Chapter Eleven

Good Wives and Wise Mothers 良妻賢母

"Good Wives and Wise Mothers" (ryōsai-kenbo) was a popular social and political slogan in modern Japan. It was unknown in Tokugawa times, but soon after the start of the Meiji period it began to appear in social and political commentary. According to Robert Smith and Sharon Sievers, Nakamura Nasanao, a Christian intellectual of the Meiji period, coined the term early in the Meiji period. (Robert J. Smith, "Making Village Women into 'Good Wives and Wise Mothers' in Prewar Japan." Journal of Family History, 8.1 [Spring 1983]: 75, Note 7; Sharon L. Sievers, "Feminist Criticism in Japanese Politics in the 1880s: the Experience of Kishida Toshiko." Signs: The Journal of Women and Culture in Society, 6.4: 604.) Soon thereafter it became a shorthand expression for the official view of the proper role of women in modern Japanese society. As a part of such institutions as civil law and school curricula, the ideas embedded in "good wives and wise mothers" gradually began to transform gender roles in Japanese society. This transformation was slow but steady, starting in the urban areas and working its way to the countryside. By the early part of the twentieth century, the "good wives and wise mothers" ideal had become the norm throughout Japan, at least among the youngest generation of teenagers/young adults. Among their elders, however, especially those born in Tokugawa times, the "good wives and wise mothers" ideology was much less evident. This chapter examines changing gender roles in Japanese society from late Tokugawa times through the mid twentieth century (roughly 1850 to 1950). The emphasis is on women, though with some reference to men. As with so much else in Japan (and many other modern societies), what appears today to be "traditional" behavior was in fact a recent construct sponsored by the modern state and connected with the idea of Japan as a nation.

Gender Roles and Social Status in Tokugawa Japan

There is a tendency to assume that gender roles in Tokugawa Japan must have been more rigid and less equal (however "equal" might be defined) than during the modern Meiji period and beyond. Why? Because we tend to assume that "modern" implies something like "progressive" or "up-to-date," and such nice-sounding qualities would surely include a relaxing of gender roles and relatively more equality between men and women. But there is nothing about modernity, however this vague term might be defined, which necessarily implies less rigid gender roles. Quite the contrary, modern states have frequently engaged in social engineering to various degrees, and one aspect of such efforts was often to impose on the whole of society a relatively rigid set of gender-based norms. Sometimes these norms also received the stamp of approval of the natural and social sciences, thus implying that they were "natural" and proper. As a general rule, gender roles are more rigid in today's Japan than they were for most Japanese of the 1850s. As a baseline for examining major changes, let us survey the situation in late Tokugawa times.

Marjorie Wall Bingham and Susan Hill Gross wrote a series of books about women in various parts of the world, past and present, the typical title being Women in ___________. The volume on Japan contains a chapter on the Tokugawa period, which includes passages such as:

[Wives] could be divorced for any of the following reasons:

The husband could decide when these conditions had been met and could simply hand his wife a three and one-half line written notice--she would have to leave. She was not allowed to take her children with her. These Japanese women had no grounds for divorcing their husbands. In cases of abuse, the best a wife might to was to escape to a Buddhist convent.

or

Under the restrictive Tokugawa code, adultery committed by a wife was punishable by death, while a husband might keep women as concubines in his own home--and have other sexual affairs without restrictions. The constant advice to young girls to grow up and to be obedient wives might be seen as teaching future wives a necessary survival skill for the time they entered a world that denied them any essential marriage rights.

or

Women of the Tokugawa were limited in their physical movements, right to property, and marital rights. They were also restricted in their most basic right--that of being allowed an education to become a complete adult person. . . . (Marjorie Wall Bingham and Susan Hill Gross, Women in Japan: From Ancient Tines to the Present [St. Louis Park, MN, Glenhurst Publications, Inc., 1987], pp. 102-103.)

The only problem with statements such as these--which are easy to find in general histories of Japan--is that they are incorrect or only partially correct for the vast majority of Japanese women in Tokugawa times. Bingham and Gross make the common error of assuming that the norms of the samurai class (approximately 7% of the total population) applied to "the Japanese" as a whole. They do point out that the situation was especially severe for samurai as compared with other social groups, but, at the same time, "Tokugawa regulations severely limited all Japanese women . . ."  (p. 105). In fact, however, nearly all indications point to a vast difference in lifestyles and social circumstances between samurai women (and, to a lesser extent, women in rich merchant households, which often imitated samurai) and ordinary women. In other words, the above passages have little or no validity when speaking about 80-90% of the population. Of course, these passages also reveal a "presentist" bias that reads present-day norms into the past, for example, in characterizing education as a "basic right"--a modern political assertion which would have made no sense to most people in the world during the eighteenth or even nineteenth centuries.

As a general rule, the higher one's social status, the more rigid were the gender roles. In other words, the activities and social spheres of men versus women were more distinct and separate among social elites. Furthermore, men tended to enjoy greater privilege and prestige vis-à-vis women at the upper end of the social spectrum. Conversely, among ordinary people, especially among ordinary peasants, who comprised the majority of the population in Tokugawa times, gender roles tended to overlap extensively and a higher degree of legal and economic equality prevailed among women and men in society. *This graphic* summarizes the situation. To understand this relationship in more concrete terms let us examine the following three areas: 1) division and value of labor; 2) formal authority, including divorce; and 3) sexual freedom and customs.

Division and Value of Labor

All complex societies feature divisions of labor, and gender is always one aspect of these divisions. In today's United States, for example, certain occupations tend to be done by men and others by women. Today's Japan is similar, though with a somewhat sharper division in many realms. To take one example, in the United States, bus and truck drivers are more likely to be men than women, though it is not unusual for women to do these jobs. In Japan it is highly unusual for women to do these jobs. Formal law has often helped shape the current situation. For example, women in Japan were forbidden by law from driving taxis until the 1980s, and it was not until the 1990s that all formal restrictions on women taxi drivers (e.g., on driving late at night) were phased out. As you might expect, the number of women driving taxis in today's Japan, while growing, is still very small.

When looking back at the situation in Tokugawa times, there is a tendency for modern or contemporary assumptions to get in the way. Two unwarranted assumptions have often clouded the work of modern scholars looking at preindustrial gender roles in Japan and elsewhere. First is the tendency to regard work life and home life as separate spheres--which is often the case today but was rarely the case for commoners in Tokugawa Japan. Second is the tendency to look at gender roles of past ages in terms of modern or contemporary dichotomies--which often function more as ideological categories than as analytical ones. One common examples is the production/reproduction dichotomy. In this view, men are commonly associated with "production" "outside" the home and women with "reproduction" "inside" the home. A gendered division of labor along these lines did apply to preindustrial Japan, but only among social elites--samurai and wealthy merchants--during the Tokugawa period. Regarding commoner households, Kathleen Uno makes the following observations:

From the Tokugawa period into the mid-twentieth century, both productive work, which sustained the [household] by producing essential goods and income, and reproductive work (childrearing, cooking, and house-keeping), which maintained [household] members, took place at home. The proximity of production and reproduction allowed men, women, and children alike to participate in tasks crucial to the household's survival. The full energies of this unity of production and reproduction for the division of labor in the small preindustrial Japanese household is not easily comprehended by scholars who assume the physical separation of work and home life. For example, participating in [household] economic activities did not preclude helping with cleaning, cooking, or child care. Today the long workday and grueling commute allow salaried male workers scant time to spend with their children, but during the Tokugawa and Meiji periods the workplace of most fathers was near their children. (Kathleen S. Uno, "Women and Changes in Household Division of Labor," in Gail Lee Bernstein, ed., Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991], p. 25.)

As you might guess from the implications of Uno's points, industrialization, which commonly separated the home and the workplace, played a major role in changing gender roles in Japan and elsewhere. In Tokugawa times, especially in rural areas, the productive and reproductive tasks were interchangeable between men and women. There was a tendency for men to perform certain tasks more often than women and vice versa, but both did both kinds of work when the home and workplace were in the same physical location.

Among many samurai, especially elite samurai (as opposed to rank-and-file foot soldiers), as well as among the wealthiest merchants, there was typically a separation between home and work. A clear division of labor along gender lines prevailed among these Japanese (totaling approximately 10% of the population), with women in charge of reproductive work in the inner sphere of the home and men charged with productive work in the outer realm of society. Among these Japanese (and only these Japanese) Chinese-derived Confucian norms informed conceptions of ideal gender roles from approximately the early eighteenth century onward. One influential book among Tokugawa-period elites was a short treatise called the Onna daigaku 女大学 (The Great Learning for women--a title derived from the Chinese classic the Daigaku 大学 [Ch. Daxue], which is usually called the Great Learning in English). Among other things, this work called for a rigid separation between men and women:

Women, from the time that they are young, are to observe the correct separation between males and females and are to hear and see absolutely nothing by way of frivolous contact [with males]. The ancient [Chinese] text Record of Rites 礼記 states that males and females are not to sit in the same place, not to stow their clothing in the same location, and not to bathe in the same place. Passing things between each other should not be done directly, hand to hand. When traveling at night, [a woman] must always carry a lantern. Even husbands and wives, brothers and sisters--not to mention strangers--should maintain proper separation between the sexes. The households of today's ordinary people 民家 are ignorant of such norms. Such people wreak havoc on the rules of proper conduct to the detriment of their reputations, bringing shame to their parents and siblings, and living their entire lives in a dissolute state. (My translation of the modern Japanese text in Araki Kengo 荒木見悟 and Inoue Tadashi 井上忠, eds., Kaibara Ekken, Muro Kyūsō 貝原益軒・室鳩巣 [Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1970]. p. 202.) (Pages from an illustrated edition of the Onna daigaku, which include parts of this passage: #page 1#  #page2#)

Whether even elite Japanese households actually lived up to such rigid ideals is doubtful, but, in theory at least, they tried. Notice that the text laments the ignorance among common people of such norms. The last sentence points to a vast gap in lifestyles between ordinary Japanese and elites. In modern times, this gap gradually closed. As we will see, the Meiji state took the samurai ideal of gender roles, watered it down somewhat and adapted it to an industrial society, and then attempted to imposed it on the entire country. This process took time, and it was not until well into the twentieth century that Japanese in remote areas began to change their behavior. But by 1930 or so, young Japanese throughout the country tended to see proper gender roles more along the lines described above in the Onna daigaku than in terms of the relatively gender-interchangeable rural society of their parents and grandparents.

In ordinary commoner society, not only did women perform work similar to that of men, in most instances, the value of that labor was approximately the same as that of men in the eyes of their peers. Of course life was often hard for men and women alike, and in farm households, both husband and wife, as well as any children, would have to put forth a full effort to get by. The only exception to the general rule of similar valuations of the labor of men and women among commoners seems to have been agricultural wage laborers. Among these (usually) migrant workers, wages for men were generally higher than for women, except at critical times in the agricultural cycle when wages for women went up nearly to the same levels as those of men. (See Anne Walthall, "The Life Cycle of Farm Women in Tokugawa Japan," in Bernstein, ed., Japanese Women, p. 57.) Although speaking specifically about issues of divorce and remarriage in Japanese farm households, Robert Smith makes the following point, which is also relevant to the question of the value of men's and women's labor:

[T]he very structure of the commoners' household and the sexual division of labor within it made it imperative that it contain an able-bodied adult couple. No man could possibly manage on his own to perform all the tasks required to keep a household going, nor could a woman do so. In this sense, a wife and husband were absolutely interdependent and should one of them leave, necessity alone was enough to cause the remaining spouse to seek another partner. (Smith, "Good Wives and Wise Mothers," p. 79.)

By contrast, in samurai households, the labor of men often had much higher value than that of women, for the male head of the household was usually the sole person who brought in an income. Among wealthy households, there would have been maids and mistresses in addition to the primary wife of the male household head. In such circumstances, a maid, for example, could be replaced with much greater ease than the male head of the household. In other words, the women of a typical samurai household could be replaced with relative ease comported with the male household members.

Formal Authority, Informal Authority, and Divorce

Laws and official regulations during the Tokugawa period generally placed the formal exercise of authority in the hands of men, not women, with respect to family-related matters. Unlike today's world, however, formal law had relatively little impact on the lives of ordinary people in Tokugawa times. Tokugawa Japanese peasants seem to have been well aware of the potential power of government entities and sometimes sued each other over a wide range of disputes involving land and wealth. But on a day-to-day basis, local customary practices, not law codes imposed from above by governments, regulated the lives of ordinary people, including the realm of relations between men and women. Domain governments, for example, typically regulated samurai marriages by formal rules. Such regulation did not apply to the common people except insofar as there was some sort of record keeping system at local Buddhist temples to register marriages and to record births and deaths. As with other matters we have seen, formal authority applied mainly to social elites, and, among those Japanese, men clearly had greater authority than did women. But among the majority of the population, those ruled mainly by customary practices, the balance of power and authority between men and women was much more equitably distributed. The "restrictive Tokugawa code," in the passages from Bingham and Gross above (whatever that term might exactly mean--there was no single "Tokugawa code") would have been the concern mainly of samurai, not ordinary people.

Among ordinary people, demographics may well have played some role in giving either men or women relatively more informal authority. For example, throughout most of the Tokugawa period (until approximately the 1840s), the large urban areas suffered a population imbalance such that men outnumbered women at most age levels. An 1844 census for the capital city of Edo, for example, indicated a male population of 52%, and this figure would have been higher in earlier decades. Popular songs and other folklore from the time often suggested better living and working conditions for women compared with men. The following passage is from a quasi-anthropological, Tokugawa-period study of the lifestyles of the common people (世事見聞録 Seji kenbunroku, literally "A record of observing and hearing the conditions of our world") and is about life in and around urban tenement buildings:

Even in the house in back of the tenement building on which the sun set, the daughter wore good clothes and was in and about passing the time with her boyfriend. Though the husband was out working hard, selling items he carried with a pole across his back, in his absence his wife complained about his obstinate nature to the neighborhood women who had gathered to play mahjong. The young people were drinking, walking about, and enjoying themselves. Moreover, although the husband who had returned was exhausted, there was no show of sympathy for him, and he even had to get his own water and do his own cooking. It was almost as if he were used as a servant. (Quoted in Ishikawa Eisuke 石川英輔,  Edo kūkan 江戸空間 [Tokyo: Hyōronsha, 1993], pp. 92-93. See also p. 96.)

Such family situations must have been at least mildly shocking to elite observers such as the compilers of this record. In rural areas, it was rare to find sharp differences in formal or informal authority between men and women. As Smith observes:

Kawashima has characterized the [Tokugawa-period] farm family as one in which the Confucian patriarch of the families of the warrior class and nobility was not found. In the farm family, he maintains, there was far less emphasis on absolute authority and filial piety and much more on the cooperation of family members in a common enterprise. Each member contributed according to his or her attributes, so that the dominant form of interpersonal relations was "coordinate" rather than hierarchical. It was of such families that Hozumi Yatsuka, a major figure in the preparation of the Meiji Civil Code, wrote that "The customs of farmers are not to be made general customs--instead we must go by the practice of samurai and nobleman. . . ." (Smith, "Good Wives and Wise Mothers," p. 73.)

Notice again the explicit desire on the part of Meiji-period elites to impose on the general population not the relatively egalitarian customs of the common people, but more strict and hierarchical customs of the social elites.

There is an obscure, Tokugawa-period manual on sexual and marital compatibility based on correspondences between the so-called "Five Phases" (gogyō 五行, also called the "Five Elements"--earth, wood, metal, water, and fire). In it, the combination man-earth / woman-earth is described as "Half Auspicious: Happy Beginnings, but Unhappy Endings." (#original text and illustrations#) The explanatory text makes an interesting observation about the difference between elite couple and those of the "lower classes:"

Perhaps it is among the lower classes that the match in dispositions matters most. As most marriages among the upper classes follow upon the directives of one's superiors, even where the match in dispositions is imperfect, it is rare for the relations to be bad. The lower classes, for their part, copulate like dogs, here on the veranda, there in the alleyways, getting it on with promises of marriage. Later, though, the incompatibilities come to the fore, and most relationships end badly. (Hayakawa Monta 早川聞多, ed., Hishikawa Mononobu 菱川師宣1: Danjo aishō wagō no en 男女相性和娯縁 [Sexual compatibility of men and women], [Tokyo: Kokusai Nihon bunka kenkyū sentaa, 2002], p. 29. Translation by Patricia Fister and Kuriyama Shigehisa.)

Notice here that one point the text makes is that the rigidity of elite marriages means that there need be little concern with compatibility of the husband and wife because society dictates their assigned roles. The author does not seem to think highly of the behavior of the common people, but points out that compatibility matters much in commoner marriages. For relationships to "end badly" meant for them to end in separation or divorce.

When textbooks and other sources describe women in Tokugawa Japan as downtrodden and oppressed, they usually cite customs and laws connected with divorce as prime evidence. A good example is the passage form Bingham and Gross quoted at the start of this section, with its mention of the reasons for divorce and the alleged ease with which a husband could divorce his wife: simply by writing a notice of three and a half lines. Bingham and Gross are not specialists in Japan, but even some specialists portray Tokugawa conditions in similar terms. (See, for example, Laurel L. Cornell, "Peasant Women and Divorce in Preindustrial Japan," Signs: The Journal of Women and Culture in Society, 15.4 [Summer 1990], especially pp. 710-711.) At the risk of sounding like a broken record, such portrayals are yet another example of taking the "ideals" of the samurai class, assuming that these ideals reflected actual practice, and then further assuming that all of "the Japanese" lived like samurai, even the 93% of the population who were not samurai. Critical readers should treat such broad generalizations with some suspicion.

It was indeed the case that, according to law, men affirmed and made official a divorce by writing a document commonly known as mikudarihan 三下り半, which literally means "three and a half lines." In this document, he sometimes specified the reason(s) for the divorce, though the main point was not the reason, but the fact of the divorce itself. When these documents are cited as evidence in alleging the overwhelming power that men had over women, such claims are often based on two incorrect assumptions about divorce in Tokugawa times. The first is that men, acting as individuals, were free to divorce their wives with impunity, even over relatively petty matters. The second incorrect assumption is that the stigma of divorce was so great for women that they became virtual outcasts in society as a result. Let us examine these areas further.

The first point to bear in mind is that marriage in Tokugawa Japan, at any level of society, was not primarily a union of two individuals. Instead, it was first and foremost a union of two families and only secondarily of individuals. Therefore, it would have been rare for any man, regardless of social status, to have had the power to make an arbitrary individual decision about a matter like divorce. This is not to say that divorce was necessarily a terribly weighty matter. As we will see, among most commoners, divorce was common in Tokugawa times. Still, most divorces would be mediated, negotiated, and arranged by the members of the two families involved. Once the separation details had been agreed upon by both parties, then the husband would finalize the agreement by writing the three and a half line document.

There has been a tendency to see this document as a divorce decree, and thus representative of the arbitrary authority men wielded over women. But were these mikudarihan arbitrary decrees of divorce? Here is the text of one that is typical of most:

To my wife. It is my pleasure to divorce you. There is no objection to your marrying anyone whomsoever.

Witness my hand, this day and month (Quoted in Cornell, "Peasant Women and Divorce," p. 710.)

It does not read like a stern decree, and the last substantive sentence is especially interesting. How would you characterize this document? A prominent legal scholar in Japan has examined over 550 such mikudarihan from the Tokugawa period. He found that divorce was not normally a matter of the husband forcing the wife out of the marriage. Instead, most divorces took place only after intense discussion between members of both families and with the agreement of both parties. The written decree was the legal instrument that finalized the divorce. These decrees usually placed emphasis on the woman being free to remarry. In other words, most of these three and a half line divorce decrees functioned as remarriage licenses. Furthermore, analysis of actual divorces reveals numerous instances in which a man's family paid money or items of value to the woman's as part of a divorce settlement. (Ishikawa, Edo kūkan, p, 195) Laurel Cornell points out that "there is reason to question that divorce, at least in preindustrial Japan, was as arbitrary and ruthless as this evidence [the divorce decrees] leads us to believe." ("Peasant Women and Divorce," p. 711) Indeed, even "this evidence" itself hardly suggests ruthlessness or arbitrariness when viewed in its social context. There is some truth to the notion of husbands wielding power over wives and threatening them with ruinous divorce, but only among social elites. Among common people, marriages were entered into with relative ease and little expense (elaborate ceremonies, for example, were rare). Similarly they were dissolved with comparative ease.

What was the divorce rate in Tokugawa Japan? Among peasants, at least all indications point to it having been high--much higher than in contemporary Japan. Social historian Anne Walthall describes divorce customs and frequencies in the following paragraphs. Notice the sharp difference between the samurai class and ordinary people:

The question of divorce highlights further differences between samurai morals and customs on the one hand and diverse peasant practices on the other. According to samurai teachings, widows and divorcées were not expected to remarry. Tales of virtuous women recount how they committed suicide rather than accept a second marriage--behavior praised also in China, where chastity was the crucial expression of female fidelity. Only a man, furthermore, could initiate divorce, either by copying a prescribed three and one-half lines telling his wife to leave, or simply by sending her baggage back to her natal home. A woman could do nothing to prevent the divorce or to protect her access to her children.

Peasant practices, in contrast, often ignored the norms of the military aristocracy. For one thing, the divorce rate, according to one study of village ledgers near Osaka was at least 15 percent (possibly even higher since these documents include only cases where the marriages lasted over a year). In addition, peasant women as well as men initiated divorce. The eldest daughter of Sekiguchi Toemon married and had three children before deciding to live alone in a temple. In 1857, a woman named Nobu, claiming "disharmony in the household," appealed to the local government office for a separation from her husband. He was a heavy drinker, and her father paid him one ryō to agree to a divorce. ("Farm Women," p. 60.)

Furthermore, Ishikawa points out that, while divorce came to incur social disapproval during the Meiji period, in Tokugawa times, the fact of having been divorced per se presented no problem in remarrying. (Edo Kūkan, p. 195) Cornell comes to the same conclusion, pointing out that the consequences of divorce for peasant women "were not in fact very serious." Most divorces, she points out, took place early into the marriage, and, in such cases, divorced women were just as eligible to marry as were those of similar age who had not yet married. ("Peasant Women and Divorce," pp. 720-723)

Even well into modern times, rural divorce rates remained high, especially in remote areas. For example, the anthropologist Ella Wiswell (Ella Embree at that time) lived for a year in the village of Suye (old spelling for Sue) in Kumamoto Prefecture (island of Kyūshyū) in the mid 1930s. According to her records, an elderly woman in the village was then living with husband number eleven (or possibly higher). Regarding this woman: "She is said to be exceptionally hard to get along with. There is no other like her in Suye. She was once married to someone in Kawaze, but left him and her infant daughter. . . . Then she married at least ten different men, eventually ending up with Tanno. They say she stays with him because he is so quiet." (Quoted in Smith, "Good Wives and Wise Mothers," p. 79). But this elderly lady's record number of marriages was the product of an earlier age. By the 1930s, divorce rates had dropped dramatically, even in villages like Suye. Kubo, a male resident of Suye, explained the change in straightforward, pragmatic terms (according to Ella Wisewell's records):

Kubo said that the present elaborate wedding ceremony is more or less an innovation. Formerly they were very simple, and one could get married for five yen. That is why divorce was so frequent, for five yen you could go to a restaurant, visit a whorehouse, or get married. As a result, one broke up marriages without too much thought. Now, however, so much money goes into them that one thinks a long time before getting a divorce. (Quoted in Smith, "Good Wives and Wise Mothers," p. 80)

In other words, marriage ceremonies had become more elaborate, which drove up the monetary price of getting married. According to many other commentators in the 1930s, this was the main reason for the increasingly low divorce rate. In the words of a woman in Suye, for example:

There used to be a lot of "secret babies" because the girls were ignorant, but today there are few. In the same way, there were many divorces and remarriages in the old days, but now things have changed. Formerly the marriage ceremony was extremely simple and did not mean much in itself, so if a girl disliked something or other in her new home, she could go back to her family and start over again. Virginity in a bride did not seem important. That is why you find so many old women who have been married so many times. But now weddings have become elaborate affairs, and so girls take them less lightly and do not seek divorce so readily. (Quoted in Smith, "Good Wives and Wise Mothers," pp. 78-79)

What about cases in which a husband would not agree to a wife's request for a divorce? In theory, there was little recourse. The bakufu recognized two Buddhist temples as "divorce temples" (縁切り寺 enkiridera) to which women could flee oppressive husbands (#Tōkei Temple;#  #Contemporary Poem: "Temple of Divorce"#). These official temples mainly served elite woman, for whom divorcing an unwilling husband would have been extremely difficult. For a fee, ordinary Buddhist temples also assisted women in need of a divorce. According to Walthall:

For women in a hurry, Buddhist temple officials served as divorce brokers. They would go to the husband's village and camp at the headman's door until he summoned the husband and forced him to agree to an amicable divorce. In most cases, just the news that the temple officials were coming was enough to produce a letter of separation. For their services the officials charged a stiff ten ryō. ("Farm Women," p. 61.)

Buddhist temple officials, in other words, sometimes functioned like divorce lawyers do in contemporary society, and they apparently charged comparable fees. But what about women who could not afford such a price? Options included seeking assistance from various local government offices or locally-prominent families. More commonly, however, they just packed up and left, usually returning to their natal families. Once it became generally recognized that a woman was serious about abandoning her husband, she was, for all practical purposes, free to remarry. Ishikawa makes the point that whether for men or women, obtaining a divorce in Tokugawa Japan was much easier than would have been the case in Europe at a comparable time. (Edo Kūkan, pp. 196-197) In short, for about 80-90% of Japanese in Tokugawa times, there was not a vast difference in authority between husbands and wives.

Sexual Behavior and Degrees of Sexual Freedom

The same general point we have seen repeatedly in the preceding paragraphs applies here as well. As with divorce, the general realm of sexual behavior is often cited in textbooks as another aspect of the oppression of women in Tokugawa Japan. And as you have surely guessed by now, an assertion such as that by Bingham and Gross cited above regarding adultery by wives as being punishable by death would have applied only to the samurai class, and, in this particular example, only to the upper levels of the samurai class. The situation for the majority of the population was much less stark--at least in Tokugawa times.

As we have seen in a previous chapter, there is much information--albeit mostly indirect information--about the sexual customs of urban dwellers in Tokugawa Japan. For rural areas, we have much lass data directly from the Tokugawa period, but there is some (#a visual tidbit--scroll down to bottom of the page#). Furthermore, it is usually safe to take the situation in Meiji times or, in very remote places, even later, and extrapolate backward into the Tokugawa period. The best estimates are that sexual customs were not constant throughout the Japanese islands, with the details varying, sometimes widely, form place to place. In general, however, all indications point to a relatively high degree of sexual freedom in most parts of Japan for ordinary people--as one might suspect just from the fact of the much higher divorce/remarriage rates. By "relatively high," I mean compared with the situation in modern times. Certain prominent modern "womanly" norms such as a high value placed on virginity prior to marriage or modesty in dress, speech, and mannerisms would have been rare among the common people of Tokugawa Japan. Such values were prominent only in elite society, and it was not until the Meiji period, with strong backing form the state, that they slowly began to sink into the ranks of the common people.

According to research summarized by Walthall, in some areas there was extensive, sanctioned pre-marital contact (sexual and otherwise) between young men and women. One study of a particular rural area showed that no more than two percent of unmarried young women were virgins, and all married women had sexual relations before marriage. Local village youth associations (wakamono-gumi 若者組み) often encouraged young people to experience a variety of short-term sexual encounters, the apparent idea being to shop around before marriage. On the other hand, in some areas of Japan, sexual encounters between young, unmarried people were more restricted. ("Farm Women," p. 51.) After marriage, social norms generally expected men and women to be faithful to each other, although there is abundant indirect evidence that they often were not. A key point regarding this matter is that in rural areas, whatever social sanctions applied to those who pursued extramarital affairs, they were usually the same for both men and women.

One specific custom in many rural areas was yobai (夜這い, literally, "crawling around at night"). The details of the practice varied from place to place, but often young men and women would gather at night during local festivals and then pair off and repair to the bushes as the night wore on. The term yobai also encompasses the sense of sneaking around at night for sexual encounters by people of all ages and circumstances, and there is an extensive set of folklore that developed around the custom in some locations (Here are four recent books on yobai-related customs and culture in Akita Prefecture. They are in Japanese, though at least a brief glimpse of the subject matter is suggested by the cover illustrations: #Example 1  Example 2  Example 3  Example 4#).

In the Ryukyu Islands to the south (at that time a separate kingdom but today part of Japan), similar customs involving young people were often called mōashibi (毛遊び, literally something like "play in the fields;" other terms included tsujiashibi 辻遊び, or "play at the intersections of roads" and yūashibi 夜遊び, or "night play"). The general requirement for participants was that they be "grown up," that is 14-15 years of age, and unmarried. Night gatherings of young men and women ranged form groups of 10 to as many as 80 depending on village size, season, and other factors. The event would start off with men and women in separate groups and one or more musicians playing the shamisen (sanshin in Okinawan). The men and women would sing and dance for each other--a series of  quasi-competitive performances. The content of the songs and the dance steps would gradually become more suggestive until couples began to pair off and move to more private settings. As in Japan, the social elites of Ryukyu did not participate in such activities (or at least were not supposed to have done so). We should not overly romanticize the often difficult lives of common people in preindustrial Japan. Still, modest social status did have occasional benefits in past ages.

The keeping of concubines, "secondary wives," and so forth by men was characteristic only of elite society. For the vast majority of the people in the Japanese islands monogamy was the rule. Furthermore, in contrast with contemporary Japan, which some social commentators have called "the sexless age" with respect to marriage (For example, see the series of articles on the "sexless age" in Fujin kōron 婦人公論, May, 1994, pp. 112-171), all indications are that sexual activity and sexual satisfaction were key elements in commoner marriages and in their definitions of family harmony. Even many Confucian-influenced moral tracts intended for peasant education asserted that sexual relations were the basis of marriage. For example: "The married couple is the foundation of morality. A couple is basically lustful, and, if they get along, produce a righteous harmony, but if they do not, everything falls apart." (Quoted in Walthall "Farm Women," p9. 55-56.) It was this general way of thinking that lay behind the many local practices that encouraged young people to gain rather wide sexual experience prior to marriage.

To summarize, notice that there are two major trends in operation within the realm of relations between men and women. The first pertains to social status. Among social elites, gender-based rules tended to be rigid and unequal. This was indeed the classic male-dominated society that is so often, and incorrectly, extrapolated to the whole of Japan. Among the majority of Japanese, however, the situation was nearly opposite. The gap in lifestyles was vast in Tokugawa times. But in the Meiji period this situation began to change. This is the second trend: change over time. The Meiji state became a strong, centralized government. And it took great interest in the private lives and personal behavior of Japan's citizens. Through official pronouncements, civil law, a school system, and simply by taking the lead socially, the Meiji state tried to impose upon the whole of Japan a set of slightly-watered-down samurai norms for gender. The result was a gradual transformation in the thought and behavior of the masses of Japanese, though in rural areas this change was not accomplished until well into the twentieth century. We now examine certain aspects of this modern transformation of gender roles.

The Modern Transformation of Gender Roles

Recall the importance of making Japanese for the Meiji state. Within five years of the new government taking power, it began to use state authority in an attempt to regulate and change the behavior of ordinary people--something to which the Tokugawa bakufu sometimes gave lip service but never even attempted to put into practice in a thorough or sustained manner. The direct impetus for the early rounds of behavioral regulations of the 1870s and 80s was to change the way that Japanese citizens appeared in the eyes of Western foreigners visiting or residing in Japan. Why bother? Because the way that these foreigners perceived Japan's people had serious implications for international politics and diplomacy.

These Westerners were products of the age of nations. They therefore tended to assume that each nation had certain distinctive characteristics and that these national characteristics could be observed in the behavior of ordinary people. This way of thinking was entirely foreign to Tokugawa-period Japanese, who assumed that people of different social groups and statuses would, of course, behave differently--as indeed they did as we have seen in the preceding material. In the 1860s, the bakufu sent ambassadors to reside in some of the powerful European countries. They were, of course, high-ranking samurai, and they disembarked form the ships that took them to Europe wearing magnificent costumes and accompanied by a retinue of servants to carry their luggage. It was the summertime, and these servants were clad in loincloths, possibly with a shirt on as well. The ambassador to Prussia was shocked when, a day or two after his arrival, the local newspaper featured a huge image, not of the samurai ambassador, but of one of his half-naked servants. The headline accompanying the image described the man as one of "the Japanese." The ambassador began to realize that these strange Westerners tended to regard any single Japanese person as representative of the whole society, and that they were prone to highlight the common people--scantily-clad servants in this case--as representative examples.

Furthermore, when the authorities of the new Meiji state sought to revise the unequal treaties that the bakufu had signed with the major foreign countries--treaties which, among other things, exempted foreign nationals from Japanese laws--their requests were turned down with scorn. The response was typically something to the effect that Japan is not a fully civilized country and thus we cannot subject our citizens to its barbaric laws and customs. Of course, Japan's leaders did not generally regard their country as barbaric, but they realized that Japan was terribly weak militarily and economically. It therefore had no choice but to conform, at least to an extent, with the Western foreigners' definitions of "civilized." In such ways, cultural power often accompanies military or economic power. As a result, the message from the Meiji state to its citizens was something like: "Hey, you are all Japanese now--so act the part and don't embarrass us!"

More specifically, consider this summary by Smith:

Early in the Meiji period [the central government] ordered the removal from public view of phallic images and sculptures depicting sexual intercourse. The o-kagura [dance] . . . was purged of its overtly sexual passages and transformed into a discrete, even stately dance. Public near-nudity was discouraged and mixed bathing was officially frowned upon, although efforts to prohibit it entirely often ended in such half-hearted gestures as putting a rope across the middle of the pool, with men and women on either side. Japan was to become a society in which decorum would be such that no foreign observer would be scandalized.  . . . The government had rightly guessed that the Western powers were more likely to take Japan more seriously and to treat it as one among equals if its people behaved in ways that met the standards implied by the words of the slogan [bunmei-kaika ("civilization and enlightenment")]. ("Good Wives and Wise Mothers," p. 77)

As for phallic images in shrines and festivals, despite the vigor of modern state suppression, a few still survive--and even thrive--to this day: #click here# and click on each image for more examples including processions of 36-year-old women marching along the parade route while carrying huge phallic objects. Also see #these images# of the same festival.

Similarly, the new state took an interest in gender roles, although there was some confusion in the early days. One the one hand, there was a common perception on the part of many Meiji Japanese social elites and government officials that women in Western societies were powerful and domineering (*example*). Such perceptions were often based on minimal, superficial evidence such as the observation of men opening doors for women or giving up their chairs so that ladies could sit down. In light of this view, some Japanese commentators of the early Meiji period advocated a kind of women's liberation from the "oppressive" customs of the past. As we have seen, however, in reality there was rather little need for such liberation for most Japanese woman. But the majority Meiji elites were former members of the samurai class or members of well-to-do families. Therefore, they generally focused their attention on women of similarly high social status, not, for example, on peasant women. When the subject of ordinary women (or men) did impinge on their consciousness, a common reaction was embarrassment over what appeared in elite eyes as boorish, unenlightened behavior.

In contrast to those who called for the adoption of (poorly understood) "Western" customs with respect to relations between men and women, many early Meiji elites feared the social havoc that such powerful and domineering women might wreak (*examples*). But it was not long before many of these elite Japanese began to understand that women in Western countries were not all that powerful vis-à-vis men despite superficial appearances. And so, with a sigh of relief, they realized that there was no need to empower Japanese women to please the foreigners. Instead, they got to work on promoting their own visions of ideal behavior for Japanese women, behavior intended to strengthen the nation.

In general, this official vision of ideal womanly behavior turned out to be a modified version of former samurai ideals, slightly reduced in severity and with one important addition: the idea of motherhood. Two broad structural changes helped bring about a transformation in gender roles. First was the economic and demographic changes that accompanied urban life and industrialization. Second was state education policy and other forms of social engineering. Uno explains these changes as follows:

After the 1868 Meiji Restoration, new political and economic policies fostered a greater separation of public and private spheres, which impinged on the household division of labor. The separation of school and workplace from the home affected increasing numbers of children, then men, and finally women. Although early policies did not aim specifically to alter the family roles of children and men, by the end of the nineteenth century private educators and government officials deliberately sought to reshape conceptions of womanhood. The cumulative effects of all these changes slowly became visible in the early decades of the twentieth century, reshaping the daily lives of women, particularly among the new urban middle class. ("Household Division of Labor," pp. 35-36)

Among the earliest policies of the Meiji government was to strengthen the military and enrich the sate (expressed in the slogan fukoku-kyōhei 富国強兵). To this end, Japan's new state promoted industrialization with a variety of financial incentives. Industrialization went hand-in-hand with urbanization, and both resulted in a spatial separation of work and home. Education also became spatially detached from the home, at least in part. By the end of the nineteenth century, Japan's government had created a system of state-operated schools, at which attendance was required by law. By the turn of the twentieth century, the majority of Japanese children, even in rural areas, attended school at least through the elementary grades. In other words, by about 1900, for most Japanese, work, education, and home life took place in different physical locations--a major change from the past. Of course, for those Japanese remaining in rural areas, the degree of change might not have been so great. But after about 1900, the majority of the total population of Japan lived in towns and cities.

This spatial separation required, for all practical purposes, a sharp division of labor. In modern Japan, the various branches of government took primary responsibility for formal education, men went off to work in the factories and other workplaces of the industrial age, and, after marriage, women *took care of the home.* By the start of the twentieth century, this gendered division of labor had become the norm for most Japanese. In the case of education, although schools took over much of the work, official rhetoric also placed much of the educating responsibility on the shoulders of mothers.

A debate took place in intellectual and journalistic circles during the first two decades of the Meiji period concerning gender roles and the proper place of women in society and the family. At this time, the debaters were all men, mostly of samurai background. Some argued that the strength of Western Europe and the United States derived in part from women in these places receiving more dignified treatment than had samurai-class women in Japan. These writers called for greater dignity for women in society, but few, if any, were willing to accept women in significant roles outside of the household. These Meiji-era male social commentators faced a challenge "to find a plausible (if not always logical) argument, carefully drawn to make the distinction clear: Japanese women were not 'ready' for significant social roles outside the family, but they were more than capable of assuming greater power in the family to influence and educate Japan's future generations." (Uno, "Household Division of Labor," p.26)

So far the topic of motherhood has not come up for our consideration. One reason is that it was not particularly important in the Tokugawa period. For most of the common people, children were raised by both parents, as well as by siblings, extended family members, and neighbors, but such people had little or no conception of child care as a specific, specialized occupation. Among elite Japanese, there was a general sense that the proper rearing and education of children was desirable. The main provider of such child care, however, was rarely the biological mother. The wisdom of the day regarded her as being insufficiently mature, and we should bear in mind that that most mothers gave birth as teenagers. Specially trained servants, tutors, and the child's grandparents, for example, were thought to be the most effective molders of young girls and boys. But even among elite Japanese in Tokugawa times, there was only a weak sense of child rearing as a specialized enterprise.

As Japan became more urbanized during the Meiji period, it was women, typically biological mothers, who increasingly bore the main (or sole) responsibility for raising children. And, as social commentators and government officials pointed out repeatedly, child raising was terribly important work for the nation. After all, mothers were charged with bringing up the next generation of Japanese. The ideal social role for women in the new Japan was to produce, nurture, and educate children within the context of managing the household. Women, in other words, should be "good" wives and "wise" mothers. The mother, went the standard argument, sets the child on a course in life that even the power of the state might not be able to alter. Good mothering, therefore, was essential in creating a strong Japan. This argument received its first public articulation by the scholar and social commentator Nakamura Masanao 中村正直 (1831-1891) in a speech, "Creating Good Mothers," which he delivered on March 16, 1875. Here is one part of his argument:

Thus we must inevitably have fine mothers if we want effectively to advance the people to the area of enlightenment and to alter their customs and conditions for the good. If the mothers are superb, they can have superb children, and Japan can become a splendid country in later generations. We can have people trained in religious and moral education as well as in the sciences and arts whose intellects are advanced, whose minds are elevated, and whose conduct is high. Not having had adequate prenatal educational nourishment, I am at middle age unable sufficiently to realize my ambitions, only sadly languishing in shabby quarters [Japan] and envying the enlightenment of Europe and America. I have a deep irrepressible desire that later generations shall be reared by fine mothers. (Quoted in William Reynolds Braisted, trans., Meiroku Zasshi: Journal of the Japanese Enlightenment [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 401-402. Note that the 1870s was a time when many Japanese intellectuals expressed strong feelings of inferiority vis-à-vis "the West.")

For Nakamura, the first step was systematic education for women, though he never envisioned this education leading to major social roles outside of the home. By the turn of the century, Japan's government adopted a deliberate policy of encouraging good motherhood. In this context, the slogan "Good Wives and Wise Mothers" (ryōsai-kenbo), first coined by Nakamura, came to express concisely the official view of women's social roles in Japan. Starting in 1911, training to be a good wife and a wise mother became the cornerstone of the school curriculum for girls.

The empress also got in on the act of promoting wise mothers. After 1868, the Meiji emperor became the living symbol of Japan as a nation. Prior to the Meiji period, wives of male emperors (although rare, there had been a few female emperors) played no significant role as political or cultural symbols. During the Meiji period, however, the emperor's (primary) wife played at least two important symbolic roles. First, she became the symbol of ideal womanhood as defined by the Meiji state. Second, she became a symbolic teacher and general advocate of education. A poem attributed to her reads (in a rather un-poetic translation):

Even a diamond, if not polished, will fail to shine

People, too, unless they study, will not demonstrate true virtue

If one is diligent every moment all day long

Like the hands of a clock that move without pause

 

What is there that will not be achieved?

Water follows the shape of its container, no matter what it may be

And people become good and bad depending on the company they keep

Seeking out friends who are better than we are

 

Driving ourselves forward

We will advance along the path of learning.

The images in these two verses were typical of the rhetoric of education during the Meiji period and part of the image of the self-made man, which was immensely popular in the early part of the period. But while the self-made man was indeed imagined as a man (i.e., male), person-making through education was imagined as both a male and female pursuit, albeit for different ends (career outside the household vs. household management). The empress frequently spoke publicly about the need for women to become educated to fulfill their duty to the nation as "mothers of men." To this end, she took the lead in #establishing a school# for the daughters of Japan's elite families.

In many respects, Meiji-era gender roles for the general population came increasingly to resemble Tokugawa-era gender roles for samurai--but without the high social status. Gender roles became more rigid and separate. Men came to hold greater power than women in nearly all aspects of social life, and this power difference was written into the legal codes of the new government. But there is one major exception to the general rule of Tokugawa-era elite gender roles being forced on everyone in modern times: the modern idea of motherhood, which was a major departure from samurai-class ideas. As Uno explains, "Ryōsai kenbo presumed a greater degree of female competence; if properly educated, mothers could prepare their children to be good subjects of the emperor by instilling in them diligence, loyalty, and patriotism. Mothers would render service to the nation from the house." ("Household Division of Labor," p.38) Additionally, mothers bore the main responsibility for keeping their children physically healthy.

But how was a mother supposed to know what to do in any of these realms? How was she supposed to be (or at least appear to be) "wise" in the pursuit of her duty to society and nation? How, in other words, were women to get the knowledge they needed to become good wives and wise mothers? Formal schooling eventually did play a major role, but even during the twentieth century, formal schooling was not enough. In practice, the popular commercial press in the form of newspapers and magazines often provided the information that many women sought at the time. Articles, often by specialists like physicians, explained to anxious mothers how to deal with problems such as sickness or how to provide the ideal balance of nutrients to give children a good start in life. In addition to articles, *advertising played a major role.* Ads often featured extensive explanations of why their products would be useful to women aspiring to be good wives and wise mothers. Many were cleverly designed to play on fears and anxieties about not being quite up to the difficult task of modern household management and mothering.

Although the "wise mother" part of the slogan probably received more attention, popular discourse also abounded with ways for women to become "good wives." Messages were not always consistent, of course, but the ability to *cook well,* keep a clean house, and maintain one's physical appearance was always high on the list. Cultural or artistic qualities were also important. For example, some women worried about the appearance of their handwriting. Calligraphy was and is the most prestigious of the visual arts throughout East Asia, and many Japanese tended to regard a person's handwriting as a direct extension of his or her personality. In the early twentieth century, beautiful handwriting was certainly not as important as it was, say, among the Heian-period aristocrats, but some vestiges of the same way of thinking have remained in modern times. As you might expect, the fruits of a growing consumer economy were available to help alleviate the *tragic problem of poor handwriting.*

The state and the broader society emphasized the positive message of the glorious service to the nation that women might render as good wives and wise mothers. There was also a corresponding negative message: do not try to do anything with your lives other than being good wives and wise mothers. More specifically, for example, do not even think about politics, much less become politically active. Indeed, the modern state frequently declared politics off limits to all truly decent citizens. After all, with such a wise government as ours, the government would say, there is really no need for politics anyway--just leave things to us! Nevertheless, everyone acknowledged that some men would indeed engage in political activities, which the state carefully regulated. Under no circumstances, however, were women to do the same. By 1889 women were banned by law from participation in any political activates (Police Peace Law, Article 5). For example, if a member of an anti-government political party came to town to give a public talk, women would be barred from listening. After all, the thinking whet, why should they listen to such things? The unsavory realm of politics could only be corrupting to women and would interfere with their duties as good wives and wise mothers. Other categories of people were banned from all political activities for similar reasons (e.g., government employees, including teachers). As you might expect given such circumstances, women were not permitted to vote until 1946, after Japan's defeat in war.

In the realm of civil law, all women were surely in a worse situation in modern times than were most Japanese women in Tokugawa times. In Japan's first civil code, in force from 1898-1947, there is a section titled "Capacity." Article 11 of this section states that "Weak-minded, deaf, dumb, or blind persons, or spendthrifts, may be placed under curatorship as quasi-incompetents." Article 12 enumerates numerous acts for which a "quasi-incompetent" person must secure the permission of his or her curator (guardian) to perform. Some examples include receiving or investing capital, contracting a loan, to prosecute a lawsuit, and to undertake major building projects. Article 14 states that "A married woman must obtain the consent of her husband for doing any of the following acts:

  1. Those enumerated in Article 12 . . . Numbers 1 to 6

  2. To accept of refuse a gift or legacy (devise)

  3. To ender into a contract calculated to subject her to bodily restraint."

Article 15 states that a married woman whose husband has permitted her to operate one or more businesses shall have the capacity of a full-fledged person (not a quasi-incompetent) insofar as those businesses are concerned. Ah such freedom! But, Article 16 specifies that "A husband may revoke or restrict the permission so given." If so, then it was back to being a full-time quasi-incompetent for the wife. (Quotations based on the translation by W. J. Sebald, The Civil Code of Japan [London: Butterworth & Co., 1934]. pp. 3-5) Other parts of the Civil Code addressed the status of women in similarly subordinate terms.

Did anyone object to the rigidity and inequality of gender roles in modern Japan? Yes, a small number of people, mostly women, were willing to oppose state and society on these points. Here are #their pictures# thanks to John Tucker. And here is a very brief summary of the major manifestations of this women's movement in the early twentieth century:

The mainstream press rarely responded positively to the activities and platforms of such women's groups (*typical cartoons*). For the most part, it was not until the post-Pacific War U.S. occupation, starting in 1945, that many of the demands of the women's groups of the early 1920s became law. Law is not all-powerful, however, and social convention and custom have continued to support relatively rigid gender roles even in the present.

The modern notion of good wives and wise mothers included new codes of sexual behavior and values--"new" at least for most Japanese. Chastity and virginity became prized and guarded commodities for women. As we have seen, most Japanese women in Tokugawa times seem to have had little regard for such abstinence. Most young people became sexually active in their middle teens in rural areas. And this same pattern could be seen even into the twentieth century in remote places. Thomas Elsa Jones was an anthropologist who conducted fieldwork in several remote areas of Japan between 1917 and 1924. According to his research:

The head of the Young Men's Association in Namase [in Ibaragi Prefecture] estimated that not more than two percent of the unmarried young women were virgins, and the same figure was given to [Jones] in Tatekoshi [in Niigata]. In Namase, it was said of one hamlet that until ten to fifteen years previously every girl there had had sexual relations before marriage and the wife of the headman of a village in Gokanosho [in Kumamoto] made the same observation about the young women of that community. (Smith, "Good Wives and Wise Mothers," p. 74)

Of course, one might wonder exactly how this association head knew that less than two percent of unmarried young women were virgins. Be that as it may, however, by the 1920s, thanks to schools, mass media, women's associations, peer pressure, and so forth, sexual values were rapidly changing even in remote areas. Regarding schools, for example, "The curriculum designed for girls emphasized homemaking and the desirability of being virginal at marriage and chaste thereafter, in addition to the standard injunction to obey one's parents and one's husband." At the movie theatre: "Many [movies] of which Ella Wiswell attended with village women dealt with the contrast between good wives, women who were "truly Japanese," as opposed to bad ones, who were invariably "modern" young women badly infected by foreign ways that rendered them disobedient and selfish." And the popular women's magazines: "featured love stories in which the good, Japanese woman always won out, albeit not without undergoing severe trials and suffering, and the bad, foreigner-like women paid the price for their liberated behavior."  (Smith, "Good Wives and Wise Mothers," p. 76)

Interestingly, this change in values resulted in a major generation gap in which young people (teens and twenties) often regarded their elders disapprovingly as lewd and oversexed. As Smith points out: "Young people, said older women and men, are not like us when we were their age. Far from denouncing the youth of the time for their loose sexual morals, their elders found them positively conservative in contrast with themselves when young." ("Good Wives and Wise Mothers," p. 77) Furthermore:

More often the young were annoyed or embarrassed, especially by the uninhibited behavior of older married women at the many drunken parties that the Embrees attended. From John Embree's journal: "There were a good many dances. One was done by Mrs. Suzuki, who used a stick of wood as a penis, held it to her vagina and jerked it up and down to the rhythm of the shamisen. This called forth much laughter." And "The young woman who had nursed her 'secret baby' throughout most of the party got up to dance. She took a small broom and held it in front of her like a penis, doing a jerky dance, and then attacking half the company with it. When she retired two women got up and simulated copulation by violently bumping together to the rhythm of the dance. Several younger people did a few of the indecent dances, which one almost never sees in other hamlets of Suye, where they usually just sit by and watch, often obviously embarrassed by the goings on." ("Good Wives and Wise Mothers," p. 81)

Even in the 1980s and 90s, I have heard tales of "embarrassing" grandmothers or other elderly female extended family members in rural areas who were notorious for behaving in shockingly lewd ways at parties. These women would not have been socially out of place in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. But by the late twentieth century, younger family members could not have imagined the historical context for such behavior. Instead, they tended to attribute it to personal failing or weakness of the elderly woman in question. Incidentally, lewd behavior by men at parties was never regarded as problematic, then or now.

Let us consider one last point about this change in female sexual values during the twentieth century. Consider the following observation based on the research of Thomas Jones circa 1920:

In the Maki villages [of Shimane Prefecture] the bon dance was dying out. This festive occasion observed from the thirteenth to the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month in connection with the celebration of the return of the ancestral spirits to their native places was associated with what he called "sexual irregularities." [Jones] found the occasion to be conspicuously less licentiousness [sic] in Maki than in the other [areas in which he did field work], and guessed that because the villages were only some twenty miles from the city of Matsue, village men could easily repair to prostitutes and cafe girls rather than to women of the village. In both Namase [in Ibaragi Prefecture] and Shirakawa [in Gifu] the bon dance was still practiced, although "leading citizens" opposed it on the grounds that it encouraged widespread sexual misconduct. (Smith, "Good Wives and Wise Mothers," p. 73)

The passage actually makes two points. The first, which we have already seen, is that local authorities were concerned with formal appearances. They sought to prohibit or modify traditional festivals and other practices that might lead to sexual immorality or even appear to do so. The second point, though not much explained or analyzed in the passage, concerns the role of prostitutes in rural areas. During the Tokugawa and Meiji periods, there was little or no prostitution in rural areas, not because men were less lusty in those days but because sex was more freely available. Young men and women in rural villages became sexually active at age fifteen or so and yobai and similar activities were sufficient as a sexual outlet such that demand for prostitution was minimal. Although married people were supposed to settle down, extensive evidence points to a high frequency of extra-marital affairs.

It is precisely this state of affairs that the modern state sought to suppress, mainly by changing female values and behavior. In so doing, it also created a surge in demand for the services of prostitutes. Young men, in short, were not expected to restrain their sexual appetites. During the twentieth century, prostitution became a significant industry in the small towns that served rural areas. One result of this rise of prostitution was a de facto two-tiered class system for rural women: respectable women and prostitutes. Anthropologist Akamatsu Keisuke has made this point in several of his articles. Here is how he describes the Taishō-period situation  in the October, 1990 issue of "middle-brow" journal Shinchō 45:

Nobody would be so foolish as to get married quickly just to have sex. Sexual intercourse is like eating and drinking—no big deal. But marriage forges connections to other households and the village, and is not so simple. The forced application of this [notion of no sex until marriage] from above gave rise to many perverse twists. While things on the surface appeared pretty, in that shadow, the prostitution industry thrived.

Throughout the countryside by the start of the Taishō era, the services of prostitutes were available, and even in one rural government office one could find about ten prostitutes. Anywhere, "in front of the station," as it was called, one could find lodging establishments and restaurants that offered extra services. Though one could always "play" (asobu) for a price, such play was no longer available for free. In the sexual customs connected with the yobai or yoasobi ["night play"] of old, as long as a man had a penis (mara 魔羅) and a woman a vagina (join 女陰), they could play until each was thoroughly satisfied. This was the fundamental aspect of yobai, which remained even into modern times. (Reprinted in Akamatsu Keisuke 赤松略介, Yobai no minzokugaku, 夜這いの民俗学 [Tokyo: Meiseki shoten 明石書店, 1994], p. 10)

Akamatsu is a classic type of Marxist-influenced Japanese scholar, and so he especially laments the intrusion of capitalist economics into the sexual economy of rural villages during the Taishō period. There is one more aspect of the economic conditions of the time, which, in connection with prostitution, greatly increased the social misery of many rural Japanese. From about the mid 1920s through most of the 1930s, many rural areas, especially in the northern parts of Japan, experienced crushing depression as a result of low crop prices (owing in large part to cheap imports of food from colonies like Taiwan and Korea) and failed harvests. Many farmers were pushed to the brink of starvation--eloquently symbolized by a *well-known photograph* from the time showing starving farmers stripping the bark off of trees to use as food. As a result of these desperate conditions, farm families often resorted to selling daughters--*some as young as 12 or so*--into prostitution. Strictly speaking, slavery was illegal, but the heads of households had great legal authority at this time and would agree to contracts obligating minor children to work as prostitutes in return for payment from the brothel proprietor. These youngsters might end up in a nearby small-town brothel, but often they worked far away in large cities. Brothel agents from such establishments frequently made the rounds of impoverished rural areas.

There is much more that could be said about the situation of women in modern and contemporary Japan. But the above points should be sufficient for grasping the major changes that took place over the period of roughly 1850-1950 and the underlying reasons for them. As an exercise, go back to the quotations from Bingham and Gross near the start of this chapter (click here). For the majority of the female population of Japan, was the situation necessarily worse in Tokugawa times than in the modern era? The modern era brought with it many benefits, and the general standard of living throughout most of Japan gradually increased from the 1880s onward. But if we focus mainly on the social situation of women, there was a serious down side to being a good wife and a wise mother. To understand gender roles in Tokugawa and modern Japan we must first disabuse ourselves of the tendency to associate "modern" with such vaguely positive notions like "progress" "liberation," "improvement," "freedom," and so forth. Furthermore, we must always bear in mind that "Japanese women" were not a singular category (ditto for "the Japanese"). The experiences of individual women depended on such variables as social status, wealth, geographic location, and time period, not to mention random factors such as luck and personal qualities. Finally, notice that in modern times, the idea of Japan as a nation had much to do with ideas about the proper behavior of women. Nothing in modern Japanese history was free from at least some influence of the process of making Japanese.