even vaguer about the house of their dreams, wanting something “pretty” or “cute.” High school students wanted a car most of all, but their responses to other questions led the researchers to believe that they chose this as a kind of magical, extravagant item, “a symbol of the cultured life” (bunka seikatsu), almost as if they were rubbing an Aladdin’s Lamp. Their desire for an older brother or sister shows, the researchers claim, the intensity of emotion and the importance of relationships for people this age, and their wish to confide in someone who is a little older but not a parent. Table 4.2 displays respondents’ hopes and ambitions for the future. The desire for fulfillment in the home appears strong across all three groups. Still, the researchers point out generational differences. Unsurprisingly, Table 4.2 In what sorts of activities would you like to find your future purpose in life and your happiness? Please give two responses. Housewives (%) Family life Pursuing interests & having fun Career & job Social welfare or community projects Working for the sake of Japan and the world Religions and faith

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Salary girls (%)

Students (%)

85 30

80 53

85 36

27 31

42 28

45 16

15

5

7

5

0

1

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housewives are most connected to the home, but, as the researchers say, “what we would like to problematize here is their means” for realizing fulfillment in the home. What they find remarkable is several respondents’ desire to leave behind something that they have written. This might be a diary, bound as one volume and left for their children, or a personal record of history as they have lived it. Understanding this desire as the housewives’ easiest way to establish an independent identity, the researchers comment, “This sort of housewife ‘who writes’ is one that we never saw before the war, she is a new type.”18 The dreams of the Salary Girl of 1956 seem to surprise the researchers, especially when it comes to so many respondents’ valuing of leisure-time pleasures over work. Despite all the talk of the postwar advancement of women into the workplace, the researchers say, these young working women still see their ultimate life purpose and happiness in the home. The researchers find this desire for home and leisure pursuits a rather old-fashioned combination of ambitions, and they prefer to think more about the set of Salary Girls who report wanting to find happiness and purpose in work. Here is where they locate another new type of woman: “Unlike housewives, [they] want to achieve independence through work, and enjoy an autonomous life through pursuing what[ever] interests and pleases them.”19 Some of these Salary Girls have big plans such as one who wants “to master English, German, and French, and travel around the world,” and many among them plan to acquire skills that will make them more able in the workplace. What lies ahead for this new type of woman who wants both home and work, the researchers caution, is the “new issue” of how to combine them both. The idea of coupling a life in the home and at work also seems to be the choice of many high school students who have yet to experience much of either one, and who the researchers assume do not have the Salary Girls’ self-confidence in imagining making a life out of home activities and personal interests. Experience of wartime deprivations, as the researchers mention but do not explain in much detail, keenly affects respondents’ notions of personal happiness; indeed, the researchers see this in the women’s emphasis on the happy home life. When asked to give “the time of your life when you felt happiest,” 40.7 percent of the housewives and 46.3 percent of the high school students chose experiencing “harmony at home.” Almost all the housewives, they note, made some reference to their husbands in this regard. Since there is no mention made of the nature of these references to husbands, perhaps we should assume that they are fairly positive. If so, this is a response that diverges sharply from the frustrations experienced by PTA Mother, Idealistic Wife, and Tanizaki’s Ikuko.

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The third question discussed here gauges respondents’ views on following and resisting one’s desires:20 “Because there is no end to human desire, Ms. A finds happiness in leading a modest life that does not make such a show of her wishes. Ms. B finds that since, any way you look at it, life is short, it is better to live as one pleases. Which one of these opinions comes closer to your own views?”21 Ms A’s cautious course was chosen by 81.3 percent of housewives and 76.8 percent of high school students, but by only 61.7 percent of the Salary Girls. Ms B’s carefree approach was selected by 37 percent of the Salary Girls, 23.2 percent of the high school students, and 15.4 percent of the housewives. The housewives who aligned themselves with Ms A did not want a luxurious life, but a stable, secure one, and found Ms B’s attitude toward life lacking in seriousness. Others thought it was impossible to have Ms B’s life, even if they did desire it. The researchers characterized the sober attitudes of the Ms A-type housewives as realistic and tempered by experience. Some of the housewives who felt close to Ms B, however, had a more restrained view than one might expect, expressing that they did “want to lead a life of significance . . . precisely because life was short” but also wanted a “life that was humble in the material sense.” None of these responses showed any conflict, the researchers state, with the housewives’ valuing of “home and community service.” In their comments on why they preferred the live-for-today Ms B, the group of Salary Girls who selected this response first wanted to clarify that they did not take an “anything goes” attitude toward life. Rather, they emphasized how they wanted to “live in a full and positive way” and demanded a “life of significance.” These Salary Girls also took care to mention that they had no intention of “infringing upon others” in aiming toward these goals. These responses give the researchers pause as they consider what deeper motives are at work here: This strongly associates with this particular group of Salary Girls’ view of happiness as being connected to home and personal interests. But couldn’t this attitude in itself be a clear indication of how these Salary Girls intend to direct their energy in rebelling against the pressures of “family life?” On the one hand, they are headed in a different direction than the housewives whose eyes have been opened to society, but, on the other hand, they share with housewives the same longing for an expanded sense of self-identity. We can certainly see this even among those Salary Girls who supported Ms A, for there were many who wrote in the proviso that they did not consider the “modest life” to be the equivalent of giving up (akirame).22

The last topic involves marriage proposals, a subject that the researchers claim distinguished the three groups of respondents as shown in Table 4.3.

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Table 4.3 When a man came into her life whom she liked, Ms A proposed to him; Ms B waited for him to propose; Ms C relied on a third person to intercede for her. Which person do you have the most favorable impression of? Housewives (%) Ms A Ms B Ms C Don’t know

23.6 29.3 41.5 5.7

Salary girls (%) 18.5 49.4 29.6 2.4

High school students (%) 14.5 71.0 13.3 1.4

Source: Shakai Shinri Kenkyūjo (Social Psychology Research Institute), “Ankēto ni miru gendai josei no yokubō” (“Contemporary Women’s Desires as Seen through Questionnaires”), Fujin kōron, December 1956, 116.

Ms A’s assertive approach won the most support from the oldest women, the housewives, who were also the least likely to support Ms B’s choice of waiting passively. Salary Girls and high school students overwhelmingly supported Ms B, while the housewives were most likely to favor Ms C, the woman who would ask a friend to intercede. The researchers explain that Ms A’s choice offers the riskiest course, Ms B’s method requires the most patience, and Ms C’s method, though apparently indirect, has the potential for more direct resolution, after a fashion. Summing up the responses to marriage, the researchers refer to the current popularity among young people of having an “arranged love marriage” (miai-ren’ai kekkon), an arranged marriage that develops into a love relationship. They praise this trend as a way for young people who want to approach marriage with their characteristic “rationality and efficiency” to benefit from the experience and wisdom of their elders. The report concludes with praise for contemporary Japanese womanhood: In the above report, we have considered women’s desires from a variety of angles. Even from this modest survey, it is clear that women’s desires arise and evolve in relation to home, workplace, school, society, and the like. It is also clear that women, working on their own initiative, have begun making all kinds of soberminded efforts to try to fulfill realistic desires by rational means. We have also realized that women are taking one step at a time, moving slowly and steadily to solve the problems that stem from that which is closest to their lives. They are laying the groundwork for building a better society.23

In making these concluding remarks, the researchers convey the message of restraint in almost every descriptive word, from “slowly and steadily” to “rational” and “realistic.” They commend this restraint, affirming women’s attention

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to the stuff of their own lives and applauding their relatively mild desires for self-expression. And in praising women’s attention to matters of daily life, they in effect cede all other aspects of the public sphere to men. Nevertheless, the language of newness does operate here: that postwar women’s efforts have only “begun” and that they are “rational” codes them as modern. For the Fujin kōron reader who might fear that she is not “new enough” for the postwar climate, the survey results offer a comforting portrait of progress as easy to manage, selfdefined, and praiseworthy even when achieved in small measure. But where has the exceptional woman of the true stories gone? The criminally expedient, business-savvy Real Estate Siren is absent. The PTA Mother who values her new love affair with a younger man over “harmony in the home” apparently was not part of the survey, nor was Hirabayashi’s Idealistic Wife who took the assertive approach and lost her husband. Gone, too, are all those wives Takagi and Teruoka feared were holding men to overly high standards and walking out on them when they failed to measure up. Read in light of other features in Fujin kōron’s special issue, this report gives the impression that even though the exceptional women’s stories are reportedly true and serve as challenging examples of the outer limits of postwar morality, they are in fact exceptional. Real Estate Siren, PTA Mother, and Idealistic Wife may indeed represent new and different “types” of Japanese women, but those types remain only a tiny minority of the entire female population. For those heartened by this thought, the aura of truth surrounding the survey must have been reassuring. Like the Kinsey reports, “Contemporary Women’s Desires as Seen through Questionnaires” communicates veracity in several ways: the precision of charts, numbers, and even minute details; occasional excerpts from respondents’ explanations of their choices in recognizable, colloquial language; and scientific objectivity provided not by individual authors but by the nameless researchers of the Social Psychology Research Institute. This studied approach to women’s desires resonates with early Cold War beliefs in the promise of science and with a curiosity about the human psyche also found in 1950s US women’s magazines.24 In this article, social science gives weight to Teruoka and Takagi’s assumption that the majority of Japanese women in 1956 and in particular, the mature housewives, see their long-range interests in maintaining the harmony of the family, and if lucky, enjoying a taste of the fruits of Japan’s increasingly healthy economy. Salary Girls appear destined for a similar life. Still, the door to postwar morality remains slightly ajar as both groups of women express desire for an expanded sense of self-identity, consumer goods, and a meaningful life

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determined for and by themselves. What would it take for them to fling the door wide open? What would their lives look like once they were on the other side? Fujin kōron gives its readers a range of possibilities, enabling the fantasy of walking through many different doorways at once.

What’s so funny about women’s desires: Men get the last laugh Other contributors to the December 1956 issue of Fujin kōron do not take women’s desires as quite the sober matter that the good scientists of the Social Psychology Research Institute do. For two men, a creative writer and a cartoonist, nothing could be a riper subject for humor than women’s wish lists. “Yokubō ni namae wa nai” (“No Name Hath Desire”), a conversation among three generations of women written by Tanaka Chikao, and a comic strip titled, “Gendai josei no yokubō” (“Contemporary Women’s Desires”) by Okabe Fuyuhiko put a comic spin on many of the images available in the feature articles. Their humor relies on readers’ recognition of the norms of Japanese society making departures from those norms funny. The subjects they choose to satirize alert us to those aspects of women’s desires with the most potential to cause anxiety—namely, generational conflict, the inversion of gender roles, and the fear of not being in control of all the changes that comprised postwar Japan. Tanaka’s piece purports to be “from a conversation among three generations of women,” but his clever use of caricature gives it away as creative fiction. The easy flow of the conversation makes “No Name Hath Desire” a funny, fast read. Three women, Senior Auntie, Junior Auntie, and Young Lady, mainly discuss marriage.25 Their conflicts take on a distinctly generational flavor as they advise, criticize, and tease each other. Junior Auntie is a young mother defensive of her choice to limit her family to one child and somewhat frustrated with her husband, an engineer who writes weighty, technical books. But Junior Auntie can also be a wicked tease who incites the other two women to argue and who plainly enjoys coming up with lines that shock the middle-aged Senior Auntie. Senior Auntie and the Young Lady do not hesitate to express their views, though Senior Auntie speaks with the authority of experience and Young Lady with staunch confidence in her analytical abilities. Young Lady embodies to the extreme the “rationality and efficiency” that the Social Psychology Research Institute reports being characteristic of the younger generation, and that Hirabayashi also found invigorating in the “progressive young wives.”

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As the conversation opens, Senior Auntie has been criticizing Junior Auntie for deciding to have only one child, asking her frankly about her birth control methods and views on parenthood, when she decides to invite Young Lady over to join them. Senior Auntie: Come take a lesson in some good housewifey gossip. Won’t be too long before all this sort of thing will be happening to you, right? Why, two more weeks and you’re going to be a bride! Young Lady: Not the sort of “bride” you write with the characters for “woman” and “house.” I intend to remain as I have always been.26 Senior Auntie: Oh sure, sure. That’s what they all say in the beginning. Young Lady: No, even though I marry, I do not want to lose sight of who I am. Junior Auntie: But what about children? Young Lady: I don’t see any need for them. I have more than enough to do simply taking care of myself. Junior Auntie: You’re a stronger woman than I, that’s for sure. Now, Auntie, how many did you say that you had? Senior Auntie: What do you mean “did I say?” What a mean tease you are to pretend that you don’t know! I have four, of course. You’re both looking at me as if this horrifies you. But, that’s the way it was in the old days. Four children was usual. Junior Auntie: But your youngest is in middle school, so you must be enjoying yourself these days. And your husband is a manager, and soon he’s going to be the company director. You’ll be on easy street! Senior Auntie: Well, yes, but . . . Junior Auntie: Take things at my home, for example. My husband is only a lowranking employee, still a petty official, and hard up for money. So if I’d had any more children, we’d be starving to death. Senior Auntie: In my own days of scrimping and saving, I’d already had two children. Junior Auntie: But in the old days, before the war, wasn’t the living easier? Senior Auntie: I suppose you could say so, but for me, I truly wanted to bear and raise children. Having the lives of these children entrusted to me alone is something that I can still feel wholeheartedly grateful for. Junior Auntie: A woman’s purpose in life—that’s where it is, all right. I understand that, I really do. But is that all? Young Lady: I wonder whether we’re not making altogether too much out of all this “mother’s love.” Haven’t we been conditioned to feel this way without even knowing it? By a conditioning process that took hundreds of years?

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To put it plainly, this business about “mother’s love” is all simply a matter of human emotion. The human emotion associated with “good morals and manners,” right? You’re born and raised in a certain environment, and things like this attachment to emotion stick to you like so many dead skin cells, clogging the pores of your own independence. On top of that, we’ve come to the point where this emotion stuff has become like some uniform—clothing that you have to wear or else you can’t show your face in public. Um, I hope that I’m not out of line in talking like this. Junior Auntie: No, I don’t think you’re out of line, but really you should know that life is not so cut and dried. It’s full of grey areas. Senior Auntie: Well, I think you’re out of line! Heavens, you’d better keep still and listen to what those of us with experience have to say. Now then, Auntie, does your husband go in for mah johng?27

This conversation shows the same generational differences present in the other articles, although here the writer plays these up for comic contrast. Senior Auntie defends her choices as reflecting the values of the times in which she grew up (before the war), and as emblems of her commitment and hard work. Teruoka and Takagi, those “Genealogy” round-table promoters of “mother’s love,” would probably take comfort in her philosophy. Junior Auntie agrees with the spirit of this, but like the housewives in the Institute survey, she wants some other route to self-definition as well. Young Lady adopts the most critical stance, analyzing what others consider natural and appropriate in women—“mother’s love”—as a socially constructed phenomenon. Her choice of words shows a marked distaste for old Japan, the Japan associated with “emotion” (ninjō), “good manners and morals” (junpū bizoku), and a preference for the new Japan with its emphasis on independence (shutaisei). Next in the conversation, Senior Auntie teases Junior Auntie about whether she worries about her husband having an affair, then asks Young Lady for her views on love. Here, Young Lady’s desire for rationality takes a more extreme form as she imagines the benefits of becoming a machine. Although women’s strongest yearnings have long been associated, in Japanese literature at least, with romance, Young Lady appears to wish to put as much distance as possible between herself and such “old-fashioned” and “wasteful” desires. Here, too, Young Lady reveals her loyalty to the language of rationality and progress. She equates love with bean cakes (anko), the native, old-fashioned Japanese sweet, and being lovesick with a Japanese vagueness (aimai). Her character supports Teruoka’s lament that the young people of today have lost their sentimentality,

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unlike members of the older generation who, he asserts, have such feelings as devotion and affection deeply ingrained in their psyches. In creating Young Lady’s character as extreme, Tanaka not only makes her funny, but like Takagi’s use of Real Estate Siren, makes the extreme stand for the newest of the new, and hence for the true embodiment of postwar women’s desires. Senior Auntie: And how about you, Young Lady? If “bride” won’t do, I wonder what I should call you. “Partner” (tsureai) has a kind of old-fashioned feel about it, doesn’t it? Junior Auntie: People also are using this term “marriage between friends” (yūai kekkon). Young Lady: The essence of marriage is, rather surprisingly, a business-like, rational sort of thing, isn’t it? That’s why those who get dazzled by excessive dreams—beautiful, self-indulging dreams as sweet as bean cakes—lose their focus, become unclear about what they want, and suffer for it. Senior Auntie: Don’t you know how much labor goes into making bean cakes? Love is the same. It’s hand-made. You can’t make it with a machine. Young Lady: You can’t say that bean cakes can’t be made by machine. Senior Auntie: You’re saying that it’s a machine you want to become. A machine! Young Lady: Yes, how nice if that were possible. Wasting so much psychological energy all for the purpose of our excessive emotions—people are really the worse off for it.28

The conversation turns to the older women’s marriages. Junior Auntie, who married after three months of dating following the omiai (arranged meeting with a marriage candidate), is silent when Senior Auntie asks her if she is experiencing any “dissatisfaction.” This leads Senior Auntie to tease Junior Auntie, saying that she and her husband probably tell each other “I love you, I love you” all the time, which Junior Auntie soundly denies. Senior Auntie seems satisfied, stating that that’s the sort of thing only “foreigners do,” when Junior Auntie blurts out that she and her husband have a very physical, spontaneous love life. Junior Auntie then turns the table, joking that Senior Auntie must receive a kiss from her husband every morning before he goes to work. Senior Auntie, who later speaks of the loneliness and “hysteria” she experienced because of her husband’s obsession with mah johng, responds that if he kissed her like that, she would faint dead away from shock. Young Lady weighs in with more of her opinions

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on love, once again affirming the value of individual identity above all else and taking a cool, calculated look at her own relationship: Young Lady: That’s where I have a different opinion. I can’t imagine really loving the man I’m marrying. There is only the potential for that. That’s why, for instance, to put this in old-fashioned terms, I can dedicate part of myself to him. But the real me will remain to the very end. That part of me dedicated to him may give over temporarily to desire, move of its own accord, and change, but my essential self will absolutely not change.29

The words, “women’s desires” are strongly associated with sexual desire, and in both The Key and in Fujin kōron’s “Genealogy” round-table discussion, much of the curiosity about women’s sexual desires had to do with their extra-marital activities. Was the traditional family system, which had been rendered more democratic by law in the postwar period, also losing its hold on women and no longer restraining their sexual desires? Further on in Tanaka’s “No Name Hath Desire,” Young Lady startles her elders later by saying that she finds nothing wrong with having friendships, even love relationships, outside of marriage. She treats the possibility of these extra-marital relationships as dispassionately as she does marriage, believing that people should be able to manage such involvements rationally and without any excess of emotion. This so surprises Senior Auntie that she initially laughs off the idea by joking about her own desire. But when Young Lady persists in discussing this unusual idea in her forthright manner, Senior Auntie responds in kind, concluding that this sort of thinking is a postwar development and that it threatens to remove so many barriers that women will be made into “nothing but desire.” We come into the conversation as Young Lady is presenting her views on extra-marital relationships: Junior Auntie: You mean, a boyfriend?30 Young Lady: Yes. And he, too, would have the same right to have a girlfriend. Senior Auntie: Well, I’m not in favor of that at all. Young Lady: But there may be someone who’ll come into my life who is superior in many ways to the other man. It would be perfectly all right to learn other new ideas and experiences from him. Junior Auntie: But what would happen if you started to fall in love with him? Young Lady: If the relationship enabled me to expand other aspects of myself, falling in love would be all right, too. That way, there would be no undue burden on either myself or my husband. Senior Auntie: What! Oh, if only I were at least ten years younger!

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Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan Junior Auntie: Come now, Auntie—you still have plenty of time before menopause, don’t you? Senior Auntie: How you tease me! Young Lady: But really, in order to live a fully genuine life, unless you try all sorts of possibilities while being aware of your biological limitations or any other aspect of yourself, you will not understand what “genuine” means. Senior Auntie: You may have a point there. Although, you know, this kind of thinking is a phenomenon that has become conspicuous in the postwar. But if women are liberated in every way, what is left over is nothing but desire. This will make people see “woman” as one big lump of desire. That’s what some are trying to make us believe. Is that genuine? Well, is it? The real meaning of being genuine isn’t so superficial. Look at me. I have long accommodated myself to my husband and family, without having any major doubts about this, and I haven’t been so strong and vehement as you young people. Indeed, you all are really strong. After all, I am an ordinary woman, you see. I never made an issue out of whether this or that satisfied my desires. Really. That’s the truth.31

Yet Senior Auntie’s defense of herself as an ordinary, self-restrained woman does not convince the other two. Annoyed, Senior Auntie accuses them of prodding her, of treating her like a sleeping baby they are trying to awaken no matter what. Her discomfort takes the form of criticizing “young people today,” whom she sees as neurotically concerned with discovering the neurotic in everyone else. This complaint segues into Young Lady’s condemnation of the old morality as she talks about how her mother was run ragged by housework. The new topic of housework prompts Junior Auntie to advocate that men and women share all the responsibilities and property of the household equally, while Young Lady argues for a separation of property—a response that plainly shocks Senior Auntie. Junior Auntie takes off on this topic, itemizing how much she should be compensated for everything that she does for her husband. This part of the conversation proves again how the desire for money serves as a critical measure of postwar women’s desires. Real Estate Siren’s postwar identity could be characterized by her avaricious ambitions, while housewives, Salary Girls, and high school students could be understood in part by “things most wanted.” In the next part of this conversation, Junior Auntie employs some postwar rationality to talk about money and marriage, and it is the pose of rationality that makes what she says so funny:

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Junior Auntie: For all the housework, there’d be 3,000 yen per month, and as for providing sexual favors, then per month, that would be . . . Senior Auntie: Per month? You’d better listen to this, Miss Bride-to-Be. Junior Auntie: How about we let that go for 4,000 yen? Altogether, that’s 7,000 yen a month—84,000 yen per year. I’ve been married for eight years, so my share should be 672,000 yen. You’ve been married twenty-five years, Auntie, so . . . Senior Auntie: Oh, now you are being ridiculous. Junior Auntie: You’d have quite a fortune, Auntie. Senior Auntie: My, my, how silly. What would Christ say about this if he heard you? Junior Auntie: Self-sacrifice is something I detest. Young Lady: That’s because you have ulterior motives, right? Senior Auntie: All right, why don’t you just repeat all this to your husband? Junior Auntie: I often do. Senior Auntie: And what then? Ha, I bet that backfired on you. Junior Auntie: (Laughing) Well, we’d owe each other the 4,000 yen, so that’s a wash. As for the 3,000 yen, that’s the cost of my food and lodging so that’s a wash, too. Senior Auntie: See. Junior Auntie: But I did get him to give in on one point. Young lady. Auntie—I’ll let you guess what this is. Senior Auntie: Well? Junior Auntie: It’s my charm fee. The fee I get for revealing my charm. Senior Auntie: What? A charm fee? Junior Auntie: It’s higher than the gas fee. Senior Auntie: How much? Junior Auntie: He has to buy me one suit every year, give me money for cosmetics, and—now this is really something—I had him buy insurance. Of course, I’m listed as the beneficiary. Senior Auntie: I bow to your greater skill. (Aside:) What a practical person!32

Junior Auntie calculates a price for everything, leaving behind for a moment the emotional bonds of marriage. Young Lady continues to hunt for ulterior motives and neurotically repressed desires, while Senior Auntie invokes Christianity, as perhaps the foreign antidote to this modern, foreign-influenced marriage. Next, Senior Auntie admits that she would like some money, too, even if it is just a little to spend freely and that she did not receive from her husband. Suddenly, she lets down her guard, confessing that she no longer feels useful in

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the home, that she wonders what she has been living for and what she should do now. Perking up, she then impishly claims that this proves that she, too, must have desire. Although Junior Auntie advises Senior Auntie to find love in her marriage as the answer to her troubles, Senior Auntie later responds that she has had enough to do with love to last a lifetime, and scolds Junior Auntie for trying to turn her into an object of pity. Senior Auntie’s secret fantasies finally emerge, and when they do, they recall the Social Psychology Research Institute’s survey results of postwar women’s hope for an “expanded sense of self-identity:” Senior Auntie: As for myself, I’d have to say that I’d like to have some kind of business. I’d like to go out in the world, meet people I don’t know—all kinds of people—and talk with them about many things. If I earned some money on my own, I’d be free to get the things that I want . . . like clothing or a trip or seeing a play. They’re pretty simple, you see, the things that I want.33

Senior Auntie’s old-fashioned sense of restraint reappears, however, as she chastises herself for even thinking this way when there are cases of whole families committing suicide because they do not have enough to survive. And so the three characters’ conversation concludes: Senior Auntie: When I think of how lucky I am just to be able to live as I do, it makes every one of my desires vanish into thin air. Junior Auntie: I’m surprised to hear you say that! Senior Auntie: Why is that? Junior Auntie: Because, Auntie, there is clearly no limit to your desires. Young Lady: (Laughing) Don’t you mean there’s no limit to “women’s” desires? That’s why desire cannot be given a name.34

“No Name Hath Desire” establishes the line between the older woman who came of age before the war and the younger, postwar generation. Senior Auntie sees herself as ordinary and views the young, as represented by Young Lady, as exceptional in their self-assertive, dogmatically rational ways. But the generational line between ordinary and exceptional blurs as Senior Auntie realizes that she has more desires than she thought and, egged on by the others, finds some dissatisfaction in her life by not following these desires. Only by reminding herself of the good fortune she does have can Senior Auntie keep herself safely in line.

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The woman in the middle, Junior Auntie, like the housewives in the Institute survey, seems basically content with her “ordinary” life in the home. Junior Auntie definitely leaves the door ajar to other avenues of self-fulfillment, yet the fact that she talks about the demands on her in a comic way betrays some discomfort with the assertive stance of the younger generation (though this discomfort may characterize Tanaka’s attitudes toward demanding women rather than what he has observed in women themselves). Young Lady gives nothing to the experience of her elders, confident that she has life, marriage, and her future all figured out. Rather like Hirabayashi’s “progressive young wives,” Young Lady, too, will bring fresh and untested ideals to her marriage. Although her elders worry about her naiveté, they find Young Lady’s self-confidence challenging—and representative of postwar morality. But where is postwar morality taking women, men, and the family? As Junior Auntie says, “I wonder what the young lady of this Young Lady will be like. I’d sure like to get a look at her face.” “Fujin kōron yūmoa daigaku” (Fujin kōron’s Humor University), a comic strip regularly featured at the end of each issue, has the last laugh. “Gendai josei no yokubō” (“Contemporary Women’s Desires”) by cartoonist Okabe Fuyuhiko consists of seven separate frames that are loosely joined by the topic of desire but not meant to be read as a consecutive narrative. Three of these make fun of desires such as the earnest wish to look pretty and dress fashionably and the ambition to promote one’s children’s talents as a stage mother. But it is the four comics whose humor depends upon the inversion of normative gender roles that reflect most satirically upon Fujin kōron’s special theme. Placed near the end of the magazine, Okabe’s comic strip has a fair amount of physical distance from the feature articles grouped together under the heading, “Special Issue: Women’s Desires.” This position, combined with the strip’s comic cynicism, creates an alternative reading of postwar desire—and one outside the main discussion. In Okabe’s comics, housewives are certainly not restraining themselves or limiting their vision to “that which is closest to their everyday lives.” They don’t pale before ambitious “live-for-today” Salary Girls, but neither are they leading the double life of Real Estate Siren or PTA Mother. Rather, the housewives in these comics have seized power, taking it away from important men. One frame, with the caption, “Desire for Social Justice,” shows a housewife standing tall and holding high a giant rice ladle symbolic of the housewife’s power. An angrily determined expression on her face, she has just felled two suited men, presumably politicians, who now sprawl defenselessly at her feet. The next frame, “Desire to Write,” pictures a housewife sitting at a low table, brush in hand and

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baby strapped to her back. She writes hurriedly as three executive-looking men in suits sit politely yet anxiously behind her, hoping that she will do them a favor by writing for their newspaper. One checks his watch as if wondering whether he is going to get his essay from her in time. These comics do have a foot in postwar reality. Protest marches by women demonstrating against food prices, for example, did include giant imitations of rice ladles with slogans painted upon them. Housewives’ essays were a part of 1956 newspapers, and the report of the Social Psychology Research Institute did indicate that the desire to write was a new feature of postwar housewives’ sense of identity. As we saw in discussion of the Housewife Debate, critics such as Shimizu Keiko spoke proudly of housewives organizing study groups and learning how to write for publication. But postwar women had hardly seized power from men, especially in the public life of politics and newspaper publishing. Indeed, it is the contrast between the housewife’s and the suited men’s actual power that makes the inversion comic. Yet a misogynistic fear also lurks here, a premonition that if women do get what they truly want, men will be the sorry losers. A comparison of two comics of husbands cooking—“Apron Husband” from a 1931 dictionary that uses comics to educate the reader about the popular culture of the modern age, and “Opportunities Are Given Equally,” from Ōkabe’s 1956 strip— reveals that anxiety over gender inversion was not limited to the postwar period.35 The 1931 comic accompanies a dictionary entry explaining the term “apron husband” (epuron hazu) as referring to a man at the beck and call of his wife, a man who “may not actually wear an apron but even helps with chores in the kitchen.”36 In both comics, the men are drawn in similar positions, crouching before old-fashioned cooking stoves. They direct their anxious attention to their wives rather than to their cooking, and they take up less space in the frame than the women do. One cannot imagine the men looking any more worried or powerless. Both comics recognize an uneven distribution of labor and privilege in the home; the crouching cook is disadvantaged no matter, what the gender. Humor comes from the shock of placing men in this role. Although the husbands’ portraits are nearly identical, the wives are drawn quite differently. The “Apron Husband” cartoon depicts (Figure 4.2) the wife as a lady of leisure—at least, at home in the evening—who enjoys her smoke and the evening paper while her husband frets over her. Smoking she reclines in a sleek modern chair as she reads the newspaper. Clad in a sleeveless sheath, the wife wears her hair in a short bob, a controversial fashion of the day. Her

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Figure 4.2 “Apron Husband,” 1931. Modango manga jiten [Manga Dictionary of Modern Language].

back toward the apron husband, the wife takes no notice of how anxious and uncomfortable her husband appears. This representation reminds us of the Modern Girl, the media’s “bad girl” of the 1920s, a woman who knew what she wanted and aimed to get it. The postwar wife in “Opportunities,” however, can barely manage to keep her abundant new opportunities from caving in on her. The cartoon depicts her holding up with one arm an enormous board, many times her size, on which are listed her many interests. There is the PTA to join, there are essays to contribute to the newspaper, and there is the fun of the lottery, beauty contests, and quiz shows or games. Although the caption describes that “opportunities are given equally,” the wife seems to have been dealt the better hand than her anxious, cooking husband. Better to win the lottery or publish an essay than slave over a hot stove at home. All her activities in the cartoon point to a self-absorption; as PTA Mother’s story (described

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Figure 4.3 “Opportunities are given equally,” December 1956. Cartoonist Okabe Fuyuhiko. Courtesy of US Library of Congress and Fujin kōron. Reprinted with kind permission of Okabe Rika.

earlier) shows, even work for that organization carries a good deal of selfinterest. Still, the distraught expression on this woman’s face seems to indicate that she fears having taken on too much postwar excitement and she struggles to keep the board of activities aloft. An equally surprised and worried expression appears on another housewife’s face in the first comic in Okabe’s strip: “Desire for a Washing Machine.” This cartoon frames the housewife, who holds a laundry basket of white-collar men’s shirts, putting them into the washing machine. She is dressed simply in a sweater, shirt, and apron, and only her slippers indicate that she is a Japanese woman at home. Without these, she could as easily be a middle-class American wife. She looks distressed, perhaps because the washing machine is actually her salaryman husband, complete with tie and briefcase, transformed into a machine that is plugged into the wall! Recall that most housewives surveyed by the Social Psychology Research Institute wanted a washing machine—an expensive and prized possession in 1956, when only about a third of the population had them. This housewife obtained one, but what price has her husband paid for it?

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Figure 4.4 “Washing Machine Husband,” December 1956. Cartoonist Okabe Fuyuhiko. Courtesy of US Library of Congress and Fujin kōron. Reprinted with kind permission of Okabe Rika.

The salaryman (sarariiman, a white-collar office worker) has literally become the washing machine for his wife’s convenience. Yet the expression on the housewife’s face does not suggest that she takes pleasure in shoving clothes down her husband’s throat (in other words, in being his taskmaster). In this frame, she could even be taking the clothing out of the machine, thus finding her husband a constant source of housework as well as money. The distraught expressions on both faces, the ambiguity of the wife’s pushing or pulling, and the symbiotic relationship of the couples are not easy to read. Whereas the liberating quality of giving in to desire figures prominently Fujin kōron’s December 1956 articles, Okabe here depicts a couple who find themselves trapped by realizing the dream of an ideal postwar lifestyle. Unfortunately, they got what they wanted.

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Understanding Okabe’s fondness for the work of American humorist James Thurber expands our readings of these 1950s comics. In his 1943 collection of cartoons, Thurber’s Men, Women and Dogs, a Book of Drawings, Thurber draws the same kinds of inversion of gender roles and figures of people meshed with things like Okabe’s “Washing Machine Husband.”37 Thurber’s work belies the misogynistic fears that American middle-class women, seen as bored, angry, and overly concerned about their unbecoming looks, were gaining power at the expense of their emasculated husbands. Intriguingly, Okabe believes that such characterizations can fit equally as well in a Japanese women’s magazine, as though saying that the Japanese housewife had indeed achieved par with the American one and as a result, couples were just as unhappy in both countries.

Conclusion In conclusion, I suggest that this tension between exceptional postwar, foreigninfluenced women and ordinary, more traditionally Japanese, women is not, in fact, a framework newly arising in the early postwar. It has antecedents, for example, in the 1910s and 1920s when comics playing on gender inversion similarly relied on readers’ fears about social change. The lack of reference in 1956 to these similar instances of exceptional women in Japan’s prewar past speaks to a vested interest in believing in the newness of the postwar. Altogether, this twentieth-century comparison of types shows how often the figure of the Japanese woman has become the contested ground over which lines of old and new, native and foreign are drawn and redrawn. Moreover, the Fujin kōron issue shows that postwar women had appetites for more than sexual pleasure, that they wanted new things, adventure, and opportunities for human connection and self-actualization. Where does this leave Japanese men in 1956? Women such as writer Hirabayashi Taiko and critic Ishigaki Ayako affirm that men have more power than women do in all aspects of Japanese society, from love relationships to the workplace. They state that men need to change in order for women to achieve equality. Men contributing to the December 1956 Fujin kōron, such as commentators Takagi Takeo and Teruoka Yasutaka, and especially cartoonist Okabe Fuyuhiko, feel that women already have much power and that any more will surely make men their subordinates. While Tanizaki’s professor experiences renewed virility as his wife more happily satisfies her own desires,

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these men hardly share that sentiment. If all the women jump ship, they fear, the men will be left swabbing the decks. The only men who welcome progressive change in women are younger men, imagined as those who are also products of the postwar era and who represent a feminized Japanese man, perhaps one made less conventionally masculine by the experience of the occupation and the occupation era’s liberation of Japanese women. Genuine romance—and all its postwar associations with liberation from the past and alignment with progress—seem elusive for both women and men.

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Figure 5.1 “Crown Prince Akihito and Shōda Michiko on the tennis court,” December 1958. Courtesy of Kyodo News Service.

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5

Fashioning the People’s Princess: Shōda Michiko and the Royal Wedding of 1959

In the spring of 1959, no story absorbed more attention in Japanese women’s magazines than did the April wedding of Shōda Michiko to Crown Prince Akihito. Most articles lavished attention on Michiko’s happy girlhood, her romantic meeting with the prince on a tennis court, and his determined pursuit of her (Figure 5.1). Photographs of the young couple appeared everywhere. With easy smiles and relaxed postures, the two projected an aura of youthful vigor and aristocratic self-confidence. Yet this image was invested with other meanings, too. Most women’s magazines applauded the match as proof of the success of the new constitution, as evidence of a more open monarchy, and as testimony to the power of romantic love in postwar Japan. Although Michiko was the daughter of one of Japan’s wealthiest businessmen, she was technically a commoner, and not the girl of noble birth the prince was traditionally expected to marry. For this reason, Michiko was heralded as the people’s princess (minkan kara no okisaki). But exactly who were the people that women’s magazines imagined were so eager to welcome Michiko as their princess? This chapter focuses on shifting portraits of the people by drawing upon the articles related to the royal wedding and their construction of royal domesticity as published in six major women’s magazines from November 27, 1958, when the engagement was announced, to July 1959, when the wedding’s newsworthiness was evaporating. While different pictures of the people can appear in the same magazine and even in the same article, most women’s magazines characterize the nation’s response to the wedding as overwhelmingly positive. The people emerge as a unified whole, fully in support of the prince’s love match with a commoner, grateful that he has brought the monarchy “closer to the people,” and hopeful that

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he, too, will now taste the joys of family life. Cautionary voices, however, are heard as well in women’s magazines; a few criticize the people as infatuated with the royals and dangerously lacking in any mature understanding of a modern, symbolic monarchy. Only the magazine Fujin kōron, discussed at length at the end of this essay, runs several articles critical of the wedding, the imperial institution, and the media’s role in promoting both. Interestingly, it is in these critical articles, written mostly by men, that we find a resistance to categorizing the Japanese as in any way unified in their attitudes toward the imperial institution; there is no people’s princess, they imply, because there is no such entity as the people. Extensive coverage of the people and their response to the wedding also occurred in newspapers, newly popular weekly magazines, radio, and television, as has been analyzed in the scholarly literature on this event.1 Kenneth Ruoff, in particular, following influential 1959 essays published on the wedding in Chūō kōron by Matsushita Keiichi, cites the event as contributing to the transformation of the imperial institution into the “monarchy of the masses,” creating an imperial family that was approachable and symbolic of postwar democracy. Discussion here of the royal wedding underscores this argument. What makes portraits of the people in women’s magazines significant? In this chapter, I argue that different portraits of the people function as a code for the degree to which democratic reforms were taking root in postwar Japan. Exploring royal wedding stories in women’s magazines not only shows how democracy was coded and understood through the narratives of love, marriage, and family, but also illustrates how democracy was presented specifically to female readers. The fact that the wedding positioned a young woman at the cross-roads of postwar democracy, the new monarchy, and the new marriage laws made Michiko’s story one that especially welcomed women into the discussion. If women’s magazines promoted Michiko as the people’s princess, then what would it mean for their readers to count themselves among her people? As John Dower has shown, translating the term “people” into Japanese in writing the new constitution was not a simple matter in the early postwar, particularly as Japan did not have a tradition of popular sovereignty comparable to that in the US constitution. In the end, the constitution employed the term kokumin, formed of the ideographs for “country” and “people,” a conservative term that connotes “the people harmoniously merged in the nation.” Dower explains that kokumin, which had been used in wartime propaganda to connote “‘the Japanese’ or even ‘the Yamato race,’” characterizes the emperor and the people as one.2 In 1959 reportage on the royal wedding in women’s magazines

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makes use of various terms for the people such as shomin (the common people, masses, populace), minshū (the mass of people), minkan (folk), kokumin (citizens, the people), and only occasionally, heimin (commoner).3 The terms are used almost interchangeably throughout most of the magazines discussed here, as if their individual histories as terms freighted with different ideas of nationalism and ethnicity have been subsumed under the conditions of postwar democracy. Given Dower’s explanation of the choice of kokumin for the constitution as a way to include a role for the emperor, it is intriguing to note that magazine articles critical of the royal wedding tend to refer to the people as kokumin, perhaps suggesting that the connotations of this term were in flux by 1959 and could come closer to meaning “citizenry.” Ruoff observes that the term kokutai (national polity), written with the characters for “nation” and “family” and indelibly associated with imperial Japan, was not present in celebratory reportage on the wedding except among writers on the far right.4 In the main, coverage of the royal wedding extolled this union as a narrative of democracy. The magazines consulted for this chapter are Fujin gahō (Ladies Pictorial), Fujin kōron (Ladies Review), Fujin kurabu (Ladies Club), Fujin seikatsu (Ladies Life), Shufu to seikatsu (The Housewife and Daily Life), Shūkan josei jishin (Weekly Woman’s Own), commonly referred to simply as Josei jishin, and Shufu no tomo (Housewife’s Companion). Photo essays, interviews, round-table discussions, public opinion surveys, and how-to articles related to the royal wedding abound in these magazines in the first half of 1959. With the exception of Fujin kōron, women’s magazines associate the wedding with many products, fashions, and services through tie-in ads and related articles on topics such as wedding etiquette. The “big four” among women’s magazines at this time were Shufu no tomo, Fujin kurabu, Fujin seikatsu, and Shufu to seikatsu which had a combined circulation in 1958 of 2,200,000.5 Josei jishin, the first weekly magazine directed exclusively to women and aimed at young, single working-women, debuted in December 1958 amid royal wedding fever, winning its niche with photographs of the upcoming royal wedding and details of the young couple’s private lives.6 For decades since, Josei jishin has continued to turn a celebrity-spotlight on the royal family. My reading of the royal wedding in this chapter approaches the Japanese women’s magazines surveyed here as a body of literature, and in doing so, departs from the more casual and partial attention usually entailed in magazine consumption. I do not intend to construct an average woman reader nor do I assume that readers had only one reaction to royal wedding stories. Nevertheless,

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this chapter shows that women’s magazines, with few exceptions, presented readers with a consistently romantic view of the royal wedding. These magazines celebrate rather than problematize the feminine. They address their readers with familiarity, providing entertaining features in an easy to read style. They ground Michiko’s story in the concerns they usually address, that is, beauty, elegant living, and personal relationships. Enfolding Michiko in the feminine, women’s magazines place the princess in a realm that is viewed as desirable, natural, and beyond politics. Simultaneously, issues of nation, democracy, and gender are removed from politics and transformed, along with Shōda Michiko, into the stuff of women’s everyday lives. Following the familiar tone of the women’s magazines, I refer to the princess most often by her given name Michiko. Like Jackie Kennedy in the same era, Shōda Michiko needed no last name for identification. More poignantly, we can also consider that in becoming a royal, Michiko no longer had a last name at all, but a title.

The princess in global popular culture Shōda Michiko’s transformation from commoner to princess took place at the end of a decade that not only blended princesses and politics in Japan, but in much of the world’s media as well. A glamorous figure in the Cold War, the princess served to blunt the equalizing forces of democracy through her connections to hierarchy, tradition, and luxury. At the same time, the princess was a symbol of the Free World, standing in opposition to communist rejections of gender difference, marriage, private property, and monarchy. The romances and luxury associated with the princess and the way global media created sentimental bonds between readers and princesses bolstered Cold War containment and integration policies. In Japan, the new princess would also need to embody the promise of a new constitution. Mention of the monarchy in postwar Japan is most often associated with Emperor Hirohito’s push from divinity to his position in the 1947 constitution as symbol of the Japanese people. Indeed, reference to the new, human (ningen) status of the emperor and the prince occurs frequently in the wedding articles in women’s magazines. Legal constructions of marriage and the family had also changed radically. Although these laws by no means engendered widespread and immediate acceptance, they did give legitimacy to the idea of marriages based on love, personal choice, and mutual respect.

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Women’s magazines consistently code these changes as emblems of modernity and progress. The fact that Prince Akihito chose his own bride and, moreover, chose a commoner, made his actions doubly progressive. As well, one could no longer imagine in this postwar context that the Prince might avail himself of concubine as had been true of emperors past—his commitment to the nuclear family was firm.7 Elements of popular culture figure into this context as well, encouraging attention to the event as yet another royal romance played out in the public realm. During the 1950s, international media nurtured interest in the private lives of princesses, real and imagined. These stories traded on the high drama of beautiful, wealthy princesses struggling for romantic love while held captive by their feelings of duty to the people. Queen Elizabeth’s 1953 coronation, the first ever to be televised; the 1953–5 saga of Princess Margaret’s failed romance with divorcé Peter Townsend; and actress Grace Kelly’s 1956 marriage to Prince Rainier of Monaco captured the attention of reporters worldwide.8 Roman Holiday, a 1953 film in which Audrey Hepburn plays a European princess escaping in Rome for one day of ordinary fun and unexpected romance, was memorably successful in Japan when it was screened in movie theaters there in 1954, and still popular there today. Disney Studios also circulated princess stories, releasing Cinderella in 1950 and Sleeping Beauty in 1959. Exploiting the era’s interest in royal women, the Miss Universe pageant began enthroning queens of its own in 1952, and as discussed in the next chapter, awarding third place to Miss Japan in 1953, and the crown, in 1959.9 Thus, by the decade’s end, the Japanese stage was set for a democratic monarchy, love marriages, and as well, for the debut of another modern princess. The oxymoronic quality of all these terms expresses as much ambivalence as it does excitement, a sense of wanting to leap into a freer, more prosperous future without leaving the comfort of older institutions behind. The many positive, even effusive, discussions of the royal wedding in most women’s magazines reflect a belief that the marriage of Prince Akihito and Michiko has the power to overcome the tensions inherent in these ideals. Their love can and will create a new Japan that is not a contradiction in terms.

The prince, the princess, the people: Home sweet home Women’s magazines, with their colorful photographs, how-to articles, and aspirations to elegance, are noted for helping readers cope with the everyday

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while promoting fantasies of the good life. In reporting about the royal romance, most magazines found opportunities to do both in one story. Unsurprisingly, romantic, rather than critical, accounts of the royal wedding are by far the most common coverage in women’s magazines. Such narratives stay close to the personal lives of Prince Akihito and Michiko, underscore the status gap between the prince and the commoner, and dramatize their relationship as the success of love over tradition. References to the Japanese people in these accounts portray them as unified in their love for the young couple and in their support for the marriage as a sign of democratic progress. Further, I tell the tale of the romance, emphasizing reportage of its melodramatic moments, as a way of drawing a composite narrative from many similar stories found in different women’s magazines. The magazines Fujin gahō (with a few exceptions), Fujin kurabu, Fujin seikatsu, Shūkan josei jishin, and especially Shufu no tomo articles tend to fall in this category. Certain themes emerge regularly throughout this tale: the idea of the British royals as model monarchs, the advocacy of mutual respect as the basis for marriage, and the theme of love as rescue. Yet, for all the emphasis on elite worlds and lives of material luxury found here, it is the “sweet home” life of the common people that ultimately triumphs as the realm of the human, the liberatory, and the real. It is this that the young couple is reportedly so determined to find and to reflect back to the national audience. This modern fairy tale begins with Prince Akihito, a handsome, studious young man of simple tastes, a prince who had been much celebrated in 1952 at his investiture as a royal for a new era in the history of the Japanese throne. Stories about Prince Akihito appear in women’s magazines long before Shōda Michiko comes into the picture, and sympathetic characterizations of him remain as an integral part of their love story. According to the popular narrative, for all his wealth and fame, Prince Akihito feels that much is missing from his life. Like Princess Ann in Roman Holiday, Prince Akihito is unnaturally confined by his royal status. He longs for the freedom to walk outside palace walls unrecognized and unguarded. Although constantly surrounded by officials and servants, Prince Akihito feels lonely. Following palace custom, he has lived separately from his parents since childhood and feels bereft of a family life. More than anything, the prince yearns for the happiness he can share with a wife and children. As Fujin seikatsu reports in 1958, even before his engagement, Prince Akihito has begun building a home for his future family with rooms for the children. The magazine asks, “Who will the heroine of his sweet home be?”10

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Fortunately for the prince, love works in surprising ways. Prince Akihito often spent his summers with a few young friends and relatives at a mountain resort not far from Tokyo known as Karuizawa. It was on a fine August day at this resort in 1957 when a mixed-doubles game of tennis introduced him to a spunky Japanese girl on the opposite side of the net. Trim and pretty in her white sports clothes, the girl played hard, unwilling to let the prince win. It was love at first sight for our lonely prince, and his pursuit of Shōda Michiko began. Or, so it seemed. In fact, this blissful reporting did not mention that also present that day at the tennis match were Prince Akihito’s mentor and former president of Keio University, Chamberlain Koizumi Shinzō, Akihito’s tutor Chamberlain Hamao Minoru, Chief Justice Tanaka Kōtarō, and Michiko’s mother Shōda Fumiko.11 The work that went on behind the scenes to orchestrate an appropriate match for the prince paled in comparison to the magazines’ delight in the story of the couple’s love at first sight experience. The encounter recalls Cinderella’s love-struck prince searching for his mysterious belle. Back in Tokyo in the fall, the prince and the commoner met at other tennis matches, and in April of 1958, played together after Michiko joined the Tokyo Lawn Tennis Club. Summer saw them once again in Karuizawa, playing yet more tennis matches. At an August party at Karuizawa held before everyone had to return from summer fun to the city, the prince reportedly saw his chance to get closer to Michiko, and asked her for dance after dance. But the prince was not just any suitor. Work had already begun to find him a suitable mate. Names of potential brides for the prince had been compiled by elite schools, and forwarded to the Imperial Household Agency. Michiko’s name was among those initially selected, and the prince asked that she be given serious consideration. Although others at the palace, including the prince’s parents, were skeptical of a commoner’s ability to undertake the royal life, Prince Akihito was adamant in his choice of Michiko. Concern for his young student’s personal welfare persuaded mentor Koizumi to negotiate on the prince’s behalf. Koizumi talked with those at the palace, consulted with the Shōda family, and even brokered an arrangement whereby journalists agreed to a moratorium on reporting about the prince’s marriage prospects. Yet things were not promising. The Shōda family declined the initial proposal. The magical summer dance party threatened to be the prince’s last chance to be with Michiko. It was Michiko’s status as the daughter of a wealthy and powerful businessman that put her in the elite circles where she had met the prince. Her father Shōda

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Hidesaburō and mother Shōda Fumiko both came from samurai ancestry. Hidesaburō was president of the Nisshin Flour Milling Co., the largest in Asia in 1959, with sales totaling $93 million yearly.12 Families of the old nobility were often reluctant to have any of their daughters considered for marriage into the royal family, in part, because of the financial burden they would incur as a result. The Shōda family was in a far better position to absorb this cost than most of the former noble (kuge) families. In her study of the postwar Japanese nobility, Takie Lebra describes how marriage into the royal family meant maintaining an upper-crust lifestyle appropriate to the status of a “royal affine” and fulfilling the constant demands of gift-giving throughout the royal kin network. “Royal marriage would require that the bridal family not only pay an enormous dowry and wedding expenses but also constantly present gifts to the whole royal household, from its head down to its lowest servants.”13 The Shōda family could meet these requirements. Who was this young woman who had captured the heart of our lonely prince? Stories about Michiko’s background and her family often make reference to the British royal family. For example, a 1959 Fujin kurabu article casts Michiko as growing up in a British-style environment. Her family lives in an elegant, two-story, “19th century English-style home” in Gotanda, Tokyo. Her father, a graduate of Hitotsubashi University, has traveled on business to many European countries, but has taken the English “Oxford style” as his own in personal dress and outlook. Michiko’s mother Fumiko shares her husband’s views, making Shōda home life a cheerful combination of “British discipline and mutual respect.” Such references characterize her parents as having a modern companionate marriage.14 According to Ben-Ami Shillony, the Shōda family was not only one of Japan’s wealthiest households, but one of its most famous Catholic families as well. Michiko received a Catholic education at institutions run by the sisters of the Sacred Heart from kindergarten through graduation from Seishin Academy and Women’s College (today’s University of the Sacred Heart; Seishin Joshi Daigaku).15 In November 1958, when the Imperial Household Council convened to deliberate on the proposed marriage of the commoner and the prince, the issue of the Shōda family’s Catholicism was raised as a potential barrier. Apparently, the fact that Michiko had not been baptized dismissed these doubts, although Hirohito was to remain suspicious of his daughter-in-law because of her Catholic background.16 Magazine articles characterize Michiko as comfortable with European ways through her lives at home and school, and as conversant in English

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and French. A talented student and dutiful daughter, Michiko is described as having been raised to think for herself, a trait that is frequently celebrated in the women’s magazines, and a characteristic that led to her election as student body president in her last year of school. For one school event, Michiko organized 48 classmates, all clad in black, into a “human typewriter;” each wore a cap with typewriter key symbol. This was intended to demonstrate that individuals in society, like keys on the typewriter, must each carry out her or his function.17 An outstanding student, Michiko graduated in 1957 as valedictorian of her college class. Magazine articles described her achievements as if they were honors that naturally fell to Michiko because of her innate goodness and talent. Unlike the striving young women that typified postwar freedoms, as we saw in Chapters 3 and 4, or Japan’s internationally successful, “ruthless” beauty queens that we meet in the next chapter, this princess is not portrayed as ambitious. She excels academically, but she is no bluestocking. Her favorite stories are reportedly fairy stories. According to the Time magazine cover story published on the royal wedding in the United States, however, Shōda Michiko, who was reading Steinbeck and Faulkner at this time, did not appreciate such infantilizing connections with fairy tales.18 The royal love story, as thus recounted in women’s magazines, emphasizes the divide between the prince and the commoner. Prince Akihito is depicted as searching for ways to break free of tradition, to slip past the old customs that would imprison him in the life of a bygone era. He is described as ardent in his love, almost beside himself in pursuit of his princess. Michiko represents the best of postwar progress. She has internalized a sophisticated sense of Western culture without losing the common touch. Her panache is more European than American, a sense that recalls Mrs Mogi’s taste and also opens the way for a democracy that retains aristocracy. She enjoys the freedom of anonymity, the support of enlightened parents, and can look forward to a future over which she exercises choice. Such stories show how much Michiko will have to sacrifice to rescue her prince, how desperately he needs her, and how much she has to offer the imperial family. Michiko’s family’s affinities for the life of the English upper-crust are certainly one of the implied benefits she can bring to the imperial household. Approval of the British royal family as a model of the “open monarchy” is a recurring theme in all women’s magazines’ coverage of the Japanese wedding, even among those critical of the event. The British model is also touted by

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American Elizabeth Gray Vining in her 1952 book on her experiences in Japan as the prince’s tutor: To [Americans] the happy, wholesome and normal life of the British royal family, which becomes for the people at large an expression of ideal family life and an example to admire and imitate, seems the pattern for royal household arrangements. Even with two thousand years of an entirely different tradition behind them, many Japanese spoke to me of their regret that the Imperial Family could not share in the new freedom that had come to Japan and enjoy a happy life together.19

Interestingly, all the discussion in England about political manipulations of the royal family and the British royals’ own efforts to increase their appeal are absent in these references.20 Promotion of Michiko’s ties to British life also argues, in effect, that she is a most appropriate, modern choice for a Japanese royal. This might be a response to those among the former nobility who believe that one of their own should have been chosen; perhaps the noble daughters are seen as too Japanese and hidebound in this context. Michiko is a “democratic” choice, but one tempered with a respect for hierarchy, class, and European-style monarchy. According to Lebra, many among the Japanese nobility also borrowed from upper-class European culture, yet this did not mean that the young women of this class hoped for a future in the palace. Although there was reportedly some grumbling among former nobles at the choice of a commoner for crown princess, there were certainly many privileged women relieved to have been passed over. Lebra observes that young noble women did not generally regard Shōda Michiko as lucky to be marrying into the royal family. Indeed, most of them reported enjoying the freedom that came from marrying out of the ranks of former nobility.21 The heart-warming conclusion to the courtship occurs as Prince Akihito finally wins Michiko’s hand. In September 1958, Michiko traveled to Brussels to attend the International Alumnae Association of Sacred Heart Schools as the Seishin representative. Rather like Roman Holiday’s Princess Ann, she visited European capitals, spending time in London, Amsterdam, Zurich, Rome and Paris, before making a brief trip to the United States on her way home. Michiko’s trip also provided the time for her, like Princess Ann, to consider whether she would choose the life of a royal or a commoner. Although her parents had already refused the proposal, the prince continued to press his suit, once Michiko returned. Again, the answer from the Shōda family was no. The press was more

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hopeful; having caught wind of the match in October, photographers kept a 24hour “bride watch” on the Shōda home.22 Undaunted, the prince persisted in his courtship. He could not date, but he could use the telephone. In early November, he telephoned Michiko, talking for an hour at a time. Finally won over by Prince Akihito’s sincerity to “trust, respect and love” her and moved by her own strong desire to rescue him from his isolation, Michiko pledged her love in return. The extended Shōda family gathered to discuss the union and, despite many reservations, decided to stand by Michiko’s “own choice.” Free to wed, the young couple now had to decide what kind of royals they would be, and Michiko had to undertake the psychological and ceremonial preparations to become a royal bride. The people have a part to play in this courtship, too, as narrated in women’s magazines, especially in its happy ending. Upon hearing that Prince Akihito has proposed to a commoner and a woman of his own choosing, all the people of Japan are overjoyed. The monarchy is opening, the prince is truly a “human prince,” and the throne is coming closer to the people. The people pledge their fidelity, hoping that the young royals will not lose touch with the life of everyday people. They urge them to fight against the shikitari (conventional practices) of the palace and for the freedom to make their own home. The importance of maintaining close ties to the people becomes one of the major themes in talking about the life of the Prince Akihito and Michiko, both before and after their wedding. Indeed, the idea begins to sound like an unwritten contract: the people give their support for this marriage with the understanding that the royals will not abandon them or their own democratic impulses. Reading these more romantic, intimate accounts of Prince Akihito and Michiko in women’s magazines brings one into the aristocratic world of garden parties, expensive holidays, chauffeured limousines, and European languages. Yet for all this luxury, it is hard to miss how good the common life looks when viewed through the eyes of confined and constrained royals. Even the most mundane errands suddenly seem like precious emblems of personal choice and mobility. For example, in one Fujin gahō essay, “Michiko-san no heya” (“Michiko’s Room”), a Shōda family friend recalls driving Michiko home one night before the official announcement of her betrothal, and remembers hearing the young woman murmur, “I’ll never be able to walk these streets on my own again,” as she gazed pensively out the window.23 Descriptions of palace life, the life that awaits Michiko, only increase the appeal of the everyday. Another Fujin gahō article paints a picture of a palace lost in time and mired in old-fashioned

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ways that did not allow love.24 All in all, these accounts raise the question of whether or not the royal couple can avoid near-imprisonment in the palace of old, and find happiness in what many articles refer to as their own truly “human family life” (ningen rashii go-katei). Tales of the royal love story capture interest by bringing the reader into Michiko’s personal life. Indeed, the details make it possible for the reader to identify strongly with Michiko. She became the fashion icon of democracy, modeling free choice as the high-style consumer choice of an elite, modern bride. Her measurements were publicized as if she were one of the head-turning beauty queens of the day and every element of her wardrobe was scrutinized, catalogued, and held up for emulation. The “I, too, am Michiko” look-alike contest offered the ultimate in identification.25 Even the mundane things of Michiko’s life and her everyday routines are pressed into service as writers and photographers heighten the drama of her transition from maiden commoner to married princess. Returning to the Fujin gahō piece, “Michiko’s Room,” we find several photographs of Michiko’s family home. One photo highlights the telephone on her desk, the very phone, we are told, which she used to speak with the prince, “the phone from which she shall also part.” Others show her bookcase and vanity table, the family dining room where Michiko, in kimono, sits at a Western-style table pouring tea into a china cup for her mother. There’s a photo of her in a bright sunroom, sitting on the edge of a chair, lost in reading a book. The fetishized stuff of Michiko’s everyday life invites the reader to identify with her, not only in her commonness, but in her extraordinariness as well. In his book on the iconic power of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Wayne Koestenbaum reflects on how Jackie’s White House-era fondness for turtleneck sweaters, grilled cheese sandwiches, and playing Scrabble could similarly connect this American princess with her people. Japanese women’s magazines objectified Shōda Michiko in the same manner: Press accounts, particularly during her time as First Lady, emphasized her association with commonplace actions and objects—on the one hand, to strengthen her tenuous connection to “the people,” and, on the other hand, because icon Jackie was herself objectified, a commonplace petite chose in mass consciousness. Everything ordinary that Jackie did, owned, or discovered becomes evidence that (1) Jackie is really just one of us, despite her elite veneer; (2) we, despite our relentlessly ordinary lives, are secretly magnificent, because we share plain objects and practices with Jackie; (3) icon Jackie is an unpretentious

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object in the American homes, and that’s why she is fond of ordinary things— she identities with them. Whatnots are her peer group.26

Koestenbaum imagines that this identification with Jackie leads viewers to believe that they know Jackie and are drawn to sympathize with her: “We imagine that the turtleneck pullover and the privacy in which she eats grilled cheese are blessed balm; we imagine that Jackie needs plain pleasures to recover from the rigors of being an icon.”27 Such appeals to sympathetic identification recur throughout articles about Michiko’s preparations to become a bride. Those involved with her wedding, her friends and family, other celebrities, and intellectuals see Michiko’s transition from commoner to princess as almost overwhelming, and hope that she, too, will still know the balm of plain pleasures. Yet, in Michiko’s case, they also see romantic love and the possibility of having children with the prince as the saving grace of her future as a princess. This difference between the constrained, chilly world of the royals and the open, warm home of the commoner not only makes the everyday appealing; it inspires the idea that someone needs to rescue these poor young royals. Magazine articles and quotes from many different people make reference to a desire to save the young couple from the forces of feudalism powerful in and around the palace. As we have seen, many advocate an opening of the monarchy that will draw the imperial family closer to the people, without specifying what “opening” the monarchy or “coming closer to the people” means. Nonetheless, the everyday home life of all commoners functions as a magical gift in this fairy tale-like narrative, something that can sustain the young royals through the rigors of their position. Although it is surely the most obvious and effective means of rescuing the young couple from the strictures of royal life, the idea of abolishing the imperial institution altogether is never mentioned in these romantic articles. References to postwar democracy abound but stop short of advocating that the royal couple becomes quite that modern. The tension between the feudal and the democratic resolves in the call for a more open monarchy. The drama of the princess narrative demands no less. If entering the royal family did not represent self-sacrifice, then Michiko’s love for Prince Akihito is diminished. If Prince Akihito were no longer a prince, his pursuit of his commoner bride would have no obstacle. Their love story would be an ordinary one. And, if there were no glittering but constrained royal life, then ordinary life would be just that, and the everyday would no longer be a magical gift, for either the royals or the people. No wonder the idea of doing away with the imperial institution is never mentioned in this

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narrative, for without the throne, the melodrama of this love story would die. For those attacking the emperor system in Fujin kōron, as we shall see, this is exactly the point; it is the romanticization of the emperor system that yokes Japan to a feudal past and renders the people all too open to manipulation and superficial self-congratulation. I also find it striking to see the absence of another solution. There is never the suggestion of a more active life for the royals outside either the palace or the family. This contrasts with celebrations in these same magazines of how much housewives have changed in the past 50 years or how working couples are leading exciting new lives in their modern, urban apartments. For example, historian Murakami Shigeyoshi’s May 1959 Fujin gahō article discussed in Chapter 1, in a move reminiscent of the Housewife Debate, points to housewives’ new social conscience and leisure, produced by modern conveniences, as the chief differences separating her from wives of the past.28 Michiko as kitchen princess, however, is supposed to be fulfilled by life inside the home. A Fujin seikatsu article gives this trajectory the whiff of aristocracy, aligning Michiko’s new domesticity with her elite education by remarking that it was the “Seishin style” to raise young women to envision finding their future happiness in the home.29 I found no reference in the sources surveyed to Michiko as having any ambition other than to create a “normal” home life for the prince. In this context, it does not appear odd to hear her friends say that Michiko is a good housekeeper or to learn that she is practicing how to make ordinary curry rice, the prince’s favorite dish, in anticipation of their life together in their large, newly built residence. Like Jackie Kennedy White House-era stories, tales of Michiko’s preference for ordinariness diminish the social inequities that exist alongside the promise of postwar democracy; what the most privileged truly want is what everyone but the poorest among us possess. At the same time, the fact that Michiko and Prince Akihito yearn for the ordinary lends sparkle to the common life. Having achieved celebrity and wealth, Michiko works to retain the real life of the home and has no need to strive for success in another arena. Unlike Princess Ann, who tragically abandons her dream of marriage and keeping house in Roman Holiday, Princess Michiko strives to retain the real, even in the palace. It was exactly this valorization of the home through Shōda Michiko’s recreation as the people’s princess, and in my terms, the kitchen princess, in all forms of mass media that more recent feminist critics point to in linking her to the ideology of mai-hōmushugi (My-homeism) associated with gendered

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Figure 5.2 “Crown Princess Michiko in her palace kitchen on her 27th birthday,” October 1961. Courtesy of Kyodo News Service.

divisions of labor in the era of high growth in Japan in the 1960s. As Fujitani (1998) and Seaman (1995) have shown, this was not the first or last case of associating royal women with a publicly meaningful life in the private realm. Meiji and Taishō constructions of the “good wife, wise mother” were associated with royal women.30 As discussed in Chapter 1, the 1993 transformation of career-woman Owada Masako as Crown Princess incited feminist concern as an attempt to reinvigorate an old model of royal domesticity. Examining thoughts on the fandom surrounding Shōda Michiko in 1959 shows that charges of manipulation of the wedding for political and commercial ends were alive then, too.

Mass-mediated spectacle, fandom, and the victimized royal The announcement of Shōda Michiko’s engagement to the prince, and the ensuing reports about her in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television made

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the young woman an instant celebrity. Even in October 1958, she could hardly set foot outside her home because of the crowds of reporters and photographers following rumors about the prince’s interest in her. With the official announcement of the engagement in November, everything Michiko was good for news and good for business. Tennis sweaters and even yukata (informal, cotton kimono) patterned with tennis rackets sold well, as did other clothing and accessories guaranteed to produce a Michiko look. Tour buses ran by the Shōda home in Gotanda, Tokyo. All over the country there were people who reportedly wanted to buy wedding gifts for the royals and send New Year’s greetings to the Shōda family. Indeed, as Simon Partner notes, Josei jishin reported on the difficulties the post office suffered in delivering 10,000 New Year’s day cards to Michiko and her family. The magazine also told readers where they could buy their own Michiko-style tennis sweaters.31 April 10, 1959, the day of the royal wedding, was declared a national day of celebration. Hundreds of thousands gathered in Tokyo to watch the wedding parade, thousands more watched the event on television, and an estimated 10,000 young couples in Japan decided to get married on the same day. The media expended enormous efforts to document the royal nuptials: 108 television cameras and 1,200 television personnel covered the wedding parade in Tokyo at a cost of 23.5 million yen.32 Another population undoubtedly joyous on April 10th was the 100,000 prisoners awarded amnesty in honor of the occasion. Crowds also gathered in places visited by the newlyweds. In Nara, shortly after the wedding, over 5,000 people lined up for a “lantern procession” for the couple; several spectators were injured due to the overcrowded streets.33 The explosion of activity surrounding the wedding, especially the attention that created Michiko’s celebrity, became known as the Mitchii būmu, literally the “boom” of interest in Michiko. Interpreting people’s fascination with Michiko thus became another part of coverage of the royal wedding. Some articles in women’s magazines coded this attention as proof of the genuine happiness of the people, a human response to a newly human prince. But other features, especially round-table discussions in women’s magazines, read the boom as an unhealthy fascination with celebrity and a naiveté about the monarchy, a discussion that rarely fails to provoke more comparisons with the British. In these cautionary narratives, the Japanese are characterized as backward and lacking in the sophisticated restraint exercised by British subject-citizens. Journalists, too, are blamed as responsible for systematically igniting excitement; a charge to which journalists speaking to Fujin kōron are quick to agree.

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Covering the story of media coverage is undoubtedly tricky. In Roman Holiday, reporter Joe Bradley proves his fidelity to Princess Ann by refusing to divulge the story of her day of freedom with him, even though the scoop would bring him money and fame. Movie viewers are simultaneously encouraged to enjoy Ann’s adventure and feel proud of Joe for his keeping it private. Magazine reportage on Princess Michiko must do the same: encourage voyeuristic delight while allowing the reader distance from the hungry hordes who wish to devour Michiko. Magazine editors must develop a strategy that enables them to continue to relay intimate details while voicing sympathy for Michiko’s lack of privacy. In part, they do this by describing the publicity as an inevitable aspect of her princess role. They also can make those who more blatantly infringe on Michiko’s life not the reader herself. For example, a February 1959 article in Fujin seikatsu begins by commenting on how difficult it must be for Michiko to become “the most popular person in Japan,” yet promises to take us into her real life, as if faithful reporting is somehow less intrusive. The same article reports an instance when people spotting Michiko praying at the family graves, yelled out her name, interfering with what was a private moment for her.34 As fascinated as the reader may be with this revelation of Michiko’s life and character, she does not have to identify with those others. Instead, the reader can identify with Michiko, imagining how she might similarly respond to adoring but rude fans with a graceful bow. Romanticizing the people’s response to Michiko as proof of their bond with her also neutralizes the idea of curiosity as an infringement on her privacy. It is the democratic way for her to be one with them. An article by Aragaki Hideo in Shufu no tomo, for example, takes this position in uncovering “the secret of the boom.” Aragaki remarks on the reluctance of people, who have been speaking of the princess simply as “Mitchii” or “Michiko-san,” to use the title of “her highness” because they truly feel as if she is of the people. This use of the familiar, he argues, reflects “the people’s genuine emotions” (shomin no shōjiki na kanjō). It is this feeling, Aragaki explains, that is the source of the boom: People of every nation have some fondness for fairy tales. The Cinderella story of someone climbing upward has become a popular tale, but the fact that in this case the imperial family moved downward, this is the true secret of this couple’s popularity, and that is something I do not want to see forgotten.35

Aragaki also believes that, contrary to Michiko’s mother’s reported concerns that the marriage would “go too far” in changing the status of the imperial family, the royals have taken much too long to come even this far. He describes the people’s

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attraction for the young couple as rooted in democracy, and sees this as boding well for the long-term stability of the imperial institution. Aragaki states: “The emperor is the symbol of the people’s desire for national unity.”36 Michiko stories, such as those described earlier, appear to bring the reader into her life, her home, and her heart. The danger in such reporting, as many acquaintances of the royals and social critics warn in round-table discussions sponsored by women’s magazines, is that people forget themselves in their enthusiasm for Michiko. The experience of seeing themselves through their identification with Michiko is as intoxicating as it is dangerous. Critics and royal friends plead that people need to see Michiko and Prince Akihito as symbols, not as their intimates, and to do that, the people must maintain a distance. Seeing the Japanese as immature in their fandom works a twist in the dominant narrative: Michiko is not the representative of a democratic people but a model for backward people to emulate in order to catch up. Writers, social critics, and friends of the royal couple, when asked to comment in women’s magazines, frequently express apprehension about the newlyweds’ celebrity status. Their concern over public frenzy for the couple mirrors anxieties discussed in Chapter 4 about the uninhibited, excessive desire driving postwar women. Writer Sakanishi Shio [Shiho], a participant in the Housewife Debate discussed in Chapter 3, in an interview with Fujin gahō says that it will be as important for Michiko to maintain a distance from the people as to seem approachable to them, and cites the British royal family as the appropriate model for this. Sakanishi wants the couple to become a beloved symbol for the Japanese people, but a symbol of the realities of the new constitution. Participating in the interview with Sakanishi, critic Kamei Katsuichirō complains that the worst part of the reporting on the wedding was the way in which reporters “intruded too far on [the couple’s]private home life.”37 The sense of intrusion into the couples’ private lives also worries their friends, who comment on this in a June 1959 discussion in Fujin kurabu (Ladies Club), after attending the newlywed’s first garden party.38 Although one young woman laughs when she calls the couple “victims of the excitement,” much of the conversation has a serious tone. Another friend comments, “There’s lots of criticism about the reporting on this in our crowd.” All the friends agree that Michiko and Prince Akihito are deeply in love and happily married, but that the media has sensationalized their story, especially the Cinderella aspects of it. Few understand the suffering endured by the couple. The friends talk about how much better life is for royals in England and Holland, where they can walk about freely without “the crowds going crazy over them.” They all seem to believe that Michiko and Prince Akihito will be

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happiest if they can create a “human” home life. They simply want that home life to be seen as a symbol for the people to emulate as is the case in Europe, rather than something for them to consume. Less worried about the royals’ privacy than the effect of fandom on Japanese democracy, critic and scholar Kainō Michitaka asks wedding enthusiasts among Fujin gahō readers to reflect on the political significance of the Mitchii būmu.39 Adopting a “Michiko style” might seem no different than copying any other look marketed in fashion advertisements, but the problem, Kainō argues, is that fandom does not stop there. Rather it stirs excitement for the imperial institution much like that institutionalized before 1947. Thus, “one cannot say that the royal wedding is not a momentous political event,” and one that plays into the conservative forces in Japan trying to revise the constitution to do away with postwar democratic reforms. Kainō cites the granting of amnesty to prisoners on the royal wedding day as a dangerous example of intervention in the legal system on behalf of the imperial household. He asks that readers not let the fervor over the prince’s “love marriage” divert their attention from right-wing manipulations of the event to involve the imperial household once again in the political life of the nation. (I should note that Kainō’s short article provides the lone voice of dissent in an issue of Fujin gahō happily devoted to features on the royal wedding, weddings in general, and housewives.) Journalists talking about their role do not describe themselves as part of a conservative conspiracy, but they are quick to admit that the excitement over the royal wedding is due in part to their overzealous reporting. Fujin kōron carries two articles in which reporters describe life on the royal beat. In September 1958, a round-table discussion among four reporters, all men, titled, “Kōtaishihi shuzai gassen” (“The Battle to Collect News about the Princess”) shows the fierce competition among reporters for news and also describes crowd reaction to the prince on a recent visit to Hokkaido. Before launching into the story of who will be princess, moderator Inukai Michiko, the one woman in the group, asks the reporters to give a “close-up” of the prince. They respond by talking about the crowds that turned out for the prince everywhere in Hokkaido, the elderly women with their hands clasped in respect, the multitudes of children waving flags, and the cheers of excited teenage girls. Remembering the familiarity with which the tour guide had addressed the prince with a simple good evening made the reporters feel as if Prince Akihito were truly a “human” royal, and not the emperor who had elicited the banzai cheers and painfully respectful distance of old. Yet they also relate instances when the preparations to honor the prince had been, in their opinion, exaggerated. Getting to the competition

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for princess news, they admit that reporters have sneaked into parties where possible bridal candidates would be, posed as graduates of the same schools, and snapped photos of the women in relaxed, natural poses—all the while looking to see whom the other undercover reporters were photographing. Rumors about potential candidates come from all over the country, causing reporters to rush everywhere and also making some women believe that they might have suddenly come to the attention of the prince. What causes all the fuss, asks Inukai, sparking disagreement among the reporters as to whether it’s readers’ desire for news of the royals, mere curiosity to see which woman wins the “princess derby,” and whether the future empress’ influence, though not negligible, warrants such attention. Discussion soon leads into the reporters’ frustration with the agreement, arranged by Chamberlain Koizumi Shinzō on behalf of the Imperial Household Agency, among all the major news agencies to stop competing for a scoop about who would become princess, and report the name only after the IHA announced it. It is this limit on freedom of the press that one of the reporters, Itō Makio, takes up in an article of his own in the July 1959 issue of Fujin kōron. In his article, “Okisaki kisha no jiko hihan” (“A Reporter on the Princess Beat Critiques His Own Role”), Itō complains that the IHA too tightly controlled the story of the prince’s choice of a bride. The IHA alibi for this control was that they were protecting the prince’s rights, preventing harm to innocent people, and diminishing the likelihood of any false stories being reported as true. (To the end, the IHA maintained that the union had been properly arranged and was not a love match.) Yet, Itō retorts that reporters try to exercise caution in all cases, so why should the prince be set apart for special concern? Most interestingly, Itō credits the press restraint as the reason behind the explosion of interest in Michiko. Because reporters could not hope for any scoop, he argues, they had to prepare long background pieces on the prince, the royal family’s life, and so on. Thus, when the news of Michiko’s selection was finally announced, all the newspapers printed the news on the same day with lots of related articles and photographs, in effect, creating the appearance of an important, breaking story. Itō also faults commercial interests, remarking on all the congratulatory signs on department stores, their congratulatory sales, and the desire for profit that drives news agencies to “make what they can sell.” Popular interest in the details of the wedding as well as the IHA’s desire for controlling the story were, Itō believes, overshadowing more important consideration of the future of the imperial institution. Although he personally hopes that the prince and princess will be able to “live more freely and more naturally,” Itō assumes that they will

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become embroiled in the battle between two competing interests, “the people’s (minshū) attempts to come closer to the monarchy” and “the force that tries to distance them from the imperial household.”40

A fractured fairy tale: Dismantling the people, deconstructing the princess Fujin kōron stands out among other women’s magazines discussed here for regularly featuring debates on a wide range of controversial issues of the day from sexual mores to the presence of US bases in Japan. After the royal engagement in late 1958 through July 1959, the magazine covers the royal wedding initially with restraint and eventually, with derision. Especially in June and July, Fujin kōron depicts the wedding as an overpublicized spectacle, questions the value of the emperor system, and, as an integral part of this critique, negates the notion of the people as well. My analysis of Fujin kōron’s response to the wedding here examines special sections featured in its January and July 1959 issues as well as two other essays run in April and June. We should also note that in May of 1959, when every other woman’s magazine surveyed here runs lengthy feature articles on the royal wedding, Fujin kōron has not one. Fujin kōron’s January 1959 issue carries a 15-page collection of articles and photographs titled, “Tokushū: Kōtaishi-hi—Shōda Michiko jō” (“Special Section: The Crown Princess—Miss Shōda Michiko”). While certainly positive, the presentation lacks the effusiveness over the wedding evident in other women’s magazines. Even the large, formal photograph of Michiko introducing the section has a different tone. Gone is the familiar portrait of the smiling girl in the tennis sweater, framed in an active pose or casually seated. She is replaced by a young woman clad in an expensively cut, dark dress, who looks directly at the camera, with a somber, perhaps even pensive, expression on her face; a photograph of the prince’s face is inset in a tiny circle above Michiko at the top right of the page. A series of smaller photographs are found on the next page. Arranged like snapshots in a family album, they locate Michiko as daughter, schoolgirl chum, college graduate, and young woman about to embark on a European trip. Only one picture captures her with a tennis racket, and even then, Michiko is wearing street clothes, unlike the girls pictured with her. Close-ups of Michiko and her mother, Michiko in Europe, Michiko sitting in the garden at home are sedate and regal, with Michiko gazing away from the camera at some undefined point in the distance.

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Articles accompanying these photographs narrate the wedding as a matter of personal choice in line with the atmosphere of a new age. Attention to Shōda Michiko, it should be noted, is only one section in this issue; the January 1959 Fujin kōron also carries a longer special section on “Seishun no enerugī” (“The Energy of Youth”). All the Michiko articles here are first-person pieces by insiders, those close to the royal couple and their families. The main contributors are Chamberlain Koizumi Shinzō; Hatano Isoko and Takeyama Chiyoko, friends of Michiko’s mother; and Tokugawa Musei, a friend of Prince Akihito and a man of noble lineage himself. There is a thematic unity to these articles: all speak to the courage of the couple in choosing their own marital partner despite the many around them who discouraged the union. Michiko earns high marks for being both a dutiful daughter and a (postwar) woman who makes her own decisions after careful consideration of all the issues. Her mother’s determination to stand by Michiko’s decision also elicits praise. Prince Akihito is complimented on his courageous and surprising choice of a commoner. Inset, in small print, among these articles, four short letters by young friends of the couple, and one by Michiko’s former teacher speak highly of either Michiko or Prince Akihito’s ability to combine friendliness and humility with talent and privilege. Two express excitement over Michiko as a people’s princess, a “first lady” for a new age. Nevertheless, the overall tone of the special section presents the marriage as a matter of considered choice, not impulsive love. Tokugawa, for example, speaks of the choice of Michiko as genetically healthy for the production of royal offspring, and remarks that her education has prepared Michiko for work on the global stage as an ambassador of Japan. Spring issues of Fujin kōron carry only two essays on the wedding, one congratulatory and the other, outraged. In the April 1959 issue, author Nogami Yaeko, one of the best known among Japanese women writers, interprets the royal wedding as the victory of love, and as an event that restores the hope she felt at the birth of the young prince in 1933, hope that she describes as dashed during the war. Reaffirming the popular narrative, Nogami, too, praises the prince for his desire to broaden his horizons through his marriage to Michiko and sympathizes with Michiko’s desire to rescue the prince from his royal loneliness. Nogami also registers her admiration for Koizumi’s skill in negotiating on behalf of the young couple.41 Fujin kōron moves from silence on the wedding in May to printing scathing criticism by author Shiroyama Saburō in June. When he first heard news of the wedding, Shiroyama writes, he was excited to think that things had changed,

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that the monarchy had become human and open, and more like the British royals (of whom he seems to approve). Yet the sensationalism of the wedding, the special treatment of the young couple, and even the words “royal wedding boom” have made him feel as if a monarchy, cleansed of recent history, was being fashioned for worship all over again. He sees the wedding as a costly camouflage of real social problems and political differences. Shiroyama likens the stray dogs rounded up and killed in preparation to clean the streets for the royal wedding parade to the Japanese youth of his generation slaughtered in the emperor’s name during the war. He reports an idea that he heard for a film that would weave footage of the royal wedding parade with old newsreels of invading Japanese soldiers. It would need no narration, he imagines, to communicate the idea that “we should not go down this road again.”42 In Shiroyama’s mind, the royals are not emblems of free choice, but icons ready for manipulation by clever politicians. He assumes that it will not be long before the people realize this, and wonders what kind of backlash may ensue. The July 1959 issue of Fujin kōron pushes this critique of the royal wedding and the emperor system itself even further in a lengthy special section, “Tennō no isu” (“The Position of the Emperor”). This includes a round-table discussion on the emperor system by such noted intellectuals as Maruyama Masao and Hidaka Rokurō that covers the constitution, Japanese history, comparisons with the British monarchy, and the question of who pays for royal events such as the wedding.43 The discussion is followed by an article describing how sensational events such as the wedding can suddenly transform even diehard anti-royalists into “fans of the imperial household.” The next article makes a montage of changing opinions on the emperor system in modern Japan by piecing together comments from the Meiji, Taishō, prewar and postwar Shōwa eras, showing how the emperor as “symbol” is open to divergent interpretations. Three themes emerge prominently in this special section: the discussants assume that many Japanese feel an admittedly irrational attachment to the imperial family that exists alongside indifference, or even opposition, to the system itself; and, for better or worse, the emperor still figures in national identity; yet attitudes toward the emperor differ by generation. The sharpest criticism of the wedding and the emperor system in this July issue also provides the most accessible, even funniest article, and one written by anonymous Fujin kōron staff. This article not only underscores generational difference in attitudes toward the emperor, but points to gender and regional differences, too. Its irreverence works to fracture the fairy tale of the postwar

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love story and reduces the people’s princess to a rich girl unluckily hitched to a prince who studies “fish brains.” “Kōshitsu ni kansuru hitobito no iken” (“People’s Opinions of the Imperial House”) presents a cacophony of diverse voices. Here, we have hundreds of people (hitobito) represented, but no singleminded “people.” The article itself is a collection of fragments: excerpts from children’s conversations on the radio, middle school students’ social studies essays (including the grammar mistakes), high school students’ interviews on the radio; a reporter’s notes on different responses to the wedding in Shiga prefecture; and the responses to a Fujin kōron survey conducted in Tokyo and seven prefectures. Looking at each one of the sections of this article in turn shows its irreverence. Reactions to the wedding reported by the newspaper person in Shiga, reveal Japanese as divided by gender, generation, region, and individual preference. Children stare in amazement as their grandparents bow on the tatami in front of televised pictures of the prince. They have no idea what is going on with their elders. Housewives become teary-eyed over Michiko and her mother parting on the wedding day, and sigh at the thought of the prince’s love for his commoner princess. Their husbands laugh at their sentimentality. Teenage boys scoff at how boring the prince’s life is while teenage girls remark that wealthy Miss Michiko is no commoner. Many in Shiga prefecture are reportedly just happy to have the day off, and merchants there see the wedding as a great chance to sell more goods. Graphs accompanying the article (Figure 5.3 [a–d]) plot responses to a Fujin kōron survey of attitudes toward the emperor system and the wedding. Respondents can choose among four possible answers ranging from negative to positive reactions to “I don’t know.” Possible responses include “the wedding was designed to divert attention from political issues”; the wedding was “irrelevant celebrity-style hype”; and “the emperor system will probably be abolished.” The three questions posed in the survey were (1) What do you think of the emperor system?; (2) What do you think about the future of the emperor system?; (3) What was the social relevance of the prince’s highly publicized wedding? While the results are not statistically representative, the graphs show that most surveyed are happy with the status quo and found the wedding “good because it was democratic” (minshū-teki de yoi). Yet, 50 percent of college students in the Tokyo area believed that “the emperor system will probably be abolished” some day.

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80 70 Rural

60

Urban

50

Students

40 30 20 10 0 OK as Is

Should be Head of State

Abolish System

Don't Know

(a) 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

10–19 20–29 30–39 40+

OK as Is

Should be Head of State

Abolish System

Don't Know

(b) 80 70 60

Rural

50

Urban Students

40 30 20 10 0 Won't be Abolished

Might be Abolished

Will be Abolished

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(c)

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Rural

50

Urban Students

40 30 20 10 0 Democratic & Good

Irrelevant Celebrity

Diversion from Politics

Don't Know

(d)

Figure 5.3 Opinions on the imperial household from various individuals: (a) What do you think about the emperor system? (b) What do you think of the emperor system (rural respondents by age)? (c) Do you think the emperor system will be abolished? (d) What is the social significance of the prince’s wedding? Graphs replicating and translating those found in “Kōshitsu ni kansuru hitobito no iken,” Fujin kōron, July 1959, 116–17.

The satiric part of this article is also the longest, that is, the first four pages of quotes from children and teenagers. Some of the teens speak angrily of the emperor’s war responsibility and bitterly of the prince’s taxpayer-supported life. They disparage the royal pageantry as hype, laugh at the baby-faced prince for “looking like Michiko’s child,” and while one girl finds Prince Akihito’s attentiveness to Michiko sweet, a boy argues that all the talk of romance (koi) between them is a story concocted to sell newspapers and that no girl that rich can be called a commoner. The conversation among one group ends as they all laugh at the idea that, at least, Michiko was good for the royal gene pool. Children at a downtown Tokyo grammar school echo similar sentiments in a radio interview. They joke about how taxpayers support all those pretty royal clothes, how radio announcers foolishly overuse honorific language for the royals, how even the supposedly liberal teachers speak well of the wedding on the radio, and how little freedom the prince has. A few girls enjoy the Cinderella story of the wedding, but their friends are intent on bursting such bubbles. As one girl says: The newspapers made such a big deal about how the prince chose a commoner over a noble and all that, but that’s not what I think. She’s a wealthy debutante, right? And you know they said that he’d never pick somebody who hadn’t been to college. So she had to have plenty of money to graduate from college. And if

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she hadn’t been to college, there’s no way she would’ve been playing tennis so she wouldn’t have even met him in the first place. That’s what I want people to think a little about.44

Fujin kōron’s critical responses to the royal wedding of 1959 are mainly the product of men writing or speaking in round-table conversations. Although some of these men also admit to an occasional attraction to the royals, they maintain that this is not the rational, modern side of their characters. Unlike the romantics who speak of themselves as one of the people, these critics tend to identify themselves as different from royal wedding enthusiasts as well as from those politicians, retailers, and publishers who wish to manipulate the wedding’s popularity for their own ends. In the Fujin kōron critiques of the wedding, “the people” collapse into different groups, differentiated in part by their attitudes toward the emperor system. The young, the progressive, the intellectuals, and men, much more than women, are seen as skeptical of the excitement over the royal romance. “Frenzied teenage girls,” “tearful housewives,” and “grandmothers paying obeisance” are seen as enthralled. Older and rural people are also imagined as supporters of the royal wedding. Overall, this codes emotional attachment to the emperor system as old-fashioned, naive, and feminine. No article here, however, considers why so many women found the story of Princess Michiko appealing. Equating the irrational with women was not deemed an observation that required explanation. Such associations certainly have the potential to place the woman reading Fujin kōron in an uncomfortable position. If she is not one of those tearful housewives or frenzied girls, does this make her “one of the boys” who scoffs at the wedding? Writing decades later in 1986, feminist historian and critic Kanō Mikiyo sees this apparent dissolve of politics into the personal as one of the most potent ways in which the mass media, particularly women’s magazines, worked the emperor system into the fabric of individual lives. She writes, “although women’s magazines seem apolitical in appearance, they play very important political roles, not least that of reinforcing the power of the emperor among women without referring to him directly.”45

Conclusion Reading about Shōda Michiko’s transformation as conveyed in women’s magazines during 1958 and 1959 gives us portraits of the people pegged to a

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continuum of progress, with progress itself defined differently by different writers. Romantics conceive of progress as more than the acceptance of democratic reforms instigated by occupation forces; rather it is seen as the liberation of the Japanese people’s inherent humanity. The reforms are less something imposed by occupation forces, than an accident of history that allows the people to show their true colors. With his marriage to a commoner, the human prince is more fully able to partake of this primordial wellspring of common goodness, and to reflect it back to the people, albeit in a glamorous fashion. As emperor one day, he will no longer be the symbolic father of the people, but their partner in a democratic, companionate relationship. Thus, for romantics, Prince Akihito’s love for Michiko overcomes the contradictions inherent in a democratic monarchy, a love marriage, and a new Japan. Those concerned about mass infatuation with the royals as celebrities, however, evaluate the Japanese as not yet progressive, as backward in contrast to the fully modern Europeans, who model a sophisticated way of blending tradition and modernity. They see the people as not yet understanding the fact and spirit of the reforms. The most critical articles in Fujin kōron depict the people, especially the young, the urban, and most men, as progressive because they read through the celebratory rhetoric of the wedding, asking who pays, who benefits, and what kinds of social inequities are disguised by the event. Here, progress is equated with a citizenry that is diverse, that disagrees, and that will not bow to authority. Many are ready to go past the current reforms to imagine a republic without any emperor system at all. Debate over the maturity of “the people” and their fascination with the enchanting royals obfuscates the non-democratic constraints binding Akihito and Michiko, restrictions on their lives far exceeding those of even the most media-hounded celebrities. As Chun emphasizes, “they lived under extensive government control,” without voting rights or freedom speech or even the ordinary independence of association with friends or Michiko’s family. Despite living in a palace among servants, they “had no private income or any valuable assets.”46 Takie Lebra’s informants among the nobility imagined life for the crown princess as “doomed to virtual slavery to palace tradition and continual surveillance by ‘nasty’ nyokan (female attendants)” as well as to the curious eyes of the entire nation.”47 Moreover, for all her postwar independence, Michiko had entered into an institution which treated women as second class, and as is still the case, allowed only males to inherit the throne. The Akihito-Michiko

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story, however, turned such inequities into the couple’s sacrifice for love and nation. Simultaneously, their love story interpreted postwar democracy as a component of modern romance. Democracy blossomed because it, too, was constrained.

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Figure 6.1 “Miss Universe 1960, Kojima Akiko,” July 24, 1959. Courtesy of Sankei Shimbun.

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Japan’s Miss Universe: Beauty Contests and Postwar Democracy

On July 19, 1959, over 200,000 people turned out along Ocean Boulevard in Long Beach, California to watch the city’s eighth annual Miss Universe parade. Even more watched live coverage on TV.1 At the height of its popularity, the Miss Universe Pageant, much like the Olympics, championed uniqueness through national costume events and peace through friendly competition. The pageant also promoted the belief that all its delegates embodied a modern kind of femininity, one emancipated by a Free World promise of liberated beauty and upward mobility. When Miss Japan won the crown in Long Beach that summer, becoming Miss Universe 1960, many saw her victory as just such a moment of liberation. A 22-year-old model from Tokyo, Kojima Akiko was the pageant’s first Asian victor (Figure 6.1).2 Americans and Japanese alike hailed her achievement as a major step forward for Japanese women’s rights. Back in Japan in mid-August, the new Miss Universe was soon promoting everything from cosmetics to appliances to ice cream—a princess of consumption and modern pleasure. At the same time, beauty contests of all kinds in Japan experienced a deluge of entries. Yet to Kojima’s dismay, rumors emerged that tarnished her reputation. Some attacked her character, painting her as a ruthless competitor in the fashion world. Others saw her as a pawn in the web of transnational commercial and diplomatic relations dominated by the United States. Charges arose that Kojima had resorted to breast injections to create her hourglass shape and that Max Factor Hollywood, a major Miss Universe sponsor, had exploited the contest in order to better launch a new line of cosmetics in Asia. Others suspected that hopes for the renewal of the controversial US-Japan Security Treaty had assured Miss Japan’s win in Long Beach. Such suspicions threatened to undo the image

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of Japan’s triumphant Miss Universe, reframing her as another postwar woman easily seduced by the rewards of American cultural imperialism. This chapter explores the story of Japan’s first Miss Universe as another way to view constructions of the princess of domesticity—and Japan itself—in the wake of democratic reforms, a recovering economy, and the nation’s multiple ties to the United States. There is no evidence to prove that the charges against Kojima, the pageant sponsors, or the US government are anything more than alarmist conspiracy theories. But these rumors do point to anxieties over changes in Japan’s cultural and diplomatic landscape that strike at the core of postwar gender hierarchy and the Japanese body itself. The fact that the Miss Universe festivities were commercial, that they involved the US military and local government, and that they purported to recognize some ideals of physical beauty as national and universal makes the pageant a rich site for exploring what meanings attached to the idea of the young Japanese woman as a transnational figure amid Cold War politics nearly 15 years after the war’s end. To discuss this instance of the construction of the postwar kitchen princess, I take up the following points. First, the young woman herself. Who was Kojima Akiko and how did Japanese and American media variously envision her as the good daughter, the cut-throat competitor, the tall, straight-legged postwar beauty, the liberated girl, and finally, the “export model?” Next, I turn to the Miss Universe festivities, explaining how Kojima’s participation pointed to two parallel yet intersecting public spheres in Southern California surrounding beauty queens: the Long Beach community group supporters who were largely Anglo and Japanese American groups (occasionally described in the press as the local “Japanese colony”) connected to the Miss Nisei Week Festival competition. One can also read the Miss Universe contest as a passionate display of Pax Americana and citizens’ international goodwill efforts that characterized early Cold War culture in the United States. Analyzing reportage of the Coronation Ball, the conclusion of the contest’s activities, I argue that the pageantry of feminized girl-nations shielded by a universal prince charming, a role played by US naval men, displays the role of the American military in the world in gendered terms. Focusing the lens more closely on interpretations of Kojima’s physical beauty, especially her long legs, as symbolic of her modern Japaneseness, I point to different interpretations of her victory offered in the mainstream American, Japanese American, and Japanese media. Finally, I read the rhetoric of the controversies that erupted in Japan after Miss Japan won the contest, asking what these say about Japanese anxieties over maintaining commercial, cultural, and military ties to

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the United States, and about the Japanese girl as transformed into a princess and seduced by American power abroad and riches. In conclusion, I bring the discussion back to the princess in this 1959 story, analyzing how Kojima Akiko used her body—and her wits—to achieve recognition for herself, her family, and her nation.

Kojima Akiko: The ambitious postwar girl Photographs and newsreel footage taken in July 1959 and available on the internet now capture Miss Japan’s participation in diverse pageant activities. Plainly, Kojima Akiko’s years of fashion modeling have made her comfortable in front of the camera. She smiles easily and directly into the lens and performs a variety of poses without looking stilted. Her modeling experience has prepared her to wear different costumes to advantage, whether swimsuits, kimono, or glamorous high-fashion gowns. One of the taller beauty delegates in the Miss Universe competition, she moves gracefully on the pageant runway as though it were just another fashion show. Kojima is calm as she waves to crowds from her parade float and even at the moment the heavy Miss Universe crown is placed atop her head. When photographers crowd her hotel bedroom the morning after her victory to take pictures of the beauty queen’s ritual breakfast in bed while reading congratulatory telegrams, Kojima still manages to strike the right pose. She consistently projects enjoyment of the pageant. In every frame, Kojima looks completely at home in the Miss Universe world. Her inability in English did not impede her performance but led to comic mistakes that rendered her vulnerable and charming, and endeared her to Americans in Long Beach. “Oh, my gosh” was a phrase she learned from others at the pageant, and reportedly what she exclaimed on winning. Who was this Miss Japan? Her story varies somewhat according to the publication consulted, but the basic narrative describes a journey from hardship to triumph. Following her victory, Kojima recounted her story in an interview for the Los Angeles-based Japanese American newspaper Rafu Shimpo; similar ones were recorded in the Japanese media.3 Below, I draw a composite from reports published in Japan and the United States. Born in the Setagaya ward of Tokyo in 1936 to an army major and his wife, Kojima Akiko shared with her generation the deprivations of wartime. Like Shōda Michiko, she, too, experienced evacuation from Tokyo, being relocated to Shikoku Island in 1944. Kojima seems to have blossomed there, growing

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up in Kochi City with a fondness for swimming in the ocean. She won swim competitions in high school, developing a passion for the sport that reportedly led to her shapely build. Her classmates called her “long-legged Kojima.” Kojima imagined that she inherited her height from her father, Kojima Tatsu, who returned home from China in poor health after the war and died in 1950.4 Kojima told the Rafu Shimpo that she had barely any memories of her father who was away much of her childhood except that “he was so handsome in uniform.” His death left the family in financial straits. Notably, this mention of Kojima’s father in no way refers to Japan’s imperialism, defeat, or its former status as an enemy of the United States; rather, such painful associations are cleansed by the seemingly innocent notion of men as handsome in military uniforms, a feature on display in the Miss Universe competition by virtue of the participation of US Navy men as discussed further. At the time of her Miss Universe participation, Akiko and her elder, married sister Kazuyo (29) were supporting their mother in Kochi City, their younger sister Takayo (17), who was a high school student in Tokyo, and their younger brother Takao (20), who had just finished high school and was living with Akiko in Tokyo. The misfortune of war and evacuation not only inspired Kojima Akiko to become financially independent, but, it is implied, led her to develop strength of character and body. Her father’s death, though difficult for the family, removed the protections and constraints that might have pressed Kojima to take a more conventional path in life. In the end, it was adversity that led to Miss Japan’s freedom, strength, and opportunity. Kojima’s first experience of beauty contests came in 1953 when she substituted for her sister in the Miss Shikoku Contest. Only 16 at the time, Akiko won the competition and went on to represent Kochi Prefecture in the Miss Japan Contest in Tokyo. She placed second behind Itō Kinuko, who, as discussed further, became one of Japan’s most famous and highly paid fashion models after winning third place in the Miss Universe contest that year. Rumor had it that Kojima actually scored higher than Itō in the 1953 Miss Japan competition, but was too young to compete in the Miss Universe contest. Following this, Kojima graduated from a business school in Kochi, did some work for a newspaper and as a local tour guide before going on to modeling in Osaka. Modeling proved lucrative: she earned between 10,000 and 20,000 yen per month. In order to advance her career, Kojima applied to enter the FMG (Fashion Model Group) agency, a well-known modeling firm, passed their test and moved to Tokyo. As a new model trying to build a reputation in Tokyo, Kojima did fashion shows, photo shoots, and television work, and even played a Santa Claus. Her monthly

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wage in Tokyo was about 25,000 yen; excellent pay in those days, this was a higher monthly salary than earned on average by high school teachers, and nearly twice what young women averaged as nurses, telephone operators, and typists.5 In her Rafu Shimpo interview, Kojima comes across as proud of her pay, stating that she “earned good money and was averaging between 300 and 700 American dollars a month.”6 Yet, this was still a sum Kojima reportedly found insufficient for supporting her family. Perhaps learning how much money Itō made as a model after her Miss Universe success motivated Kojima to try her hand once again at beauty contests. In 1958, Kojima entered the Miss Japan contest again, this time representing Tokyo. According to the Japan Times, she had been rated as a top favorite to win.7 Unfortunately, an accident that occurred during the Miss Japan pageant motorcade left her with a leg injury that forced her to withdraw from the competition, earning her the sobriquet of the “tragic beauty queen.” In 1959, however, luck was with her, and with her all the way to the top. After her Miss Universe victory, attention in Japan turned to Kojima’s modeling career as a way to understand her character. Rather than analyzing the techniques Kojima had learned on the job and how these had served her well in the pageant, scrutiny turned to her motives for entering modeling and beauty contests. Was she selfish? In 1962, one of her friends, fellow model Arimoto Chiyoko, pointed to Kojima’s ambition to overcome financial hardship, telling the magazine Josei jishin that Kojima had vowed to “banish her experience of poverty to a mere dream of her past.” Arimoto emphasized that Kojima was determined never to take second place to a more privileged girl.8 For her part, in post-pageant reports, Kojima emphasized her responsibilities to her family, and in 1966 reported that her Miss Universe prize money (US$3,500.00) had put her brother through college.9 When some reporters in Long Beach asked the new Miss Universe about her plans for the future, Kojima expressed interest in Hollywood movie offers. The response publicized in Japan was that she had replied that, “it might be fun to make a film or two,” but her driving desire was to become “a lovely wife” (kawaii okusan).10 It was this last goal that earned the most press attention. Her mother publicly approved of this domestic goal, too. Contacted for her reaction immediately after her daughter became Miss Universe, Kojima Hisako, still in Kochi, hoped that Akiko would marry soon and settle down following her reign. She also spoke proudly of her daughter’s drive, however, and the initiative she had displayed even as a young girl.11 The idea that a young woman who had just won a highly publicized, prestigious international competition would immediately announce her plans

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to pursue a domestic life says much about beauty contests in this era. Sarah Banet-Weiser, author of The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity, has observed the awkward place of female ambition in the Miss America contest. Although pageants affirm femininity as modest restraint and selflessness, they place women in competition and in an arena that demands a narcissistic focus on the self. As Banet-Weiser writes, “to be a beauty pageant contestant is to compete, and to desire to win”; thus, she describes how contestants “need a cover story . . . to mask and to dilute the ruthlessness that often occurs in the competitive atmosphere of the pageant.”12 In this Japanese case, the narrative of the dutiful daughter turning to modeling and beauty pageants in order to support her fatherless family “masks and dilutes” the narcissistic nature of Kojima’s work. Returning to Kojima’s status in 1950s Japan, we see good reason for Kojima to “mask and dilute” her obvious ambition. The Japanese catch-phrase “in the postwar, women and stockings became stronger,” speaks not only to the postwar economic recovery fueled in part by advances in the textile industry, but to the ways in which women were perceived as seizing the new freedoms accorded to them by the postwar constitution.13 As described in Chapter 4, Fujin kōron’s 1956 issue on “Josei no yokubō” (“What Women Want”) explored the allegedly endless desires of contemporary Japanese women, especially postwar girls, for self-actualization through amassing money, sexual adventures, and travel—and for housewives, through obtaining appliances. Although in Kojima’s case, there was much lauding in the Japanese press of her ambitions as democratic and up with the times, concerns were also voiced that put Kojima in the same category with those postwar women who saw no end to their ambitions, had lost their modesty, and were becoming unapologetically greedy. The Fujin kōron articles also made clear that such greedy girls were not about to be held back by “old-fashioned” Japanese men but would do everything to seek their rights and fulfill their desires, a theme that reemerges in Kojima’s story as well. In fact, Japan’s beauty queens in the 1950s came to epitomize the postwar girlturned-diva. Most famous among these was fashion model Itō Kinuko, who had returned home a national hero after nearly winning the Miss Universe crown. At 5 feet 4 inches, Itō was considered tall in Japan at the time. She also became a public curiosity at home as the perfect embodiment of hattōshin (in which one’s head measures one-eighth of the total body height), an asset that most Japanese believed had led to her achievement in Long Beach. Her triumph in the Miss Universe contest was hailed as a boost to national pride and a balm for

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the defeated nation, a phenomenon that beauty contest historian Inoue Shōichi refers to as “hattōshin nationalism.”14 It also ignited a fad for calisthenics and other body and beauty-enhancing regimes.15 Although such acclaim brought Itō extraordinarily high pay for modeling assignments and drew record crowds to any show in which she appeared, she soon faced criticism as a demanding prima donna.16 Here, Kojima’s ambition was interpreted in light of the public’s perception of Itō. When Kojima’s Miss Universe victory put Itō in the news again, she was a fledgling fashion designer and dress shop owner, still single and trying to live down unflattering publicity. In an interview with the Associated Press, Itō congratulated Kojima, but warned her not to “let the title give you illusions of grandeur” and advised her “to stick to her statement of wishing to become a good housewife.” By 1959, Itō’s fantastic story of rising to fame through beauty contest success had become a cautionary tale of excessive female ambition as the road to remaining unhappily single.17 Despite her “good daughter” narrative, Kojima faced the same kind of criticism. Soon after her victory, the Asahi newspaper columnist Hori Hidehiko, for example, sternly admonished Kojima to remember that beauty was fleeting and to stay true to her word and keep her ambitions modestly focused on becoming a charming wife.18 The following summer, in August 1960, Josei jishin carried an article based on conversations with her fellow models that gossiped of Kojima’s “monstrous ambition” (susamajii yashin), along with the positive account by her coworker Arimoto described earlier. The article cited a grumbling Seibu Department Store executive who remembered Kojima as a tough negotiator who did not hesitate to ask for higher pay and better assignments. The article sums up Kojima’s attitude toward work as forceful and opportunistic, casting her as one who would never miss a chance to get ahead and be the top in her field, no matter whom she had to step over. Among Kojima’s worst offences, the other models charged, was the way she had manipulated her connections with a powerful businessman in order to have a fellow model removed from a select group going to a fashion show in Sydney so that she could take her place.19 As things turned out, Kojima’s Miss Universe experience did lead to glamorous work and ultimately but not immediately to her life as a “lovely wife.” Being Miss Universe meant a great deal of work and media attention that, among other reasons, led Kojima to postpone marriage for several years. In the summer of 1959, this Miss Universe’s face was everywhere in the Japanese media: advertising diverse products from cosmetics, face soap, and ice cream to sewing machines and cameras. She devoted herself to numerous modeling assignments and personal

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appearances, earning top pay for this work. Although there was a fair amount of public attention to her romantic life in the early 1960s, once Kojima married film star Takada Akio in 1966, she retired from the limelight and concentrated on raising their children. Like Shōda Michiko, Kojima became another postwar symbol of the newly appropriate path of moving from adventurous girlhood to the domestic princess enjoying “My-homeism.” In November 1979, Josei jishin published an article looking back at 35 women who had won the title of Miss Japan, finding 28 who had participated in the Miss Universe contest. The most successful were presented as those who had managed to adapt from temporary celebrity to the ordinary life of a homemaker, having wisely left behind such excitement as but a notable chapter of their girlhood. By 1979, Kojima and Itō were still two of Japan’s most famous former beauty queens; both were married and living quietly away from the public eye. Their position as privileged housewives recalls the ojōsan, or “good girl from the good family,” who had spent her young adulthood at an elite women’s college, not a poor girl competing in beauty contests or scrambling to get well-paying modeling assignments. In fact, Kojima, who was 41 at the time, had to postpone the interview because she was helping her child study for an elementary school entrance exam. The interviewer remarks that she has “exactly the manner of speaking as an upper-class wife.”20 In the end, Kojima had managed to “banish” all trace of her former poverty, but she also had to give up her career. Narratives of Kojima as the good daughter or the overly ambitious one were influential in coloring reception of her victory, but they were not the only ways of interpreting it. As we shall see by turning to the symbolism of the contest as well as the reactions of the American, Japanese, and Los Angeles-based Japanese American press, there were yet other ways to read the moment when a Japanese captured the Miss Universe crown. Sifting through these press reports, one needs to keep in mind that the editors and reporters played a significant role in how this story was covered, deciding which comments and anecdotes to print to shape their Miss Universe story.

Long Beach, California, 1959: Miss Japan becomes Miss Universe Understanding the politics surrounding Japan’s Miss Universe takes us to the contest itself and media attention to this spectacle of American diplomacy and showmanship. For Japanese viewing this international competition, the

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controversies building over the potential ratification of the US-Japan Security Treaty and the status of Japan’s future alliance with the United States were never far from view. Those opposed to the treaty hoped Japan could achieve a more equal footing with the United States and “maintain a neutral stance with regard to U.S. hegemony in East Asia.”21 Yet there was also the bloom of Japan’s steadily improving economy, the benefit of its subordinate relation to the United States. Ambivalence over this relationship proved to be an important subtext to Japanese readings of their Miss Universe. Initiated in 1952, the Miss Universe Beauty Pageant was held annually in Long Beach, California through 1959. Shortly after Kojima’s victory, local newspapers reported a rift over pageant finances between the City of Long Beach and pageant swimwear manufacturer, Catalina, Inc. In the end, the City of Long Beach lost the Miss Universe contest to Miami, and although the Miss International Beauty Contest was held in its stead from 1960 to 1967, pageant fever was never the same in Long Beach. As a mass-mediated spectacle in the 1950s, however, the Miss Universe Beauty Pageant attracted worldwide attention and intense exposure locally. The pageant was covered by the Los Angeles Times, international newspapers, local television, and in detail by the local Long Beach newspaper, The Independent, Press-Telegram. The contest included a Miss USA competition, which in 1959 saw 46 states represented, whose winner (Miss California) then competed in the Miss Universe contest with 33 international “beauty delegates.” Cosponsored in 1959 by the City of Long Beach, Catalina, Inc., and Max Factor Hollywood, the pageant involved numerous civic organizations—booster groups and women’s clubs, local businesses, and the public at large. From first to last—from the parade and Coronation Ball to the people-to-people kind of exchange between the internationals and the locals—Miss Universe week 1959 provided an impressive display of Cold War Pax Americana. In her 2003 book, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961, Christina Klein stresses how a culture of sentiment arose in the United States in the 1950s that encouraged ordinary Americans to participate positively in containing communism by strengthening bonds of sentiment among peoples in the Free World through overtures of friendship that would transcend the differences of language and culture. Klein describes, for example, how the Eisenhower administration officially launched the People-to-People program “to make the idea of international interdependence come alive in the popular mind.”22 Certainly, the Miss Universe Beauty Pageant fits squarely within these projects of Free World integration. The 1959 pageant program proclaimed “the promotion

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of international goodwill and friendship” as its lofty goal, promising that “there is no barrier to international friendship and understanding which cannot be overcome by the outstretched hand of friendship.” The program describes the American and international beauty delegates as “unofficial ambassadors” who transcend difference as they “teach each other their country’s language, ideas and mannerisms.”23 At one point in the pageant, all the delegates recited the Miss Universe Creed, solemnly pledging to work for “peace, justice, and mutual understanding” while practicing “the highest ideals of sportsmanship.”24 Despite these high-minded sentiments, the Miss Universe Beauty Pageant promoted an atmosphere of summer seaside fun. Reporters followed the delegates as they tried new foods, enjoyed events in their honor, posed in swimsuits and “national costumes,” and made friends with each other. Kojima often made the local pageant news. On July 8, The Independent-Press Telegram introduced Kojima to locals by announcing that Miss Japan would arrive in the United States soon; the feature “Meet Akiko” ran with a photograph depicting the voluptuous Kojima in a dark, strapless swimsuit perched on a stone and looking directly up the camera.25 On July 13, the newspaper featured Kojima in an entirely different look for her arrival. Resplendent in a kimono, flower lei, and tiara, Kojima is pictured with a child, also in kimono, described as “Little Linda” (Watamura) and identified as “a member of the Los Angeles Japanese colony.”26 At the airport, “100 members of various Japanese societies” were reportedly on hand to greet Kojima.27 Kojima’s most prominent opportunity for publicity as a contestant occurred on July 14 when the Los Angeles Times ran a large photo of her on its front page; the reigning Miss Universe looked on as make-up artist Hal King applied cosmetics to Kojima’s face while she held up a Japanese fan.28 Another photo pairs Miss Japan chatting with Miss Cuba, both women are equally tall, and their costumes quite different.29 Photographs often grouped the contestants by region, and much attention followed all four Asian delegates. Miss Burma, Miss Japan, Miss Korea, and Miss Thailand are featured together in one photograph as “Four Vivacious Visitors from the Orient.”30 Describing interactions with the Miss Universe contestants in an unpretentious, mildly tongue-in-cheek style kept the focus on “bonds of sentiment” and away from other, more politicized ways in which the hosts and the contestants were connected. The local media, especially The Independent-Press Telegram intentionally kept the tone light, joking about contestants’ missteps in English and their love of certain American foods. This kind of gentle humor directed to the Miss Universe contest, their Long Beach hosts, and even to the reporter

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as one attending to the minutiae of the competition, recalls the carnivalesque and the banality often associated with the beauty contest. As Christine Yano explains, however, the beauty contest for all its associations with triviality does not equate to innocence—“the politics of banality are embedded within the reproduction of structures of power.”31 As carnival, the beauty contest turns things upside down, playing up banality and playing down references to actual power. Rather than a United Nations-level discussion of nuclear arms, Miss Universe offers debates on whether to wear nylon stockings or eat hot dogs instead of hamburgers. The Miss Universe contest revels in the trivial, leaving unspoken the politics of race, gender, and the powerful position of the United States vis-à-vis other nations that were plainly in view. It is worth noting before leaving this discussion of Pax Americana that controversies within the United States itself did disrupt the 1959 contest to some degree. Catholic bishops in the United States banded together to threaten all Catholic Miss USA contestants, declaring that neither they nor their families would have access to the sacraments if they participated in the swimsuit competition. This policy forced the highly publicized withdrawal of the American Catholic contestants. The United Arab Republic also did not send its delegate, refusing to allow her participation in swimsuit display.32 Articles about the contest in The Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram in July 1959 give much attention to this controversy, while also reporting that the public swimming pools in Long Beach will allow women to wear bikinis and strapless swimsuits. Racial tensions in American life were on display only in their invisibility. All the Miss USA contestants were Anglo; the only women of color in the competition were international contestants from the Caribbean, Asia, and the island nation of Madagascar. Scenes of racial and ethnic diversity in the Miss Universe contest, it seems, were more easily consumed by majority readers if difference came from and returned to other nations. Perhaps Miss Japan’s victory in 1959 made it easier for the contest to welcome its first AfricanAmerican contestant, Miss Ohio, to the Miss USA/Miss Universe contest the following year.33 The national beauty queen as representative of her nation and homogenized standards of beauty has been scrutinized in the academic literature on local and national beauty contests. Less has been written about the politics of the international pageant. In the case of this contest, the masculinity of the American military was as much on display as the femininity of other nations and its own states. Young US naval cadets stationed in Long Beach played the role of escorts at some of the most celebratory events. Cadets of the Los Alamitos Naval Air

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Reserve Station carried flags for the states and nations. During the parade of the Miss USA/Miss Universe delegates, it was the men in their naval uniforms who guided the women’s floats along Ocean Boulevard. A young Japanese American sailor, Roger Uyehara, pushed Miss Japan’s float. A photo on the front page of the Rafu Shimpo (too grainy to include here) captures Kojima in her swimsuit and Uyehara in his bright white sailor uniform and cotton cap as they stand atop the float, posed with their arms loosely around each other; her greater height makes her appear an unusually tall Japanese woman, something that receives much attention after her victory.34 At the Coronation Ball, the finale of the week’s events, it was again the naval cadets, all members of a Navy choir, this time in their formal dress whites, who escorted the women, each of whom wore a unique formal gown, to the gala event. The Coronation Ball, with its association with Cinderella stories and actual royal ceremonies such as Queen Elizabeth’s 1953 coronation, was the contest event that provided the richest symbolic tableau of Pax Americana. With the exception of the United States, all the nations were represented at the Ball only by lovely young women, who, as the pageant required, had to be unmarried. American strength intertwined with a narrative of compulsory heterosexuality, naturalizing and romanticizing the position of girls (girl countries and girls at home) shielded by their handsome escorts. While the women showed their feminine sense of fashion, their American naval escorts, beautifully but uniformly suited, displayed their masculine allegiance to the US military. The Coronation Ball casts the American naval cadet as the gallant boy-next-door who practiced courtesy and gentlemanly restraint, but was at the ready should his belle need his protection. The event was off limits to the public and the press, making the Ball somewhat less an official event and more like an American country club dance where elite young people would enjoy a date. When Miss Japan arrived at the Coronation Ball as Miss Universe, she “swept into the ballroom on the arm of 20-year-old Cadet 2-C Kenneth Gifford,” a “youthful six-footer.”35 Her height (5 feet 7 inches) had made finding an appropriate escort—one taller than she—something of an issue.36 The PressTelegram reported that, “Other contestants were paired off with cadets in true Navy fashion—by height.”37 There is no mention of whether race or ethnicity were factors in choosing the other escorts. For their part, Kojima and Gifford made a striking picture of a potentially new chapter in Japan-US relations. The newspaper photograph of the radiant Kojima on the arm of her equally beautiful, only slightly taller and immaculately attired US naval cadet

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Figure 6.2 “Miss Universe Kojima Akiko and Cadet Kenneth Gifford, Coronation Ball, Long Beach,” July 25, 1959. Courtesy of Sankei Shimbun.

(Figure 6.2) differs radically from the famous 1945 photograph of General Douglas MacArthur, casual in his fatigues, towering over the formally dressed, stiff Emperor Hirohito (Figure 6.3). Kojima and Gifford walk together, nearly equally tall and enchanting. In one sense, this new Miss Universe stands as a metaphor for the revival of a strong Japanese economy, national security, and consumer culture, the spoils of the nation’s alliance with the United States; viewed in hindsight, the image resonates

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Figure 6.3 “General Douglas MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito,” September 27, 1945. Courtesy of US Library of Congress.

with the economic growth policies later championed in the early 1960s by Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato. The beautifully dressed naval man also revises a familiar fictive chapter in US-Japan relations, the failed romance of Madame Butterfly (Cio-Cio San) and naval Lieutenant B.F. Pinkerton. Unlike Pinkerton, whose heartless betrayal of the naive Butterfly was the cause of her honor suicide, Cadet Gifford pays respect to Miss Japan, leading her not to disgrace and death, but to her coronation as the world’s most beautiful woman. In this scenario,

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the American man has become honorable, and the Japanese woman more sophisticated and with a life of her own on the global stage. Notably, such a scenario is only possible in this arena if Japan and the other nations are represented by women. Only the “Miss” can be the potential marriage partner to the handsome naval man in 1959. There is no place left in this equation for the Japanese man nor could one imagine the reverse—a beauty contest in Japan in 1959 in which international beauties were escorted by Japanese military men. The personal story of Miss Japan—rendered fatherless by Japan’s aggression in China and now responsible for supporting her younger brother—and the story of her postwar nation—constitutionally forbidden from engaging in war—heighten the absence of the Japanese man as protector in this narrative.38 Absent, too, is the Japanese American man. One wonders if Uyehara, for example, as shorter than Kojima, was considered tall enough to guide her parade float but not to escort her to the ball. Or, was the choice of the Anglo Gifford meant to signal to the world American “tolerance” of potentially intimate interracial relations?39 This scenario of the protective American man, the beautiful Japanese girl, and the absent Japanese man recalls the argument of Naoko Shibusawa’s America’s Geisha Ally. Shibusawa discusses how fears of communism motivated postwar American policymakers to “make Japan a model of capitalism in Asia.”40 She argues that Japan was transformed from enemy to ally in the American imagination through a sympathetic focus on Japanese women and children in various projects such as those to support orphans and women disfigured by the atomic bomb (Hiroshima Maidens) as well as by popular films and novels such as James Michener’s Sayonara. Miss Japan’s 1959 victory functioned as one more way to feminize and beautify Japan and conceive of the nation as a young person maturing into an ally. Moreover, the Miss Universe contest’s ostensible mission to further international goodwill through people-to-people exchange, its embrace of girl-nations, and the benign involvement of the US military underscored the postwar protection of individual liberties “while preserving a commitment to the common good and ‘universal,’ humanistic values.”41 Amid this particular politics of beauty contest, it is also important to ask what it meant for Kojima Akiko to be the first Japanese, the first Asian, and, in more recent American terminology, the first woman of color to win the Miss Universe contest. Not only did various racialized and ethnicized readings attach to Kojima’s beauty, but by extension, they interpreted Japan as well. That Kojima’s physical beauty was also read by some as evidence of the positive outcome of the

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occupation gave a different spin to characterizing Miss Japan’s good looks, as we see in looking at reportage on her victory.

Japan’s Miss Universe “What? Eat breakfast without getting up and washing my face and putting on make-up?,” exclaimed Kojima.42 On July 25, the brand new Miss Universe awoke to much excitement. Unlike Sleeping Beauty, she did not see her Prince Charming before her, but 20 reporters and photographers clamoring to capture the negligeeclad Miss Universe’s ritual breakfast in bed as she read congratulatory telegrams. She was provided with her own bodyguard, a “husky motorcycle officer” by the name of Paul Goforth who was to escort her everywhere she went.43 Kojima signed personal appearance contracts with Catalina, Inc. and Max Factor Hollywood. Also that day, she and several other contestants were to enjoy lunch at 20th Century Fox Studios and have screen tests for specific films. The news of Kojima’s victory had already reached Japan the night before, producing swift and joyous reaction. Radio and television in Japan reported the story as breaking news; “newspaper switchboards were jammed with incoming calls for more details.”44 The Los Angeles Times must have startled more than a few readers with the headline, “MISS JAPAN WINS,” as if this were a wartime victory.45 On both sides of the Pacific, many rushed to proclaim Miss Japan’s victory as having significance far beyond Kojima’s personal success. Some hailed it as a new sign of accord in US-Japan relations. Daiei Film Company director Kawaguchi Matsutarō exclaimed, “the crowning of Miss Kojima at Long Beach reflects the general goodwill of the Americans toward the Japanese.”46 Others interpreted Japan’s Miss Universe as proof of expanded rights for Japanese women and the bounties of the Americaninfluenced postwar diet in Japan. The July 26th headline of the Press-Telegram read, “Nippon in Uproar Over News of Miss Universe Victory: Equal Rights for Women Given Boost.” An excerpt from the story communicates that even the emperor was happy at the news: Miss Universe, Tokyo’s Akiko Kojima won much more than just a beauty crown when she triumphed over 78 international beauties in the Miss Universe Pageant. The Miss Universe crown for 1960 may signal the final emergence of full equality for Japanese women, an official close to Emperor Hirohito indicated in a transpacific telephone interview with The Independent, Press-Telegram Saturday.47

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According to The Independent, Press-Telegram, Americans in Tokyo were happy to take credit for Miss Japan’s success, as the following two comments show: “If you ask me, the historians of the future may list her as one of America’s greatest contributions to postwar Japan.” “Didn’t we change the food habits? Well, what do you think got them sprouting so high and filling out that way—our lessons in diet, less rice, more milk and other body-building foods.”48

In her Japan Times column, “A Woman’s Viewpoint,” Tsugi Shiraishi, whom we met in Chapter 2, expressed a similar interpretation of Kojima’s body. She, too, credited Kojima’s voluptuous figure and poise to American influence in Japan. In her comments, Shiraishi echoes another idea common in the 1950s, evident in narratives of democracy in the chapter on Mrs Mogi, that Western women represented the apex of women’s liberation. For Shiraishi, Kojima literally embodies women’s progress in Japan: The emancipated young women have confidence in themselves and are free to express their joys and sorrows whereas before they were taught to hide their feelings. Such spiritual liberation must have helped women to hold their heads high and thus grow taller and more attractive.. . . Not only Miss Kojima but many postwar Japanese girls have caught up with their Western sisters in poise, stature and appearance. Young girls of today are lively and attractive compared with the expressionless girls of prewar days.49

Shiraishi also had words of caution, warning Kojima that her success would last only “so long as she keeps her ‘commercial’ value.” To avoid the disillusionment that had plagued other winners, she advised, Kojima should not be taken in by all the publicity, but plan ahead and face the cruel reality that former beauty queens dependent only on their appearance soon became “nobody.”50 Kojima’s height produced still other readings among Japanese. For example, one secretary commented, “It just goes to show what we’ve been saying for a long time: ‘Japan exports only the highest quality goods now.’” More cynically, another said: “Miss Japan looked more like western girl than an Oriental. She was tall, unlike a Japanese. Maybe that’s why she won.”51 The remark that Kojima was only a product good for shipping abroad was frankly voiced by one Japanese man who said, “She’s just an export model. She’s too big for me.”52 Another Japanese man grumbled, “Why the devil can’t the outside world leave us alone to enjoy Japanese beauty? I guess the Japanese male will have to add six inches to his height if he intends to hold his own

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against the new Japanese female.”53 Here, the theme of a conservative Japanese man lagging behind progressive Japanese women, a common theme in 1950s discourse on women’s rights, as we have seen, emerged in discussion of the meaning of Miss Universe’s body, too. Yet, we recall that Independent, PressTelegram reported that sources “close to the emperor” stated that Kojima’s victory would be just the ticket for pushing “recalcitrant Japanese men” to move up with the times and accept new roles for women.54 Although the article covers these comments in a lighthearted tone, the joke is at the expense of Japanese men. How many among them could equal Miss Universe’s “six footer” cadet escort? That Japanese men are not tall enough for new Japanese women implies metaphorically and literally that they are not keeping up with the strides being made by Japanese women to take advantage of postwar reforms. This narrative also assumes that the (heterosexual) man should be the stronger and taller mate. The move to read Kojima’s body for signs of postwar progress drew much attention to her long, straight legs as well. The Associated Press wire service dubbed Kojima “a leggy fashion model from Tokyo.”55 The women’s magazine Shufu to seikatsu remarked that the tall Kojima had a fashion model’s stage presence, and that when she walked the stage in Long Beach she “utterly demolished the preconceived notion of the Japanese woman as small and cute.”56 Her legs signified new kinds of training of female Japanese bodies. Kojima’s mother told reporters that she had made a point of arranging the baby girl’s legs in such a way as to keep them straight when she carried her.57 Much was made in many media reports of Kojima’s childhood love of swimming in Kochi and her prowess in swimming competitions. In her contest speech, Kojima invited the audience to attend the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.58 Although she modestly denied being an athlete herself, her tall build must have given the impression that Japan was ready for international sports competitions as well as global beauty contests. While all this attention to leggy beauty and sports was coded as remarkably postwar, for those with long memories, these themes would have resonated with wartime eugenics projects, as Jennifer Robertson’s research on the 1930s Miss Nippon contest has shown. Robertson explains how the contest was born of a blend of modern interests in popular photography, eugenics and women’s fertility, and the desire to prove Japan’s purity as a nation; Miss Nippon “was an icon inscribed with the utopian hopes for and scenarios of a eugenic nation.”59 Like Itō Kinuko, the ideal Miss Nippon candidates’ bodies were to conform to hattōshin ideals. What was new in the case of Japan’s Miss Universe was the question of

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how her body represented Japan abroad and domestically, and especially its relation to the United States, in the midst of early Cold War politics. Kojima’s Japanese body had somewhat different meanings to the Japanese American communities in Southern California. Japanese Americans celebrated the new Miss Universe as their own. Reportedly, numerous Japanese Americans attended the Miss Universe competition, applauding Miss Japan with enthusiasm. As Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain (2006) and Christine Yano (2006) have discussed in their books on Japanese American beauty pageants, such contests were, in part, a response to the way dominant American culture valued beauty contests yet restricted them to majority women. The Miss Nisei Week contest and the Miss Japan American Citizens League were two contests popular with Japanese Americans in California in 1959. Reading reportage on the 1959 Miss Nisei Week festivities, one finds a perfect parallel to the boosterism attending the Miss Universe Contest, but on a smaller scale. Miss Nisei Week, too, placed men in leadership positions and women (except for beauty queens) in supporting roles such as taking charge of food preparation. The competition showcased local Japanese American business and art groups (dancers and singers), featured related public festivities to produce community spirit and attracted tourists to Little Tokyo. As Miss Japan, Kojima was feted in Los Angeles at two banquets organized and attended by Japanese Americans, and soon after becoming Miss Universe, she appeared in a photograph surrounded by Miss Nisei Week hopefuls. Following incarceration in internment camps during World War II and under continued suspicion as more foreign than American (as evident in the Los Angeles Times reference to the “Japanese colony”), many Japanese Americans took pride in Miss Japan’s achievement. For them, Kojima as Miss Universe represented recognition of Asian beauty in general and Japanese beauty in particular. It was her Japanese body—and her recognition in an international beauty competition on their home turf—rather than any attributions to the “postwar” aspects of her height, her straight legs, or personality that had meaning for them. The Rafu Shimpo, for example, reported that Kojima’s victory proved that the “reputation of Japanese women has elevated,” that “Japanese beauty” had been recognized, and called Kojima in one headline, “the pride of Japan.” Japanese American joy over Kojima’s victory was also reported in Shufu to seikatsu: the article observes how pleased Japanese Americans in the audience were to see that Kojima exhibited no sense of the “shy embarrassment” (hazukashigari) associated with Japanese women, but walked the runway confidently. Further, the article describes how Japanese Americans caught their breath when it appeared Miss Japan was going

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to be the first runner-up or even Miss Universe, and “when she won the title seconds later, they rushed to the foot of the stage, reaching up to shake hands with the tearful, happy Kojima.”60 One week after becoming Miss Universe, Kojima went to Elysian Fields Park in Los Angeles where immigrants from Yamaguchi and Okayama, prefectures relatively close to Kochi, were holding festivities. They greeted her as their celebrity.61 The Japaneseness or Asianness of Kojima’s body was cause for celebration among some Japanese, too. Comments along these lines had orientalist overtones, reading the Miss Universe victory as recognition of an Asian aesthetics through the beautiful body of Miss Japan, and recall Mrs Mogi’s pride in so-called Asian spirituality. Ultraconservative Prime Minister Kishi, who was then in Rio de Janeiro, was quoted as saying, “We are all happy that Miss Kojima won the contest. Not only is she physically beautiful but also she has beauty of the soul and beauty of the mind. Japanese always seek the ideal of beauty of the soul.”62 The October 1959 issue of the popular magazine Fujin kurabu lauded Kojima as “a typical Eastern beauty, a pearl of the Orient.”63 Debate over the meanings of Kojima as both a “pearl of the Orient” and an Americanized beauty intensified after she returned home to Japan.

Miss Universe returns to Japan On August 14, 1959, Kojima Akiko arrived home a hero. On the evening of her return, Max Factor Hollywood sponsored a 30-minute television show celebrating her victory and homecoming. One hundred camera people and 1,200 well-wishers gathered at Tokyo’s International airport to see Kojima step off the airplane in “a jeweled tiara and a silk kimono.”64 The Japan Times reported that there was “far more excitement than that generated just a few days before by Prime Minister Kishi returning home from a month-long trip to Europe and Latin America.”65 Yet no sooner had Miss Universe disembarked than she was busy denying reports about herself. She denied the rumor that she wanted to marry an American and settle down in the United States. She vehemently denied the report that she had resorted to cosmetic surgery. Nevertheless, there was continuing suspicion about the naturalness of her hourglass figure, about Max Factor Hollywood’s interest in her victory, and the usefulness of her victory at that particular juncture in US-Japan relations. Considering each of these rumors in turn reveals the particular meanings associated with the beauty

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contestant as an ambitious person, a racialized body, and as a representative of Japan to the world. On August 13, an article appeared in The Independent, Press-Telegram, just after Kojima had left Long Beach for Japan, reporting that a Japanese surgeon told the Japanese newspaper Sankei newspaper that Miss Kojima had visited him earlier that summer for breast enlargement. The surgeon claimed that he had injected her breasts with silicon to create the 37-inch bust line. Whether or not it is true, the charge of breast enlargement draws further attention to the ways in which ideas of postwar women’s liberation and Japan’s close connections to the United States were played out in changes in women’s bodies. There were fears that the Japanese woman’s political life was being altered artificially, and that her body was being changed for the worse as well. The focus on artificially enlarged breasts no doubt recalled painful memories of the sexual politics of the occupation. As Laura Miller’s research into the Japanese beauty industry has shown, sex workers in the early postwar did indeed have silicon directly injected into their breasts in the hopes of attracting American customers. Of course, such treatments damaged their health and even led to death in some cases.66 In his critique of the Miss Universe contest published in the October 1959 issue of Fujin kōron, critic Natsubori Masamoto questioned whether Kojima’s shapely body had not in fact assuaged Japanese women’s feeling of inferiority to the white bodies of Hollywood stars, as some claimed, but only driven them to desire cosmetic surgery so they could look more like her. (Indeed, as Mark McLelland’s research has shown, popular magazines on sexuality in Japan in the early 1950s promoted breast therapies and surgery to women and made unflattering comparisons of Japanese bodies to Hollywood stars’ figures.)67 In either case, Natsubori argued, Japanese women were still being made to feel inferior to an ideal shape few had hope of attaining.68 Still others remarked that whether or not Kojima had resorted to surgery, she was “too tall to be a model for Japanese women,” thus lending some support to the assumption that foreign judges chose Kojima because she looked “more Western than Oriental.”69 The notion that Kojima might look more “Western” than “Oriental” also played into rumors about the role that Max Factor Hollywood, as a major sponsor of Miss Universe, had played in her victory. About five days after Kojima’s victory and after much publicity over her win in Japan, Max Factor Hollywood ran an announcement in the Yomiuri newspaper staking exclusive claim to Kojima as Miss Universe for the year of her reign. She would be the face of their new

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line of cosmetics launched in Japan. The next day’s edition of the Yomiuri ran a cartoon satirizing Max Factor’s policy. The caption reads, “Exclusive Rights of American Firm—Hands off!” The comic depicts Miss Universe, in her crown and royal cape, riding on the back of a big, long-nosed “American sponsor,” while the little Japanese businessmen of Japan’s cosmetic industry are literally being kicked about by the American sponsor. The suspicion about Max Factor’s involvement in Miss Kojima’s win continued. Max Factor was about to launch a product line in Japan, and its newly founded Japanese office was the beginning of its expansion into Asia. Although Max Factor strongly denied influencing the outcome of the Miss Universe contest, Japanese companies still had reason to worry about this internationally thriving corporation entering the intensely competitive world of the Japanese cosmetics industry. Since Japanese cosmetics companies had long been the sponsors of the Miss Japan contest, the news of their most famous Miss Japan becoming the exclusive model of their giant US competitor was galling indeed.70 In fact, each Miss Universe delegate, as a prerequisite for pageant victory, had to bring to Long Beach “a sworn affidavit that she has not made any commitments, written or verbal, to any products of any commercial organization.”71 Contest regulations, publicized in pageant programs, made clear Miss Universe’s obligation to a year of exclusive obligation to the Miss Universe sponsors. In the end, the Japanese businessmen confessed that they had not looked into the rules carefully because they had not expected Miss Japan to win.72 The coincidence of a Japanese victory in the Miss Universe contest during a critical moment in US-Japan diplomatic relations also gave rise in Japan to charges that the contest had been fixed. On July 28th, just three days after Kojima became Miss Universe, seven Japanese warships sailed into Long Beach; two of them lent by the United States. Such evidence of American involvement in building Japan’s Self-Defense Force (established in 1954) underscored the strategic importance of Japan to the containment policies of the United States in the Pacific. Yet The Independent, Press-Telegram reported Miss Universe’s visit to the ships as a date with her countrymen, continuing the jovial tone of the contest reportage and turning this example of US-Japan military alliance into another harmlessly fun, touristic event. Surrounded by Japanese sailors, Kojima looks taller than many of them. Similarly, on August 9, just a few days before Kojima returned to Japan, she was at Los Angeles International airport to greet Prime Minister Kishi who was on the last legs of his month-long 11-nation tour through Latin America and Western Europe. An Associated Press photo of the pair shaking hands shows the Prime Minister smiling as he

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looks up at the tall beauty queen; the title of the accompanying article reads, “Security Pact Talks to End Soon: Kishi.”73As Natsubori commented in his Fujin kōron critique, taking a cynical view of the Miss Universe contest as a political tool was common. Hadn’t the choice of a Colombian Miss Universe worked well to quell anti-US feelings in South America the year before, he wrote, and hadn’t Itō Kinuko’s success in the 1953 Miss Universe contest been rumored as a strategy to contain the same kind of resistance in Japan in the wake of the 1952 peace treaty?74 Although Natsubori argues that seeing Kojima’s victory as part of an organized conspiracy is farfetched, he also writes that Japan’s current situation makes it necessary to look closely at the political climate feeding such rumors.75 Japanese critics were not the only ones who believed political interests determined who won the Miss Universe contest; some letters to the local Long Beach paper voiced similar concerns. In contrast, the Sankei newspaper, one of the Miss Japan contest sponsors, reported Kojima’s victory and the congratulations offered by the Miss Universe executive producer Oscar Meinhardt as “a sign of nothing other than the U.S., by adopting a stance of being among equals, making a genuine effort to appreciate the participants from every nation represented.”76 Despite these rumors, Kojima maintained a busy schedule in Japan, and rather like Princess Ann in Roman Holiday, carried on her role as unofficial ambassador. The Sankei newspaper photographed her meeting on August 16 with Prime Minister Kishi, only after a week after their initial meeting in Los Angeles. An accompanying photograph depicts the two sitting on office chairs, facing each other directly across a low table, as though equals.77 On August 18, the Sankei newspaper runs a photo of the smiling Kojima greeting the mayor of Tokyo, who appears small and awkward in comparison, as he congratulates her on behalf of the city; she humbly thanks the city for making it possible for her to enter the contest.78 The next day, the Japan Times runs a photo of Kojima paying “a courtesy call” to Foreign Minister Fujiyama.79 Kojima attended fetes in her honor—a Tokyo reception hosted by Max Factor Hollywood and a celebration in Kochi reportedly attended by 180,000 fans.80 She also resumed modeling. As Andrew Gordon has pointed out, a Janome Sewing Machine Company advertisement promoted modern domesticity by featuring Kojima dressed in a white wedding gown and veil poised behind a sewing machine.81 Once derided as an “export model,” Kojima became the role model—the domestic princess in her shiny new kitchen—for the increasing vitality of domestic consumption of goods for the home and its association with an empowered and luxurious role for the Japanese housewife.

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Conclusion The case of Kojima Akiko as Miss Universe 1960 offers a rich text for interpretation. In the United States, Kojima presented a reassuring picture. Her status as a beauty queen, her appearance in kimono, and her halting English muted her display of ambition and reinforced American notions of Japan as a feminized land of refined arts and gentle women. At the same time, Kojima’s victory was read, like the princess debut of Shōda Michiko, as another sign of progressive American influence in Japan. The reactions that Kojima’s victory provoked in Japan, on the other hand, can be read as an indication of disparate Japanese attitudes toward being made “America’s geisha ally,” tensions that erupted into massive protest the following spring after Kishi and the LDP rammed the unpopular US-Japan Security Treaty through the House. In the summer of 1959, however, many Japanese newspapers and women’s magazines lauded Japan’s Miss Universe as genuine—democratic Japanese royalty that symbolized girl, body, and nation fully recovered from the war and transformed by her own merits into a beautiful competitor. In the cultural politics of the late 1950s, Miss Japan traveling, parading confidently on stage, giving speeches in English, being honored by the Japanese American community, being judged the top competitor by an international panel of judges, and being greeted by the Prime Minister signaled progress in women’s rights for many Japanese, too, and the fulfillment of democratic reforms aimed at giving women selfconfidence and a presence in public life. Once back home and modeling in advertisements to sell the newest goods, Japan’s Miss Universe became a symbol as well of postwar economic recovery. But, as we have seen, critics in Japan such as Natsubori could read all these signs as quite a different story. For him, the Japanese beauty queen crowned as Miss Universe obfuscated the particularity of Japan’s unequal relationship to the United States, a relationship that was reshaping the body politic and the actual bodies of Japanese citizens at home and on the world stage. It was also a relationship, as newspaper quotes show, that some feared would encourage Japanese women to flourish at the expense of Japanese men, leaving them out of the picture altogether. Kojima Akiko had little control over the various meanings attached to this story. She did exercise a good deal of choice over the course of her own life. At a time of few opportunities for girls to gain fame and fortune, especially fatherless girls with only a high school education, Kojima used her tall frame, her determination, and her intelligence to succeed in the new arena of beauty

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pageants. One does not need to celebrate beauty contests to recognize her boldness. She had the courage to travel abroad and face international competition, and the talent to make a remarkable impression. In winning the Miss Universe crown, she brought recognition to herself, her family and her recovering nation, and achieved a significant measure of financial success. No wonder Kojima inspired so many other girls to enter beauty contests in 1959 and perhaps to envy her future as the beautiful princess in the public eye and at home.

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Figure 7.1 Nō Mask of the Fukai Type. Photograph © 2014 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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7

From the Housewife’s Kitchen to the Witches’ Den: Fantasies of Female Power in Enchi Fumiko’s Masks

For a radically different perspective on the 1950s debates over princesses, housewives, and beauty queens in Japan, this concluding chapter takes us from shiny modern kitchens to a fictional spaced dubbed the “witches’ den.” This perspective comes from Enchi Fumiko’s now classic novel, Onnamen (Masks), originally serialized in the journal Gunzō (Arts group) from April through June 1958, and regularly taught in English translation in classes in the United States on Japanese literature.1 Reading this famous novel in view of popular narratives of kitchen princesses, democratic reforms, and women’s liberation in the 1950s interprets Masks in a specific historical context and reveals the cultural landscape that Enchi Fumiko’s macabre novel resists. By the same token, reading Masks as a critique of postwar culture gives us a new way to view the photo of Crown Princess Michiko in her palace kitchen, as we see in this chapter’s conclusion. The intricacy of Masks’ allusions to classical Japanese literature, particularly Tale of Genji and Nō theater, the complexity of its psychosexual imagery, and its place within Enchi’s substantial oeuvre have been insightfully discussed by literary scholars, particularly Doris Bargen and Nina Cornyetz.2 In contrast, this chapter will analyze how Masks spoke against the dominant narratives of the 1950s. Consequently, rather than treating the entire novel here, this concluding chapter narrows to issues in Masks discordant with the triumphant narrative of Japanese women’s postwar progress as seen, for example, in the Time magazine cover story of 1959 discussed in the Introduction. After an introduction to the novel’s themes and plot, I use the following ideas to foreground the contrasts between Masks and the largely positive representations of postwar housewives discussed in the book up to this point. First, I take up representations in Masks of

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the “woman in the postwar home,” her alleged independence, and her fascination with the 1950s glamour displayed in fashion magazines. We see how in Enchi’s terms, the ordinary, hardworking Japanese housewife and the trendy fashion model alike pale in comparison to the gothic grandeur of a woman freed from housewifery and the witches’ coven she rules. Related to this, we find a similar binary of time operating in the novel with modern-day office workers dismissed as chained to the clock and the lead female character steeped in the aesthetics of eros and revenge living within a natural time of moon and menstrual cycles, and even supernatural connections to times past. References to the Pacific War and the Cold War intrude in the narrative, but they remain merely intrusions, having an effect to be sure, but not altering the deeper aesthetic, karmic forces that have been centuries in the making. Hence, China is not so much the space of recent invasion, but the grand location of ancient painting and poetry, and the United States, despite its military power, appears juvenile within the psychosexual politics of Masks. In the end, however, Masks characterizes young postwar women as cut off from this aesthetic heritage and the imaginative powers and burdens of Japanese women’s literary legacy. Sanitized and orderly, the modern kitchen has no room for the disruptive Japanese past. At the same time, Enchi’s imaginative narrative of female resistance offers no fundamental challenge to patriarchy. The “reality gap” between the equality promised in the new constitution and the sexist barriers women experience in everyday life is doomed to continue.

Beauty and deceit in Masks: An introduction to plot and characters We begin by considering the aesthetic world of Masks, its main characters and their motivations. Fair warning to those who have not read the novel—this synopsis reveals the crimes at its heart. References to the classical arts abound in Masks. The novel cites the Nō theater in all manner of ways from the lore behind its costumes and masks to hints of the theater’s struggles to stay alive in a postwar world of competing entertainments. Even the structure of the work itself is an homage to Nō: the novel is divided into three sections that replicate the jo-ha-kyū (introduction, development, rapid conclusion) progression of a Nō play, and, in a move that fashions Masks as a tale about Japanese women, each section is titled by the name of one of Nō’s many archetypal women’s masks.3 Compositions of tanka poetry, deeply held affinities for Tale of Genji, and references to other classical works and ancient

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paintings both Chinese and Japanese thread through each chapter in Masks. An erotic interest in séances, spirits, and ghosts intertwine with the main characters’ engagement in an aesthetic past. This engagement inspires elegant allusions for the main characters’ every pose and deed and pulls them outside of everyday time into a world of desire and practiced elegance. Deceitful intervention in the privileges of patriarchy is one of the driving forces in Masks. The protagonist, Toganō Mieko, a leader in poetry circles, is the wealthy widow of an abusive husband, banker Masatsugu, whose estate in Tokyo was once almost too vast to measure. Mieko has long covered up how she defrauded the patrilineal pride of the ancient Toganō family by passing off her twin children, Akio and Harume, fathered by her secret lover, as her husband’s own. This act was a vengeful one: Mieko had suffered a miscarriage because of a fall secretly engineered by the housemaid Aguri, a pretty young woman whom, in the long tradition of men in his powerful Niigata family, Masatsugu had selected from among the maidens in his homelands, brought to his new house in Tokyo as maid and mistress, and twice forced to have an abortion. (Masatsugu’s freedom to cause and terminate pregnancy not only speaks here to his cruelty, but also to his power to evade the laws that made abortion illegal, even during times when women were exhorted to bear children.) After the miscarriage, Aguri is sent home, Mieko and her family receive an apology, and Mieko apparently suppresses her anger, taking up her wifely place in the Toganō home. For his part, Masatsugu allows Mieko the freedom to follow her own interests, which lead her to poetry circles and meeting the man who became her lover. This mysterious man later died of disease at the front after being conscripted and sent to China shortly after the October 1937 outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War—a fateful time in history, but one emphasized in Masks as a personal turning point. Also at this point, Mieko authored and self-published a long, provocative essay, “An Account of the Shrine in the Fields,” where she sympathizes and identifies with the proud character of Tale of Genji, the Rokujō Lady, whose angry spirit was blamed for the deaths of two other women intimate with Prince Genji, by linking her with ancient female shamanism.4 Mieko muses that Rokujō’s character signals “women’s extreme ego suppression” as combined with shamanistic practice “in opposition to men” (57). In the conclusion of the essay, Mieko foregrounds female rage against patriarchal privilege as so intense that it is both embodied by Japanese women and the source of their out-of-body power: Perhaps it is true, as Buddhism teaches us, that this [shamanic] power constitutes woman’s greatest burden and delusion—and ultimately her greatest sin. But the

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sin is inseparable from a woman’s being. It is a stream of blood flowing on and on, unbroken, from generation to generation. Just as there is an archetype of woman as the object of man’s eternal love, so there must be an archetype of her as the object of his eternal fear, representing, perhaps, the shadow of his own evil actions. The Rokujō lady is an embodiment of this archetype. (57)

As the novel opens in the late 1950s, the war is over, Masatsugu has died, and the Toganō property has been much reduced by occupation-era land reforms. We also learn that Akio, an assistant professor of Heian literature with an interest in shamanism and spirit possession, died four years earlier in an avalanche on Mt Fuji. His beautiful 20-something widow Yasuko, who continues to live with Mieko and acts as her helpmate in poetry activities, continues Akio’s spiritpossession research. Yasuko eventually serves Mieko as an accomplice in “a crime that only women could commit” (126). Brain-damaged in the womb by her twin Akio’s usurpation of space and raised apart from her immediate family due to an old-fashioned association with twins and beastliness, Harume is a stunning beauty. In contrast to her academic brother, she has severely limited intellectual capabilities, a disability that makes Harume vulnerable to Mieko’s machinations. Clues throughout the novel hint at some mysterious plot afoot, but it is only near the end that the reader sees how Mieko involves Yasuko and Harume in the woman-crime that defrauds the Toganō line once again. She continues her lover’s legacy by fooling a man into impregnating Harume while thinking he is seducing Yasuko. Although a doctor warns Mieko that Harume’s pregnancy will likely be dangerous and her own long-time maid begs her to put an end to her evil vengeance, Mieko goes forward: a boy is born and Harume dies in childbirth. Prepared to raise the grandson and “instinctively” connected to “a baby with Akio’s blood in its veins,” Yasuko will leave the Toganō home in Tokyo to move with Mieko to Kamakura, the ancient shogunal capital by the sea (126). In the last scene of the novel, Mieko comes literally face to face with her own deeds as she stares at the Nō mask Fukai (Figure 7.1), a mask carved to represent the sorrow of infinite wells of pain and anger.5 Two male characters, both 33 years old and, like Akio, intellectually curious about spirit possession, are important to forwarding the story: Assistant Professor Ibuki Tsuneo, husband of Sadako and father of 3-year-old daughter Ruriko, was senior to Akio at their university and shared with him a scholarly interest in Heian literature. Ibuki is also the man tricked into fathering Mieko’s grandchild.

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Ibuki’s old friend from college days and now his rival for Yasuko’s affections, the boyish looking Mikame Toyoki is a psychologist in “daily contact with the mentally unsound” who makes an academic hobby of studying shamanism through methodologies devised by scholars of folklore (81). As a bachelor, Mikame has the luxury of spending his money and time as he chooses, and indulges in luxuries such as purchasing a foreign automobile, taking rooms in expensive Tokyo hotels for some private writing time, and initiating liaisons with women of different social classes for sport—even his effort to win over Yasuko with lots of presents is “basically a game” (117). Although indulgent bachelor Mikame is heavy, Ibuki is thin—perhaps a comment on the fact that his time and finances are overseen by his wife. Throughout the novel, readers view the men’s intellectual pursuit of spirit possession, their desire to know more about Mieko and Yasuko and what drives them, and, most of all, the privileged space they occupy in postwar Japan as men, and professional, salaried white-collar men at that. In contrast, Mieko and Yasuko’s engagement with shamanism is intensely personal, and in Mieko’s case, visceral, as her sympathy for the Rokujō Lady resonates with her own desire for vengeance following her husband’s cruelty and her passionate attachment to her lover. The men discover Mieko’s 1937 essay, employing their analytical abilities in an attempt to understand what motivates Mieko. In what follows, we look specifically at moments in Masks that intersect with and comment on women in Japan in the 1950s.

The housewife Housewives and fashion models, discussed thus far in this book as paragons of democratic progress, emerge as brittle and commonplace in Masks. Ibuki Sadako, for example, is the postwar “professional housewife” through and through, and analysis of her role in the novel sets the stage for provocative contrast with Mieko. Scholarship in English on Japanese housewives sometimes cites Enchi’s influential 1957 novel Onnazaka (The Waiting Years), set in the late nineteenth century, and its enduring protagonist, Tomo, the maltreated wife and mother at the center of a wealthy multigenerational family and manager of its properties, to explain how long-entrenched values continued to shape the ethics of the postwar housewife.6 Like Mieko, Tomo is married to a malicious, influential man, and it is his desire for young mistresses that leads Tomo to her own unethical acts— procuring concubines for him. For all this, Tomo remains a sympathetic, even majestically dignified character. Sadako’s character, on the other hand, incites

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little empathy. In Masks, Mieko, the “witch,” is the one associated with complex interiority, while housewife Sadako defines the mundane. A year or two younger than Toganō Yasuko, Sadako has none of her charm, delicate beauty, or mystery. She devotes all her time to the care of her daughter and her housework. Sadako is so short of uniqueness that the author gives no description of her background and almost none of her appearance or the house she manages—as if to say all housewives are alike in their predictable uniformity. We do learn that Sadako is poised, clear-sighted, and determined about managing her household. When her husband’s affair with Yasuko threatens family stability and he takes to furtively using his extra income for this, too, Sadako does not hesitate to exhaust her small savings to hire a private detective to ferret out the strange occurrences at the Toganō home. In the process, she learns much about Mieko’s background and her husband’s frequent amorous visits there at “all hours of the day and night” (117). Like the women described in Chapter 4 by Hirabayashi Taiko as “postwar” in their fearless actions in the face of a husband’s misdeeds, Sadako sees herself as one “that has to get to the bottom of whatever’s bothering me” (117). She, too, confronts her husband with “a list of facts” (128), confident that he still wants “to keep his home life intact” (118). She has no interest in her husband’s fascination with spirit possession. Rather, she prods him to keep up with everyday life. When Sadako nags Ibuki to pay their property taxes, he aptly retorts that what would frighten her most is “a husband out of work” (59). He says this without sympathy for her, but merely self-pity as though he is another “Washing Machine Husband” plugged into the grid for the convenience of his wife. Ibuki’s description of Sadako as “immaculate” is important here too in distinguishing the housewife from the witch. After his initial lovemaking with Yasuko, an encounter he describes as lush, Ibuki can only think of his daughter and wife as constraints. Neither the “sweetness” of his daughter nor the “neatness” of his “slender, immaculate wife” warm his feelings (43). Sadako’s tidy appearance points to her success as a housewife, reminding us of comments in the debate over Mrs Mogi’s letter about wifely pride in spotless, well-ironed table cloths. There is a suggestion of dry, crisp clothing. “Immaculate” can also imply that, unlike Ibuki and Yasuko, she is faultless. This is altogether different from the seductively “moist uncleanness” Ibuki associates with Yasuko and Mieko, as we see further. Sadako’s neat and orderly quality reminds him of the routinized life he must lead as a proper husband and father. The contrast between Sadako and the Toganō women also reflects a divide between mothers and Ibuki’s imagination of “whores.” As Nina Cornyetz explains, the postwar saw the fusion of “maternity and female value” that gave mothers a respected and highly public

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position in Japan, but one “radically split from the sexual.”7 This reinforced the homosocial organization of women and men, and also supported men’s privilege to seek the commodified pleasures of women in the mizu shōbai “water trade” of geisha, bar hostesses, and sex workers. Captivated by the sensuality of the Toganō women, Ibuki imagines one night when both Mieko and Yasuko see him to the door of their home that he is “being escorted by two prostitutes down the hall of a brothel in some long-ago time” (79). Even though Mieko is a mother, such descriptions add to her aura of mystery and her difference from Sadako who fulfills the stereotype of the sexless, upright postwar mother. As a housewife with her feet firmly planted in reality, Sadako scoffs at the idea, broached by her husband, that even deep resentment could ever transform her into a Heian court lady’s “possessive spirit.” “I’m hardly the type,” she says; she had given up on higher powers when her brother died in the war despite her prayers (59). But this does not mean that Sadako cannot become irate over the Toganō incursions into the security of her home life. Scenes of Sadako venting her righteous anger depict her as losing her “ladylike” manner, derisively chastising Ibuki and Mikame for letting themselves fall prey to Mieko and Yasuko, and berating the women for their sinister ways. At the same time, she loses any physical charm, melting into a distasteful cacophony of complaints. Listening to her, Mikame can only see her body and voice as hardened, fragmented, and irritating. He watches “Sadako’s thin lips moving busily” (119), her glare is “rigid,” and when she reports in a matter-of-fact way about hiring the detective, he is “stunned by the hard and smoothly enameled surface [Sadako] possessed, which enabled her to turn aside all suggestion of impurity or ambiguity” (115). Witnessing her anger, Mikame feels that this is the “least attractive side of a woman” and can see why Ibuki prefers Yasuko over his wife. For his part, angry at being found out, Ibuki coldly mocks Sadako as his “idiot wife” for hiring the detective, insisting that, “A rational woman is as ridiculous as a flower held together with wire” (128). He diminishes her for wanting “to expose everything in a world she couldn’t even see” (128). In fact, Sadako has taken a rational approach to her problem by hiring an investigator and she sees through the Toganō enticements to the probability of a child being born whose father’s identity is unknown. Although Mieko expresses mild sympathy for Sadako, in the men’s eyes, her anger is pathetic. In Mikame’s terms, she is “nothing at all like the brooding sort of wrath that could force a woman’s spirit to leave her body and wreak vengeance on a rival” (118). Nothing in the novel’s narration makes Sadako, the housewife, a sympathetic character; rather, she is rendered flat, strident, and annoying. In this, Enchi’s characterization of the housewife is no different from the unflattering “noisiness” of the middle-

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aged housewives clamoring at city hall for a children’s playground in the opening scenes of the famous 1952 Kurosawa film Ikiru (To Live). Masks and Ikiru shape the men caught having to listen to this fury as the ones deserving of sympathy. Men’s annoyance with housewives’ assertiveness also recalls Shimizu Keiko’s claim in the Housewife Debate that only those who fear women’s speech attempt to trivialize it. In Ibuki’s case, turning away from his wife’s assertions in favor of following the mysterious women of the Toganō home is exactly what transforms him into their easy prey.

The fashion model One young woman, described by the narrator as “a fashion model, perhaps, or a dancer,” makes the briefest of appearances in Masks. She meets Mikame in a hotel lobby to return his camera. Despite Mikame’s enthusiastic plans to propose marriage to Yasuko, he had driven with this woman to Hakone, the well-known hot springs town near Mt Fuji, just the other day. The woman says nothing, but her appearance speaks volumes. She sports a mink stole, her hair has been dyed red, and she holds herself in an affected manner. Irritated by her “flashy” appearance, Ibuki, who usually admires Mikame’s taste in women thinks: “And for all her outer flashiness one sensed a dryness inside—a flimsiness, as though her joints cracked” (90). Arid and anonymous, this character seems out of place in a novel about spirit possession and classical aesthetics, but as other analyses of Masks have shown, even minor elements have a place in this complex novel. In contrast to the model, Mieko and Yasuko are anything but dry, as discussed earlier. Indeed, just before the young woman’s appearance, Ibuki muses “that the relationship between Mieko and Yasuko possessed a quality of moistness” (90). This contrast points to Enchi’s disaffection for contemporary tastes and highlights the profound and erotic depth that she associates with Mieko, and by extension, the literary allusions and ancient Nō masks that elaborate her character. One does not get the sense that either the fashion model or Sadako read the classics or follow poetry. Further considering the fashion model’s appearance connects Masks to the 1950s. The “fashion model” is the source of an image for mass duplication in the numerous magazines proliferating in Japan in the postwar. The emphasis is on her stylish exterior, as if there are no hidden wells of imagination. Yet, the 1950s star text of the Japanese fashion model, as we have seen, was read as the epitome of women’s postwar self-confidence and independence. Mention of

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the model in Masks can recall the vogue for beauty contests in the 1950s discussed in Chapter 6 and the ease with which some women such as Itō Kinuko and Kojima Akiko, to name two of the most famous examples, crossed from modeling to beauty contests and back to even more lucrative modeling careers. Although criticized as overly American and therefore greedy and selfish, Itō and Kojima inspired thousands of Japanese girls to enter beauty contests. They modeled chic clothing and, as beauty-queen prize winners and models, promoted the new appliances that signaled the housewife’s modern life of luxury and fulfillment. Japanese commentators in the 1950s read the beauty queen’s tall, healthy body on runway display as a positive sign of democracy taking hold in Japan. It is an image a world away from the suppressed anger and magical shamanic body at the center of Masks. That this anonymous Masks character might also be a dancer calls to mind that early beauty contest entrants in the 1950s came from the ranks of entertainers, such as dancers and bar hostesses. Such association would have lent a certain vulgarity to this character. It is also possible that the garishly dressed character is not a model or dancer, but merely a pretender trying to replicate the alluring look of the day, much like the femme fatale boldly dressed entirely in red (Figure 4.1). This, too, would lessen her appeal in the context of Masks where the few references to current fashion also allude to the artificial and dry. Although Mikame, for example, acknowledges that “it’s the style for women to be glamorous,” he finds “city women” are “too clever with makeup,” losing too soon “that perishable, flowerlike beauty” (13, 15). In contrast, he finds that Yasuko, although past 25, has a “face clear and moist as justopened petals” and that she satisfies a man’s “instinctive yearning for smallness and fragility” (15, 13). Like Sadako, the city women as viewed through Mikame and Ibuki’s eyes are undeniably modern, but unappealing. When women explicitly voice desire, however, the men are even more put off. In a conversation with Mikame, Ibuki claims that “the more outspoken and aggressive women become, the less attractive they are” (87). Most disgusting is the young woman, such as a “university coed,” letting a man know that her “time of the month” has made her lustful (87). Similarly, we learn that Mieko’s lover admitted that he possessed “the unreasonable fastidiousness of the Japanese male, to whom the blood of menstruation is of all blood the dirtiest” (104–5). In a sense, such references to menstrual blood connect these young urban women to the Toganō home where the childlike Harume drips blood, a sign of her disorderly fertility. References to blood also resonate with the concluding thoughts in Mieko’s essay about Japanese women’s rage against patriarchy, and by extension, their intense, shamanic sexuality, as being passed on “generation after generation” through blood. Menstrual blood

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as a sign of power—whether evident in trendy postwar coeds bragging about their heightened sexuality or Mieko imagining a flow of female rage—is not something men want to contemplate. Their preference is for the Yasuko-like woman who appears intellectual, but “soft and clinging as a pussycat” (88). Seen through men’s eyes, 1950s glamour and assertive women fail to excite. Indeed, little about 1950s trends interests Ibuki or Mikame. The women who most locate them in the present day—Sadako and the model/dancer— particularly irritate Ibuki. Mieko and Yasuko pull them into a different kind of time altogether, and this, too, becomes a comment on urban life in the 1950s.

Telling time in Masks The indistinct time associated with the Toganō home contrasts sharply with the sight of productive office workers scurrying among Tokyo’s tall postwar office buildings revving the engine of Japan’s phenomenal economic recovery. One evening as Ibuki visits Mikame in his seventh-floor room in a modern hotel near the busy hub of Shinbashi Station, Mikame suggests he look out the window at the sight below. The office workers down at street level appear as “objects struck from a mold and walking off silently at the same unvarying speed” (83). As though an anthropologist introducing Ibuki to a foreign space, Mikame, who is fond of observing this back street from his hotel window at all hours, explains its life. Vagrants and then cleaning women inhabit the area in the early morning hours, but it is the office workers who own it most of the day. The men’s elevation and distance from the people below and their academic gaze magnifies the anonymity of the workers and their own sense of subjectivity. Somewhat cynically, they speak of “quitting time” as “the liberation of the office worker” (83). The buildings, tightly pressed together as if to form a “canyon,” bear different colors and the scars of age such that one can almost make out faces in them, but the people living in the moment who inhabit the buildings are indistinguishable. This scene mirrors anxieties in the United States in the same era over the conformist elements of postwar culture evident in best-sellers such as Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and David Riesman’s 1950 sociological study, The Lonely Crowd, both translated into Japanese in the mid1950s.8 For Ibuki, however, the sight of “this geometric neighborhood with its neat files of silent office workers whose lives were measured so precisely by the clock” reminds him that his “obsession with Mieko and Yasuko” was causing him to lose

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his grip on time (84). This realization stirs fear in Ibuki even as he seems repelled by the precision and conformity of the office workers. After leaving Mikame to his model/dancer in the hotel, Ibuki pauses outside the station, catching sight of “the moon, shining like a chip of splintered ice” above the clock dial that had appeared to “glitter like brass” “from the hotel room” (92). He makes no comment, but the imagery resonates with the binary of yin (feminine, moon symbol) and yang (masculine, sun symbol), between which Ibuki feels caught. As noted, Sadako nags him to stay up with the march of the clock and the timely payment of his taxes. The Toganō home, moving in sync with the moon, offers a different kind of liberation than quitting time—the pull of immersion in the imaginary.

The kiss: On board with the Americans There is another minor scene in Masks, one including an American couple, that appears discordant with the main narrative, but functions as a comment on the cultural landscape of postwar Japan. It occurs at the charged point where the intimacy between Ibuki and Yasuko is intensifying. Through Mieko’s skilful manipulation to bring the two together, Ibuki and Yasuko find themselves on an express train bound from Kyoto to Tokyo. When the train pulls into Atami, a seaside town a few hours from Tokyo with a reputation as a place for illicit assignations, Ibuki abruptly pulls Yasuko off the train. It is an impulsive decision that leads to a night of sexual abandon that he later describes as “a sensual feast of astonishing richness” (43). Up to this point on their train ride, they had talked about Yasuko’s complicated relationship to Mieko, her late husband’s desire to escape his mother’s influence by fleeing Japan for South America, and Yasuko’s thoughts about remarrying, not for love or any sentimental attachment to the “marriage ritual,” but to break decisively her own ties to Mieko. Their conversation was interrupted when an American couple entered from the dining car and took seats across the aisle. Ibuki “glanced coldly in their direction” and then continued talking with Yasuko. The description of the Americans is brief, and it is not explicit what about them incites Ibuki’s chilly reaction: The young man, whose short-cropped hair resembled the fur of a small animal, sat with one arm around the woman and said something to her in a nasal voice, all the while fondling her hand as if loath to give it up even for a moment. (29)

A short while later in the conversation, Ibuki is engrossed in Yasuko’s description of Mieko’s “peculiar power to move events in whatever direction she pleases, while

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she stays motionless” when he catches sight of the Americans again, visible just beyond Yasuko’s head. He quickly dismisses the image, taking note only that: he could see the American woman’s flaxen hair swaying playfully against the man’s shoulder. They were asleep, leaning against one another like a pair of tame animals. (30)

Certainly in 1950s Tokyo, Americans would have been a common sight on major train routes, but why this brief appearance in Masks? In other parts of this book, in the 1955 Housewife Debate and especially in the 1949–50 debate over Mrs Mogi’s letter, Americans have played a larger-than-life role, nearly stealing the scene at every entrance. Whether in the form of Mrs Roosevelt, Hollywood film stars or the occupationnaire, the American woman could never be dismissed. She hovered as the ideal of American progress and liberation, and as a woman supported by the gallant American husband standing shoulder-to-shoulder by her side. Even when this American woman was physically absent, as we saw in the Housewife Debate, she still represented a model of modern womanhood that had to be reckoned with. Here, the presence of the American couple is a mere intrusion, and yet they do have a role in this scene. In the context of the 1950s and of Ibuki’s gaining time with Yasuko, we can read the Americans’ brief entrance as a negative comment on the era’s much endorsed values of American sexuality and democracy. The Americans on the train are living up to the common image of Americans in Japan as people who express physical affection in the light of day, in public, without caring who sees—in Enchi’s terms, like “tame animals.” In reality, during the occupation, whether American men were kissing “pan-pan girls” or greeting wives with a kiss, the sight was shocking to Japanese. For American occupation officials, kissing, like the idea of the companionate marriage, signified equality between the sexes. As Mark McLelland has discussed, “the meaning, practice, and cultural appropriateness of kissing” incited much debate in occupied Japan and became imbricated in “new discourses of sexuality.”9 Kissing soon occurred in Japanese movies and in a 1948 production of The Mikado.10 The sense of newness lasted for some time. Even a Bunraku performance of Madame Butterfly in 1956, which included the puppets Pinkerton and Cio-Cio-San embracing, made the news for photographs of its “puppet clinch.”11 We recall the comic moment in Chapter 4, in the 1956 play “Women’s Desires” when Senior Auntie jokes that Junior Auntie and her husband probably tell each other “I love you, I love you” all the time, as “foreigners do,” and Senior Auntie says that she would faint dead away from shock if her husband kissed her every morning before he

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went to work. The ideology of American-style democracy in Japan encompassed the popular culture of music, movies, and novels, and the practices of dating and kissing as well. Yet, Americans and public displays of affection do not fare well in Masks. Enchi’s Americans are not the tall, proud occupiers Mrs Mogi encountered; rather they are anonymous interlopers. Their juvenile, sock-hop behavior is almost painful to observe through Japanese eyes. Sexuality does play a major role in the novel, but it is not the democratic kiss. Nor does the “marriage ritual,” democratic or not, have interest for Yasuko. Rather, sexuality is strongly associated with the witches’ coven—moist and eroticized—channeling an ahistorical female power and earlier scripts of Japanese women’s sexuality. Unbounded and dangerous, it cannot be contained by patriarchy or made to behave by democracy. Nevertheless, Masks does contain a memorable kissing scene, a graphically detailed carnal moment of illicit love radically distant from the sock hop: Yasuko accepted [Ibuki] with a smile, but her tongue twisted and turned like a ballerina, swift and strong, thrusting him back, putting him to flight, sporting freely with him inside her small mouth. Roused by her challenging, tantalizing play, he embraced her with such strength that even in the space of a kiss she cried out. (108)

The erotic in Masks is not playful nor the stuff of the happy endings of American movies, but always connected with the taboo, and often, the other-worldly. Yasuko’s kiss takes place the morning after Ibuki is drugged into seducing Harume, when he felt “transported into another realm” (109). At another point in the novel, Ibuki describes Yasuko as “an experienced whore—one who had mastered every skill” (91) and we have seen his description of Mieko and Yasuko together as “two prostitutes.” In all, the most powerful image of female sexuality in Masks comes from Ibuki’s description of shamanesses, who view sex as sinless and also are prostitutes: The state of inspiration itself is intensely physical, heightening a person’s sensuality to the furthest degree (unlike intellectual labor, which diminishes sexuality), so that the body of a medium in trance comes to seem the very incarnation of sex. (77)

In Masks, the shamaness and the housewife are at opposite ends of a continuum of postwar female sexuality. The shamaness experiences pleasure in an almost supernatural, completely visceral way, but sexual intercourse is merely functional for the housewife, giving her the ability to become a mother. Men’s sexuality can

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also be marked along this continuum—by sex as a duty to their families that chains them to routinized commutes and work and their yearning for pleasure outside of marriage. Men’s fascination with the intensity of shamanic sexuality, as displayed by Ibuki and Mikame, both intrigues and somewhat scares them. Intimations of Mieko and Yasuko’s dōseiai (same-sex love) for each other, implicit in one bedroom scene and suspected by other characters, however, shows that “witches” do not necessarily need to consider men at all in their expressions of desire.

In the witches’ den with Toganō Mieko In an era when the rhetoric of progress and jubilant pronouncements of “how far Japanese have come” are making news, and Sputnik circles the sky, Mieko inhabits a world of her own making, one that is ever receding, tethered to the past.12 Much like Shōda Michiko, though at least a generation older, Mieko, the daughter of a Buddhist priest, had also been a bright, privileged, tennis-playing student at an elite institution—in her case, Ochanomizu Women’s University. A sheltered young lady, she had lived with relatives while attending college. Her marriage into the tradition-bound, high-status, patriarchal Toganō family cut short any possibility of Mieko building on the progressive aspects of her education. She managed life with her husband by immersing herself in poetic circles and attending events that took her out of the house frequently—giving her an unusual mobility for a woman of her class at the time and enabling her illicit love affair. She became “a tanka poet of the romantic school, with roots in the [medieval] Shinkokinshū aesthetic of ‘mystery and depth,’” whose poems have a “lyrical immediacy” (45–6). Mieko has remained in the world of classical poetry, with little interest in the changes in the urban landscape evident by the late 1950s. No fan of the popular postwar pastimes of women’s magazines, television, PTA groups, or department store shopping, Mieko publishes a monthly haiku journal, works with haiku students, and attends social events related to this and other classical arts. Everything about Mieko points to bygone times. An oil painting of Mieko as a college student, commemoration of her graduation, captures the woman of youthful potential and obvious strength that she once was. Bargen argues that its famous painter may even have been her mystery lover.13 By the end of the novel, the painting seems to have taken on gothic properties, hanging in the study that almost no one uses, and overseeing the seduction of Ibuki. The portrait is described as displaying “an old-fashioned beauty with hair swept into a chignon, a russet shawl about her shoulders” (107). On seeing the painting, Ibuki, who doesn’t initially recognize Mieko, feels as if

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he is seeing her for the first time, yet has the sense that, “It’s certainly different from the way she is now” (107). Both he and Yasuko exclaim over the hidden strength in Mieko that the masterful painter has revealed and its potential to “give away her secrets” (108). Yasuko explains that Mieko conceals the painting because it shows her strength, “the part of herself she keeps most deeply hidden now” (108). The narrator describes the painting: complicated effects of light and shadow gave an impression of heaviness and inertness, the oval face with its bright eyes and firmly shut mouth was portrayed with utmost vividness. There was not a trace of the filmy beauty that veiled Mieko now like fold upon fold of thin silk. (107–8)

The “filmy beauty” that envelopes Mieko now sets her apart from the hardened Sadako and the garish fashion model. Sometimes likened to a Nō mask, Mieko’s face is elusive and unmarked by her tragic personal history—it contains neither “sorrow nor regret” (64). Ibuki is struck by how hard it is to get a mental picture of her face. Descriptions of Mieko allude to images of ancient women in Japanese literature, Buddhist iconography, and a T’ang poem. Mikame thinks of “a slightly vulgar background of some sort—a heavy, ornate tapestry or a large blossoming tree” (17). Yasuko poetically describes Mieko as “a woman whose heart was as secretive as a garden of flowers as night: the mingled scent of unseen blossoms trailed from her every gesture” (92). Mieko’s ephemeral character makes her endlessly curious to Ibuki, Mikame, and Yasuko. It is Mieko’s wounds—the betrayal and miscarriage and the guilt over the deeds she will execute to produce her lover’s grandchild—that drive her actions and even her passion for classical literature. This pulls her away from the reality of day to day life. Even her maid Yū, when pleading with Mieko to give up her plot and relieve Harume of her pregnancy “gazed at Mieko’s face—a face well known to her from years of service—and watched its features begin slipping into a cloud of obscurity” and tries to “force the elusive face to return” and fully realize what she is doing (123). Mieko is not the responsible Sadako, the housewife firmly located in time, who protects her daughter by reining in her husband. Rather, Mieko seems more alive in her fascination with the spirit world than anywhere else. We also learn about Mieko by the space she inhabits. With obvious disgust, Sadako sums up the Toganō home by exclaiming, “That house is a witches’ den” (119). Unlike the home as a wholesome space managed by the housewife, the old Toganō house is gothic, unclean, and no good. It is haunted, in a sense, by the ghostly after-lives of Masatsugu’s abuse of women, evil that pushes Mieko to concoct her own diabolical plot. Thus, the Toganō home, almost a character in itself, provides the eerie setting for Mieko’s crime, and speaks to the family’s past

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and current privileges. After land reform, Mieko had sold most of the property, including the enormous main house built by Masatsugu that had required the work of many servants. She also had to part with many of the family’s things. There is no mention of the estate suffering harm from the fire bombs that devastated Tokyo near the end of the war. As though a court lady of olden times, Mieko has retired from her main-house roles of wife and mother and now pursues poetry while living in a retreat on the former estate. The old structure is surrounded by grounds large enough to contain a pond, garden, and small hill—a rare property amid the urban density of Tokyo, a souvenir of former times. Since the deaths of her husband and son, there is no male house head. The property is owned by Mieko and inhabited only by women—Yasuko, Harume, her old servant Yū, and housekeepers. In contrast to the sparkling kitchens promoted in 1950s women’s magazines, descriptions of the Toganō property throughout the novel refer to its aged quality, as if everything about it verges on a kind of romantic disrepair. Unlike the small, functional apartments being built across the urban landscape for housewives and their salaried husbands, this old Japanese home, fragrant and floral, is a maze of spaces as puzzling as Mieko herself—rooms with sliding doors that open on to other rooms, corridors, a veranda, and a garden suitable for hosting quaint parties. The house and grounds are not precisely mapped for the reader, but the novel gives the impression of spaces dimly lit and not easily navigated by a newcomer. There is no mention of the kitchen in this home or, for that matter, a washing machine or vacuum cleaner, even though the Toganō household could certainly afford those. Mieko is no housewife and cooking is not part of her story. Food preparation at the Toganō house and the servants performing that task occupy the shadowy, functional parts of the home that the reader never sees. There is only a single glimpse of a housekeeper—nameless as the houseboy in Mrs Mogi’s narrative—dusting a room, evidence that others take care of this house. The elusive qualities of Mieko push other characters to describe her in reference to the richness of the aesthetic past. If she can be likened to a princess, it is to one of ancient times, and not the beauty queen or the commoner royal of the 1950s.

The loss of woman-power A short scene at the end of Masks depicts young Japanese women—for better or worse—as increasingly cut off from this aesthetic past and the suppressed history of female shamanism. This scene takes place at a regular meeting of the poetry

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circle of young women, Mieko’s students, at the Toganō home. Toe Yakushiji, daughter of the late Nō master introduced at the outset of the novel, has brought the Fukai mask that “conveyed the somber and grief-laden look of a woman long past the age of sensuality” that her father wanted to give Mieko (138). In the novel, this produces the critical moment where Mieko literally comes face to face with the woman that she has become. As we have seen, other characters have difficulty in describing or remembering Mieko’s face; it recedes, it is veiled, and in distinct. It is the mask, a frozen archetype of a face, that makes visible to Mieko exactly who she is. The young women resist the full meaning of the fearsome mask: After Mieko had taken the mask Fukai in her hands and studied it, the sunkencheeked, sorrow-stricken face traveled around the circle, from hand to hand. All of the young women, married and single, were gaily dressed and vivacious, but as each one held up the mask and gazed at it in turn, her features would be crossed by a look of lonely solemnity that seemed to mirror the shadows in the mask. As if to escape that solemnity, they were lavish with praise, exclaiming over the mask like foreigners. “What an exquisite, sad sort of beauty it has! Women today have lost this quiet gracefulness.” (139)

In the end, for these young postwar women, the ancient mask is only an object, much like the souvenirs the occupationnaires picked up on one of their many curio-hunting expeditions. The women escape the deeper pull of what the mask represents and appreciate it merely as a kind of classical Japanese beauty, an aesthetic object. Their exclamations, like those of foreigners, refuse identification with the mask, something that Mieko so powerfully feels at the end of the novel, and that she and Yasuko express early in the novel. Their remarks are cliché, rather like speaking of Miss Universe Kojima as a “pearl of the East.” These women may not be burdened with the wounds and rage Mieko harbors, but they are also losing touch with the rich aesthetic legacy created by Japanese women centuries before. Although Enchi Fumiko’s exploration of shamanic power and women’s writing in Masks is compelling, she ultimately offers no way forward for women. As Nina Cornyetz writes: [Enchi’s] attempt at liberation through the dangerous woman trope frequently collapsed into a modern inhabiting of a femaleness-as-site as it was already circumscribed by a phallic agenda. The political limitations of empowerment bound by the confines of inhabiting a male imaginary are obvious: the trope becomes a site for enormous ambivalences, resistances, and collusions. That

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Enchi won numerous literary prizes (she remains the most lauded modern female Japanese author to date), awarded by panels of primarily male judges presiding over a phallocentric literary agenda, suggests that the “essence” of femaleness that these judges feted in her narratives reproduced a femaleness collusive with or supportive of notions of the phallic subject as norm. Her dangerous women ultimately bolstered, however unintentionally, the phallic agenda they were designed to undermine.14

Although Enchi offers no way out for women, her novel is mesmerizing. Her critical view of vocal housewives and glamorous fashion models as well as sympathy for misunderstood court ladies poses a different reading of the idealized kitchen princess of the new middle class. The 1961 photo of Crown Princess Michiko cooking in her palace kitchen on her twenty-seventh birthday (Figure 5.2) would have symbolized for many that fresh winds were blowing through the palace, and that in important ways, once-commoner Michiko, Akihito, and their baby son were a family “like the rest of us,” nourished by the able housewife on par with her American counterpart. The photo trained attention on Michiko as companion to her husband, and in turn, made the imperial institution partner, rather than father, to the people, too. Although the royal couple had worn ancient Japanese garb on their wedding day, recalling the golden era of courtly poetry and practices, depictions of their youth and young family embraced the present and held out hope for the future. In Enchi’s view, what is lost in this neatly gendered, wholesome scenario is the unruly shamanic spirit of ancient Japanese women and a rage against patriarchy expressed in Japan’s most famous work of courtly literature. Like the young women who can only respond to Nō masks “like foreigners,” the young royals, too, represent a happy environment, but also one cut off from a more powerful legacy associated with women in the imperial court. The unresolved questions of Japan’s imperial past are similarly veiled.

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Notes Chapter 1 1 “Japanese Women,” Time, March 23, 1959, 36. 2 Ibid., 34. 3 Amanda Seaman, “Modeling Masako: Commodities and the Construction of a Modern Princess,” Chicago Anthropology Exchange, no. 21 (Spring 1995): 35–72. 4 For more on the construction of Michiko and Akihito as symbolic of a new middle class, see Kenneth J. Ruoff, The People’s Emperor: Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy, 1945–1995 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 224–7. 5 Sheldon Garon, “The Transnational Promotion of Saving in Asia: ‘Asian values’ or the ‘Japanese model’?” in Sheldon M. Garon (ed.), Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 168. 6 There is a rich literature in English on all these icons; I suggest a few sources for each. For analysis of the girl student in Meiji fiction, see Melanie Czarnecki, “Bad Girls from Good Families,” in Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley (eds), Bad Girls of Japan (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 49–63; Rebecca L. Copeland and Melek Ortabasi, The Modern Murasaki: Writing by Women of Meiji Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); and Rebecca L. Copeland, Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000). For research on the Bluestockings, see Jan Bardsley, The Bluestockings of Japan: New Woman Essays and Fiction from Seitō, 1911–16 (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2007) and Dina B. Lowy, The Japanese ‘New Woman’: Images of Gender and Modernity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007). For the Modern Girl, see Sarah Frederick, Turning Pages: Reading and Writing Women’s Magazines in Interwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006); Barbara Hamill Sato, The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Miriam Rom Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); and Modern Girl around the World Research Group, The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). For research on the shōjo, see Jennifer Prough, Straight from the Heart: Gender, Intimacy, and the Cultural Production of Shōjo Manga (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011) and Deborah Shamoon, Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012).

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7 Jordan Sand traces the catch-phrase “culture life” (bunka seikatsu) to the 1920s when there was a culture-house boom and all kinds of mass-produced goods were given a dose of panache by association with bunka. House and Home in Modern Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Center, 2003), 323. 8 For more on cartoons and women’s rights, see Martha Banta, Barbaric Intercourse: Caricature and the Culture of Conduct, 1841–1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) and Peter Duus, “Presidential Address: Weapons of the Weak, Weapons of the Strong—The Development of the Japanese Political Cartoon,” Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 60, no. 4 (November 2001): 965–97. 9 See Lonny E. Carlile, Divisions of Labor : Globality, Ideology, and War in the Shaping of the Japanese Labor Movement (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005) and Ann Sherif, Japan’s Cold War: Media, Literature, and the Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 10 Vera C. Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment, and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 123. 11 Andrew Gordon, “Managing the Japanese Household: The New Life Movement in Postwar Japan,” in Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno (eds), Gendering Modern Japanese History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 425. 12 Murakami Shigeyoshi (1928–91) became known for his critical scholarship on State Shinto; Fujin gahō identifies him as a member of the Japan Modern History Study Group (Nihon kindai-shi kenkyūkai). “Kono 50 nen de shufu no shigoto wa doo kawatta ka” (“How Has the Work of Housewives Changed over the Last 50 Years?”), Fujin gahō, May 1959, 63–6. 13 Ibid., 63. 14 Ibid., 66. 15 Data on salaries comes from table 19–39: Average Age and Monthly Contractual Cash Earnings (1948–2004) found in chapter 19, “Earnings” Historical Statistics of Japan, compiled by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, editorial supervision [by] Statistics Bureau, Management and Coordination Agency, and accessed online July 29, 2013 at www.stat.go.jp/english/data/chouki/index.htm 16 For more on the importance of appliances, see Simon Partner, Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 17 For scholarship on postwar developments in reproductive choice and attitudes toward this see: Samuel Coleman, Family Planning in Japanese Society: Traditional Birth Control in a Modern Urban Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983); Helen Hardacre, Marketing the Menacing Fetus in Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Tiana Norgen, Abortion Before Birth Control: The Politics of Reproduction in Postwar Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Hiroko Takeda Hiroko, The Political Economy

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of Reproduction in Japan: Between Nation-state and Everyday Life (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005). Sandra Buckley, “Altered States: The Body Politics of ‘Being-Woman,’” in Andrew Gordon (ed.), Postwar Japan as History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 349–50. For poignant accounts of the postwar “reality gap” as faced by actual women, see Ronald P. Loftus, Changing Lives: The “Postwar” in Japanese Women’s Autobiographies and Memoirs (Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, 2013). Sheldon M. Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 179. For more discussion of Okabe and Thurber’s comics, see Chapter 4. Deborah Werksman, I Killed June Cleaver: Modern Moms Shatter the Myth of Perfect Parenting (Naperville, IL: Hysteria Publications, 1999); Ann Dunnewold, Even June Cleaver Would Forget the Juice Box: Cut Yourself Some Slack (and Still Raise Great Kids) in the Age of Extreme Parenting (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, 2007); and Cary O’Dell, June Cleaver Was a Feminist! Reconsidering the Characters of Early Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013). Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, [1988] 2008), 1. Ibid. Ibid., 14. Joanne Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1994), revises the domestic stereotype of American women by offering studies of the diversity of women, including subcultural challenges to conventional gender constructions and women’s labor activism, and analyzes “the competing voices within the public discourse on women and the internal contradictions that undermined and destabilized the domestic stereotype even as it was constructed (2).” Stephanie Coontz’, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1992) uses historical and sociological context to debunk the stereotypes of the American family promoted in popular culture, or, in her terms, the “Leave It to Beaver Myth.” Robert H. Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty: Exhibiting American Culture Abroad (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997). Ruth Oldenziel, “Exporting the American Cold War Kitchen: Challenging Americanization, Technological Transfer, and Domestication,” in Ruth Oldenziel (ed.), Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 315–39, esp. 315. Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV : The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 276.

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29 Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty, 209. 30 Marling, As Seen on TV, 247. Despite the Soviet ban on Coty lipstick, 15 Soviet volunteers per day had the chance for hairstyle makeovers at the Rubenstein Salon; see “Soviet Women Delighted by the Fair’s Beauty Salon,” New York Times, July 27, 1959, 28. 31 May, Homeward Bound, 22. 32 SCAP, an acronym for Supreme Command[er] of Allied Powers, “was commonly used to refer to MacArthur’s command.” John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton/New Press, 1999), 45. 33 Shufu no tomo (Housewife’s Companion) ran the interviews with United Press correspondents Bonnie Wiley and Hazel Hartzog in November 1945 and with Brookman in May 1946. 34 Censorship documents, currently appended to microfiche of these magazines, marked for deletion the quote by Pearl Buck in March 1946 Fujin gahō (Women’s Pictorial) and the article “Hollywood Actresses Are Not Representative of American Women” in the November 1947 Hataraku fujin (Working Woman) microfiche held by Prange Collection, University of Maryland, College Park. 35 Dower, Embracing Defeat, 622, note 40. 36 Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 78. 37 Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession, no. 91 (1991): 33–40. 38 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 6. 39 Mire Koikari, Pedagogy of Democracy: Feminism and the Cold War in the U.S. Occupation of Japan (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2008), 13. 40 Lisa Yoneyama, “Liberation under Siege: U.S. Military Occupation and Japanese Women’s Enfranchisement,” American Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 3 (September 2005): 892. 41 Mire Koikari, Pedagogy of Democracy, 79. 42 Richard J. Lindstrom, “Letters to the Editor,” Time, April 13, 1959, 6. 43 Leland Stowe, “What’s Wrong with American Women?” The Reader’s Digest, October 1949, 49–50. Condensed and reprinted from Esquire (September 1948). 44 Ibid., 49–50. 45 James Michener, Sayonara (New York: Ballantine Group, 1953), translated into Japanese by Masaichi Hosogai and published in 1955 by Chūō Kōron-sha. Warner Brothers produced the film Sayonara in 1957. 46 Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Gina Marchetti, Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

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47 Hiroko Hirakawa, “Give Me One Good Reason to Marry a Japanese Man: Japanese Women Debating Ideal Lifestyles,” Women’s Studies, vol. 33 (2004): 423–51. 48 Karen Kelsky, Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 222–3. 49 For more on housewife feminism, see Laura Dales, Feminist Movements in Contemporary Japan (London: Routledge, 2009). 50 Mire Koikari, “Training Women for Disasters: Gender, Crisis Management (Kiki Kanri) and Post-3.11 Nationalism in Japan,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, vol. 11, no. 26 (July 2013), available online at www.japanfocus.org/-Mire-Koikari/3962 51 Laura D’Andrea Tyson, “Japan’s Women to the Rescue,” New York Times, August 23, 2013. 52 Ibid. 53 United Nations Development Programme’s Gender Inequality Index 2012 is posted online at http://data.un.org/DocumentData.aspx?q=HDi&id=332 54 Leonard J. Schoppa, Race for the Exits: The Unraveling of Japan’s System of Social Protection (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 55 Tyson, “Japan’s Women to the Rescue.” 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Vera Mackie and Ayako Kano, “Is Shinzo Abe Really a Feminist?” East Asia Forum, November 9, 2013; accessed online December 16, 2013 at www.eastasiaforum. org/2013/11/09/is-shinzo-abe-really-a-feminist 59 Ofra Goldstein-Gidoni, Housewives of Japan: An Ethnography of Real Lives and Consumerized Domesticity (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 127–8. GoldsteinGidoni also observes that the emergence of the “new type of housewife” was introduced in the 1998 White Paper on People’s Lifestyles by the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare and later explored by Ogura Chikako in her well-known book, Kekkon no jōken (Preconditions for Marriage) (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbun Publications, 2003). 60 Ibid., 69. 61 Ibid., 147. 62 Alisa Freedman and Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt, “‘Count What You Have Now. Don’t Count What You Don’t Have’: The Japanese Television Drama Around 40 and the Politics of Women’s Happiness,” Asian Studies Review, vol. 35, no. 3 (2011): 295–313. 63 Goldstein-Gidoni, Housewives of Japan, 199–203. 64 Laura Miller, “Rebranding Himiko, the Shaman Queen of Ancient History,” in Mechademia, An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga and the Fan Arts: Issue #9: Origins (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, in press). 65 Toko Sekiguchi, “Japan’s Beauty Queen Factory,” Time Magazine, June 12, 2007. Accessed online on November 20, 2011, www.time.com/time/world/ article/0,8599,1631932,00.html

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66 Ibid. 67 Mori Riyo, Simple Life (Shinpururaifu), (Tōkyō: Amēba Bukkusu Shinsha, 2010). 68 Ines Ligron, Sekaiichi no bijo no tsukurikata (Fashioning the World’s Top Beauty), (Tōkyō: Magajin Hausu, 2007). 69 Brenda R. Weber, Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 25. 70 Laura Miller, Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics (Berkeley: University of California, 2006). 71 Hyakuta Naoki, Monsutā (Monster), (Tokyo: Gentōsha, 2010). 72 Kiyomiya Yumiko, Michiko-hi tanjō to Shōwa no kioku: Purinsesu ni mitchakushita josei kameraman no sennichi (The Birth of “Princess Michiko” and Memories of the Shōwa Era: One Thousand Days of Close Coverage of the Princess by a Camera Woman), (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2008). 73 I analyze American reportage and Japanese reaction to it in my article, “Japanese Feminism, Nationalism and the Royal Wedding of 1993,” Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 31, no. 2 (1998): 189–205. 74 Ben Hills, Princess Masako: Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin Group, 2006). 75 The IHA letter is posted at www.kunaicho.go.jp/e-kunaicho/taio-20070202l.html/.Kodansha International had originally agreed to publish a translation of Hills’ book, but negotiations broke off when Hills refused to agree to certain changes. The Japanese translation, Purinsesu Masako no shinjitsu (The Truth about Princess Masako), edited by Noda Mineo and translated by Fujita Mariko was published in 2007 by the small press Daisan Shokan. Noda’s introduction takes up the points in the original, such as mention of yakuza, that Kodansha had requested be deleted from the translation. 76 John Burnham Schwartz, The Commoner (New York: Nan A. Talese, 2008). 77 For excellent analysis of the controversy, see Japanese Women: Lineage and Legacies, edited by Amy McCreedy Thernstrom and published in 2005 by Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. It is available online at www.wilsoncenter.org/ sites/default/files/Japanese%20women%20PDF.doc.pdf

Chapter 2 1 Millie Johansen, “Matters of Opinion,” Nippon Times, November 22, 1949. 2 For analysis of the politics of etiquette in Japan, see Jan Bardsley and Laura Miller (eds), Manners and Mischief: Gender, Power, and Etiquette in Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 3 Since the original Nippon Times photo is not of sufficient quality to reproduce here, I include a photograph of Teruko Mogi, dated November 8, 1949, from the Asahi photo archives, and provided to me by Getty Images.

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4 “American Goodwill and Sympathy Spans the Broad Pacific,” Nippon Times, November 17, 1949, 8. 5 Ibid., 9. 6 “Mrs. Mogi Answers,” Readers in Council, Nippon Times, December 9, 1949, 4. I have not been able to locate Buck’s interview; Mogi writes of reading it in late 1948. 7 Mogi Teruko, “Ashita no josei no tame ni—‘Amerika hihan ni kotaeru’ no hankyō” (“For the Women of Tomorrow—Reaction to ‘Responding to Criticism of the US’”), Fujin kōron, February 1950, 71. 8 Ibid., 71. 9 Ibid. 10 Dower, Embracing Defeat, 47, 207. 11 Nora Waln, “How the Japanese See Us,” The Saturday Evening Post, April 30, 1949: 26. 12 Dower, Embracing Defeat, 207. In her article on the similar power relations between Australian women and domestic workers in occupied Japan, Christine de Matos notes how the widespread use of the diminutive terms “houseboy” and “housegirl” infantilized domestic workers, identifying them only as the vanquished and part of a labor category. “Living the Colonial Lifestyle: Australian Women and Domestic Labour in Occupied Japan, 1945–52,” in Hans Hägerdal (ed.), Responding to the West: Essays on Colonial Dominance and Asian Agency, 18th to 20th centuries (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2009), 143–4. 13 Teruko Mogi (letter), “American Goodwill and Sympathy Spans the Broad Pacific,” Nippon Times, November 17, 1949. 14 Ibid. 15 Published in 1931, The Good Earth won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and played a major role in Buck winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1938. 16 Pierre Loti was the penname of Julien Viaud whose 1887 tale of travel to Nagasaki, Madame Chrysanthème, was widely read and translated, shaping romantic ideas of Japan abroad and serving as one of the precursors to Puccini’s famous opera, Madame Butterfly. 17 Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 20. 18 Ibid., 21. 19 Teruko Mogi (letter), “American Goodwill and Sympathy,” 9. 20 Mogi implies that French culture is more sophisticated than American. Nora Waln’s article (cited earlier) discusses her visit with Hayama ladies and their preference for speaking in French rather than English. Could this group have included Mogi? 21 New officers of the Colonial Women’s Club are introduced to Nippon Times readers on January 16, 1950, through a photograph on page 3 provided by the US army. All the new officers are married women; each woman’s husband’s name and position are listed after her name and club position. The husbands are diplomats and corporate executives.

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22 Nippon Times, January 30, 1950, issue features a photograph of members of 8225th WAC company at a children’s home; the land and buildings were provided by contributions of the members of the Occupation Forces. 23 “U.S.-Japan Friendship Must Begin with the Women,” Nippon Times, November 7, 1949, 2; photograph shows three American women, and nine women of the Women’s Section of the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce and Industry. 24 “Committee Members of Gold Rush Ball,” Nippon Times, November 29, 1949, 4. Photograph shows 16 women standing as a group at the base of a long staircase. All are in ballgowns. They are “members of the Catholic Women’s Club in Tokyo who recently organized the Gold Rush Ball, the proceeds of which are to aid Japanese welfare and educational institutions, shown at the GHQ Officers’ Club in Tokyo during the benefit show.” All women are listed as Mrs (husband’s full name). 25 Nancy Echols was married to Colonel Marion P. Echols, GHQ Public Information Office. With critic Hani Setsuko of Jiyū Gakuen (School of Freedom) who was active in voicing her opinions on women’s issues, she participated in a dialogue published as, on the subject, “Zenshin suru Nihon josei” (Japanese Women Moving Ahead), Fujin kōron (February 1949), 16–19. 26 For example, “Flower Arrangement by U.S. Women Shown,” Nippon Times, February 23, 1950, 4, reports on how American women, all students of the Shofu School, wear kimono while conducting “actual flower arrangements” for American and Japanese viewers. 27 Much attention in the Nippon Times, Asahi, Fujin kōron is given to the group of ten Japanese women leaders who visit the United States in March by 1950. Tsugi Shiraishi, Women’s Editor for the Nippon Times, similarly gets attention in her paper when she travels to the United States as a representative of the YWCA for an 80-day observation trip. Nippon Times, February 4, 1950. Mire Koikari analyzes the leaders’ trip in Pedagogy of Democracy, chapter three, “Feminism, the Cold War, and Cold War Citizenry.” 28 Pearl Buck, “US Civilization to Blame,” letter in feature article, “American Goodwill and Sympathy Spans the Broad Pacific,” Nippon Times, November 17, 1949, 8. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 “Gould, Beatrice (1898–1989),” in Doris Weatherford (ed.), American Women during World War II: An Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 2010), 190. 32 Beatrice Blackmar Gould, “Must Build Goodwill Bridge,” letter in feature article, “American Goodwill and Sympathy Spans the Broad Pacific,” Nippon Times, November 17, 1949, 9. 33 Senator Margaret Chase Smith, “Recent Events Hard to Forget,” letter in feature article, “American Goodwill and Sympathy Spans the Broad Pacific,” Nippon Times, November 17, 1949, 8.

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34 Mogi, “Ashita no josei no tame ni,” 73. 35 “‘Amerika hihan ni kotaeru’ no hankyō” (“Reaction to ‘Answering Criticism of America”). Asahi Shinbun, November 24, 1949. 36 Although these letters were directed to the “Koe” (Voice) section, the Asahi ran them together in this special short article. Many more letters were printed in Nippon Times. 37 The Asahi, however, did not make any effort to expand the conversation. One Japanese man, Toshi Takata, who participated in the Nippon Times exchanges, writes of his disappointment that the Asahi would not give more room to the debate: “I had an interview with an editor of the Asahi, asking him to take this matter up in his press, for from his paper the Nippon Times received the news. To my great disappointment, however, they would not take any article concerning this matter. ‘The News Value’ to them was in those four American letters. What a helpless tool the Japanese paper is, in building this country into a more democratic one! They, too, are the followers of the feudalistic idea.” Nippon Times, December 8, 1949. 38 Millie Johansen, “Matters of Opinion,” Nippon Times, November 22, 1949. 39 Ibid. 40 Millie Johansen, “Matters of Opinion: An American Woman Speaks Frankly,” Nippon Times, December 5, 1949. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Nancy Echols (letter), Nippon Times, November 23, 1949. 44 Ibid. 45 Tomoko Kasai (letter), Nippon Times, December 11, 1949. 46 Nancy Echols (letter), Nippon Times, December 8, 1949. 47 Thea Tezuka-Berger (letter), Nippon Times, November 26, 1949. 48 Ibid. 49 Meiji University student (letter), Nippon Times, November 25, 1949. 50 Hiroshi Mogi (letter), Nippon Times, November 30, 1949. 51 Susan J. Dunbar (letter), Nippon Times, December 8, 1949. 52 Utagawa (letter), Nippon Times, November 29, 1949. 53 Robert W. Russell (letter), Nippon Times, November 26, 1949. 54 Utagawa (letter), Nippon Times, November 29, 1949. 55 Ann Bradshaw (letter), Nippon Times, November 29, 1949. 56 Susan J. Dunbar (letter), Nippon Times, December 8, 1949. 57 Tezuka-Berger (letter), Nippon Times, November 26, 1949. 58 Adelia Wheeler (letter), Nippon Times, December 2, 1949. 59 Mariko Nitta (letter), Nippon Times, November 29, 1949. 60 According to Jeanne M. Gleich-Anthony, Shiraishi’s Nippon Times column “Women’s World: Weekly Roundup” had been instigated by the newspaper at the

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Notes encouragement of SCAP. “The Women’s Information Branch [of CI &E] then held weekly conferences with [Shiraishi] and other female reporters in an effort both to effectively disseminate information on issues and events concerning Japanese women and to confer upon these press women a measure of prestige.” Jeanne M. Gleich-Anthony, “Democratizing Women: American Women and the U.S. Occupation of Japan, 1945–1951,” Ph.D. diss., Ohio University, 2007, 139. Tsugi Shiraishi, “Who Is Mrs. Mogi?,” Nippon Times, December 8, 1949. “Mrs. Mogi Answers,” Readers in Council, Nippon Times, December 9, 1949. Ibid. Ruth Benedict’s 1946 Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (New York: Houghton Mifflin) has been widely critiqued by anthropologists and scholars in Japanese Studies. “Mrs. Mogi Answers.” Ibid. Ibid. Letters to the editor continued to come in on the topic of etiquette even after debate on Mrs Mogi’s letter has been formally concluded. Nippon Times, in effect, continues the dispute by publishing two letters of different perspectives on December 13: Helen H. Dalton of Tokyo writes at length about the graciousness of Japanese guests; W. K. L. of Hakodate finds Mrs Johansen’s criticisms of Japanese customs fair, and wonders if Japanese do not “abandon their customs and good manners when dealing with Americans.” Tsugi Shiraishi, “As Others See Us: Eastern Ways through Western Eyes,” Nippon Times, January 15, 1950. Ibid. Elizabeth C. Mark, “Attitude to Japanese: Derogatory Tendency Deplored,” Nippon Times, January 20, 1950, 4. Ibid. Lucy Crockett, Popcorn on the Ginza: An Informal Portrait of Occupied Japan (New York: Sloane Associates, 1949), 4–6.

Chapter 3 1 For brief accounts of several feminist debates in modern Japan, see Mioko Fujieda and Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow, “Women’s Studies: An Overview,” in Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow and Atsuko Kameda (eds), Japanese Women: New Feminist Perspectives on the Past, Present, and Future (New York: Feminist Press, 1995), 155–80. For more in English on the Housewife Debate in Japan across the decades past 1955, see Ofra Goldstein-Gidoni, Housewives of Japan: An Ethnography of Real

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Lives and Consumerized Domesticity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Hiroko Takeda, The Political Economy of Reproduction in Japan: Between Nationstate and Everyday Life (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005). The first reprinting of selected essays from the Debate appears in Shisō (Thought), which is volume 9 of historian Maruoka Hideko’s impressive ten-volume, ten-year project titled Nihon fujin mondai shiryō shū (A Collection of Data on Japanese Women’s Issues) (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 1976–80). Maruoka, who participated in the Housewife Debate herself in 1957, divides it into two stages, including five essays from the 1950s and five from the 1960s, and includes one essay from 1974 that interprets the Debate. In 1982, well-known sociologist Ueno Chizuko, working in conjunction with two feminist study groups, published a two-volume edition, Shufu ronsō o yomu: Zen kiroku (Reading the Housewife Debate: Complete Records), Parts One and Two (Tokyo: Keisei Shobō). Ueno’s edition collects thirty-three essays written between 1955 and 1976, similarly dividing them into successive stages: Stage One (1955–9), the debate about whether housewives should seek outside employment, is collected entirely from Fujin kōron and includes all the essays in Maruoka’s edition as well as twelve others; Stage Two (1960–1) includes nine essays from Fujin kōron, Asahi janāru, and other publications, and involves a debate on ways of recognizing the economic value of housework; Stage Three (1972) considers whether the housewife’s autonomy and leisure point the way to human liberation; and Stage Four (1974 to present) contains three examinations of the Housewife Debate, including Ueno Chizuko’s own essay, making this stage the contemporary analysis of the Debate as a whole. Ueno’s edition includes her other essays on the Debate, a bibliography of related texts, and a chronology that graphs the stages of the Debate, plotting them against social, political, and cultural changes and events in women’s history. Neither collection gives the criteria by which the essays were selected. What is lost in the reprinted editions of the essays is the montage of competing images in which they were originally embedded. Reading the Debate as it occurred in the pages of Fujin kōron gives one a much more complicated, contradictory picture of how the magazine conceived of feminism and promoted femininity. Ishigaki Ayako’s initial essay has been translated by Keith Vincent as “On Housewifery as a Second Career.” This translation appears in Annual Report, no. 7, 30–2, Center for Women’s Studies, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, March 1997. Ishigaki Ayako, “Shufu to iu dai-ni shokugyō-ron” (“The Secondary Occupation Called the Housewife”), in Ueno, Shufu ronsō o yomu, 9. The original line is kokoro ga fuyakete iru, literally, “their hearts/minds are all wet.” I use the colloquial English expression to communicate how derisive Ishigaki’s phrase seemed. Ishigaki’s description of female speech is reminiscent of the criticism found in the famous seventeenth-century Neo-Confucian tract by Kaibara Ekiken

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Notes (Ekken, 1630–1749), Onna Daigaku (Greater Learning for Women; in Basil Hall Chamberlain (trans.), Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan [London: J. Murray, 1902], 502–8). Ekiken recommends divorcing a woman “who, by talking overmuch and prattling disrespectfully, disturbs the harmony of kinsmen and brings trouble on her household” (Chamberlain, Things Japanese, 504). While Ishigaki advocates that “woman must be strict with herself ” to live fully as a human being (Ueno, Shufu ronsō o yomu, 12), Ekiken also advises that “a woman must ever be on the alert, and keep a strict watch over her own conduct” (Chamberlain, Things Japanese, 505). Since Ishigaki argues that women do have the potential for intelligent, active, and positive lives, it is striking to see her employ a rhetorical stance associated with conservative patriarchal authority. This indicates how much Ishigaki had internalized negative views of women and perhaps explains why she distances herself from the “bad” housewife, whom she sees as embodying everything commonly despised in women for centuries. These negative stereotypes of the female seem to have made Ishigaki Ayako afraid of her own potential to succumb to the lures of the female space, leisure, and pleasure. Ishigaki in Ueno, Shufu ronsō o yomu, 8–9. The one productive activity that Ishigaki will allow housewives in the home is mothering since she sees this as a creative, challenging process that encourages a woman’s self-development. Mothering small children, she admits, also takes so much time that it makes it difficult to work outside the home, too. Still, Ishigaki writes about her hopes that daycare centers will allow even mothers of young children to work outside the home one day. Ishigaki in Ueno, Shufu ronsō o yomu, 8–9. In making this argument, Ishigaki prefigures Betty Friedan’s 1963 characterization of the housewife’s troubles as the problem “with no name” in The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001). As Andrew Gordon observes, women often successfully resisted compulsory retirement upon marriage through the 1960s and beyond with the aid of their unions and courts, Andrew Gordon, The Wages of Affluence: Labor and Management in Postwar Japan. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 191. In his discussion of Tōhō union activities, however, Christopher Gerteis shows that it was not only company executives that discriminated against women with such regulations; the union leadership also made it difficult for women to maintain long-term employment, especially after marrying and having children. This maledominated leadership “excluded women from collective bargaining agreements by making ineligible categories of employment (short-term, temporary) commonly reserved for women; signing agreements that required ‘early retirement’ for women who had married or had children; or required round-the-clock availability for rotating shifts, which legally excluded women who were prohibited by the 1947 Labor Standards Law from engaging in ‘night work.’” Gerteis, Gender Struggles:

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Wage-Earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009), 38–9. Ishigaki in Ueno, Shufu ronsō o yomu, 13. Hiratsuka’s free-form essay, “Genshi, josei wa taiyō de atta” (“In the Beginning Woman Was the Sun”) has been called the manifesto for the 1911–16 Seitō journal, the literary magazine of the Japanese New Woman. The essay is translated in Jan Bardsley, The Bluestockings of Japan: New Woman Essays and Fiction from Seitō, 1911–16 (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2007), 94–103. Haru Matsui, Restless Wave (New York: Modern Age Books, 1940); recently reprinted, with an introduction by Greg Robinson, by New York: the Feminist Press, 2004. Yomiuri shinbun, November 13, 1996, 27. International version. Sakanishi Shio [Shiho] (1896–1976) was certainly no “ordinary housewife”—nor ordinary anything else. She went to the United States shortly before Ishigaki did, taking an undergraduate degree at Wheaton College before earning a doctorate in aesthetics at the University of Michigan and working for some time as an assistant professor. Sakanishi also headed the Asian Section at the Library of Congress from 1930 to 1942, before being forced to return Japan in 1942. After the war, she worked for the Civil Intelligence Section of SCAP. Hiroshi Kitamura describes at length her contributions as a spokesperson for the American Movie Culture Association (AMCA) in postwar Japan, noting that Sakanishi recommended Hollywood films to Japanese for their optimistic, entertaining quality and for the purposes of self-education, yet also encouraged critical thinking about films. See Kitamura, Screening Enlightenment: Hollywood and the Cultural Reconstruction of Defeated Japan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 150–3. Sakanishi had several prestigious appointments in Japan, working with UNESCO, founding the Parent-Teacher Association in Japan, and, as Kitamura (ibid., 153) notes, writing a variety of books on “democracy, culture and society.” She also translated Japanese poetry into English, including poet Yosano Akiko’s famous 1901 collection, Midaregami (Tangled Hair). See Haga Noboru (ed.), Nihon josei jinmei jiten (A Biographical Dictionary of Japanese Women) (Tokyo: Tosho Sentā, 1993), 475. Although Sakanishi’s given name is commonly romanized now as Shiho, she used Shio when living and writing in the United States; Shio corresponds most accurately to the Japanese pronunciation of her name. I thank Aki Hirota for this information. See biographical notes on Sakanishi also in Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1983), vol. 6: 378–9. For analysis of Sakanishi’s writing in the 1930s in Japanese in the magazine Kagayaku (Radiant), see Sarah Frederick, “Beyond Nyonin Geijutsu, beyond Japan: Writings by Women Travellers in Kagayaku (1933–1941),” Japan Forum, DOI:10.1080/09555803.2013.804108. Accessed online December 11, 2013.

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14 Sandra Buckley, “Altered States: The Body Politics of ‘Being-Woman,’” in Andrew Gordon, Postwar Japan as History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 349–50. 15 Curiously, the essays by Sakanishi and Shimizu—the ones most in favor of a positive view of the housewife—were not included in Maruoka’s edition of selected Housewife Debate essays (see note 2). The representative readers’ letters and two letters representative of students’ responses to these essays, although carried in Fujin kōron, are not included in either collected, reprinted edition of the Debate. 16 SakanishiShio [Shiho], “Shufu dai-ni shokugyō-ron no mōten” (“The Blind Spots in ‘The Secondary Occupation Called the Housewife’”), In Ueno, Shufu ronsō o yomu, 19–20. Originally published in Fujin kōron, April 1955. 17 Here Sakanishi is responding to a criticism that Ishigaki levels against young Japanese women at the outset of her essay. Ishigaki describes a conversation with high school girls who wish to work for banks not because of anything intrinsically interesting about the industry, but because the job requires an attractive appearance. Ishigaki imagines that these girls want this job as a way to display themselves as beautiful in an effort to attract potential marriage partners. Thus they are not committed to work but are merely “warming the chair” until they can get married. Sakanishi uses the same terminology but finds nothing wrong with this attitude toward work. 18 The value of seeing Japanese husbands and wives as in complementary relationships that achieve equality over time was also argued later by psychologist Iwao Sumiko in her book, The Japanese Woman: Traditional Image and Changing Reality (New York: Free Press, 1993). 19 Sakanishi in Ueno, Shufu ronsō o yomu, 22. 20 Sakanishi also states that being a husband and being a parent are occupations as well, and that their value has no connection whatsoever with a salary. Sakanishi in Ueno, Shufu ronsō o yomu, 17. 21 Tanaka Sumiko, “Shufu ronsō to Amerika no josei: shufu dai-ni shokugyō ron ni yosete” (“The Housewife Debate and American Women: Comments on the Secondary Occupation Called the Housewife”) in Ueno, Shufu ronsō o yomu, 83–96. This is the first article among those in Fujin kōron to call this discussion “the Housewife Debate.” Tanaka wrote articles about women’s history in other issues of Fujin kōron. 22 Tanaka cites the example of a predominantly African-American school in New York City that has 900 pupils, noting that of these pupils’ mothers, 600 are employed. Tanaka says that these black women do not have any choice about whether or not to work outside the home, nor do they have the same kind of generalized “dissatisfaction” experienced by middle-class (Anglo) women. This leads Tanaka to say that when Americans speak so proudly of their society, they

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are referring only to the middle class and are ignoring the working class. Tanaka in Ueno, Shufu ronsō o yomu, 93. In a discussion that Ishigaki Ayako leads with three Japanese male intellectuals on the topic “Nihon wa dore dake amerika-ka sareta ka” (“How Americanized Has Japan Become” [Fujin kōron, August 1955, 166–74]), she argues that Japanese men have become nicer to Japanese women because of the influence of American customs. And in her article on the Housewife Debate, Tanaka Sumiko asserts that since American men experienced sexual adventures in foreign lands during the war, they are no longer so willing to continue being chivalrous or leap at the opportunity to marry and provide for wives and children. Yet, Tanaka also claims that American men have taken on most of the housework. Tanaka in Ueno, Shufu ronsō o yomu, 94. There are references in Fujin kōron to translations of texts such as Women Who Work, a slim volume by Grace Hutchins of the Labor Research Association (New York: International Publishers, 1952), and a book by Pearl Buck titled Of Women and Men (New York: John Day Company, 1941), translated into Japanese by Ishigaki Ayako in the 1940s. Tanaka Sumiko also refers to ideas expounded by Margaret Mead, although she does not cite a specific book. It was not only American women’s works that appeared in Japanese; Simone de Beauvoir’s famous book, The Second Sex, was translated and published in Japan in 1953. See Julia Bullock, “Fantasy as Methodology: Simone de Beauvoir and Postwar Japanese Feminism,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, English Supplement, no. 36 (2009): 73–91. In a stance similar to the one assumed by Ishigaki Ayako in Restless Wave, Shimizu casts ordinary Japanese men and women as the unwitting victims of militarist forces beyond their control. Shimizu Keiko, “Shufu no jidai wa hajimatta” (“The Age of the Housewife Has Begun!”), in Ueno, Shufu ronsō o yomu, 24. For a more critical discussion of Japanese women’s involvement in the Pacific War, see Aoki Yayoi (ed.), Sensō to onna-tachi (Tokyo: Origin Shuppan Sentā, 1989). Shimizu in Ueno, Shufu ronsō o yomu, 30–1. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 32. A harsher view of the influence of the United States on the lives of Japanese women appears in the essay on “Sengo josei kaihō shi” (“The History of Postwar Japanese Women’s Liberation”) by Marxist historian Inoue Kiyoshi, on pages 80–95 of the August 1955 issue of Fujin kōron, in which he begins by describing all the incidents of rape of Japanese women by American military men. Homophobic concern that the postwar Japanese man was turning into a sissy (ikareponchi) was the subject of an essay by male psychologist Mochizuki Mamoru, “M to W no shakaigaku” (“The Sociology of M and W”), on pages 152–5 of the

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Notes September 1955 issue of Fujin kōron. Mochizuki imagines that men are dressing in a distinctly feminine way and do not realize that the fashions they think so wonderfully American are in fact those of gay American men. In case the reader has any doubts here, Mochizuki uses the Japanese term dōseiai for “homosexuality” and follows this with gei boi for “gay boy” in the katakana syllabary. Mochizuki also states his belief that Japanese men lost faith in their masculinity and in their superiority to Japanese women because of the occupation experience. For a discussion of women who did hold public office, see Sally Ann Hastings, “Women Legislators in the Postwar Diet,” in Anne E. Imamura (ed.), Re-imaging Japanese Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 271–300. Shimazu Chitose, “Kaji rōdō wa shufu no tenshoku de wa nai,” in Ueno, Shufu ronsō o yomu, 34–5. I could not locate any biographical references for Shimazu Chitose. She also wrote an article for the February 1955 issue of Fujin kōron on women in mining. According to a 1956 survey by the women’s magazine Shufu no tomo, only about 35 percent of Japanese housewives had washing machines, and most others yearned for one. See Amano Masako, “Mono to onna” no sengoshi: Shintaisei, kateisei, shakaisei o jiku ni (The Postwar History of Women and Things: Along the Axis of Physicality, the Family, and Sociality) (Tokyo: Yūshindo, 1992), 141. Fukuda Tsuneari, “Ayamareru josei no kaihō-ron” (“A Mistaken Theory of Women’s Liberation”), in Ueno, Shufu ronsō o yomu, 48–9. Fukuda Tsuneari (1912–94), a graduate of Tokyo University, had achieved notoriety as a staunchly conservative critic, and as a literary critic who called for a separation between literature and politics. See Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1983), vol. 2, 362. Fukuda in Ueno, Shufu ronsō o yomu, 52–3. To Ishigaki, as Fukuda explains it, “production” signifies “work,” which, in turn, signifies “men.” Ishigaki thus feels as inferior to men, Fukuda writes, as rich young people do to their servants or the privileged to the working class. Fukuda in Ueno, Shufu ronsō o yomu, 56. In Restless Wave, however, Ishigaki shows much sympathy for those on the lower rungs of Japanese society. She writes about visiting a bathhouse used by burakumin (outcaste) women, describing how little her privileged background prepared her for even a day amid such poverty. Fukuda in Ueno, Shufu ronsō o yomu, 56. Donald Keene, Dawn to West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984), 375. While Ishigaki does not want to say that housewifery is slavery, in her rebuttal she does equate young Japanese living within the old family system to AfricanAmerican slaves in the United States. Both had shelter and food, she argues, but their sufferings are well known, and no one now maintains that this kind of life was preferable to freedom.

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43 Ishigaki does not reply to any of the other essayists, all of whom were women and, as we have seen, criticized her first essay. 44 Tanaka Sumiko makes the same argument against Fukuda, saying that Americans have mistakenly taken the attitude, too, that fine-tuning human relations is the answer to all social problems. This does not mean, she says, that she wants to ignore human relationships, but rather that she sees this focus as too narrow. Tanaka in Ueno, Shufu ronsō o yomu, 95. 45 Ishigaki in Ueno, Shufu ronsō o yomu, 72. 46 Considerable English-language scholarship exists on Hiratsuka; see, for example, Hiroko Tomida, Hiratsuka Raichō and Early Japanese Feminism (Leiden: Brill, 2004). 47 Hiratsuka Raichō, Genshi josei wa taiyō de atta (Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten, 1971), vol. 4. In her own autobiographies, both in English and in Japanese, Ishigaki writes about her first introduction to the Bluestockings, remembering how a teacher’s stern warnings about these New Women excited her curiosity. 48 Hiratsuka Raichō, “Shufu kaihō-ron: Ishigaki, Fukuda Tsuneari shi no fujin-ron o megutte” (“On Women’s Liberation: A Look at Thoughts on Women from Ms Ishigaki and Mr Fukuda”) in Ueno, Shufu ronsō o yomu, 76. 49 Fukuda is the only essayist in the Debate in 1955 who objects to drawing close connections between individual families and the larger society. To his mind, this is a dangerous theme in both prewar feudalistic thinking and socialism. Fukuda in Ueno, Shufu ronsō o yomu, 59. 50 Raichō began exploring what was then called the Woman Question in 1913 by studying the writing of Swedish feminist Ellen Key (1849–1926), a woman who emphasized women’s value as mothers. See Dina Lowy, The Japanese “New Woman”: Images of Gender and Modernity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007). 51 Hiratsuka in Ueno, Shufu ronsō o yomu, 79. 52 Gordon, The Wages of Affluence, 54.

Chapter 4 1 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s novel Kagi, first serialized in Chūō kōron in 1956, appeared in English translation shortly after as The Key, translated by Howard Hibbett (New York: Knopf, 1960). 2 For a most helpful interpretive essay on The Key, see chapter 8, “Writing as Power,” in Ken K. Ito, Visions of Desire: Tanizaki’s Fictional Worlds (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). 3 In her essay on The Key, Enchi Fumiko praises Tanizaki’s use of sexuality as the subject of an abstract novel that raises questions about power, knowledge, and

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Notes sexuality in later life. She expresses particular interest in Tanizaki’s use of Kimura as a kind of intermediary for the couple. Enchi Fumiko, “Ryōsei no shitō: Kagi ni okeru fūfu kankei” (“The Life-and-Death Struggle of Both Sexes: Marital Relations in The Key”), Fujin kōron, December 1956, 124–6. As Ann Sherif explains, the subject of extensive mass media attention, the “Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial was one of the first postwar public forums in which writers and citizens could openly debate political, literary, and sexual values.” For analysis, see chapter 2, “Sex and Democracy: Lady Chatterley’s Lover in Cold War Japan,” in Ann Sherif (ed.), Japan’s Cold War: Media, Literature, and the Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), esp. page 83. Carol Gluck, “The Past in the Present,” in Andrew Gordon (ed.), Postwar Japan as History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 69. Mark McLelland observes that Japanese reception to Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, authored by the Institute for Sex Research (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1953), was “widely reported upon in the Japanese press” but stirred less attention than the first Kinsey report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948). One reason was that the notion of independent female sex drives was commonly understood in Japan by 1953. Mark McLelland, Love, Sex, and Democracy in Japan during the American Occupation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 130–3. “Nihon josei no yokubō no keifu” (“Genealogy of Japanese Women’s Desires”), Fujin kōron, December 1956, 101. Women of the past cited as examples of those who realized their ambitions through men are Kasuga no Tsubone (1579–1643), nurse to Tokugawa Iemitsu when he was a child and instrumental in maneuvering his rise to the position of the third Tokugawa shogun, and Hatoyama Haruko (1861–1938), a leader in girls’ education, whose son, Hatoyama Ichirō, became prime minister. Ishigaki cites the example of Kasuga no Tsubone to refute Takagi’s contention that women of the past were capable only of impulsive crimes, not premeditated plots. Takagi agrees with the example, yet while he finds Kasuga no Tsubone’s desires reflective of her era, he sees her behavior as “fairly modern” (kanari kindai-teki). Ishigaki comments that Kasuga no Tsubone had a desire for name and position. Takagi then cites Hatoyama as a woman who definitely expressed her ambitions through her husband and children, joking about her excessive ambition as “haunting” her children—an image that makes Teruoka laugh as he agrees. Examples of powerful women tend to make Teruoka and Takagi chuckle; the same kind of humorous, anxious reaction to powerful women is evident in the cartoons discussed at the end of this chapter. For more on sex work in wartime and the early postwar era, see Sarah Kovner, Occupying Power: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Postwar Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).

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10 “Nihon josei no yokubō no keifu,” 102. 11 A translation of Ishihara’s popular postwar novella appeared in translation in 1966 as Season of Violence. The Punishment Room, translated by John G. Mills, Toshie Takahama, and Ken Tremayne (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle). For analysis of this work, see chapter 5, “The Aesthetics of Speed and the Illogicality of Politics: Ishihara Shintarō as a Cold War Youth,” in Ann Sherif, Japan’s Cold War. 12 “Nihon josei no yokubō no keifu,” 107. 13 After the former husband died in 1959, Hirabayashi sought to rescue his impoverished widow (who had once been the couple’s housemaid) and child, locating a shelter for them. James Morita writes that this act shows Hirabayashi’s “identification with, and sympathy for, abused women and the poor.” Michiko Aoki, “Hirabayashi, Taiko,” in Chieko Mulhern (ed.), Japanese Women Writers: A Bio-critical Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 127. 14 Hirabayashi Taiko, “Josei no kaihō to yokubō no higeki” (“Women’s Liberation and Desire: A Tragedy”), Fujin kōron, December 1956, 97–8. 15 Ibid., 98. 16 The article states that these numbers represent a 62 percent return rate for housewives, 40 percent return rate for Salary Girls, and a 100 percent return rate for the high school students, who were given the survey at their school in Tokyo. The students were in their second year of high school. Shakai Shinri Kenkyūjo (Social Psychology Research Institute), “Ankēto ni miru gendai josei no yokubō” (“Contemporary Women’s Desires as Seen through Questionnaires”), Fujin kōron, December 1956, 112. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 115. 19 Ibid. 20 The authors state here that they are particularly interested in the responses of the subgroups they categorize as “home/community service housewives,” “home/ hobbies Salary Girls,” and “family/work high school students.” They appear to be looking for evidence of conflict between their feelings about following one’s desires in general, and their wish to pursue two primary activities to find happiness and life purpose. 21 Shakai Shinri Kenkyūjo, “Ankēto ni miru gendai josei no yokubō,” 115–16. 22 Ibid., 116. 23 Ibid., 117. 24 See, for example, Eva Moskowitz, “It’s Good to Blow Your Top: Women’s Magazines and a Discourse of Discontent, 1945–1965,” Journal of Women’s History, vol. 8, no. 3 (1996): 66–98. 25 Tanaka writes this as a conversation, and rather like a script, marking the two older women’s lines simply as “woman” (onna), and rather than the usual “woman 1”

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Notes and “woman 2.” This requires that the reader pay close attention to speaking order, terms of address, and voice to keep these two straight. The youngest woman’s lines are preceded by the term “daughter” or “maiden” (musume), though the women addresses her as “Young Lady” (ojōsan). I distinguish the two older women as Senior Auntie and Junior Auntie, as one appears to be older than the other and because they address each other as Auntie (obasan). Using these titles makes a clear distinction between the two women for easier reading in translation. Ironically, Tanaka writes this line using the accepted character for “bride” (yome) by combining the two characters “woman” (onna) and “house” (ie). Does this show the futility of the young lady’s protest against the norms of patriarchy embedded in the written language? Tanaka Chikao, “Yokubō ni namae wa nai—san sedai no josei no kaiwa kara” (“No Name Hath Desire—From a Conversation among Three Generations of Women), Fujin kōron, December 1956, 118–19. Ibid. Ibid., 102. Both “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” are written here in katakana, marking them as foreign loanwords. Tanaka, “Yokubō ni namae wa nai,” 121–2. Ibid., 122–3. Ibid., 123. Ibid. This comic is found on page 95 in Yoshigoro Nakayama (ed.), Kindai yōgo no jiten shūsei (A Collection of Dictionaries of Modern Terminology), vol. 19: Modango manga jiten (Manga Dictionary of Modern Language, 1931) (Tokyo: Ōzarasha, 1995). Ibid. Okabe’s fondness for the work of American humorist James Thurber is obvious in theme, style of drawing, and inversion of gender roles. For examples of Thurber’s comics, see Thurber James, Thurber’s Men, Women and Dogs, a Book of Drawings (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).

Chapter 5 1 My work concentrates on coverage of the royal wedding in women’s magazines. Superb analyses in English of the broader media involvement and various responses to the wedding are found in Jayson Chun, “A New Kind of Royalty: The Imperial Family and the Media in Post-war Japan,” in Timothy Craig (ed.), Japan Pop! Inside the World of Japanese Popular Culture (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2000), 222–44; Ruoff, The People’s Emperor; Ben-Ami Shillony, Enigma

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of the Emperors: Sacred Subservience in Japanese History (Kent: Global Oriental, 2005); and Shunya Yoshimi, “The Cultural Politics of the Mass-mediate Emperor System in Japan,” in Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg, and Angela McRobbie (eds), Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall (London: Verso, 2000), 395–415. Dower, Embracing Defeat, 381–2. The English-language equivalents for these terms are taken from Masuda Koh (ed.), Kenkyūsha’s New Japanese-English Dictionary (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1974). Ruoff, The People’s Emperor, 228. Shuppan nenkan: 1959 (Tokyo: Shuppan Nyūsūsha, 1959), 45. Shuppan Databook: 1945–1984 (Tokyo: Shuppan Nyūsūsha) gives circulation figures for 1959 for the following magazines: Fujin kōron—273,000 in the first half of 1959, and 263,000 in the second half of the year; Fujin kurabu—429,000 in the first half, 193,000 in the second half of 1959; Shūkan josei jishin—783,000 in the first half, 788,000 in the second; Shufu no tomo—418,000 in the first half, and 235,000 in the second half of 1959. Ruoff, The People’s Emperor, 223–4; Emiko Ochiai, “Decent Housewives and Sensual White Women: Representations of Women in Postwar Japanese Magazines,” Japan Review, vol. 9 (2000): 155. See Yoshimi, “The Cultural Politics,” 406–10, for analysis of coverage of the royal wedding in Japanese weekly magazines overall. When Empress Nagako suffered a miscarriage in late 1932, Hirohito was advised to take a concubine from among several princesses and even introduced to a potential candidate. Hirohito remained monogamous and, luckily for Nagako, she gave birth to Akihito in 1933. Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 271. The Meiji emperor had several wives, and one of his concubines fathered his son Yoshihito, later known as the Taishō emperor. Harald Fuess, Divorce in Japan: Family, Gender, and the State, 1600–2000 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 56. Fujin kurabu runs an article on Princess Margaret’s love life that recounts the Townsend episode as evidence of the royal imperative to put duty first: “Because she was born a royal woman, Margaret has known great sorrow. Deeply sympathetic to her, people all over the world have prayed that she will very soon be able to find a blissful love (koi) that will lead to marriage and wipe away all those bitter memories.” Azuma Fumio, “Mata saita Māgaretto-hi no koi” (“Love Blooms again for Princess Margaret”), Fujin kurabu (November 1959), 115. The winner of the Miss Universe contest in July 1959 was Kojima Akiko. Itō Kinuko won third place in 1953. “Kōtaishi-sama no suīto hōmu” (“The Crown Prince’s Sweet Home”), Fujin seikatsu, March 1958, 102. Shillony, Enigma of the Emperors, 234–5.

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12 “Japanese Women: New Freedoms Amid Old Customs,” Time (March 23, 1959), 34. This article refers to Michiko’s mother’s as Tomi; however, Fumiko appears to be the most common romanization of her full given name. 13 Takie Sugiyama Lebra, Above the Clouds: Status Culture of the Modern Japanese Nobility (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 229. 14 “Purinsesu Shōda Michiko-san no sugao” (“Profile of Princess Shōda Michiko”), Fujin kurabu, January 1959, 111. 15 Shillony argues that the royal wedding was not only intended to popularize and democratize the imperial family, but also to extend Christian influence in the palace. He cites how many Christians, including Koizumi, Hamao, and Vining, were involved in educating Akihito, and the large number of Catholics among those in service at Akihito’s Akasaka palace in Tokyo as ladies in waiting and chamberlains. Ben-Ami Shillony, Collected Writings of Ben-Ami Shilloni (Tokyo: Edition Synapse, 2000; reprinted Routledge Curzon, 2004), 44–6. 16 Ibid., 45. Michiko has long had an abiding affinity for Catholicism. Peter Hebblewaite reports that Michiko, on her 1958 trip to Brussels as the Seishin representative at the international conference of Catholic schools, “was elected there as president of the world Sacred Heart Universities Graduates’ Association.” Peter Hebblewaite, “Japan’s Imperial Family Has Catholic Ties,” National Catholic Reporter, May 12, 1989, 9, as cited in Shillony, Enigma of the Emperors, 235–6. Shillony observes that as crown princess, Michiko “kept her Catholic practice and friends” and that her imperial father-in-law suspected of her proselytizing among the royals (239). Kevin Doak observes that Michiko’s Catholicism has received renewed scholarly attention in Japan. Kevin Doak, Xavier’s Legacies: Catholicism in Modern Japanese Culture (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 27, note 14. 17 “Purinsesu Shōda Michiko-san no sugao,” 111. 18 “Japanese Women: New Freedoms Amid Old Customs,” 34. 19 Elizabeth Gray Vining, Windows for the Crown Prince (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1952), 34. 20 For analysis of British efforts to popularize the monarchy through royal ceremonials, see David Cannadine, “The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition’, c. 1820–1997,” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 101–64. 21 Lebra, Above the Clouds, 229. 22 Elizabeth Gray Vining, Return to Japan (Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott, 1960), 224. 23 Takeyama Chiyoko, “Michiko-san no heya” (“Miss Michiko’s Room”), Fujin gahō, May 1959, 13–14. 24 Fujino Tokuko, “Kumo no ue ni tsukaeta mono to shite” (“Speaking as One Who Served Those above the Clouds”), Fujin gahō, May 1959, 26–9.

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25 The look-alike contest was staged by the magazine Myōjo (Yoshimi, “The Cultural Politics,” 402). There were also contests for those who had the same birth date as Michiko (Chun, “A New Kind of Royalty,” 229). 26 Wayne Koestenbaum, Jackie under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon (New York: A Plume Book, 1996), 90. 27 Ibid., 95. 28 Murakami Shigeyoshi, “Kono 50 nen de shufu no shigoto wa doo kawatta ka,” 63–6. 29 “Tokubetsu repōto: Hanayome-san no seitai” (“Special Report: Brides’ Modes of Life”), Fujin seikatsu, April 1959, 113, reveals this information in quotes from an interview with longtime Michiko friend and Seishin classmate, Kodera Yuriko. 30 Fujitani discusses how the royal Meiji wedding, for example, complemented constructions of “good wives, wise mothers” and the civil code that made divorce more difficult. “The restructuring of the imperial family, with a single and permanent marital bond between emperor and empress (or crown prince and princess), sanctified by a wedding performed in the Shinto style, can only be fully appreciated by noting its relation to the new official emphasis on marriage as a sacred institution, which dates from the 1890s” (187). By the 1940s, Fujitani explains, Japanese considered the Shinto-style wedding ceremony traditional (190). Takashi Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 31 Simon Partner, Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 174. 32 Ibid., 174–5. Partner puts to rest the legend that the wedding prompted the sale of 1 million television sets, arguing that sales were brisk throughout 1959. 33 Itō Makio, “Okisaki kisha no jiko hihan” (“A Reporter on the Princess Beat Critiques His Own Role”), Fujin kōron, July 1959, 121. 34 “Kōgō e no kaidan” (“Stairway to Becoming Empress”), Fujin seikatsu, February 1959, 126. 35 Aragaki Hideo, “Kōtaishi-sama go-fusai ni nozomu koto” (“Hopes for the Royal Couple”), Shufu no tomo, May 1959, 67. 36 Ibid., 69. 37 Kamei Katsuichirō and Sakanishi Shio [Shiho], “Taidan: Kokumin wa kōshitsu o korekara dō kangaeru darō?” (“Conversation: How Will the People Think about the Imperial Family from Now On?”), Fujin gahō, May 1959, 23. 38 “Kōtaishi gofusai o otazune shite: ofutari no gakuyū-tachi ga kataru” (“Former Schoolmates Talk about Visiting the Royal Couple”), Fujin kurabu, June 1959. 39 Kainō Michitaka, “Kōtaishi no go-kekkon” (“The Prince’s Wedding”), Fujin gahō, May 1959, 229. 40 Itō, “Okisaki kisha no jiko hihan,” 121. 41 Nogami Yaeko, “Kōtaishi no go-seikon ni omou” (“Reflections on the Wedding of the Prince”), Fujin kōron, April 1959, 56–60.

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42 Shiroyama Saburō, “Tennō-sei e no taiketsu” (“Challenging the Emperor System”), Fujin kōron, June 1959, 86. 43 “Tennōsei” (“Emperor System”), Fujin Kōron, July 1959, 90–9. The participants are listed as Miyazawa Toshiyoshi, Rikkyō University Law Department Chair; Maruyama Masao, Tokyo University Professor of Politics; Hidaka Rokurō, Tokyo University Assistant Professor of Political Science; and Nagai Michio, Tokyo Institute of Technology Assistant Professor of Education and Sociology. 44 “Kōshitsu ni kansuru hitobito no iken” (“Opinions on the Imperial Household from Various Individuals”), Fujin kōron, July 1959, 113. 45 Mikiyo Kanō, “Remolding Tennoism for Modern Japan,” AMPO Japan-Asian Quarterly Review, vol. 18, no. 2–3 (1986): 27. 46 Chun, “A New Kind of Royalty,” 235. 47 Lebra, Above the Clouds, 229.

Chapter 6 1 Art Ryon, “200,000 Will View World’s Beauties in Parade Today,” Los Angeles Times, July 19, 1959, A-2. 2 Winning the title in 1959, Miss Japan became Miss Universe 1960. When the pageant moved to Miami the next year, however, Miss USA Linda Bement was also crowned Miss Universe 1960. The Miss Universe official site now lists Kojima as the 1959 winner and Bement as Miss Universe 1960 (www.missuniverse.com). 3 Akiko Kojima, “‘The Other Girls Were So Pretty,’ Says Tokyo Beauty,” Rafu Shimpo, July 25, 1959, 1. 4 “Heibon na ‘kawaii tsuma’ ni” (“To Become an Ordinary, Lovely Wife”), Shufu no tomo, September 1959, 144. 5 Kojima did better, for example, than high school teachers who earned an average of 21,645 yen per month in 1959. Data on salaries comes from table 19–39: Average Age and Monthly Contractual Cash Earnings by Occupation (1948–2004) found in chapter 19, “Earnings” Historical Statistics of Japan, compiled by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, editorial supervision [by] Statistics Bureau, Management and Coordination Agency, and accessed online July 29, 2013 at www.stat.go.jp/english/data/chouki/index.htm 6 Kojima, “‘The Other Girls Were So Pretty,’” 1. 7 “Women in the News: Akiko Kojima, 1960 Miss Universe,” Japan Times, July 26, 1959. 8 “Utsukushisa to mazushiza ni oitsumerarete” (“Caught between Beauty and Poverty”), Josei jishin, February 12, 1962, 32–4. The Independent, Press-Telegram had a slightly different story of Miss Universe’s winnings, reporting that Kojima was

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to receive a cash prize of $2,500 from Max Factor Hollywood along with a year’s contract for personal appearances outside the United States worth $3,500. Catalina, Inc. was to contribute $5,000 for personal appearance tours within the United States. The new Miss Universe was also promised many goods as prizes, including a pearl necklace, a two-year supply of hosiery, and a Sunbeam hairdryer. Ben Zinser, “Prizes Total $150,000 for Beauty Contestants,” The Independent, Press-Telegram, July 25, 1959, A-3. I could find no evidence, however, of Kojima making tours anywhere in the United States, although she did make one tour to Singapore during her reign in December 1959. “Naze futari wa jūnen kekkon o nobashita ka” (“Why Did the Couple Postpone Their Wedding for Ten Years?”), Shūkan josei, February 26, 1959, 35–9. This translation of kawaii okusan as “lovely wife” is the one used in American newspapers at the time. It was also translated as “charming wife.” Today, “cute wife” would be the more typical translation. Hints of her interest in filmmaking were reported by Ben Zinser, “Miss Universe Homesick, Tired, but on Cloud, Having a Dream,” The Independent, Press-Telegram, July 25, 1959, A-3. “Heibon na ‘kawaii tsuma’ ni,” 144–5. Sarah Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 51. Chimura Michio, Sengo fasshon sutōrī, 1945–2000 (Postwar Fashion Story, 1945– 2000) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2003), 38–9. Inoue Shōichi, Bijin kontesuto hyakunen-shi: Geigi no jidai kara bishōjo made (The One-hundred Year History of Beautiful Women: From the Days of Geisha to Those of Pretty Maidens) (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1997), 139. Nagahara Kazuko and Yoneda Sayoko, Onna no Shōwa-shi (Women’s History of Shōwa Japan) (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 1986), 187. Watanabe Kieko, “Itō Kinuko no meisei to kekkon no kankei” (“The Connection between Itō Kinuko’s Fame and Marriage”), Madomoazeru, December, 1959, 102–8. The report of Itō’s interview appears in “Ex-Miss Universe Runner-up Tells Akiko Crown Not Means to End,” Rafu Shimpo, July 27, 1959, 1. For extensive analysis of reportage on Itō’s Miss Universe experience, fashion career, and marriage in 1969, see my chapter, “Miss Japan on the Global Stage: The Journey of Itō Kinuko,” in Alisa Freedman, Laura Miller, and Chris Yano (eds), Modern Girls on the Go: Gender, Mobility, and Labor in Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 169–92. Hori Hidehiko, Jinsei annai (Life’s Guide) (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbun, 1959), 3. “Nihon ga urikonda futatsu no kao” (“Japan’s Two Popular Faces”), Josei jishin, August 14, 1960, 26–9. “Misu Nippon 35-nin no bijo ga tadotta eikō, arui tenraku” (“Miss Japan: The Glory or the Downfall Pursued by 35 Beauties”), Josei jishin, November 1979, 70–6.

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21 Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 132. 22 Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 49. 23 The Miss University Beauty Pageant Program, 1959. Courtesy of Long Beach Historical Society. 24 The Miss University Beauty Pageant Program, 1956. Courtesy of Long Beach Historical Society. 25 “Meet Akiko,” The Independent, Press-Telegram, July 8, 1959, B-1. 26 “Miss Japan Welcomed to U.S.,” The Independent, Press-Telegram, July 13, 1959, B-1. 27 “US Beauties to Arrive En Masse,” The Independent, Press-Telegram, July 13, 1959. 28 “Painting the Lily,” Los Angeles Times, July 14, 1959, A-1. 29 “Cuba Meets Japan,” The Independent, Press-Telegram, July 17, 1959. 30 “Four Vivacious Visitors from the Orient,” The Independent, Press-Telegram, July 17, 1959. Miss Korea, Ehwa Women’s University student, Hyun Choo Oh, was one of the 15 finalists and won Most Popular Girl in Parade. The contestants voted Miss Thailand, Sodsai Pantoomkomol, known in the contest as Sondi Sodsai, Miss Friendship, and she also earned the unofficial title of “the comedienne of the pageant.” Miss Burma was a student at UCLA. 31 Christine Yano, Crowning the Nice Girl: Gender, Ethnicity, and Culture in Hawaii’s Cherry Blossom Festival (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), 6. 32 “Miss UAR Won’t Attend Beauty Show,” Los Angeles Times, July 19, 1959, A-2. 33 “First U.S. Negro Seeks Title of Miss Universe,” New York Times, July 3, 1960. Nineteen-year-old Corinne Huff, went from first runner-up and on to the Miss USA/Miss Universe contest when the original Miss Ohio, 16-year-old Cathy Justice, was found to be too young to compete in the next rounds. Huff ’s entry apparently took the contest by surprise. As the article states, “Contest officials said that girls from Madagascar and Martinique had participated in pageants [but Huff would be] the first American of her race to compete.” According to the Miss Universe press information person, Huff would be welcome at the contest as long she met all the requirements. 34 “Miss Universe Parade,” Rafu Shimpo, July 20, 1959, 1. 35 “Cadets Escort Universe Beauties in Privacy of Coronation Ball,” The Independent, Press-Telegram, July 26, 1959, A-1. 36 Kojima’s height is also given variously as 5 feet, 5 inches and 5 feet, 6 inches. 37 Ibid. 38 Although the 1947 constitution forbade Japan from engaging in war or maintaining a military, fears of the spread of communism in Asia led the United States to urge Japan to establish the Self-Defense Force (Jietai), which it did in 1954.

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39 Whether or not African Americans or American men of other ethnicities or races were present at the Coronation Ball is not mentioned in any of the reports I could find. 40 Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 3. 41 Ibid., 9. 42 Zinser, “Miss Universe Homesick,” A-1. 43 “Miss Universe, Runners-up Sign Contracts for the Tour,” Japan Times, July 27, 1959. 44 Jim Douthit, “Nippon in Uproar at News of Miss Universe Victory: Equal Rights for Women Given Boost,” The Independent, Press-Telegram, July 26, 1959, A-1 and A-3. 45 Art Ryon, “Miss Japan Wins,” Los Angeles Times, July 25, 1959, 1. The newspaper had run a similar headline the year before: Art Ryon, “Miss Colombia Wins Miss Universe Title,” Los Angeles Times, July 26, 1958, 1. In a 1988 interview, June Doherty, executive secretary of the International Beauty Congress, recalled the enormous publicity the Miss Universe pageant in Long Beach generated in the mid-1950s: “In fact, the day after Miss Japan was crowned in 1959, the Los Angeles Times came out with ‘war headlines,’ ‘Japan Wins,’ and everyone knew what they were talking about.” Gene Lassers, “Long Beach Story: Miss Universe Pageant,” Long Beach Review, February 1988, 18. 46 “Ex-Miss Universe Runner-up Tells Akiko Crown Not Means to End,” Rafu Shimpo, July 27, 1959, 1. 47 Douthit, “Nippon in Uproar,” A-1. 48 Ibid., A-3. 49 Tsugi Shiraishi, “A Woman’s Viewpoint,” Japan Times, July 25, 1959, 4. 50 Ibid. 51 Douthit, “Nippon in Uproar,” A-3. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 “Akiko, 14 Others Anxiously Await Judges’ Big Decision,” Rafu Shimpo, July 24, 1959, 1. 56 “Bishin ni aiserareta hito” (“The Person Admired as a Goddess of Beauty”), Shufu to seikatsu, September 1959, 142–3. 57 “Heibon na ‘kawaii tsuma’ ni,” 144. 58 “‘The Other Girls Were So Pretty,’” 4. 59 Jennifer Robertson, “Japan’s First Cyborg? Miss Nippon, Eugenics and Wartime Technologies of Beauty, Body and Blood,” Body & Society, vol. 7, no. 1 (2001): 2. 60 “Bishin ni aiserareta hito,” 156. 61 “Misu Nihon ga Yamaguchi-ken pikunikku e shusseki” (“Miss Japan Attends Yamaguchi Prefecture Picnic”), Rafu Shimpo, July 25, 1959, 1.

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210 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

73 74

75 76 77 78

79 80 81

Notes “Kishi Says Miss Japan ‘Has Beauty of Soul,’” Rafu Shimpo, July 25, 1959, 1. “Miss Akiko no bishō” (“Miss Akiko’s Lovely Smile”), Fujin kurabu, October 1959, 87. “Miss Universe Hits Surgeon’s Claim,” Japan Times, August 15, 1959, 1. Ibid. Laura Miller, Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics (Berkeley: University of California, 2006), 81–4. McLelland, Love, Sex, and Democracy in Japan, 136–7. Natsubori Masamoto, “Bijo o kettei suru mono wa dare ka” (“Who Is the One to Determine the Beautiful Woman?”), Fujin kōron, October 1959, 314. Douthit, “Nippon in Uproar,” A-3. Natsubori, “Bijo o kettei suru mono wa dare ka,” 316–19. “Rules and Regulations for Contestants,” The Miss University Beauty Pageant Program, 1959. Courtesy of Long Beach Historical Society. “Beigyō-sha dokusen de hamon: Nihon gawa ‘hanashi ga chigau’ to okoru” (“Repercussions of US Corporate Monopoly: Japanese Side Angry, ‘Story Was Different’”), Yomiuri shinbun, July 30, 1959, 9. “Security Pact Talks to End Soon: Kishi,” Japan Times, August 9, 1959, 1. When Itō Kinuko placed near the top in the 1953 Miss Universe contest, there was some suspicion that her success had been intended to assuage anger in Japan over the recently enacted Mutual Security Treatment Agreement which allowed US bases to remain in Japan and gave forces stationed there the right to intervene in Japan’s domestic affairs. Natsubori, “Bijo o kettei suru mono wa dare ka,” 316. “Saikō no sanji o okuru” (“Sending Highest Compliments”), Sankei shinbun, July 26, 1959, 1. My translation of Meinhardt’s sentiments as reported in Japanese. “Shūkan buri no saikai” (“Meeting Again after One Week”), Sankei shinbun, August 16, 1959, 11. “Okagesame de” (“It’s Thanks to You”), Sankei shinbun, August 18, 1959, 2. The article announces that the major of Long Beach will attend a mayoral conference in Osaka in November. Photo, “Miss Universe, Akiko Kojima Paid a Courtesy Call on Foreign Minister Aiichiro Fujiyama at the Foreign Office Yesterday,” Japan Times, August 19, 1959, 3. “Kochi People Stunned by Miss Universe Zoom,” Rafu Shimpo, July 28, 1959, 1. Andrew Gordon, Fabricating Consumers: The Sewing Machine in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 174.

Chapter 7 1 Onnamen was beautifully translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter: Masks (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983). I will refer to the novel as Masks throughout since it is well

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known in English by this title; all references here are to Carpenter’s translation. Literally, onna-men is “woman mask” or perhaps “women’s masks”; since Japanese has no plural, either is correct. Enchi Fumiko (1905–86), novelist, playwright, and translator of Tale of Genji into modern Japanese fully established her reputation in the 1950s, receiving prestigious awards for her work. She was close friends with author Hirabayashi Taiko, discussed in Chapter 4. For introductions to Enchi’s life and work, see J. Yumiko Hulvey, “Enchi Fumiko,” in Chieko Mulhern (ed.), Japanese Women Writers: A Bio-critical Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 40–60, and Lucy North, “Enchi Fumiko,” in Jay Rubin (ed.), Modern Japanese Writers (New York: Charles Schribners’ Sons, 2001), 89–105. Most prominently cited works in English in relation to Masks are articles by Doris Bargen, “Spirit Possession in the Context of Dramatic Expressions of Gender Conflict: The Aoi Episode of The Genji Monogatari,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 48, no. 1 (1988): 95–130, and “Twin Blossoms on a Single Branch: The Cycle of Retribution in Onnamen,” Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 46, no. 2 (1991): 147–71; Nina Cornyetz, “Bound by Blood: Female Pollution, Divinity, and Community in Enchi Fumiko’s Masks,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, English Supplement, no. 9 (1995): 29–58 and “Part II. Enchi Fumiko,” in Dangerous Women, Deadly Words: Phallic Fantasy and Modernity in Three Japanese Writers (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 99–154; Hulvey, “Enchi Fumiko,” and Wayne Pounds, “Enchi Fumiko and the Hidden Energy of the Supernatural,” The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, vol. 24, no. 2 (1990): 167–83. Critical analysis in Japanese includes Mizuta Noriko’s books, Heroin kara hero e: josei to jiga no hyōgen (From Heroine to Hero: The Female Self and Expression) (Tokyo: Tabatake Shoten, 1982) and Sunami Toshiko, Enchi Fumiko ron (Tokyo: Ōfū, 1998). Doris Bargen uncovers numerous and provocative links between Masks and Nō and Tale of Genji; see Bargen, “Twin Blossoms.” The Tale of Genji character Rokujō Miyasudokoro, as described by Bargen, is a widow who nurses wounded pride and ambition when her husband’s death forecloses her own potential to be an empress. For a short time, she is one of Prince Genji’s lovers. Bargen argues that Rokujō’s possessing spirit does not intend to attack his other lovers so much as through this possession “haunt Genji’s, and perhaps by implication, all men’s conscience.” Bargen, “Twin Blossoms,” 155. The art object is identified by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston as follows: Deme Mitsushige, Japanese, died in 1719. Nō mask of the Fukai type. Japanese, Edo 15 5 period, eighteenth century, Japanese cypress. 21.0 × 13.5 × 7.5 cm (8¼ × 5 16 × 2 16 in.) (h × w × d). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. William Sturgis Bigelow Collection. 11.5952. Onnazaka was originally published in segments from 1949 through 1957 in various journals; when published as a single volume in 1957, it won the Noma Prize. It was translated into English by John Bester as The Waiting Years (Tokyo: Kodansha

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Notes International, 1971). The panorama of the novel spans the married life of Shirakawa Tomo from her procurement of the first concubine through her fearsome management of her wayward family and its extensive wealth to the brink of death where she obliquely promises to haunt her husband for the rest of his days. Cited, for example, in Amy Beth Borovoy, The Too-good Wife: Alcohol, Codependency, and the Politics of Nurturance in Postwar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 18–19. Cornyetz, Dangerous Women, Deadly Words, 112. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950) was first translated into Japanese in 1955 by Sasaki Tetsurō, Suzuki Kōju, and Yatabe Bunkichi as Kodoku naru gunshū (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō). In 1956, Tanaka Yūji published his translation of Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955) as Haiiro no fuku o kita otoko (Tokyo: Hayakawa Shobō). McLelland, Love, Sex, and Democracy in Japan, 96. Ibid., 102. See Stanleigh H. Jones, Jr, “Puccini among the Puppets: Madame Butterfly on the Japanese Puppet Stage,” Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 38, no. 2 (1983): 163–74. Mention of Sputnik, the artificial satellite that took the dog Luna into space and was launched by the Soviets on October 4, 1957, is one of the few clues in the novel that Masks is set in the late 1950s. Mikame refers to Sputnik when disparaging the professor who had set up the séance as “raving about” the wonders of the “Buddhist concept of infinite cosmos” even in the era when “we have dogs riding around outer space in satellites” (12). Doris Bargen considers that the painter, named as Shimojō Minoru—the Chinese character for Minoru suggesting “to bear fruit,” could be Mieko’s anonymous lover. His painting of Mieko hanging in the room where Ibuki is tricked into seducing Harume would mean that both he and Mieko are symbolically present at their grandchild’s conception. Bargen, “Twin Blossoms,” 159. Bargen also makes the case for considering the minor male characters poet Kawabe Junryō and Nō actor Yakushiji Yorihito as “invisibly active behind the scenes” in shaping Mieko’s journey (164). Cornyetz, Dangerous Women, Deadly Words, 102–3.

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Index Boldface locators indicate illustrations; locators followed by “n.” indicate endnotes. 20th Century Fox Studios 154 Abe Shinzō, Prime Minister 14–15, 187n. 58 adultery 75, 81–2, 84, 167 see also marriage advertising 86, 127, 145, 161–2 African American beauty contestant 149 aging 13 Aiko, Princess 18–19 Akihito, Emperor 1–2, 18, 108, Chapter 5, 182 Akishino, Prince 19 ambassadors American women 22, 42 beauty queens 148, 161 Princess Michiko 130 ambition female 17, 49, 59, 77, 80, 88–9, 98, 101, 122, 143–5, 162, 200n. 8, 211n. 4 American National Exhibition, Moscow, 1959 10 anti-war sentiment 2 apartment 7, 78–9, 88, 122, 180 appliance 3, 6–8, 10–11, 22, 25, 42, 46, 48, 62, 87, 139, 144, 173, 184n.16 see also washing machine Americans self-image as conquerors 1, 24 Apron Husband 102–3 arafō (around forty) 15–16 Aragaki Hideo 125–6 archetype 168, 181 Arimoto Chiyoko 143, 145 arranged marriage (miai kekkon) 91, 96, 128 see also marriage Asahi Shimbun 21–4, 31–3, 39, 43, 145, 190n. 27, 191n. 36–7 Associated Press 145, 156, 160–1 atarashii onna 3 see also New Woman atomic bomb 153

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bachelor 169 bad girl 103 Banet-Weiser, Sarah 144 Bargen, Doris 165, 178, 211n. 2–4, 212n. 13 bathing suit see swimsuit beauty contest 16, 19, 72, 103, 113, Chapter 6, 173 Benedict, Ruth 39, 192n. 64 birthrate 9, 13, 16 Blondie (American comic strip) 11, 31 Bluestockings see Seitō body-building 155 boyfriend 97, 202n. 30 Bradshaw, Ann 38 Brookman, Laura Lou 11, 186n. 33 Buck, Pearl 11, 21, 23–7, 29–33, 39, 43, 56, 186n. 34, 189n. 6, 189n. 15, 197n. 25 Buckley, Sandra 52, 185n. 18 Buddhism 167, 178–9, 212n. 12 brothel 171 bunka kuni (culture nation) 4 bunka seikatsu (cultured life) 88, 184n. 7 calisthenics 145 calligraphy 79 camera 23, 87, 124, 129, 141, 145, 148, 158, 172 capitalism 10, 62–3, 153 Carlile, Lonny 5 cartoons 4–5, 8–9, 93, 101–6, 160, 184n. 8, 200n. 8 Cary, Otis 58 Catalina, Inc. 147, 154, 206–7n. 8 Catholic bishop 149 censorship 11, 186n 34 see also Supreme Command for the Allied Powers (SCAP)

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childcare center 63 child support payments 45 daycare center 194n. 7 leave 15 childbirth see reproduction China 51, 68, 142, 153, 166–7 Chinese 36, 51, 167, 212n. 13 Christianity 36, 99, 204n. 15 Chrysanthemum and the Sword see Benedict, Ruth Chun, Jason 136 Chūō kōron (Central Review) 75, 110 Cinderella 1, 113, 115, 125–6, 134, 150 Cio-Cio San see Madame Butterfly City of Long Beach. See Chapter 6 civil code 63, 205n. 30 civilization 26, 30 civilizing gestures 52 colonialism 22, 26–8, 39, 189n. 12, 189n. 21 comics 11, 31, 45, 101–2, 106, 160 communism containment 9–10, 14, 112, 147, 153, 160, 208n. 38 concubine 27, 113, 169, 203n. 7, 211–2n. 6 consumption 2–5, 8, 10, 12–13, 27, 48, 50, 53, 59–60, 62, 69–70, 92, 111, 120, 127, 139, 149, 151, 161 constitution 1, 8, 58, 63, 109–12, 126–7, 131, 144, 153, 166, 208n. 38 contact zone 2, 6, 11, 41 Coontz, Stephanie 10, 185n. 25 Cornyetz, Nina 165, 170, 181, 211n. 2 cosmetics 10, 84, 99, 139, 145, 148, 154, 160, 185n. 28 cosmetic surgery 158–60 court ladies (Heian period) 171, 180, 182 crime 76, 78, 80, 92, 166, 168, 179–80, 200n. 8 Crockett, Lucy Herndon 43 Crown Prince Akihito see Akihito, Emperor Crown Princess Masako see Masako, Crown Princess cute (kawaii) culture 4, 88, 156, 207n. 10 Daiei Film Company 154 dancer 157, 172–5 dating 96, 119, 150, 160, 177

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department store 11, 128, 145, 178 detective private 170–1 disability 168 disasters in Japan, March, 2011 13–14 Disney Studios 113 divorce 8, 9, 54, 82–5, 113, 205n. 30 see also marriage Dower, John 24, 110–11 Echols, Nancy 29, 33, 35–8, 40–1, 43 education Junior College of Bunka Gakuin 39 Ochanomizu Women’s University 178 women’s college 9, 78–9, 117, 129, 132, 134–5, 143, 146, 168–9, 173 Egawa, Toshy 33 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 147 Elizabeth, Queen 113, 150 emperor see Akihito, Hirohito, or Meiji. emperor system 121–2, 129, 131–6, 133 employment 9, 14–15, 45, 52, 55, 61–2, 66–8, 87, 170, 193n. 2, 194n. 9 Enchi Fumiko 3, 75, 165–6, 169, 171–2, 176–7, 181–2 engagement 109, 114, 123–4, 129, 167, 169 see marriage English-language ability 12, 21, 28, 40, 89, 141, 162, 189n. 20 Esquire (magazine) 12 ethnicity 111, 149, 150, 153 etiquette 2, 21, 22, 25, 27, 30, 42–3, 111, 192n. 68 bad manners/bad taste 27, 33, 37, 41, 43 behavior 48, 50 impolite 43 Ladies Forum on Etiquette 41–2 manners 21, 22, 25, 28, 33, 34, 35, 37, 41, 41, 43, 43, 77, 95 virtue 27, 32, 37, 72, 81 eugenics 156 evil 168, 179 family system 59, 63, 73, 97, 198n. 42 fans 8, 33, 83, 123, 125–7, 131, 161, 178 fashion model 3, 10, 16, 31, 74, 139–46, 155–6, 160–2, 166, 169, 172–6, 179, 182 see also Arimoto Chiyoko, Itō Kinuko, Kojima Akiko.

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Index fashion shows 72, 141, 142, 145 father 15, 50–1, 73, 82, 84, 87, 115–16, 136, 142, 144, 153, 162, 167–8, 170–1, 181, 182 femininity 3, 12, 24, 45, 72, 112, 135, 139, 144, 149–50, 175, 193n. 2 feminism 9, 12, 16–17, 29–30, 45–6, 50, 64, 122, 123, 135 domestic 52 housewife 13 feudal 4, 25, 63, 121–2, 191n. 37, 199n. 49 Five Women Who Loved Love 82 folklore 169 food 7, 10, 30, 41, 70, 99, 102, 148, 155, 157, 180 foreigners in Japan 34, 58, 78–9, 96, 176, 181–2 Free World 112, 139, 147 Fūfu seikatsu (Conjugal Couple Lifestyle, magazine) 76 Fujin gahō (Ladies’ Pictorial, magazine) 6–8, 111, 114, 119–20, 122, 126–7 Fujin kōron (Ladies’ Review, magazine) 5, 8, 24, 36, 39–40, 45–7, 51–2, 56–7, 64–5, 69, 73, 75–80, 83, 86–7, 91–3, 97, 101, 104–6, 110–11, 122, 127–32, 134–6, 144, 159, 161 Fujin kurabu (Ladies’ Club, magazine) 111, 114, 116, 126, 158, 203n. 5 Fujitani, Takashi 123, 205n. 30 Fujiyama Aiichirō, foreign minister 161 Fukai (Nō mask) 18, 164, 168, 181, 211n. 5 see also Nō theater Fukuda Tsuneari 64–9, 71, 198n. 38, 199n. 44, 199n. 49 Garon, Sheldon 8 geisha 1, 153, 162, 171 gender roles 4, 5, 9, 76, 93, 101, 106, 202n. 37 generation 15, 29, 83, 88, 93, 95–6, 100–1, 131–2, 141, 168–9, 173, 178 ghost 167, 179 GHQ 11, 32, 186n. 32, 190n. 24, 191–2n. 60, 195n 13 see also Supreme Command for Allied Powers Gifford, Kenneth 150–3, 151 girlhood 109, 146 ojōsan 80, 81, 146, 201–2n. 25

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schoolgirl 3–4, 86, 129, 173–4, 196n. 17 see also shōjo glamour 2, 10, 166, 174 Gluck, Carol 76 Goforth, Paul 154 Goldstein-Gidoni, Ofra 15, 187n. 59 Good Earth, The see Pearl Buck good wives, wise mothers (ryōsai kenbo) 72, 123, 205n. 30 Gordon, Andrew 5, 161, 194n. 9 Gossamer Diary 82 Gould, Beatrice Blackmar 21, 30, 33 Gunzō (Arts Group, journal) 165 Hamao Minoru, Chamberlain 115 Hatano Isoko 130 hattōshin (perfectly proportioned body) 144–5, 156 see also Itō Kinuko height 79, 101, 140–2, 144, 148, 150–1, 153, 155–7, 159–62, 173, 177, 208n. 36 Helena Rubenstein Salon 10, 185n. 28 Hepburn, Audrey 72, 113 see also Roman Holiday Herbert L. Herberts, Mrs. 41 heterosexuality 150, 156 Hidaka Rokurō 131 Hills, Ben 19, 188n. 75 Himiko 16 Hirabayashi Taiko 77–8, 83–5, 92–3, 101, 106, 170, 201n. 13 Hirakobari Shōji 7–8 Hiratsuka Raichō (Haruko) 50, 64, 69, 199n 47 see also New Woman Hirohito, Emperor 112, 116, 151–2, 154, 203n. 7 Hiroshima Maidens 153 Hisahito, Prince 19 Hollywood films 11, 195n. 13 stars 11, 28, 159, 176, 186n. 34, 186n. 46 studios 143, 154 homemaker 1–2, 8–9, 25, 146 homosexuality 9, 197–8n. 32 Hori Hidehiko 145 houseboy 25, 180, 189n. 12 housing 7, 24, 79, 88 Hyakuta Naoki 18 Idealistic Wife 83–5, 89, 92 Ikeda Hayato, Prime Minister 152

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Ikiru (To Live) 172 see also Kurosawa Akira immigrant 158 Imperial Household Agency (IHA) (Kunaichō) 18, 19, 128 Imperial Palace 1, 2, 18–19, 114–15, 118–23, 136, 165, 182, 204n. 15 imperialism American cultural 140 Japanese 142 income 7, 9, 48, 62, 88, 136, 143, 170, 196n. 20 Inoue Shoichi 145 Inukai Michiko 127–8 Ishigaki Ayako Chapter 3, 78, 81–3, 106, 200n.8 see also Matsui, Haru Ishigaki Eitarō 51 Ishihara Shintarō 83, 201n. 11 Itami Jūzo 80 Itō Kinuko 142–6, 156, 161, 173, 210n. 74 Itō Makio 128–9 Janome Sewing Machine Company 161 Japan-America Student Conference 38 Japan Times 21, 143, 155, 158, 161 see also Nippon Times Japanese Americans 140–1, 146, 148, 150, 153, 157–8, 162 jo-ha-kyū 166 Johansen, Millie 21, 29, 33–5, 41, 192n. 68 June Cleaver 9–10 juvenile delinquency 5, 54 Kano, Ayako 15 Kainō Michitaka 127 Kanō Mikiyo 135 Kasai, Tomoko 35 Kawaguchi Matsutarō 154 Kawashima Kiko see Kiko, Princess Kelly, Grace 113 Kennedy, Jackie 112, 120–2 Key, The (Kagi) 75–7, 86, 97, 199n. 1–3 see also Tanizaki Jun’ichirō Khrushchev, Nikita. See kitchen Khrushchev-Nixon debate Kiko, Princess 19 kimono 6, 29, 120, 124, 141, 148, 158, 162, 190n 26 see also national costume King, Hal 148 King-O’Riain, Rebecca Chiyoko 157 Kinsey report 77, 92, 200n. 6

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Kishi Nobusuke, Prime Minister of Japan 158, 160–2 kiss 96, 175–8 kitchen 2–3, 7, 9–10, 38, 42, 44, 87, 102, 122, 161, 165–6, 180 Khrushchev-Nixon debate 10 palace 1, 123, 165, 182 princess 2–3, 9, 13, 42, 122, 123, 140, 165, 182 Klein, Christina 147 Koikari, Mire 12–14 Koizumi Shinzō, Chamberlain 115, 128, 130, 204n. 15 Kojima Akiko 3–4, 6, Chapter 6, 138, 151, 173, 181 Kojima Hisako 142–3, 156 Kojima Kazuyo 142 Kojima Takao 142–3, 153 Kojima Takayo 142 Kojima Tatsu 142 Korea Japanese occupation 36 Korean War 59 Kurara Chibana 17 Kurihara Harumi 15 Kurosawa Akira 172 Ladies Home Journal (magazine) 11, 21, 30 Lambert, Mrs. Tom 41 Lawrence, D.H. 75–6 LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) 162 Lebra, Takie S. 116, 118, 136 leisure 7, 15, 31, 46–50, 53, 56–7, 59, 61–2, 64, 69–71, 73, 89, 102, 122, 193n. 2, 193–4n. 5 lesbianism 178 Ligron, Inés 16–17 Lindstrom, Richard J. 12 Long Beach, California Chapter 6 Los Alamitos Naval Air Reserve Station 149–50 Los Angeles Times 147–8, 154, 157, 209n. 45 Loti, Pierre 27, 189n. 16 Lystad, Maria, Mrs. 41 MacArthur, Douglas A. 1, 36, 152, 186n. 32 Mackie, Vera 5, 15 Madame Butterfly 152, 176, 189n. 16

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Index manga 4, 17, 103 Margaret, Princess 113, 203n. 8 Mark, Elizabeth C. 42 marriage 6–9, 13, 15–17, 51, 54, 55, 67, 69, 71, Chapter 4, 145, 153, 172, 175–8 bride 18, 94, 96, 99, 113, 115, 119–21, 128, 202n. 26 in-laws 2, 8, 19, 38, 116, 204n. 16 royal marriage 1–2, 18–19 Chapter 5 Maruyama Masao 133, 206n. 43 Marxist ideology 60–1, 197n. 31 Masako, Crown Princess 18–19, 123, 188n. 75 masculinity 5, 12, 80, 107, 149, 150, 175, 197–8n. 32 Masks (Onnamen) Chapter 6 maternity 170 Matsui, Haru 51 see also Ishigaki Ayako Matsushita Keiichi 110 Max Factor Hollywood 139, 147, 154, 158–61, 206–7n. 8 May, Elaine Tyler 9–10 McLelland, Mark 76–7, 176, 200n. 6 Meiji, Emperor 131, 203n. 7, 205n. 30 Meinhardt, Oscar 161 menstruation 166, 173 Meyerowitz, Joanne 10, 185n. 25 Michener, James A. 12, 153 Michiko, Empress 1–3, 13, 18–19 Chapter 5, 108, 123, 141, 146, 162, 165, 178, 182, 183n. 4 Mikado Bunraku puppet theater performance 176 militarism Japanese 12, 22, 51, 58, 197n. 26 Miller, Laura 17–18, 159 miscarriage see reproduction Miss America contest 144 Miss Colombia 161, 209n. 45 Miss International Beauty Contest 16, 147 Miss Japan 16–17, 113, 139–43, 146, 148–50, 152–5, 157–8, 160–2, 206n. 2 Miss Japan American Citizens League 157 Miss Korea 148, 208n. 30 Miss Lulu Love 43 Miss Nippon 156 Miss Nisei Week Festival 140, 157 see also Japanese Americans

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Miss Ohio see African American beauty contestant Miss Shikoku Contest 142 Miss Tōhoku 16 Miss Universe 3–4, 16–17, 26, 72, 113, Chapter 6, 138, 151, 181, 203n. 9, 206n. 2 Miyazaki Miyako 17 Modern Girl (modan gāru) 3–4, 72, 80, 103, 183n. 6 modesty 37, 41, 88, 90, 144–5, 156 Mogi, Hiroshi 37 Mogi, Teruko 20, Chapter 2, 170, 176–7, 180 morals 4, 71–2, 76–8, 82–3, 85, 92, 95, 98, 101 mores, sexual 129 Mori Ōgai 67 Mori Riyo 17 motherhood 14–16, 71 Mount Fuji 26, 168, 172 Murakami Shigeyoshi 6, 122, 184n. 12 My-homeism (mai-hōmushugi) 2, 146 Nagako, Empress 203n. 7 Naruhito, Crown Prince 18 national costume 17, 140–1, 148, 162 see also kimono Natsubori Masamoto 159, 161–2 Navy Japan 160 US 12, 140, 142, 149–53 neighborhood association (chōnaikai) 81 New Life Movement 5, 71–2 see also Gordon, Andrew New Woman (atarashii onna) 3, 4, 58, 64, 69, 71–2, 80, 183n. 6, 195n. 10, 199n.47 see also Hiratsuka Raichō New York Times 14–15, 208n. 33 Nippon Times 3, Chapter 2 Nisei 40 see also Japanese Americans and Miss Nisei Week Nitta, Mariko 33, 38 Nixon, Richard see kitchen KhrushchevNixon debate Nō theater 164, 165, 166, 168, 172, 179, 182 see also Fukai (Nō mask) nobility Japanese (kuge) 116, 118, 136 Nogami Yaeko 130

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nostalgia 10, 18 nuclear age 9, 52, 149 energy 13–14 family 2, 8–9, 113 occupationnaire Chapter 2 Of Women and Men see Buck, Pearl Okabe Fuyuhiko 8, 9, 93, 101–6, 104, 105 Oldenziel, Ruth 10 Olympics 139, 156 Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy see Kennedy, Jackie orientalism 12, 22, 27, 36–7, 42, 147–8, 155–6, 159, 208n. 30 Overacker, Mrs. Charles B. 41 Owada Masako see Masako, Crown Princess pan-pan girls 176 Parent Teacher Association (PTA) 1, 3, 76, 81–2, 85, 89, 92, 101, 103, 178 Partner, Simon 124, 205n. 32 patriarchy 11–12, 59, 73, 166–7, 173, 177–8, 182, 194n. 5, 202n. 26 Pax Americana 140, 147, 149–50 Pearl Harbor 22, 39 people Japanese terms (heimin, kokumin, minshū, minzoku, shomin) 110–11 People-to-People program 147, 153 Pinkerton, Lieutenant B.F. see Madame Butterfly poetry Chapter 7 Pratt, Mary Louise 11 Prince Charming 140, 154 Princess Grace see Kelly, Grace property 61, 63, 98, 112, 168, 170, 180 prostitution 66–7, 79, 80, 171, 177 race 2, 12, 26, 29, 36, 57, 110, 149–50, 153, 159 Rafu Shimpo 141–3, 150, 157, 207n. 17 Reader’s Digest (magazine) 12 Real Estate Siren Chapter 4 reality gap 6, 8, 15, 166, 185n. 18 refrigerator see appliance reproduction 8, 72, 94, 167–8, 179, 184n. 17 abortion 8, 72, 167, 184n. 17

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birth control 8, 94, 184n. 17 childbirth 9, 18–19, 130, 168, 203n. 7 contraception 72 family planning 184n. 17 fertility 156, 173 miscarriage 167, 179, 203n. 7 pregnancy 167–8, 179 Return to Japan 119 reverse course 59 see also Supreme Command for the Allied Powers Riesman, David 174 Robertson, Jennifer 156 Rokujō, Lady 167–9, 211n. 4 Roman Holiday 72, 113–14, 118, 122, 125, 161 Roosevelt, Eleanor 21, 23, 30–3, 176 royalty 18–19 Chapter 5 Ruoff, Kenneth 110–11 Sakanishi Shio (Shiho) 126, Chapter 3 Salary Girl (sararii gyaru) 86, 88–92, 98, 101, 201n. 16, 201n. 20 salaryman (sararii man) 5, 104, 169 Sankei shimbun 159, 161 Saturday Evening Post (magazine) 24 Sayonara see Michener, James SCAP see Supreme Command for the Allied Powers (SCAP) Schoppa, Leonard 14 Schwartz, John Burnham 19 Seaman, Amanda 123 Seitō (Bluestockings) see New Woman Self-Defense Force (Jietai) 160, 208n. 38 sexuality 56, 75–6, 159, 173–4, 176–8, 199n.3 see also heterosexuality and homosexuality shamanism 167–9, 173, 177–8, 180–2 Sherif, Ann 5, 200n. 4 Shibusawa, Naoko 27, 153 Shillony, Ben-Ami 116, 204n. 15 Shimazu Chitose Chapter 4 Shimizu Keiko 102, Chapter 3 Shinto 205n. 30 Shiraishi, Tsugi 39, 41, 155, 190n. 27, 191–2n. 60 Shiroyama Saburō 130–1 Shōda Fumiko 115–16, 120, 125, 129, 130, 132

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Index Shōda Hidesaburō; President, Nisshin Flour Milling, Co. 115–16 Shōda Michiko see Michiko, Empress shōjo (maiden) 3–4, 72, 183n. 6 Shufu no tomo (Housewife’s Companion, magazine) 83, 111, 114, 125, 198n. 35, 203n. 5 Shufu to seikatsu (The Housewife and Daily Life, magazine) 111, 156, 157 Shūkan josei jishin (Women’s Own Weekly, magazine) 111, 114, 124, 143, 145–6, 203n. 5 Sleeping Beauty 113, 154 Smith, Senator Margaret Chase 21, 23, 30–1 Social class 2–3, 10, 12, 24, 27, 32, 39, Chapter 3, 76, 81–2, 104, 106, 118, 146, 169, 182, 196n. 22, 198n. 38 Social Psychology Research Institute (Shakai Shinri Kanri Kenkyūjo) 86, 91–3, 100, 102, 104, 201n. 16 Soviet Union 2, 10, 68, 185n. 28, 212n. 12 spirit possession 168–72 stereotype 2, 5, 9, 22, 171, 186n. 25, 193n. 5 Supreme Command for the Allied Powers (SCAP) 186n. 34, 191–2n. 60, 195n 13 see also censorship swimsuit 141, 148–50 swimsuit competition 149 see also beauty contest Taiyō-zoku (Sun Tribe) see Ishihara Shintarō Takada Akio 146 Takagi Takeo 78–83, 85, 92, 95, 96, 106, 200n. 8 Takeyama Chiyoko 130 Tale of Genji 82, 165–7, 210–1n. 1, 211n. 2, 211n. 4 Tanaka Chikao 93 Tanaka Kōtarō, Chief Justice 115 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō 75, 77, 85, 89, 106, 199n. 1–3 see also Key, The Teruoka Yasutaka Chapter 4 Tezuka-Berger, Thea, M.D. 33, 36–9 Thurber, James 8, 106, 202n. 37

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Time (magazine) cover story on 1959 Japanese royal wedding 1–2, 4, 11, 17, 117, 165 reader response 12 Tōhō film company 49, 194n. 9 Tokugawa Musei 130 tourists 16, 27, 157, 160 Trump, Donald 16 Tyson, Laura D’Andrea 14, 15 Ueno Chizuko 193n. 2 United Nations 13–14, 149 US-Japan Security Treaty 139, 147, 162 U.S.S.R. see Soviet Union Uyehara, Roger 150, 153 vanity 12, 88 vengeance 18, 166–9, 171 Viaud, Julian see Loti, Pierre Vining, Elizabeth Gray 204n. 15 volunteers American women 11, 40 Japanese women 1, 49, 54–5 Soviet women 185n. 28 voting 8, 29, 58–9, 61, 208n. 30 Waiting Years, The (Onnazaka) 169, 211–12n. 6 Waln, Nora 24, 189n. 20 washing machine 7, 72, 76, 87, 104–6, 180, 198n. 35 Washing Machine Husband 105–6, 170 see also Okabe Fuyuhiko Watamura, Linda 148 Weber, Brenda 17 wedding 1, 3, 5–6 Chapter 5, 161, 182 Wheeler, Adelia 33, 38 Wilson, Sloan 174 Windows for the Crown Prince 118 witch 170, 178 beautiful (bimajo) 16 coven 166, 177 den 3, 165, 178–9 women’s emancipation 1, 12, 29, 139, 155 liberation 6–7, 12, 28, 50, 56–7, 61, 64, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77–8, 85, 98, 105, 107, 114, 139–40, 155, 159, 165, 176, 181

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women’s magazines 2, 5, 11, 13, 15, 64, 65, 92, 109–14, 117, 119–20, 124, 126, 129, 135, 162, 178, 180 Yamada, Mrs. Taka 41 Yamamoto, Mrs. Matsuyo 41

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Yamato identity 110 Yano, Christine 149, 157 Yoneyama, Lisa 12 Yoshimatsu Ikumi 16 Yoshimoto Banana 4

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