It turned out that Ōi had mixed up two different letters, sending Kageyama a missive meant for Shimizu, with whom he had started an affair and also fathered a child. Shimizu received the letter intended for Kageyama. The two women’s friendship came to an abrupt end, Shimizu suffered a second nervous breakdown (Ōi’s letter had been enquiring after the first), and both women left Ōi for better prospects.
Remarrying, Shimizu carried on producing acclaimed work, but struggled to avoid compromising. A woman who just a few years before had used Jogaku Zasshi to excoriate Meiji-era marriage now found herself writing the magazine’s katei column. ‘How to Select a Wet Nurse’ and ‘Delicious Sweet Potatoes’ were amongst her offerings. Shortly after her husband returned from five years of work in Europe, Shimizu stopped writing altogether. Rumour had it that she had retired from writing – had ‘broken her brush’ – under duress. Her son Yoshishige later recalled an exchange in which Shimizu suggested resuming her work as a writer, from home. ‘Ha!’ replied her husband. ‘But the tensai (genius) is now a gusai (stupid wife).’
*
Far above and beyond any school-teaching or magazine column, the ultimate lesson in ‘family’ was provided by Japan’s imperial household. Great ceremonial occasions offered ideal opportunities, and one of the greatest was the promulgation of the Constitution in 1889. In Tokyo, festival floats snaked through the streets underneath evergreen arches, passing by buildings decorated with flags and lanterns. People walked alongside them, eating rice cakes and mandarins. Sumo wrestlers grappled with one another. Sake flowed, and an ultra-modern light-show sparked up. Several people drank themselves to death.
Erwin von Bälz – the Tokyo Imperial University professor of medicine, recruited almost at random by a Japanese exchange student in Leipzig – wondered uncharitably to himself how many of the people gadding about the streets of Tokyo this day actually knew what was in the Constitution. But of course that wasn’t the point. Content mattered less than choreography: the celebration of the archetypal Japanese family, stretching far back in time – even beyond time, to Japan’s formation out of droplets from the spear-tip of a great god. The choice of 11 February for the day’s ceremonies had been quite deliberate: Empire Day (Kigensetsu) was a national holiday created back in 1873 to commemorate the accession of Japan’s first Emperor, Jimmu, which experts working with the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki set at 660 BCE.
And yet the ideal of the kazoku kokka (‘family state’), developed by Japanese thinkers building on Western ‘organic state’ theories, did not at first sit easily with a population accustomed to imagining the imperial institution as distant and secluded. Much time and money had to be spent on changing their minds. The Meiji Emperor found himself carted (or rather palanquined) around the country on imperial processions and tours, the first of which, from Kyoto to Tokyo in late 1868, may have been the first time a Japanese emperor laid eyes on Mount Fuji.
On one such tour, in the early 1870s, residents of Kamakura and Enoshima simply did not believe they were looking at the real Emperor. Others complained that whereas a daimyō and his retinue processing by would have guaranteed a good turnout and brisk business at street stalls, not many people bothered with the Emperor, so it was hardly worth the effort of cleaning the roads. The attitude seemed to be quite pervasive. One year, the police found themselves tasked with ‘encouraging’ people to come out of their homes for public celebrations of the Emperor’s birthday.
At least the younger generation could be trained. Where adults might mill around in the background when imperial tours came through, mothers breastfeeding their babies, children could be dragooned into straight lines, bowing and breaking into ‘Kimi ga yo’ – the song adopted as Japan’s national anthem in 1888, its excessively upbeat original melody, written in a rush by a British military bandmaster named John William Fenton, quickly replaced with something more suitable.
By the time of the Constitution’s promulgation, these anxieties about popular enthusiasm for the Emperor prompted a search for some appropriate expression of celebration for the big day. Performances of ‘Kimi ga yo’ was the natural choice, but schoolchildren aside there was as yet no tradition in Japan of large groups singing in unison. It was decided that a cheer would be better. The Education Minister Mori Arinori suggested hōga: ‘respectful congratulations’. But this ran perilously close to ahō ga – ‘the idiot’. Given Japanese satirists’ fondness for wordplay, it didn’t seem a risk worth taking. Instead, an ancient cheer was modified and popularized: Tennō heika banzai! ‘May His Majesty the Emperor live for ten thousand years!’
*
If the effectiveness of a new ideology can be judged by how far its opponents end up forced to fight it on its own terms, then ‘happy families’ – from humble household up to imperial palace – was by the early twentieth century a roaring success. Many radicals found themselves trapped either into working with it or making recklessly direct moves against it. Very much in the latter vein was a 1908 magazine article entitled ‘The First Enemy’:
The first enemy that we meet as soon as we enter society are parents and masters … yes, the parents are the enemy of children, and masters of servants. If you really love justice and freedom, you must beat … your parents.
A magazine called Sekai Fujin (‘Women of the World’) – one of three socialist women’s journals active around this time – was fined so heavily for carrying this piece that it was no longer able to afford the 500-yen ‘guarantee’ fee payable to the authorities by anyone wishing to publish on current affairs. It was forced to operate instead as a ‘learned journal’, resulting in fresh fines (and the imprisonment of its editor) when inevitably it exceeded its limited new academic brief.
The man behind bars was Ishikawa Sanshirō, led by some combination of love, chivalry and publishing pragmatism to put his name to what was really Kageyama Hideko’s latest venture. Since leaving Ōi Kentaro, Kageyama had married again – acquiring in the process the name ‘Fukuda’, by which she was later better known – had three children, suffered the early death of her husband and ushered her offspring into Ishikawa’s adopted family instead: Japan’s small band of socialists.
Many in this group were Christians, including Ishikawa, with whom Fukuda now began to attend a church near Tokyo University. They were attracted by the social gospel and by what they saw as Jesus Christ’s embodiment of the jinkakusha (man of character) ideal, which seemed to them so sorely lacking elsewhere in the politics of their times. Japan’s socialists, whether Christian or not, took a powerfully and unashamedly moral approach in their early campaigning, seeking not to overthrow the bourgeoisie but to establish a middle class in Japan that possessed a sense of decency and purpose, and which everyone might one day be able to join.
Women’s rights, however, continued to be something of a blind spot for many a male radical. Back in the early 1880s, a man had been so embarrassed at being slated to speak on the same stage as the female activist Kishida Toshiko that he faked a toothache at the last minute to get out of it – prompting Kishida to ask the crowd what kind of man would ‘get such a terrible toothache at the mere sight of a woman’. Journalists proved little better: many of Kishida’s speeches are lost to history because newspaper coverage of them focused so heavily on what she was wearing. Kishida herself had well understood the deeply insidious nature of what was going on here. The transition from an old Tokugawa theme of ‘Respect Men, Despise Women’ (danson-johi) to the ladies-first gentlemanliness of the Rokumeikan era was little more than a minor makeover. ‘Ah, you men …’ Kishida sighed, ‘you talk of reform but not of revolution.’
Now, a generation later, when Japan’s socialists organized meetings for and featuring women – carefully billed as ‘academic lectures’, to circumvent the law – men rarely bothered turning up. And though Fukuda Hideko’s group liked to imagine their tight-knit, constantly imperilled organization as an ‘extended family’ (complete with pet dog ‘Maru’, short for ‘Marx’), the benef
its of having comrades to see you off to jail and welcome you home again were perhaps outweighed by Fukuda finding herself referred to as ‘mother-in-law’, while other women – whether married to group members or not – were cast as ‘wives’. It always seemed to be a female member who was tasked with the cooking. One signed off an article for the group’s magazine by saying that she had plenty more to say but had to head off now to make dinner.
Elsewhere, socialists seemed to draw deeply on Meiji images of womanhood in seeking to win women to their creed: women should ‘fall in love with socialism’, wrote one, apparently on the basis that women were ruled by romance; others explored the ways in which women’s natures – humane, conciliatory, full of sympathy – suited them to the socialist cause.
The publication of Fukuda’s magazine, Sekai Fujin, was made possible through expertise acquired in the course of producing her successful autobiography. Warawa no Hanshōgai (‘Half of My Life’) (1904) was reprinted more than forty times. The magazine was intended as a way of pushing a serious, committed political agenda. It campaigned first and foremost for a revision of the law forbidding women’s participation in politics, so that all other issues that concerned Meiji women – from education to prostitution and concubinage – might be more effectively tackled. It informed women about their rights (and their many vulnerabilities) under the Civil Code. And it carried articles on women’s suffrage movements around the world, to remind Japanese women that they were not alone.
Parliamentary campaigns to amend the law in favour of allowing women to participate in political meetings were successful in the Lower House but were constantly frustrated by Japan’s conservative Upper House, which thereby showed itself to be working very much as the crafters of the Constitution had intended. Fukuda watched from the gallery on one occasion as the measure was voted down by 300 votes to just 4, later condemning the men of that House as bigoted, ignorant and illogical. The cause was not finally won until 1922.
Some regarded falling foul of the police, as Fukuda’s magazine often did, as potentially beneficial for a movement’s credibility. Witnessing skirmishes with law enforcement, including on one occasion the descent into violence of a socialist cherry-blossom viewing party (perhaps the event’s sheer incongruousness was regarded as grounds for intervention), could be an effective way of showcasing injustice and persuading new people of the progressive nature of a cause. But Fukuda finally ended up in poverty after her magazine’s fine in 1908, cooking and washing for her children in the mornings and selling kimono fabric in the afternoons to make ends meet. Suffering now with beriberi, Fukuda – Okayama schoolteacher, bomb-carrier, socialist and sometime radical Christian – had one last great piece of writing in her. ‘The Solution to the Woman Problem’ was published in February 1913, and it suggested quite openly that the only way now truly to achieve emancipation for women was all-out communism.
Unsurprisingly, the magazine that carried Fukuda’s firecracker of a farewell saw its February issue immediately banned. The editor’s father was unhappy, but not surprised. When it came to embarrassing her family, his daughter, Hiratsuka Haruko, had form. The incident in question, five years before in 1908, had been the cause of all those unpleasant items arriving for her in the post – the pornography, the fake marriage proposals. It had all begun with a single, and singularly strange, letter, containing the following thoughts:
The moment that any woman dies is the most beautiful moment in her life. I will kill you. I am an artist. I am a poet. I am an envoy of beauty. I must observe your last dying moment, which will be the most beautiful moment in your life.
The sender was a man with an awkwardly large head and body, his physical movements as ponderous as his speaking style. Or so it had seemed to Hiratsuka, sitting in his classroom. Morita Sōhei was a lecturer in Western literature at a literary society for women, known as the Keishū Bungakukai. Having read Hiratsuka’s first novel, Ai no Matsujitsu (‘The Last Day of Love’), which appeared in the society’s magazine, Morita came to feel all the more keenly his wife’s relative dullness of spirit and the soulless slog of his career. The woman in Ai, by contrast, was a force of nature: she jumped out of her lover’s bed to interrogate him smartly and mercilessly over all the things they disagreed on, ignored his pleas to marry him regardless, and then left him for an independent career as a high school teacher.
Much Japanese fiction of this era, and perhaps especially a first novel, was deeply autobiographical. And so, in Hiratsuka, the author of Ai, Morita felt himself face to face with someone who drove the proverbial coach and horses through Japan’s drab womanly ideal and who seemed to have stepped, instead, straight out of one of the plays he taught – D’Annunzio’s The Triumph of Death or Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.
Hovering somewhere between fiction and real life too was the plan Morita now hatched, which he imagined ending with him whiling away his life in a ‘lone cell in a snowbound Sakhalin jail, observing the changes in myself’. His letter to Hiratsuka, on 21 March 1908, was written to let her know that the time had at last come for her to run away with him – and be killed.
Hiratsuka had become attracted to Morita by this point, despite his many flaws, including a tendency to trip over tree roots during romantic walks through the park. He somehow appealed to an ‘irresponsible playfulness’ in her, she decided. She packed a bag and dashed off to meet Morita – taking with her a dagger, a family heirloom, with which he could do his deed.
Together, the two of them left Tokyo by train and then rickshaw, travelling north via Ōmiya, in Saitama prefecture, all the way up to Shiobara, in the mountainous north of Tochigi prefecture. Finally, they trekked together on foot up a snowy mountain road. There at the edge of a steep drop, as night fell, they poured whisky over their letters to one another and set them alight. Morita at last brandished the dagger, but cried out suddenly that he couldn’t kill anyone, not even Hiratsuka (this seems to have been intended as a compliment). He threw the dagger, still in its black leather sheath, down into the dark valley below and collapsed into the snow, wailing.
Hiratsuka persuaded him to get up, and the two spent the rest of the night trudging through the snow, until they were found the next morning by a couple of policemen and returned to their homes: Morita to write the autobiographical novel (Baien, ‘Smoke’), for which Hiratsuka suspected he had concocted this whole episode as inspiration; Hiratsuka to face a very angry father and some very excited journalists. Not only had two highly educated assets of the state gone AWOL on a mad-cap adventure. It was widely (and wrongly) assumed that they had had a passionate sexual relationship. In fact, Hiratsuka had refused Morita’s advances, condemning him to an afterlife, once that fact became known, of tittering commentary about a man twice unable to plunge his dagger when the crucial moment came.
The moral charge sheet against Hiratsuka looked for a time as though it could hardly be more comprehensive. And yet the same newspapers that helped to compile it found themselves, just a few years later, carrying adverts for Hiratsuka’s new magazine: Seitō (‘Bluestocking’). It was probably not her father’s first wish that money put aside for his daughter’s wedding should be spent instead on setting up a women’s literary monthly. But in 1911 the epoch-making first issue appeared nonetheless, with an opening statement from Hiratsuka – now taking the pen-name Raichō (‘thunderbird’) – that featured a refrain hallowed ever since in histories of Japanese feminism:
In the beginning, woman was the sun, and a true being.
Now woman is the moon.
She lives through others, and shines through the light of others.
The first line reminded readers that while Japan’s great national family might have an emperor at its head, it had a goddess at its originary heart. Seitō – both the magazine and the associated society – was intended as the means by which the brilliance of Japan’s women, long overshadowed, could finally be shared.
What started as a literary venture, giving women writers the chance to meet a
nd to hone and demonstrate their talents, could hardly avoid becoming political. In 1912, goaded by criticism over a misleadingly reported fact-finding visit to the Yoshiwara red-light district (this time, pelted rocks replaced malicious mail), Hiratsuka penned a ground-breaking piece in the highly respected journal Chūō Kōron (‘The Central Review’). It was entitled ‘A New Woman’:
I am the Sun … [which is] renewed day by day. A ‘new woman’ places a curse on ‘yesterday’ … not satisfied with the life of an oppressed old woman, made ignorant, made a man’s slave and treated as nothing but a lump of meat by male selfishness. A new woman seeks to destroy old morals and laws, which were created for men’s convenience.
The next year in Seitō, a couple of months after its February issue was banned for publishing Fukuda’s advocacy of communism, Hiratsuka did away with literary allusions altogether, in a stark denunciation of where happy families had left Japan’s women:
The so-called women’s virtues exist only for men’s convenience. The lives of many wives are no more than being their husbands’ slaves during the daytime and their prostitutes at night … If love arises from such marriages, it must be only a pretence, and no more than the result of calculating interests and convenience in many cases.
As per their training, and the Meiji family ideal, the police played it gently with the mostly middle-class women of Seitō. They professed to be more disappointed than angry. When this latest piece was published, two of Seitō’s members were called to the Metropolitan Police Department’s Special Higher Police Section for a meeting. There they were told that this particular (April) issue would not be banned, but they should be careful not to ‘disturb the conventional virtues of Japanese women’ in this way again.
Japan Story Page 9
