© Columbia University Press
In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun: The Autobiography of a Japanese Feminist
October, 2006
Cloth, 432 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-13812-3
$38.00
/ £22.50
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Introduction
"In the beginning, woman was truly the sun. An authentic person. Now she is the moon, a wan and sickly moon, dependent on another, reflecting another's brilliance...."
Thus did Hiratsuka Raicho (1886-1971) announce the publication of Seito, Japan's first literary journal created by women for women. By invoking the image of a lost sun, Raicho was calling out to Japanese women to reclaim their sense of self-worth, reaffirm their creativity, and fulfill their human potential. Seito would serve as a forum for the full expression of women's awakened self-awareness. The year was 1911; Raicho was twenty-five.
Nothing in Raicho's early life foretold her future as a leader in the women's movement. Her father was a high-ranking official at the Audit Board of the Meiji government and a member of the small coterie that framed the Meiji constitution. Fluent in German, for a time he taught that language at the First Higher School. Her mother was well born, the daughter of a family that had furnished physicians to a Tokugawa branch house. Raicho—the pen name she adopted in 1911—was born Hiratsuka Haru in 1886, three years before the promulgation of the constitution. Indeed, her earliest memory was of being taken by her grandmother to see the festivities surrounding the occasion.
As the second daughter of an upper-class Tokyo family, Raicho grew up in privileged circumstances with the family expectation that she would marry well and live comfortably. Even as a child, however, she was stubborn and given to what she later called—in English—a propensity to "inwardness." She attended local public schools, and in 1898, entered Ochanomizu, an elite girls' high school attached to the Tokyo Women's Higher Normal School. She excelled in her studies. It is probably not significant that she and a small clique of classmates called themselves the "pirates." It is more telling that she occasionally walked out of morals class, a sign of her impatience with the school's emphasis on womanly virtues. She took private lessons in koto and the tea ceremony—traditional "marriage arts" considered indispensable for middle- and upper-class girls.
Raicho entered Japan Women's College in 1903. In Japan at that time, only a tiny fraction of one percent of women received a higher education. Her father had opposed her application to the college, but relented on the condition that she enroll in the home economics department. She spent most of her school years auditing courses on Western philosophy, Western art, and Japanese and European history. She also began a serious practice of Zen Buddhism, which, she later claimed, gave her an inward freedom and an awareness of the unlimited possibilities of life. She graduated at age twenty in 1906, a year after Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War, the event that marked the nation's coming of age as an imperial power.
A victory over a major Western nation would have been unimaginable forty years earlier. At the time of the Restoration (1868), Japan, long isolated from the world, was still divided into "feudal" daimyo domains, and its economic and military foundations were weak. The new Meiji government set out to transform the country. It centralized political authority, abolished the samurai class, began conscription, mandated universal primary education, established a cabinet and a new judiciary, and in 1889, promulgated a constitution. It also embarked on an extensive program of industrialization. Private initiatives soon matched those of the government.
Along with such political and economic changes, by the time Raicho entered college, Japan had also undergone a cultural and social revolution that led to an intellectual and moral ferment in society. The first wave of cultural change came during the 1870s and was known as the Civilization and Enlightenment movement. The first public discussion of women's issues began at this time. The members of the Meiji Six Society (Meirokusha), all men, criticized the low estate of women in the Japanese family system and called for reform. University students read translations of Adam Smith, Bentham, Darwin, Spencer, Mill, and Rousseau. Newspapers and journals popularized democratic ideas. A second, overlapping wave was the Freedom and People's Rights movement of the late 1870s and 1880s. Among the activists in this movement for representative government were a few women, such as Kishida Toshiko and Fukuda Hideko, who delivered public speeches calling for women's rights and "a single standard of sexual morality." During the decades before and after the turn of the century, Christian women's societies also presented arguments against prostitution and concubinage and in favor of a more Western moral code.
From the second half of the 1880s, the once revolutionary Meiji government took on a more complex character. It continued to emphasize modernization, but it also began to stress elements of Japanese tradition. Nowhere was this more evident than in measures affecting women. The government continued to press for universal primary education; by the turn of the century, virtually all school-age children, boys and girls alike, were learning to read and write. In 1899, it passed a law requiring at least one girls' high school in each prefecture. At about the same time, it also approved of the establishment of private and public three-year colleges for women, though none was given university status. The formation of such institutions and the entry of educated middle-class women into the workforce led, almost inevitably, to a new social consciousness among women.
The government was also concerned about social stability; indeed, the stated goal of public girls' high schools was to educate "good wives and wise mothers." Rejecting a more liberal code, it affirmed the subordinate status of women in the 1898 Civil Code. Among other restrictions, a wife could not enter into a legal contract without her husband's permission or share in his estate after his death. Adultery was a crime for a wife but not for a husband. In the event of a divorce, the wife had no custody rights over the children. Two years later, under Article 5 of the Police Security Regulations, women were prohibited from joining political organizations and holding or attending political meetings. Fukuda Hideko and other women socialists petitioned the Diet for its revision. A partial amendment was passed by the Lower House in 1906, but was defeated by the nonelective Upper House on the grounds that it was "detrimental to female virtue."
Raicho was keenly aware of these inequities, but she was intent on cultivating the inner self. Even after graduating from college, she lived at home. She continued her practice of Zen, studied English, read books at the Ueno Library, and in 1907, joined a woman's literary group started by Ikuta Choko, a translator and graduate of Tokyo Imperial University. The next year, Raicho became involved in an unconsummated affair with one of the group's lecturers, a married man. The affair was reported in the newspapers and the man divulged the thinly veiled details in a novel, which became a best-seller. Overnight, the daughter of privilege became a figure of scandal. It does not exaggerate to say that the incident was a major turning point in her personal life. Raicho bore the brunt of the ensuing public criticism. Undaunted, and still undecided about her future, she pursued her religious practice and studies even more zealously. Then, in 1911, Ikuta Choko urged her to begin a monthly literary journal for women. She accepted the challenge, though somewhat reluctantly. Choko suggested that she name the journal Seito (Bluestocking). The term, first applied derisively to a group of unconventional women in eighteenth-century England who met to discuss literature, had a defiant ring to it. To defray the initial printing costs, her mother gave her 100 yen from the money that had been set aside as her dowry. The dowry was no longer necessary, since a normal, that is to say arranged, marriage had become unlikely.
The journal immediately attracted attention. Other women's magazines were already in existence, but they were mainly devoted to practical advice on home and family. Seito was the first to call for women's spiritual revolution. Among its contributors were Yosano Akiko, Tamura Toshiko, and Okamoto Kanoko, who wrote fiction and poetry, and others who translated Chekhov, Maupassant, and Anatole France. Within two years of its founding, the journal began to shift from literature to larger issues affecting women, and became identified with candid discussions of female sexuality, chastity, and abortion—topics scrupulously avoided by other women's journals of the era. Several issues of Seito were censored. The private lives of some of the contributors—their easy involvement in love affairs, their defiance of moral and social convention—also gave the journal notoriety as the "training school" for "New Women" or "made-in-Japan Noras." In 1914, Raicho herself began to live openly with her younger lover, an artist named Okumura Hiroshi, with whom she had two children out of wedlock in 1915 and 1917. (Their relationship was monogamous, and they married in 1941.)
Raicho was never physically strong, and in January 1915, pleading ill health, she relinquished control of the journal to Ito Noe, a younger colleague. Circulation was already declining, and the journal collapsed early the next year when Ito began an affair with the anarchist writer and activist Osugi Sakae. Seito barely lasted five years, but by encouraging women to speak out and assert their selfhood, it gave fresh impetus to the nascent feminist movement in Japan.
The story of Raicho's life to 1917, as she herself related it, is presented in this translation. For the remainder of her life, until 1971, I have appended a moderately detailed translator's afterword. With one exception, there is no need to discuss her later life here. The exception is her founding of the New WomenÕs Association in 1920, Japan's first women's organization to call for female suffrage.
After Raicho withdrew from Seito in 1915, it was almost as if she had turned her back on the women's movement. She lived quietly at home with Okumura and her children. Along with some financial help from her parents, she supported her family by writing articles for leading journals such as Chuo koron and Fujin koron. During these years, as the mother of two young children, she daily faced the conflicting demands of work and family, and her concern for women's spiritual awakening and personal issues gradually turned to questions of social reform. She felt that mothers with young children deserved government aid, and in 1918, engaged in a prolonged published debate with Yosano Akiko, who thought otherwise. A visit to textile mills in Nagoya in 1919 convinced her that women must act collectively to gain political rights and achieve social reform.
In turning toward reform, Raicho moved in step with the times. In 1916, a women's division had been established in the Yuaikai, the first national labor union, which had been formed in 1912. This was not surprising, since women workers in textile mills accounted for more than half of Japan's industrial labor force. The following year, thousands of workers at steel mills and shipyards went on strike demanding higher wages. In the summer of 1918, riots broke out across the country to protest soaring rice prices. Troops had to be called in, and the Terauchi cabinet resigned. In 1919 the Yuaikai leadership was taken over by socialists, who also formed unions for tenant farmers.
During the same years, intellectuals also wrote in support of reform. Minobe Tatsukichi, a scholar of the Tokyo Imperial University law faculty, attacked the notion of an absolute state. Even the emperor, he argued, was not an absolute authority but an organ of the state and subject to its laws. Yoshino Sakuzo, another scholar at the same institution, wrote and campaigned in favor of parliamentary reform and party cabinets. Expectations for a genuine party government rose throughout the country, and in 1918, Hara Takashi became the first "commoner" prime minister, the first who was not a member of the domains that carried out the Meiji Restoration. Although Hara extended the suffrage, it did not meet the popular demand, and opposition parties called for universal manhood suffrage and held political rallies throughout Japan.
In 1920, after a five-year hiatus, Raicho reemerged as a leader in the women's movement. Soon after her visit to the textile mills in Nagoya, she enlisted the aid of Ichikawa Fusae and formed the New Women's Association (Shinfujin Kyokai). The primary goal was social reform, and to that end, the association demanded women's suffrage. As a first step, it petitioned the Diet for the revision of Article 5 in the 1900 Police Security Regulations, and was partly successful: in 1922 the Diet amended the law, giving women the right to hold and attend political meetings, but not to join political organizations or to vote. Late that year the association was dissolved. The New Women's Association was short-lived—Raicho herself withdrew in 1921—but it had proven that by working together through legal channels, women could bring about political reform.
Hiratsuka Raicho is chiefly remembered for her pioneering role in Seito. Her autobiography recounts the striking array of emotional and intellectual factors that led her to this initiative, and later, to the formation of the New Women's Association. Raicho was complex. She was at once idealistic and elitist, fearless and vain. While she lacked staying power and was often erratic and inconsistent, she was brilliant, an iconoclast in a conformist society and a perceptive observer of its foibles. The force of her personality, her articulate writings, and her life-long quest for self-transcendence and self-actualization make her the most compelling, and the most appealing, of Japanese feminists. Her autobiography is the record of an extraordinary person who inspired Japanese women to reclaim their hidden sun.
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