Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies Number 71 Center for Japanese Studies The University of Michigan Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan: The Development of the Feminist Movement MARA PATESSIO Center for Japanese Studies The University of Michigan Ann Arbor 2011 Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/ Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. Copyright © 2011 by The Regents of the University of Michigan Published by the Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan 1007 E. Huron St. Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1690 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Patessio, Mara, 1975- Women and public life in early Meiji Japan : the development of the feminist movement / Mara Patessio. p. cm. — (Michigan monograph series in Japanese studies ; no. 71) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-929280-66-7 (hbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-929280-67-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Women—Japan—History—19th century. 2. Women—Japan—History— 20th century. 3. Feminism—Japan—History—19th century. 4. Feminism— Japan—History—20th century. 5. Japan—History—1868- I. Title. II. Series. HQ1762.P38 2011 305.48-8956009034—dc22 2010050270 This book was set in Times New Roman. Kanji was set in Hiragino Mincho Pro. This publication meets the ANSI/NISO Standards for Permanence of Paper for Publications and Documents in Libraries and Archives (Z39.48-1992). Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-1-92-928066-7 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-92-928067-4 (paper) ISBN 978-0-47-212765-8 (ebook) ISBN 978-0-47-290160-9 (open access) The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Contents Acknowledgments vii 1 Early Meiji Women and the Public Sphere 1 2 Female Students and Teachers in Private and Public Schools 33 3 Foreign Women Missionaries and Their Japanese Female Charges 71 4 Women's Groups and Their Activities 107 5 Women's Political Participation 141 6 Conclusions and a Step Forward 173 Bibliography 195 Index 223 Acknowledgments A number of individuals have helped me with this project in various ways over the past ten years. My PhD would not have been finished without the generous support, help, and direction of my supervisor, Professor Peter Kornicki. Now that I am a teacher myself, I better appreciate the amount of time and help he devoted to my research. I hope with this book I have not let him down. Discussions with Dr. Francesca Orsini, Dr. Susan Daruvala, Dr. Mark Morris, Dr. Chiara Ghidini, Dr. Anya Andreeva, Dr. Anna Boermel, Dr. Darren Aoki, Dr. Sean Bready, Dr. Tracey Gannon, Dr. Gaye Rowley, and Dr. Barak Kushner stimulated new ideas. I am really grateful to them for the time and meals they shared with me. While a PhD student, the generous support of the Japan Foundation Endow- ment Committee enabled me to do research in Japan. My research in Japan would not have been so successful without the help and generosity of all the archivists and librarians of the various schools opened for girls during the Meiji period that I visited, as well as the archivists at Tokyo University's Meiji Shinbun Zasshi Bunko, who always helped me locate hard to find Meiji period articles. Their time and expertise have been invaluable. In Cambridge, the Japanese studies librarian, Mr. Noboru Koyama, as well as Mrs. Kazumi Cunnison, always found the time to answer my questions. To them I am most grateful. After completing my PhD, I went to Japan with a postdoctoral scholarship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and collaborated with Profes- sor Ogawa Mariko for a year. Her help in obtaining the scholarship was crucial for the development of my project. While there I was able to participate in the activities of Ochanomizu University's Gender Study Center, and I want to thank Professor Tachi Kaoru, Professor Ito Ruri, soon to be Dr. Hasegawa Kazumi, and all the graduate students for allowing me to become a member of their group. Meeting Cynthia Enloe, who was a visiting professor at the center, was like being catapulted into a new world. Although at that point Cambridge seemed to be a closed chapter in my life, Professor Peter Kornicki, not having done enough for me already, was granted funding from the Leverhulme Trust for a collaborative project, and I found myself in Cambridge for two additional years. Part of that time was spent doing research in vii Acknowledgments Japan, and I want to thank in particular Mr. Kawao Toyoshi, director of Takinogawa Gakuen, for opening its doors to me. While in Cambridge I was fortunate enough to meet Dr. Naoko Shimazu, who not only gave me a temporary lectureship at Birkbeck, University of London, but also became a precious supporter and friend. Her suggestions and discussions have been extremely important for my career's development, and I hope to be able to count on her friendship and support in the coming years as well. My colleagues at the University of Manchester, where I work now, and espe- cially Professor Ian Reader and Mr. Jonathan Bunt, have been extremely positive toward my work and have allowed me to bring it to a conclusion. After working with Professor Kornicki, I thought it would be impossible to find such a congenial environment in which to work, but I was wrong. Further financial support by the Japan Foundation Endowment Committee allowed me to bring this project to a close. The two anonymous readers of my manuscript made many important sug- gestions that strengthened my theories and the way in which I presented them. Susan Meehan kindly consented to go through this work and helped me with its style. Janet Opdyke, my copyeditor, and Bruce Willoughby, executive editor of the Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, gave the manuscript its final push. Thank you. Some of the arguments developed in the following chapters were first at- tempted in the articles "Western Women Missionaries and Their Japanese Female Charges, 1880-1890," Women's History Review 16.2 (2007): 59-77 (journal web- site: http://www.informaworld.com); "The Creation of Public Spaces by Women in the Early Meiji Period and the Tokyo Fujin Kyofukai," The InternationalJournal of Asian Studies, 3.2 (2006): 155-82 (published by Cambridge University Press); and "Women's Participation in the Popular Rights Movement (Jiyu Minken Undo) dur- ing the Early Meiji Period," U.S.-Japan Women's Journal 27 (2004): 3-26 (© Josai International Center for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences, Josai University). To my family and to Andrew words fail me. Vlll 1 Early Meiji Women and the Public Sphere Beyond the wall on one side of our school was a rough path leading past several small villages, with riceflelds and patches of clover scattered between. One day, when a teacher was taking a group of us girls for a walk, we came upon a dry ricefleld dotted with wild flowers. We were gathering them with merry chattering and laughter when two village farmers passed by, walking slowly and watching us curiously. "What is the world coming to," said one, "when workable-age young misses waste time wandering about through bushes and wild grass?" "They are grasshoppers trying to climb the mountain," the other replied, "but the sun will scorch them with scorn. There can be only pity for the young man who takes one of those for his bride." ... We walked on homeward. Just as we reached our gate in the hedge wall one of the girls, who had been rather quiet, turned to me. "Nevertheless," she said, defiantly, "the grasshoppers are climbing the mountain into the sunlight."1 In recent years, an ever-increasing amount of scholarship has been published in English on Japanese women. On the one hand, the Edo period (1603-1867) has long been regarded as an age of female oppression, but recent publications show that this was not always the case.2 On the other hand, the activities and opinions of Taisho (1912-26) and Showa (1926-89) women, as opposed to women of earlier periods, are easier to investigate as the number of published articles written by 1. Etsu Sugimoto, A Daughter of the Samurai (North Clarendon: Tuttle, 1990), 143-44. 2. See, for example, Martha Tocco, "Norms and Texts for Women's Education in Tokugawa Japan," in Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan, edited by Dorothy Ko, Jahyun Kim Haboush, and Joan Piggott, 193-218 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and P. F. Kornicki, Mara Patessio, and G. G. Rowley, eds., The Female as Subject: Read- ing and Writing in Early Modern Japan, Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, no. 70 (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2010). 1 Early Meiji Women and the Public Sphere women increased significantly from the 1910s onward, and a great deal has been written on their lifestyles, occupations, writings, and the discourses they initiated. They are represented as extremely vocal in their demands for social and political rights and in expressing their opinions.3 Scholars have focused less on late-nineteenth-century women. Late-nineteenth- century books containing the words women, girls, or married women in their titles were mostly written by men who were concerned with the reform of the condition of women and with women's roles in society, making it harder to gain an accurate picture of what women themselves thought.4 Most of the early Meiji (1868-90) women who contributed to the print media submitted their articles to periodicals owned by men who probably edited and filtered them, and they often did not sign their articles or used pen names, partly in fear of being accused of overstepping social boundaries.