Organizer: Robin LeBlanc, Oglethorpe University
Chair and Discussant: Akio Igarashi, Rikkyo University
Gender studies specialists have persisted in viewing Japanese women as the subjects of state ideology—the constrained victims of Confucianism or the dutiful housewives of state-led capitalist development. Political scientists have largely ignored Japanese women. Gender politics scholars and political economists cannot operate independently of each other if either group wants to give the modern Japanese state a thorough treatment. In three closely related papers, this panel will argue that Japanese women are as much self-conscious participants in national development dialogues as other recognized political actors. Tokuko Ogai’s paper "Japanese Housewives’ Political Participation: A New Style" will examine housewives who choose political activism over paid employment and thus challenge definitions of women’s agency. In "What Every Political Economist Needs to Know About Housewives: Notes from the Japanese Case," Robin LeBlanc will argue that vigorous attention to the place of housewives in the socio-political order challenges current understandings of contemporary and future political economy in Japan, and, therefore, political scientists should no longer treat gender study as a sidebar to their usual work. Michael A. Schneider will demonstrate that the construction of the woman’s gender role is a project central to the development of an internationalist ideology for Japan’s modern state in "Gender, Consumerism and Colonial Development in the Making of Japan’s Middle Class Cosmopolitanism." Political scientist Akio Igarashi will provide commentary.
Robin LeBlanc, Oglethorpe University
The time for a new model of gender study among Japanologists has arrived. Students of the gendered division of labor in Japan have led a generally peaceful coexistence with "mainstream" political economists, but gender issues have remained a "special" category. Conscientious scholars take an interest in topics such as women’s participation in the political structure, but few feel compelled to think of gender as a necessary category of analysis when they are writing about Japan’s political economy. This paper will assert that political economists who leave discussions of "gender" out of their work, assuming that gender issues are ancillary or too specialized for their treatment, are ultimately short-sighted if not irresponsible social scientists. Describing ways in which a close examination of Japanese housewives’ contribution to Japan’s economic and political structures can inform an understanding of even national level political dynamics, this paper will argue that studies of women or gender differences should no longer be relegated to "women’s studies" panels, symposia and journals. Students of gender should speak to and side-by-side with mainstream economists, political scientists and historians. "Gender studies" ghettos should be replaced by a serious re-thinking of general categories of social analysis.
Tokuko Ogai, Ochanomizu University, Tokyo
According to Mary Brinton, the "full-time housewives" who appeared during the period of rapid economic growth should be noted for their contribution to Japanese society’s stability. On the other hand, feminists both within and without Japan criticize the full-time housewife for accepting a "gendered division of labor" that places her subordinate to men.
In actuality, since the 1970s, when housewives’ moves into the paid workplace became an aim, "housewives’ work" has come to mean "part-time labor." This trend has had the economic benefit of keeping wages low while allowing women a way of making a compromise between the workplace and their responsibility for the home.
But feeling dissatisfied and used as part-time laborers and seeking an opportunity for self actualization, some housewives have begun to participate in community activities, aggressively committed to dealing with "shadows" of Japan’s economic growth such as pollution and the rapid aging of society. I will introduce the Seikatsu Network’s Proxy Movement as one example of the work of these "activist full-time housewives."
The members of the Proxy Movement are housewives who became involved in consumer cooperative activities in an attempt to feed their families safe food. As they dealt independently with the total consumption process—production, distribution, consumption, disposal—they bumped up against various contradictions in the social structure. In an effort to achieve a political solution to the problems they saw, they formed a movement to elect their fellow housewives to local assemblies.
This political movement of women who try to change their communities while continuing to take responsibility for the home already has a history of over 10 years. I will examine the ways in which this movement has allowed women a means of political participation and led to a change in their political consciousness. As the larger Japanese political structure moves toward devolution, the significance of these women’s participation in local politics should be great.
Michael A. Schneider, Knox College
The rise of Japan’s postwar middle class ethos has been seen as the gratifying, if deluding, offspring of affluence, or worse, the product of the hegemonic merger of bourgeois and state interests. Such skepticism toward middle class values draws on the middle classes’ own ambivalence toward the state. The postwar state is a repository of a Japanese sense of rootedness and a commitment to managerial expertise, both middle class virtues. But the state is antagonistic to other virtues, blocking unrestrained consumerism (by tariffs and consumption taxes) and asserting a masculine field of politics counterpoised to the gendered construction of cultural cosmopolitanism as feminine.
This paper argues that these tensions in middle class identity are not only meager rationalizations of Japanese affluence but instead reflect a long intellectual contest in the history of Japanese internationalism and its relationship to Japanese colonialism. I will characterize this contest as two competing claims to overlapping turf, imperial command of development and national identity versus middle class command over ideas of professional management and cultural identity in a consumer society.
This paper traces the roots of this contest to the 1920s, when the colonial bureaucracies promised relief to urban consumers through projects for agricultural development in the colonies. Middle class women, with their central role in urban consumer culture, promoted their own positions on such issues as ethnic identity within the empire and close associations between Japanese and Korean women. Within the cosmopolitan framework of the 1920s, Japanese women invariably found themselves both supporting and rejecting these official development schemes.