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The following essay was written for Professor Irwin Scheiner's fall 1993 History 103F seminar on the role of Japanese women in society from Tokugawa through Taisho periods. It examined how the Meiji state's definition and assignment of gender roles to women resulted in the eventual formation of feminist consciousness. Considering that I was also taking Architecture 100A studio, I can't believe this was due only three days after my essay on John A. Macdonald for Professor Barnes. Mentally, I was all over the map during my junior year. Alas, the paper was also a wee bit belaboured, but it remains one of the few records I have in digital form from that period of my life.
In the Tokugawa period, prevalent teachings concerning gender were generally observed only by the members of the ruling samurai class (which logically had a tight control over its own female members) and by wealthy members of the merchant or peasant classes who aspired to be like samurai, traditionally considered by society as arbiters of values and virtues (at least until the rise of the merchant class in the eighteenth century). Since the samurai class rarely imposed these Confucian-influenced teachings on the rest of the population, and since rural peasant society was often beyond the reach of ordinary state controls and authorities, most Japanese lived in a rather different world with respect to the roles of women. Tokugawa-era society seemed to be much more fluid and complex than the politically centralised Meiji Japan in this respect. Because they often lived in poverty and chronically under precarious circumstances, rural peasants had to adapt to their vicissitudes of being subsistence farmers by being very flexible in all aspects of life (and thereby disregarding whatever the samurai class felt about women's roles). In fact, it seemed that this flexibility in gender roles at times contributed to the very survival of the family unit itself and its individual members. Women did whatever they could to make ends meet, and couldn't be bothered with something as frivolous as gender roles. As a result, peasant women experienced much greater freedom and diversity of experiences than what the official ideology suggested (Bernstein 4) and what the later Meiji state permitted or condoned. In historian Anne Walthall's study of the lives of Tokugawa-era farm women, she concluded that social relations between the sexes varied much more than historians had previously thought possible, and that the lives of farm women were dictated far more by an individual's economic circumstances or by particular hardships farmers faced than by prescribed gender roles. Surprisingly, Tokugawa-era women outside of the samurai class appeared to have led as varied lives as the men. Among the unexpected positions these women held included: females as primary wage earners outside the home; rural and urban girls who went to school; instances of female scholars and painters (cf. Patricia Fister's study of bunjin Ema Saiko (1787-1861)); participation of women in village politics; businesswomen and entrepreneurs (cf. Joyce Chapman Lebra's study on sake brewer Tatsu'uma Kiyo (1808-1900)); females who traveled on religious pilgrimages (mostly without husbands); women who chose their own husbands or even enter into matrilocal marriages (taking in a mukoyoshi); women who divorced or even remarried; and women who served as designated heads of households. There were even instances of women who were decidedly promiscuous, adulterous, willful, or outspoken; and they all managed to survive relatively unstigmatised by village social sanctions (Bernstein 4). Using village records which included population registers, petitions, passports, promissory notes for brides, deeds of inheritance, agricultural handbooks (which described the kinds of work women performed and what they were expected to perform), family histories, and diaries (Walthall 42), Walthall also concluded that Tokugawa-era farm women played a much more vital economic role in the family than expected. Unlike the usually severely restricted samurai women, peasant women participated in their husbands' industries, and they often worked very closely with their spouses, sometimes alongside men in the fields (Walthall 57) or in their workshops. Since a Tokugawa peasant women was often her husband's partner in work, she proved to be more than a beast of burden. In fact, a peasant wife often exhibited a sense of determination and independence that did not seem characteristic of the archetypical gentle Meiji woman or her samurai counterpart. Even though the official teachings may have emphasised a wife's subordination to her husband and to his parents (particularly the mother-in-law), peasant women generally held a much more equitable position, which even enabled them to talk back to their husbands (Walthall 58) or make important decisions. The meek and submissive stereotype of the traditional Japanese woman could not have fared well in the rough and tumble world of peasant society. This aspect of equality could be supported by examining divorces among peasants. In contrast to the ruling class, peasant women, often with a remarkable degree of independence, did initiate divorces, and they did so quite often (Smith/Wiswell 149). According to Walthall, samurai teachings prohibited widows and divorcees to remarry:
On the other hand, peasant women had more choices. A wife could seek refuge from abusive husbands by simply going back to her natal home or by going to a Buddhist temple for severing marital relations where she could obtain a divorce (Walthall 60-61), which, like remarriage, had no stigma attached to it (Walthall 62) (as opposed to prevalent samurai conventions). In fact, remarriage was extremely common (Smith/Wiswell 149,151), and it was relatively easy for a woman to find another husband (Smith/Wiswell 274). There were also instances where a divorcee could also take her children with her (Walthall 61; Smith/Wiswell 169). In stark contrast to puritanical samurai conventions (e.g., samurai women could be put to death for adultery, or-- in practice-- any suspicion of adultery (Sievers 4)), peasants had a relatively high tolerance for promiscuity, premarital sex, and illicit or adulterous affairs (Walthall 63), which seemed to be rampant in peasant communities. Furthermore, most peasant men and women were actually quite frank, often to the point of being bold or even crude, in discussing sexual matters (cf. Smith/Wiswell 1982). Sex and female sexuality seemed not to be taboo topics. The promiscuity and the relatively liberal peasant values regarding sexual and marital relations were described in detail in John and Ella Embree's 1935 anthropological study of the remote village of Suye Mura in Kyushu. When the Embree study was conducted, Suye Mura was still rather isolated from urban, mainstream Japan, and it had relatively little government influence or control (i.e., the samurai values adopted by the Meiji government for all of Japan still did not penetrate remote Suye Mura); therefore, the village provided a significant insight into Tokugawa-era peasant life before the advent of Meiji-era national social engineering. According to Robert J. Smith (who edited Ella Embree's notes and wrote an introduction and conclusion based on them), the high rate of remarriage and why a significant number of husbands tolerated adulterous wives at Suye Mura could be partly explained by the fact that a farming household unit required at least two able-bodied adults in order to function year-round in addition to the crucial transplanting and harvesting seasons. It could be a simple matter of labour shortage:
This reflected the fact that farmers had to be flexible in regards to divorce and remarriage matters for practical reasons and cannot simply follow the rather unrealistic guidelines set forth by the ruling samurai class. This flexibility also sometimes allowed peasant women to become registered heads of households when there was not an appropriate male heir, or when the male heir was still too young to accept the role. In fact, the rate of female succession actually increased in the early nineteenth century when difficult economic times simply required mature adult leadership, regardless of sex (Walthall 68). First-born daughters often succeed the ie even if they had brothers (Lebra 85). While Meiji Japan strictly precluded female participation in politics, let alone their voting in elections, some Tokugawa period village records revealed cases where female heads of households participated in elections of village officials. There was also a case where a widow was permitted to serve on the village council on behalf of her late husband (Nolte/Hastings 153). Giving these rights to women could be viewed as pragmatic responses to family difficulties, but it also demonstrated the fact that women could and did play what was normally a man's role depending on their structural position within the family. It was only during the Meiji period that gender definitions became so severe as to exclude flexibility in role adaptation (Walthall 69). (The Wiswell study on Suye Mura provided a somewhat telling insight on the aspect of leadership in Japan. Even though the women of Suye Mura were often independent, strong-willed, and rambunctious, they also seemed to be in the process of starting to be brought "into the fold" whenever the central government intervened in village affairs. The official, prefectural government-sponsored women's associations were ironically all led by men. All organising, all resolutions, and all the arrangements were made by men. The women just seemed to follow the orders given by men (Smith/Wiswell 30; 26-28). This does not contradict the fact that men, as prescribed by Confucian traditions, are often the designated educators of Japanese society (i.e., schoolteachers or civil servants), even when teaching women how to be mothers. This is still valid to a certain extent (Lebra 213).) The flexibility and fluidity of women's roles in peasant society could also be detected in the area of motherhood. It seemed that the role of being a mother did not dominate the lives of Tokugawa-era women as much as it did from the Meiji period onward when government ideology stressed that motherhood should be the primary raison d'etre of the Japanese woman. In Tokugawa peasant society, womanhood did not always equate with motherhood nor childrearing (Bernstein 3). The ability of a wife/ daughter-in-law to run a farming household efficiently proved to be just as important (Walthall 59). The nature of agriculture and its division of labour did provide women with more flexibility in roles. In rural farming communities of the Tokugawa period, domestic work like childrearing and housekeeping was not separated from work that provided income, whether working in the fields or in a craft. These activities all took place in and around the home, and both wife and husband often had similar occupations. They would even work side by side along with their children in the fields. Because of the close proximity between home and work, division of labour and gender roles were not clearly delineated. As a result, men would also at times engage in childrearing (Uno 32) when necessary, and both boys and girls were expected to perform farm work, as well as acquire domestic skills (Uno 26). The familiar "good wife, wise mother" role of domesticity somehow did not completely derive from the Meiji government's adoption of Confucian samurai class values. When the Japanese government started to promote nationwide industrialisation and education, men were encouraged to leave home and commute (which sometimes may take a considerable amount of time) to school or to work in a factory or in an office. Whether the government intended it or not, the women were often left to take care of the household duties and children not old enough to go to school. As a result, women and young children remained at home. As gender roles became more clearly delineated when the men worked away from home (Uno 18), fathers ended up being not as close to their children as during the Tokugawa period (Uno 25). Proximity to children and motivation to participate in childrearing began to decline by the end of the nineteenth century as new forms of employment, economic organisation, and opportunities appeared (Uno 37). The role of the Japanese father became more clearly delineated with the rise of an industrial society. In its efforts to create a strong, modern, unified, centralised, and industrialised state, the Meiji government also directed its social engineering programmes toward measures aimed to keep the Japanese masses under control. The foundation began with the Constitution of 1889, and culminated with the draconian Civil Code of 1898. Strongly influenced by the conservative Prussian constitution, which emphasised the dominance of the executive branch, the Meiji constitution provided an extremely limited scale of democracy, which allowed only a small percentage of wealthy and propertied individuals the right to vote in elections for the relatively weak lower house of the Diet. The constitution's purpose was clearly maintaining the current ruling oligarchs' hold on power, and to ensure political stability, while providing the western nations with a facade of modern democracy (part of the ongoing government's efforts to gain the western powers' recognition of its role as a formidable modern power worthy of being their equal). At the same time and to some extent, the constitution successfully placated the demands of the leaders of the progressive Popular-Rights Movement of the 1870s and 1880s. This relatively widespread movement originally called for the creation of a liberal constitutional democracy, but the resulting constitution actually and ironically precluded the establishment of a true democracy. The Meiji constitution, along with the subsequent Civil Code, ended the old hierarchic system based on class and replaced it with a new, neo-Confucian hierarchic system based on the ie structure: the Emperor on top as penultimate patriarchal guardian of the state; the peers right beneath him; the men of Japan in the middle (leading their own respective households); and women at the very bottom (cf. the concept of a "family state"). Needless to say, women did not receive the right to vote under this constitution. Under this emerging new order, the ruling oligarchy brought Confucian-influenced samurai values to the forefront of society to be used as instruments of social control over all Japanese subjects. The leaders reinforced the importance of the household, or ie (the patrilineal stem-family structure with only one primogenital successor/ heir), as the main organising principle for the entire society: the Emperor leads the Japanese national household, while the male head of the family became the absolute ruler of his respective domain. The state and the concept of family became inseparable. Under this neo-Confucian framework, the wife should unconditionally obey her husband, the children should obey their parents, and everybody should obey the Emperor, the patriarch of the nation. According to Confucian doctrines, one cannot deny or disobey his parents and family; that would be tantamount to defying the gods and ancestors. In the family state of Meiji Japan, being disloyal to the state was just as treasonous as disobeying one's parents. For a wife to disobey her husband was also a violation of Confucian hierarchical doctrines, and therefore also an act of disloyalty to the state. The Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890, a document which all Japanese schoolchildren were supposed to memorise, emphasised the importance of "filial piety" and loyalty, and it became one of the first acts by the Meiji government to instill Confucian-influenced samurai values on the entire nation. To the ruling oligarchs, once the population accepted these values, social cohesion, national unity, and loyalty to state would naturally follow. In the Tokugawa period, as stated before, the status of Japanese women varied, and gender roles, especially in rural areas, were subject to flexibility and fluidity. In Meiji Japan, however, women as a whole were singled out and relegated to the bottom of this new hierarchic order. The constitution not only precluded the majority of Japanese males from the right to vote (let alone females the right to vote), but the Meiji government also at the same time barred all females from attending all political functions. They were specifically prohibited from participating in any political activity whatsoever; the political arena became a realm which they were restricted from entering. The so-called Peace Preservation Police Act, which did not get repealed until 1922, could be considered not only as part of the Meiji government's efforts to define women's roles, but also as a reaction against the People's Rights Movement, whose leaders included women. In fact, the insurgent movement actually politicised a considerable number of women, who also started to openly condemn the oppressive patriarchal system and the authoritarian state while fighting for popular rights (Nolte/Hastings 155). The Peace Preservation Act not only managed to curtail further development of labour activism among female industrial workers and other militant political movements (Nolte/Hastings 155-156), but it also reinforced the state's policy of making motherhood as one of the raison d'etre of women, since it implied that a woman's duties lay elsewhere. Unlike the Tokugawa period, all Meiji women were eventually assigned roles, which were so clearly defined that they became virtually "civil servants" (Nolte/Hastings 157) with specific, defined duties to the state. According to historians Sharon Nolte and Sally Ann Hastings:
Banning women from politics told women that their role belonged in the home, where they should be mothers who are obedient to their husbands. Even the Meiji nationwide educational system was geared toward educating "good wives and wise mothers," an aphorism popularised by the Education Ministry (Nolte/Hastings 152). Although the state mandated the establishment of at least one higher school (post-elementary) for girls in each prefecture, it also simultaneously narrowed the scope of education offered to women. The offerings at these schools focused on educating women in running a household, and they were definitely not the academic equal of the curriculum offered in middle schools for boys. As a result, women were never adequately prepared for universities, which remained a male domain for some time to come (Nolte/Hastings 158). In the elementary schools, the curriculum for girls was also geared toward the education of "good wives, wise mothers," and "feminine modesty" (Nolte/Hastings 158). Female education in the Meiji period essentially stressed values which included submission, endurance, frugality, sacrifice, industriousness, and self-reliance (Nolte/Hastings 165). Ultimately, women were simply not prepared for life in the public realm, let alone for positions of leadership. (It is interesting to note that it was probably not surprising to find city dwellers and younger women feeling embarrassed or appalled by the behaviour of the earthy peasant women at Suye Mura who had never been refined by the Meiji educational system. The contrasts between Meiji urban women, or even the younger women who lived in or around Suye Mura, and the older, uneducated Suye Mura women were quite evident.) The most significant attempt by the government to place women under a permanent role of obedient wife and compliant mother was the Meiji Civil Code of 1898. As the primary pillar of the patriarchal family state, it legally forced the women of Japan into a subordinate position in every respect. According to historian Gail Lee Bernstein:
According to Robert J. Smith in his introduction to the Embree study:
With the educational system, the restrictions on women in politics, and the Civil Code, Japanese women living within areas effectively controlled by the government had no choice but to comply with the order to become "good wives, wise mothers." The enforcement of gender roles also affected how women identified themselves. In the Tokugawa period, women tended to identify themselves by their work, or by their immediate role in the farming community, and to a certain extent, by their class. The strong identification with work and community was suggested by the fact that commoners did not have the right to keep family names until after 1870 (Lebra 21). The Embree study noted that there was a surprising number of people who were unable to recall the surnames of others or even their own (Smith/Wiswell 150). The Meiji government tried to shift the point of reference from one based on work/ community to another based on position within the ie, where a woman's duties lay. She was now entirely responsible for her role as mother in the family unit. The household became the focus, and now all women regardless of class had the same sources of identification and duties. As an unintended consequence of the assignment of gender roles, some Japanese women also began to consider themselves as a distinct, oppressed class. This would not have been possible in the Tokugawa period, because not only were women separated by class barriers, but they were also not singled out and had never been forced to accept gender roles, which were virtually non-existent before. For the first time, the source of their identity derived from their sex and its accompanying respective duties assigned by the state, and not from their positions within the work/ farming community framework. When the state started to define the roles of women, they started to gain consciousness. One of the reactions to the state oppression of women was the literary magazine Seito (Bluestocking). Even though it was originally a literary publication, the periodical and its contributors constituted an emerging political force, since it featured female writers who attempted to define and evaluate possible roles for women in society. It was the first time that Japanese women wrote and debated about being women. Unlike the concurrent nascent movements for women's rights, which focused on legal equality and obtaining the rights and privileges enjoyed by men, Seito reinforced female independence from society. It encouraged women to think and create for themselves as a form of empowerment. The contributors to this journal, which included among others Yosano Akiko (who advocated equality and independence of women), founder Hiratsuka Haruko (Raicho) (who advocated state aid and protection of mothers), socialist Fukuda Hideko, writer Tamura Toshiko, and radical Ito Noe, accomplished what Japanese men (and only men) had been doing for centuries: deciding what the role of women should be. With rise of publications such as Seito, Meiji social engineering triggered female consciousness and the eventual rise of a feminist movement in Japan.
NOTES
Beasley, William G. The Rise of Modern Japan.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990.
Bernstein, Gail Lee. Introduction. Recreating
Japanese Women, 1600-1945.
Edited by Gail Lee Bernstein.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1991.
Lebra, Takie Sugiyama. Japanese Women: Constraint
and Fulfillment.
Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984,1985.
Nolte, Sharon H. and Sally Ann Hastings. "The Meiji
State's Policy Toward Women, 1890-1910."
Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945.
Edited by Gail Lee Bernstein.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1991.
Sievers, Sharon L. Flowers in Salt: The
Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in
Modern Japan.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983.
Smith, Robert J. and Ella Lury Wiswell. The Women
of Suye Mura. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1982.
Uno, Kathleen S. "Women and Changes in the
Household Division of Labor."
Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945.
Edited by Gail Lee Bernstein.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1991.
Walthall, Anne. "The Life Cycle of Farm Women in
Tokugawa Japan."
Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945.
Edited by Gail Lee Bernstein.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1991.
05 November 1993 
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he perennially archetypical role of Japanese women as universally repressed and submissive housewives under the heel of restrictive gender roles assigned and enforced by the state and society at large was not the result of centuries of unchanging and repressive traditional values.
This common perception actually reflects relatively recent development in attitudes and in governmental policies which coalesced during the mid-Meiji period as Japan strengthened into a modern, imperialist power.
Most Tokugawa-era women, particularly those living in rural areas, seemed to be relatively unaware of the specific roles and duties which their sex entailed until the centralised Meiji government's social engineering efforts of the late nineteenth century.
More often than not, they certainly did not bear the burden of the severe gender roles which the Meiji government attempted to propagate and impose universally.
The reality was bit more complicated.
The Restoration government's imposition of gender roles, however, also made Japanese women aware of their oppressed state in society, and it eventually led some of them to propose and evaluate gender roles for themselves for the first time in Japanese history.
In other words, the Meiji government imposed rules, values, and roles which were generally nonexistent previously among the majority of the populace.
The state's efforts to differentiate, separate, and assign specific roles to the sexes directly contributed to the formation of female consciousness, vis-à-vis society at large (which there were none previously), and to the rise of nascent political movements fighting for legal rights of women.
espite its pivotal role in Japan's rapid modernisation, the Meiji Restoration of 1868 could be viewed as the beginning of a prolonged attenuation of women's rights, which arguably lasted until the American Occupation in 1945.
What was to be a great leap forward for many sectors of Japanese polity also proved to be a step backward for some.
From the Restoration onward, the government sought to build an industrialised nation with an educated populace and a strong military to defend itself from formidable and encroaching western imperialist powers.
In the hope of eventually becoming as powerful as the western nations, Japan also wanted to emulate the west in the areas of government, military structure, technology, industry, finance, diplomacy, and social & legal structures.
More specifically, the Meiji government attempted to create a modern, unified, and politically centralised nation state of citizen-subjects, instead of a fragmented collection of fiefs with a rigid hierarchic caste structure ruled by the samurai class.
As a measure to ensure national unity and allegiance toward the central authority (as opposed to daimyo and domain during the shogunate era), all Japanese males became citizens (who eventually received universal suffrage in 1925) equal under the law, and the feudal caste system was abolished.
At the same time, however, all Japanese women were forced to take a step backward.
The Meiji government adopted heavily Confucian-influenced values of the samurai class as the foundation for its new social and legal structure, which made women decidedly subordinate to men.
This new order took the concept of ie, the stem-family household, as the organising basis for its new hierarchical social structure, with the Meiji emperor on top as the head of the Japanese household and the Japanese husband as the absolute head of his respective household.
Despite the progressive slogans broadly identified with the Meiji era like "enrich the country, strengthen the military" (fukoku-kyohei) (Beasley 22) and "civilization and enlightenment" (bunmei-kaika) (Beasley 91), women were ironically relegated to the familiar role of obedient "good wife, wise mother" (ryosai kenbo) (Bernstein 7).
Although the majority of Japanese women lived under a decidedly patriarchal system during the Tokugawa and Meiji periods (and to a certain extent they still do), most Tokugawa-era peasant women did possess relatively more rights and freedoms than their Meiji counterparts.
The Meiji new order officially and legally brought down the status of all Japanese women.