Introduction

Abstract

I n the 1970s Gerda Lerner, a pioneering American women's historian, wrote:'The striking fact about the historiography of women is the general neglect of the subject by historians.'This remark accurately describes the state of historical writing on Japanese women before 1945. 1 More specifically, the Japanese writer Yamazaki Tomoko wrote: 'The majority of history books, from Nihonshoki published in the Nara period to the complete works of Japanese history which existed before 1945, were written by men who had ruled our country, and narrowly focused on male political leaders.' 2 Somewhat earlier the Marxist historian Inoue Kiyoshi recorded that: Almost all the scholarship of Japanese history before 1945 was not the history of ordinary men and women, who accounted for over ninety percent of the population, but the history of a very limited number of men who had dominated ordinary people. Accordingly, it was a common practice for the majority of women to be omitted from history. 3 Hiroko Tomida and Gordon Daniels -9789004213838 Downloaded from Brill.com03/13/2023 12:36:54AM via free access THE HISTORY OF JAPANESE WOMEN: JAPANESE WRITING BEFORE 1945Closely related to the low status of women, Japanese women's history hardly existed before 1945. As Inoue Kiyoshi observed, Japanese women's history was small in quantity, surprisingly poor in quality, and normally comprised either biographies of famous ladies from the imperial family, aristocracy and warrior class, or romantic stories on women written from male perspectives. 4 Indeed, only a very few exceptional women were singled out for attention by male writers on account of their social status and political power. These included Empresses Suiko (554-628) and Ko ¯ken (718-770), Ho ¯jo ¯Masako and Hino Tomiko, and well-known literary figures such as Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon.Although Japanese women's history was in an undeveloped state, a few publications existed before 1945. For example, Sakai Toshihiko, one of the first Marxists in Japan, published Danjo So ¯to ¯shi ('The History of Struggles between Men and Women') in 1920, which was a pioneering example of women's historiography. 5 This work was followed by another Marxist historian, Watanabe Yoshimichi's Nihon Bokeijidai no Kenkyu ¯('A Study of the Matrilineal Era in Japan') in 1932. 6 In June 1936 a special issue of the historical journal Rekishi Kyo ¯iku featured a collection of articles on ordinary women's history by left-wing historians. 7 Takamure Itsue, who had already established her name as a poet, commenced her pioneering research on Japanese women's history in 1931. She studied matrilineal practices in ancient Japan, consulting numerous family records, anthropological data, as well as mythology and early literary sources such as the Manyo ¯shu ¯and Kojiki, and produced her first book on Japanese women's history Bokeisei no Kenkyu ¯in 1938. This book played a significant role in undermining the established view that women's low social status was long-standing and inevitable. It argued that women's ...