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Prison Memoirs of a Japanese Woman

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Prison Memoirs of a Japanese Woman The Prison Memoirs of a Japanese Woman Kaneko Fumiko April 1997 Contents Introduction 5 Preface 14 Father 18 Mother 28 Kobayashi’s Village 40 Mother’s Family 48 My New Home 54 Bugang 56 The Iwashitas 59 My Life in Korea 61 I 62 2 II 64 III 66 IV 68 V 69 VI 71 VII 74 VIII 76 IX 78 X 82 XI 84 XII 85 XIII 88 XIV 90 XV 93 XVI 100 XVII 103 XVIII 105 XIX 110 Home Again 113 Into the Tiger’s Mouth 121 3 The Vortex of Sex 131 Farewell Father! 145 To Tokyo! 147 Great-Uncle’s House 149 Newsgirl 153 Street Vendor 165 Maid 174 Drifter 182 A Work of My Own! 194 Afterword 206 Glossary 208 4 Introduction MIKISO HANE KANEKO FUMIKO (1903–1926) wrote her memoir, translated here, while she was in prison, having been convicted of a plot, the authorities charged, to assassi- nate the emperor. Her life, as her memoir shows, was one of misery, privation, and hardship from early childhood. Her parents were not legally married, and they did not register her birth in their family register. Ever since the Meiji Restoration, the government had required each household to have its family members registered at the local government office. A child born out of wedlock often was registered as thechild of the mother’s parents. This was not done for Fumiko until 1912, when shewas registered in her maternal grand-father’s family register as his daughter. A per- son not recorded in any register, vas in effect a nonperson. To attend school, gain employment, or have any legal standing, a person had to submit a household reg- istration certificate. Thus, when Fumiko first enrolled in school she did nothave any legal status, so she was not allowed to enroll as a bona fide student; she was permitted to attend only as an auditor. Not only did Fumiko not have any legal status, but she was virtually an orphan. Her father drank heavily and failed to hold a steady job. He gambled, had a violent temper, and beat his wife often. He eventually abandoned his family and went off with his wife’s sister. Fumiko’s mother in turn drifted from man to man. She and her family were in a continuous state of poverty, and she even considered selling Fumiko to a brothel. In 1912, when Fumiko was nine, she was sent to Korea to be placed in the care of her paternal grandmother, who was living with her daughter. Fumiko’s aunt’s husband was a member of the Japanese colonial administration in Korea, which had been annexed by Japan in 1910. Fumiko’s grandmother treated her in a heartless, almost sadistic fashion as an unwanted member of the family. She was punished harshly for the most trivial reasons and was kept in virtual penury. At one point, as her memoir reveals, she even contemplated committing suicide. The only people from whom Fumiko was able to gain some comfort and support were the Koreans in her family circle. This no doubt accounts for her identification with the Korean students and activists she encountered in Tokyo after she returned to Japan. After annexing Korea, Japan imposed harsh administrative measures against the Korean people. The police and military forces were employed to crush any resis- tance to the Japanese occupation; large tracts of farmland were confiscated from the Korean farmers, reducing them to tenancy and poverty. Many left their home- land to seek employment in Japan, where they were used as construction workers and miners, often under harsh conditions. In March 1919, just before Fumiko was sent back to Japan, Koreans staged a massive demonstration demanding their na- 6 tion’s independence. At least two thousand Koreans lost their lives, and twenty thousand were arrested. The heartless treatment she received by her parents and grandmother aswell her observation of the harsh Japanese military administration in Korea undoubt- edly conditioned Fumiko to rebel against all authoritarian persons and institutions. Out of the life of hardship, loneliness, and misery emerged a strong personality who eventually turned against all authority and embraced a nihilistic, anarchistic philosophy of life. In response to the officials who interrogated her after her arrest she wrote: Having observed the social reality that all living things on earth are incessantly engaged in a struggle for survival, that they kill each other to survive, I concluded that if there is an absolute, universal law on earth, it is the reality that the strong eat the weak. This, I believe, is the law and truth of the universe. Now that Ihave seen the truth about the struggle for survival and the fact that the strong win and the weak lose, I cannot join the ranks of the idealists who adopt an optimistic mode of thinking which dreams of the construction of a society that is without authority and control. As long as all living things do not disappear from the earth, the power relations based on the principle [of the strong crushing the weak] will persist…. So I decided to deny the rights of all authority, rebel against them, and stake not only my own life, but that of all humanity in this endeavor.[1] Perhaps her life as an underprivileged member of society molded her outlook and personality more than the discrimination that girls and women of Japan had to endure in Meiji and Taisho Japan. But the fact that Fumiko was a female undoubt- edly accounted for the way she was treated by her parents and other relatives. Thus, Fumiko suffered not just the economic deprivations and injustices thatthe underclass members of society endured, but also the restrictions and discrimina- tion that all Japanese women had to put up with. Many strong-willed women like Fumiko struggled desperately to assert their will and fight for their autonomy and personal fulfillment. This is revealed in Fumiko’s remarks about why shechose schools attended primarily by men when she went to Tokyo. She was determined not to play second fiddle to men. Women like Fumiko, finding the existing institu- tions and entrenched interests indifferent if not hostile to their fight for justice and recognition of their right to be treated the same as men, turned to the left-wing reformist or revolutionary movements. Women under Tokugawa rule were expected to live in accordance with the Con- fucian ideal of subordinating themselves to men. A Japanese Confucian scholar, Kaibara Ekken (1630–1714), prescribed the ideal behavior for women, especially of the samurai class, in his Onna daigaku (Great learning for women). He asserted that from an early age a girl should observe the distinction that divided men and women. As wife, a woman was to serve her husband faithfully as her husband 7 served his feudal lord. “She must look to her husband as lord, and must serve him with all worship and reverence.”[2] In all matters she was to obey her husband. A widow was not to remarry, and strict marital fidelity was to be observed. The prac- tice of primogeniture was followed among the samurai class, and women were not accorded any property rights. In the samurai class, the family head had absolute authority over the members of his household, even the power of life and death. A husband could execute an unfaithful wife. The treatment of women was less strin- gent among townspeople and the peasantry, but rulers encouraged all classes to emulate the samurai class in male-female relations. When the feudal rule of the Tokugawa shogunate ended with the establishment of the new Meiji government, numerous social, political, economic, and cultural changes were instituted, but uplifting the status of women was not on the listof reforms to be implemented. The insurmountable obstacles that prevented women from asserting their individuality remained as the political and legal systems, social mores and customs, and economic imperatives all compelled them to play subordi- nate roles to men. Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), an advocate of liberal reforms, remarked concerning the status of women, “At home she has no personal prop- erty, outside the house she has no status. The house she lives in belongs to the male members of the household, and the children she rears belong to her husband. She has no property, no rights, and no children. It is as if she is a parasite in a male household.”[3] A number of women participated in the movement to win “freedom and people’s rights” in the early Meiji years in the hope that women would benefit if the move- ment succeeded, but when the Meiji Constitution was adopted in 1889, women were not accorded any political rights. In fact, authorities restricted the rights of women even further. In 1882 the government forbade women from making politi- cal speeches; in 1890 it banned them from participating in any politic•al activities, or even listening to political speeches. The civil code of 1898 gave the head of the extended family virtually absolute• authority. The head of the household was given the right to control the family property, fix the place of residence of every member of the household, approve or disapprove marriages and divorces, and so on. The wife was treated as a minor under the absolute authority of thehousehold head. One provision stated that “cripples and disabled persons and wives cannot undertake any legal action.”[4] Brothels were sanctioned by the government, and impoverished families sold their daughters to these establishments in most of the towns and cities in Japan. In the realm of education also, girls were discriminated against, although the Ed- ucation Act of 1872 called for the education of both boys and girls.
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