Liberation under siege: U.S. military occupation and Japanese women's enfranchisement

American Quarterly

Volumn 57, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 885-910

  Yoneyama, Lisa ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950329732     PISSN: 00030678     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/aq.2005.0056     Document Type: Review

References (87)

1. David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt, "U.S. Has a Plan to Occupy Iraq, Officials Report," New York Times, October 11, 2002
2. Amy Kaplan, "Confusing Occupation with Liberation," Los Angeles Times, October 24, 2003
3. "Bush Says War on Terror Led to Women's Freedom," Los Angeles Times, March 13, 2004
4. "Bush Likens War on Terror to WWII," Los Angeles Times, June 3, 2004
5. "Another Pose of Rectitude," Newsweek, September 2, 2002, 70
6. On the concept of American exceptionalism, see Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002)
7. See chap. 6, "Postwar Peace and Feminization of Memory," 190-91, in Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)
8. Susan J. Pharr, Political Women in Japan: The Search for a Place in Political Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 30-31
9. For instance, Robert E. Ward and Yoshikazu Sakamoto, eds., Democratizing Japan: The Allied Occupation (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1987)
10. John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999)
11. Eiji Takemae, The Allied Occupation of Japan (New York: Continuum, 2002)
12. Seminal studies that focused specifically on the occupation policies' effect on Japanese women's status, as well as Japanese women's active involvement in the SCAP programs are: Yasuko Ichibangase, Kyōdō tōgi sengo fujin mondaishi (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 1971)
13. Kiyoko Nishi, Senryōka no Nihon fujin seisaku: sono rekishi to shōgen (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 1985)
14. and Susan Pharr, "Politics of Women's Rights," in Democratizing Japan
15. Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 179
16. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 83
17. For collective works of critical feminisms, see among others, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table, 1981, 1983)
18. Teresa de Lauretis, ed., Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986)
19. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (New York: Routledge, 1992)
20. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, eds., Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994)
21. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, eds., Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (New York: Routledge, 1997)
22. and Gabriela F. Arredondo et al., eds., Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003)
23. Helen Moscicki, "The Unhappiest Women in the World," Saturday Evening Post, July 8, 1944, 19, 37
24. The image of subservient and oppressed Japanese women has been dominant not only within the United States but also among Japan's modernist elites. However, the feminine ideal of chastity, subservience, and subordination to men had been shared only among a limited elite segment of society until the late-nineteenth-century modernization and westernization. See, for instance, Robert J. Smith and Ella Lury Wiswell, Women of Suye Mura (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)
25. New York Times, December 7, 1941
26. "Japan's Kimono Eclipsed by 'Uniform' for Women," New York Times, February 21, 1942
27. For similar reports in popular magazines, see, for instance, Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad, "An End to the Flippant Kimono," The Living Age, April 1941, 112
28. "Japanese 'Girls in Uniform,'" Asia, May 1941
29. Later, "Japan Mobilizes Women" reported that Japanese premier Hideki Tojo spoke to the public of the "necessity for mobilization of women." New York Times, November 12, 1943
30. "2 Japanese Women Die in Action," New York Times, May 18, 1944, for the quote
31. For similar emphasis on the fear of the armed Japanese women warriors, see also "Japanese Women Get War Duty in Burma," May 19, 1942
32. "Japanese Women Snipers Reported at Guadalcanal," December 1, 1942; "Japanese Women Are Told to Fight," June 17, 1945
33. Robert Bellaire, "Slave Women of Japan," Woman's Home Companion, February 1943, 29, 62, 64; 64 for the quote
34. John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986)
35. New York Times, October 12, 1945
36. Newsweek, October 22, 1945, 64
37. See, for instance, "Chaplain's Aid Asked to End Fraternizing," New York Times, April 3, 1946
38. Newsweek, March 25, 1946, 51
39. Lindesay Parrott, "Now a Japanese Woman Can Be a Cop," New York Times Magazine, June 2, 1946, 18, 56
40. "The Rising Sun of Democracy," Senior Scholastic 48 (May 13, 1946): 12-13; 12 for the quote
41. Marion May Dilts, "New World for Japanese Women: Elevation to Eminence Offers Opportunities and Makes Problems," Christian Science Monitor, August 23, 1947, 1-2
42. Lindesay Parrott, "Out of Feudalism: Japan's Women," New York Times Magazine, October 28, 1945, 10, 44, 46; 10 for the quote
43. Parrott, "Now a Japanese Woman," 18, 56. Ichikawa's name is misspelled as "Ishikawa." A similar remonstration concerning U.S. women's sense of superiority toward Japanese women was communicated personally from Mary R. Beard to Ethel B. Weed in 1946. Chikako Uemura, "Nihon ni okeru senryō seisaku to josei kaihō: rōdoshō fujin shōnenkyoku no seiritsu kate wo chūshin toshite," Josegaku kenkyū 2 (1992): 5-28
44. See for instance, John Dower, Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878-1954 (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1988)
45. and his "Occupied Japan and the American Lake, 1945-1950," in Americas Asia: Dissenting Essays on Asia-American Relations, ed. Edward Friedman and Mark Selden (New York: Random House, 1969-71)
46. "Japan: Fumbling Toward Democracy," Newsweek, May 12, 1947, 38, 40; 40 for the quote
47. Lafe Franklin Allen, "Democracy in Japan," The Commonweal, September 1947, 542-46; 546 for the quote
48. For the enduring implications of the CIO's suppression of workers' direct actions and wildcat strikes under the cold war, see George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). Women CIO members were also active in occupied Japan
49. In her analysis of official U.S. policy over Japanese women's issues under occupation, Mire Koikari notes that the occupation authority promoted "a white, middle-class progressive motherhood" from the beginning. "Rethinking Gender and Power in the U.S. Occupation of Japan, 1945-1952," Gender and History 11.2 (July 1999): 313-35; 319 for the quote. To a great extent, the U.S. media representation loyally reflected this official policy, but not without contradiction or significant shift in emphasis
50. Gertrude Penrose, "Reporting on Japan's Women," Independent Woman, November 1948, 322-24; 322, 324 for the quote
51. New York Times, April 9, 1949
52. See my piece "Hihanteki feminizumu no keifu kara miru Nihon senryō," Shisō, November 2003, 60-84
53. Vicente L. Rafael, "Colonial Domesticity: White Women and United States Rule in the Philippines," American Literature, 67.4 (December 1995): 639-66
54. Amy Kaplan, "Manifest Domesticity," American Literature 70.3 (September 1998): 581-606
55. Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California, 2002)
56. Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)
57. Yu-Fang Cho, "Narrative of Coupling in the Shadow of Manifest Domesticity: Transnational Politics of U.S. Cultures of Benevolence, 1890s-1910s" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 2004)
58. Miriam Frank et al., The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter: The Story of Three Million Working Women During World War II (Emeryville, Calif.: Clarity Educational Publication, 1982)
59. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988)
60. For further analyses of gender, sexual, and others forms of cold war domestic containment, see Caroline Chung Simpson, An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar American Culture, 1945-1960 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001)
61. Joanne Meyerowitz, "Sex, Gender, and the Cold War Language of Reform,"
62. and Jane Sherron De Hart, "Containment at Home: Gender, Sexuality, and National Identity in Cold War America," in Rethinking Cold War Culture, ed. Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2001)
63. John D'Emilio, "The Homosexual Menace: The Politics of Sexuality in Cold War America," in Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University, ed. John D'Emilio (New York: Routledge, 1993)
64. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000)
65. Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997)
66. Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)
67. Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Regions in the Global Arena (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001)
68. Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998)
69. Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interest in the Middle East, 1945-2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 76
70. New York Times, April 15, 1951
71. See, for instance, "Japan's 'Second-Class Citizens,'" New York Times, August 22, 1954
72. "Japan: The Women," Time, April 26, 1954, 37-38
73. Beryl Kent, "Is Democracy Making Japanese Women Neurotic?" The American Mercury, June 1954, 139-40
74. Leti Volpp, "Feminism Versus Multiculturalism," Columbia Law Review 101.5 (June 2001): 1181-218. Further, in calling for alternative alliances across multiple differences, Volpp also extended her critique of "absolution of responsibility" by mainstream American women in ignoring their complicity in minority women's oppression to the transnational feminists' women's rights regime that tends to practice "a missionary feminist effort assuming West is Best." See 1190, 1215, and 1216 for the quote
75. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism," in "Race," Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985; 1986), 262-280. Of course, racialized American women's participation in this discursive process complicates such a simple dichotomy. See Caroline Chung Simpson's observations on Yuri Kochiyama's involvement in the American attempt to physically rehabilitate a group of severely disfigured women survivors of the atomic bombing. Simpson, An Absent Presence
76. "Japan's Women Could Be Model in Postwar Iraq," Rocky Mountain News, April 16, 2003. A few months later, Gordon wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times and reiterated her point
77. See the New York Times, October 1, 2003
78. See Butler's Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993)
79. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996)
80. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981)
81. Cherríe Moraga, "From a Long Line of Vendidas: Chicanas and Feminism," in Feminist Studies, Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986)
82. For theorization of the simultaneity of oppression, see also Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Feminist Politics: What's Home Got to Do with It?" in the same volume
83. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988)
84. Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996)
85. Kurt Steiner, "The Occupation and the Reform of the Japanese Civil Code," in Democratizing Japan, 188-220
86. See, for example, Yoshie Kobayashi, "A Path toward Gender Equality: State Feminism in Japan" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hawai'i, 2002), 52-82; 81 for the quote
87. For more details, see Takashi Fujitani, "The Reischauer Memo: Mr. Moto, Hirohito, and Japanese American Soldiers," Critical Asian Studies 33.3 (2001): 379-402