Asia Past & Present: New Research from AAS, no. 10. Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, 2013. 206 pp. (Figures.) US$25.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-924304-69-9.
In Changing Lives: The “Postwar” in Japanese Women’s Autobiographies and Memoirs, Ronald Loftus applies feminist critic’s Kana Masanao’s argument that men and women experienced Japan’s emergence into the postwar era differently. Indeed, the personal essays and memoirs that Loftus elegantly interweaves reveal Kano’s contention that for women, the heavy weight that had been lifted after the warwas indeed the “albatross” of “the very concept of the Japanese ‘male’ (otoko)” (2). But it is much more. As memoirist Yoshitake Teruko explains, the era represents “a revolution in consciousness” for women through their active participation in the antiwar movement of the 1950s and 1960s and women’s lib movement of the 1970s. Casting in relief Yoshitake’s notion that “defeat in war had been, for women, the most wonderful treasure imaginable” (2), Loftus traces moments of historical and personal reflexivity that allowed women to redefine themselves in resistance to a culture that continued to make inhabiting their newfound rights as equal citizens under the law an ongoing challenge.
Introducing some of the “Endings and Beginnings” that these women faced immediately after hearing the “imperial broadcast” (gyokuon hōsō), the garbled words of the emperor who explained that Japan must accept defeat, Loftus opens his analytic translation by juxtaposing this important historical moment with an array of personal moments that function as sites of self-discovery within the lives of women: for example, Okabe Itsuko’s retrospective embrace of the meaning of her fiancé’s final words to her, “this war is a mistake” (11); and Yoshitake’s ability, years after being gang-raped by American GIs during the Occupation, to confront her feelings of hatred and fear through the women’s movement.
Loftus convinces us of the value of these women’s writings as not only personal, but historical writings as well, providing us with telling details of women’s experiences and perspectives that histories so often lack. Knowing that Japanese women were granted the right to vote in April of 1946, for instance, is not the same thing as knowing that girls like Yoshitake “dragged” their mothers to the polls because they knew that “if you do not exercise this important right, then the status of women is likely to revert to what it was in the prewar period” (45). Loftus reminds us that the early postwar women’s movement represented a commitment to peace that spanned the Korean and Vietnam Wars, a torch passed “from woman to woman” through consciousness-raising (62), especially as women struggled to recast their roles as wives and mothers against their new roles as (often token) career women. Yoshitake’s narratives provide the transition between the antiwar and women’s movements so often missing from the histories of postwar Japan, the notion that women’s participation in these important protests paved the way for the Women’s Lib Movement in 1970, in which women unfurled their flag of resentment (怨) in the streets of Tokyo.
The idea of the transformative moment is extended to the writing process in Loftus’ focus on journalist Kishino Junko, who came to see her battle with breast cancer as “the inevitable rebellion of my own body against … me placing work above all else” (115) in a journalistic career that eventually caused Kishino to feel “haunted by recurring feelings of regret that I had virtually erased a part of me that is woman … and had made myself just like me, for whom competition and one’s success in the workplace are everything” (137). And yet it is the transformation of experience into language that becomes the sense of “consciousness” that Kishino craved as a feminist in the 1970s. As Loftus observes, Kishino “occupies that moment of reflexivity” through her writing and, “in effect, not only encounters her own agency but transforms it as well” (117).
Following up on a previous collection of women’s memoirs from the interwar years, Telling Lives, Loftus wisely foregrounds the voices of the women whose lives he chronicles in this new volume, rather than let his analysis get in the way of the women’s writing. My one minor criticism is that I think that Loftus could have retained this primacy of the women’s voices even while weaving his analyses a bit more subtly into the fabric of his chapter, rather than saving the bulk of the analysis for the end of the chapter under the subheading “analysis,” which too radically marginalizes his strong interpretive abilities.
What intrigues me as a scholar of the postwar and contemporary women’s literature is the way in which the authors’ postwar experience is examined through the lens of the contemporary, with Yoshitake and Okabe’s memoirs both being written as recently as 2006, for instance. Looking at history through both ends of the telescope, we find ourselves in the present day in the final chapter, “Framing Gender Questions,” in which Kanamori Toshie, whose professional career allowed her an active life and way of supporting herself after her husband’s death, discusses very current women’s questions revolving around male participation in the domestic sphere. Claiming that women must let go of the “curse” that they must be the sole caregiver of elders, for instance, Kanamori asserts that increased social services should play a role, but so too should men themselves. Males who participate in caring for elders not only allow women to play more significant roles outside the household, but in doing so, men can also glean “the very human experience of understanding how fragile and precious life can be, which comes with
the act of caring for another” (164). This “horizontal” personal experience, as opposed to the vertical “chain of command” experience that many men are accustomed to in their working lives, allows men to expand their own frame of reference as human beings. While it would appear in some ways that women are still struggling to free themselves from the heavy weight of the otoko, Changing Lives offers compelling evidence for just how the transformation of women’s lives has been taking place in Japan for nearly three quarters of a century, moment by moment, story by story.
Lee Friederich
University of Wisconsin-Barron County, Rice Lake, USA
pp. 865-867