It is impossible to know in advance how a Constitution will work out in practice. In the case of the Meiji Constitution, an early effect of having ‘transcendent’ rather than party cabinets was that battle lines emerged as much between the executive and the House of Representatives as between parties in the House. Many a time the House would try to bring down individual ministers, using its power of budget approval to try to get its way. The government could, if necessary, have the previous year’s budget renewed without the need for approval, but in an era of escalating costs this was far from an ideal solution.
Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909) Illustration of the Imperial Diet of Japan (Gotō Yoshikage, 1890): upper left, the Emperor looks on as proceedings get under way The anger that sometimes lit up the Lower House was understandable. For the first two and a half decades after its establishment in 1885, Cabinet government looked very much like the old Council of State. Japan’s premiership circulated almost entirely around a small band of Satsuma-Chōshū men and their protégés. Itō Hirobumi held the post four times, Yamagata Aritomo twice. Matsukata Masayoshi, Satsuma architect of the famously radical and radicalizing deflation of the mid-1880s, also served twice as prime minister during this period, as did Katsura Tarō (Chōshū, mentored by Yamagata) and Saionji Kinmochi of the pre-1868 imperial court. Kuroda Kiyotaka (Satsuma) and Ōkuma Shigenobu (Saga) both served once.
Meanwhile, an Imperial Rescript on Education in 1890 helped to embed further the victory for traditionalists and new nationalists that the Constitution represented. Education was a passion of the Emperor’s, and he had long encouraged his tutor, Motoda Eifu, to write books that would help instil in the young a degree of filial piety and loyalty towards the imperial institution. Together, Motoda, the Minister of Education, and a third man named Inoue Kowashi – referred to by contemporaries as ‘Itō’s brain’ – came up with the 1890 Rescript in response: the influence of Neo-Confucian virtues and kokugaku visionaries could not have been clearer:
Ye, Our subjects, be filial to your parents, affectionate to your brothers and sisters; as husbands and wives be harmonious, as friends true;
Bear yourselves in modesty and moderation; extend your benevolence to all; pursue learning and cultivate arts, and thereby develop intellectual faculties and perfect moral powers;
Always respect the Constitution and observe the laws; should emergency arise, offer yourselves courageously to the State; and thus guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial Throne coeval with heaven and earth.
A copy of the Rescript was issued to all schools, where it was bowed to and recited in unison by students every day. Both the Rescript and portraits of the Emperor were to be saved from fire or other disasters at all costs – including human life: hagiographical accounts emerged of head teachers dying while trying to save these sacred items from harm.
But like the Constitution, imperial rescripts were highly ideological documents capable of being put to unpredictable uses. They offered standards to which an individual might hold not just him- or herself, but others too – not least people in positions of power. For those attending ceremonies for the promulgation of the new Constitution in early 1889, the absence of Japan’s influential Minister of Education, Mori Arinori, must have seemed odd. And yet there was good reason for it: he had just been stabbed, and would shortly die. The attacker left a note, accusing Mori of profaning the divine presence and offending the imperial family on a visit to the Grand Shrine at Ise. Mori had allegedly entered without removing his shoes, and had then used his cane to move aside the curtain that protected from view the sacred mirror (one of the three treasures mentioned in Japan’s ancient chronicles), so that he could take a quick look. An investigation subsequently found his attacker’s claims to be false, but such ‘patriotic’ attacks on Japan’s politicians were only just beginning. A higher authority and standard had been articulated, well beyond them, to which a sufficiently heartfelt appeal would later become capable of justifying the most violent actions.
A few years before his untimely death, Mori Arinori had divorced his wife. They had tried out an ‘egalitarian marriage’, but Mori claimed that it had rendered his wife ‘flighty and peculiar’. Japan’s early experiments with modernity were never just a matter of grand places, public spaces and great events. There was also trial and error within intimate relationships and the sheltered four walls of the home. Family was no longer a place of escape from whatever was happening in the outside world. It was a crucible, in which many women and men faced for the first time the deep uncertainties of the journey on which their leaders had set them.
4
Happy Families
March 1908, and the arrival of the post was no longer something Hiratsuka Haruko looked forward to. Today’s item was a small package. Opening it, she discovered a series of pornographic images, sent by a stranger. Other days brought letters containing sarcastic proposals of marriage, alongside offers of a less wholesome sort. A friend from Hiratsuka’s Buddhist meditation group turned up at her door offering to wed her, apparently out of pity. Journalists, too, clamoured outside, and then abused her in print: immoral home-wrecker, who ought to be sent to the slums; poisoner of young minds; shameless ingrate; madwoman. Japan Women’s College, from which Hiratsuka had recently graduated, were kind enough to send round a messenger – to let her know in person that she had been expelled from their alumni association.
Such were the wages of sin. Hiratsuka had offended gravely against a story about the nature of Japanese womanhood, developed across recent decades and now commanding a visceral attachment (in public at least) throughout much of urban society. The power of this narrative lay in its synthesis of diverse womanly virtues – drawn from around the world and from across Japan’s old class system – and its production in a kind of cultural surround-sound: the law, police officers, schools, newspapers and magazines, fiction and fantasy, and of course the family.
If the Constitution and Imperial Rescript on Education had worried some as a step back from the aspirations of 1868’s Charter Oath, the same was true of the new Meiji Civil Code in its final 1898 incarnation. For a while it had looked as though Japan might adopt a French-style civil code, and a man with no less a name than Gustave Emile Boissonade de Fontarabie had been brought across from the Sorbonne to advise. And yet officials worried that an emphasis on individual rights and private property might put at risk the household, or ie, as the primary social unit, and with it the filial piety and respect for ancestors that was by this point so widely regarded as a good and natural legacy of an older era. In fact, this traditional family had always been a fantasy: households of that older era were often home to a range of people beyond immediate family – concubines and adopted children, apprentices and servants – and afforded relatively little of the civilized privacy so valued by Japan’s early modernizers. Much of this modern official thinking was instead a matter of pragmatism: a society premised on hierarchy, cooperation and public duty would be more conducive to achieving the swift economic and military development that Japan’s leaders knew they needed.
Under the new arrangements, the ie was the country’s basic legal unit (rather than the individual). Its headship passed from father to eldest son, conferring privileges including the allowing or disallowing of marriages for daughters up to the age of twenty-five and sons up to the age of thirty. Under a new Family Registry System, all families were required to register their members with the authorities, and without family membership a person could not enjoy legal rights.
As in many parts of the West in these years, women were denied a range of legal and educational privileges enjoyed by men. In Japan, they were forbidden from testifying in a court of law, bringing legal proceedings, or involving themselves in financial or business matters without their husband’s permission – restrictions they shared with people designated under the law as ‘quasi-incompetent persons’. A woman could initiate a divorce in cases of extreme cruelty or desertion, but not on the basis of adul
tery. A man, on the other hand, would be quite within his rights to seek divorce on such grounds, along with a two-year prison sentence for both his wife and the gentleman in question. If a marriage ended, the children belonged to – and so stayed with – the ie. The wife would be the one to leave.
A woman wanting to change any of this had a struggle on her hands. She did not have the vote, and she was banned, after 1890, from any kind of participation in politics. Much time would be spent instead at home, where a visit from a police officer would not be uncommon, encouraged as Japan’s constabulary were to take a careful paternal interest in women’s activities and whereabouts and to blend law enforcement with moral guidance.
Where the law and the police placed limits on women’s prerogatives, the state bureaucracy went to great lengths to spell out their duties. In a country run almost on a permanent war footing – with periods of actual conflict marked by changes of pace more than tone – women, men and children alike were viewed as productive assets of the state. And assets needed to be developed, honed and protected. While boys were prepared for service in a range of professions, the highest of which required study at one of Japan’s imperial or private universities, girls pored over textbooks on kaji (‘domestic things’). They learned about nutrition and laundry, family finances and hygiene, until they were ready to set up and run households of their own. No prospect yet of a university education. Instead, vocational colleges were for the time being the rarely reached summit of institutional female learning in Japan.
To interpret all this as women mattering less than men would be to underestimate the ambition of Japan’s political elite. When Mori Arinori as Education Minister exhorted middle-class women to become ryōsai kenbo – ‘Good Wives, Wise Mothers’ – he was not banishing them from the public sphere. He was radically expanding that sphere. As the text of a Ministry of Education publication entitled Meiji Onna Daigaku (‘The Meiji Greater Learning for Women’) put it in 1887: ‘the home is a public place.’
‘Home’ and ‘homemaker’ were rapidly evolving ideas across the late nineteenth century in Japan. Onto the figure of the modest and frugal samurai wife was grafted the get-your-hands-dirty hard work ethos of rural women, together with a range of Anglo-American ideas about domesticity that were captured in the loan word ‘hōmu’.
Iwamoto Yoshiharu, the Anglophile Christian editor of Jogaku Zasshi (‘Women’s Education Magazine’), claimed the credit for popularizing this term, which he took to mean the establishment of a secure domestic environment where the real, loving core of a family – parents and children – could flourish, as far away as possible from the human household clutter of times gone by: the servants and extended or adopted family members who compromised true familial affection and cohesion.
The multigenerational household was never in danger of disappearing, but increasingly an urban middle-class ideal was established – later extended down the social scale – whereby ‘home’ was associated with a moral and hygienic environment sealed off from strangers and bad influences, while remaining porous to the public good and conducive overall to parents’ shaping of healthy imperial subjects. Its spirit was captured in a new word, katei (‘household’ – literally ‘home-and-garden’), popularized via a publication boom around the turn of the twentieth century. Alongside newspaper katei columns were Katei Zasshi (‘Household Magazine’) in 1892, followed by Katei no Tomo (‘Household Friend’) in 1903, later to become the highly influential Fujin no Tomo (‘Woman’s Friend’). Advice was offered on everything from recipes to the price of domestic essentials, alongside virtual tours of real-life ‘model’ households run by the wives of successful politicians or businessmen.
One such account, appearing in a book called Katei no Kairaku (‘The Pleasures of the Home’) (1901), described a ‘family meeting’ held at 3 p.m. every Saturday afternoon. Tea would be prepared in the household head’s room and the family ushered in, offering one another formal greetings as they entered. The head would then read aloud from the newspaper for the edification, in turn, of his parents, his younger siblings, and finally his children. Tea and sweets followed, after which the koto (a traditional Japanese stringed instrument) was played and a young boy sang the national anthem. Variations on this ‘family time’ theme included the giving of speeches, the telling of anecdotes and gathering around a baby to gaze smilingly into its face.
Japan’s business community made the most of the opportunities here. Architects and house-builders worked on homes in which the family could be separated more effectively from servants and guests – though not from one another: there was little recognition of any need for individual space. Kitchen design allowed women to enhance productivity by standing up while they worked, at units along the wall or at mobile worktables. From 1904, advertisements hit the newspapers for Japan’s first gas-burning rice cooker, complete with slogans like ‘With just one match’ and ‘No need for a maid’ – the latter so catchy a concept that the device itself came to be known as a gejo irazu (‘maid not required’). The same year, Mitsukoshi opened as one of Japan’s first department stores, operating as a mixture of shop, product exhibition space, tourist spot, children’s playground and even salon for intellectual conversation – putting consumer culture in grander, purposeful perspective. Discussion highlights were published in Mitsukoshi’s own magazine.
A family meeting pictured in the 1902 edition of Katei no Kairaku (‘The Pleasures of the Home’): the head of the household, top right, seats himself on a cushion. There was no escaping this Meiji family, even in fiction. Male writers revealed themselves in their writings as sons who rhapsodized about rather than really knew their mothers, and who sought desperately as a result to fix the womanly and the maternal as comforting social and emotional, even spiritual categories. Many a Japanese boy continued to miss his mother long after he left home. Kosawa Heisaku’s Freudian free associations regularly returned to his own mother: bathing with her at the turn of the twentieth century; her joy when later he used to come home from boarding school, making him amazake (a sweet rice drink) that was so tasty he licked the cup clean – ‘like a baby,’ he recalled, ‘just moving onto solid food’.
Childhood baths with mother helped set the novelist Tanizaki Junichirō off on his career, too – a lifetime of writing longingly about women:
The flesh of her thighs was so marvellously white and delicate that many times … I would find myself looking at her body with amazement. It seemed to me that her skin grew whiter as I looked at it … Women before the turn of the century did not go out much into the light and air: they wrapped their bodies in voluminous robes and lived secluded in rooms that remained dim even at noon. No doubt that explains why their skins were so fair. My mother’s skin retained its wonderful fairness until I was a young man of twenty-six or twenty-seven.
In this way, mothers, wives, mistresses, sisters and daughters could all find themselves imprisoned on pedestals, forced to be the ultimate answer to every male doubt about Japan’s modernity; the means by which every loss might be recovered. There was even an ideal type for failed marriages: the wife who suffers, beautifully and patiently, emerged from centuries of celebration in Chinese and Japanese literature to become a staple of Meiji-era fiction by men.
An emerging trend for writing by women at turns impressed, titillated and terrified the reading public. Shimizu Shikin started to work at Jogaku Zasshi in 1890 shortly after her first marriage, marred by her husband’s infidelities, ended in divorce. In her first story, ‘Koware Yubiwa’ (‘The Broken Ring’), published in the magazine, Shimizu described marriage as like drawing lots. Men have a life outside the home, she pointed out, so an unlucky draw need not be defining or disastrous for them. Women are less fortunate.
In place of the stoically suffering wife, Shimizu’s writing offered a new image: a woman whose life truly begins only when she escapes her marriage. A mother teaches her daughter modestly to conceal herself from visitors to the house, introducing her to Chinese biog
raphies full of women who went as far as cutting off parts of their bodies to demonstrate their fidelity. When the mother dies, the daughter is able to open up a new world of books and magazines. She first tries to change her husband, before later divorcing him, refusing to accept that sorrow is a natural part of the female condition.
As a journalist, Shimizu criticized both the mainstream men who limited women to a narrowly functional education (they could sense that it was wrong, but were unable to forgo its sheer convenience) and the People’s Rights activists who fought for women’s rights in public, but ‘lord[ed] it over their wives and children’ at home. Some were known to rail energetically against prostitution and then visit brothels to unwind, while the Freedom and Popular Rights leader Ōi Kentarō’s busy schedule of travel, writing, and activism was matched by an equally hectic private life – as Shimizu herself discovered, to her cost.
One of Shimizu’s closest friends was Kageyama Hideko, the Okayama schoolteacher and explosives courier who had been arrested in the Osaka Incident. Both Kageyama and Ōi were released early from prison as part of an amnesty timed to coincide with the promulgation of the new Constitution in 1889. Welcomed into Osaka station with great cheers and a shower of flowers – a scene repeated across the city that afternoon as she travelled around in a rickshaw with her father – Kageyama went back to the station the next day to greet Ōi off the train from his own release. His prison love letters had finally worn her down: Kageyama went to live with him, and they had a child together. But Ōi refused her the equal marriage she wanted, and one day she received an odd letter from him, asking after her health and professing his love for her. Kageyama was perplexed: she was quite well.
Japan Story Page 8
