While the beginnings of feminism are generally recorded in America and England, there was also an early, first wave of feminism in Meiji Japan.
It began with the problem of child prostitution. In the late nineteenth century, twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls (especially farmers’ daughters) were being sold into prostitution by their parents to meet family debts. It was the Christian women’s groups that first mounted a protest against this practice as a basic infringement of human rights. In those days a father could dispose of his daughter in any way he pleased, and she had no protection. Early attempts to draw the attention of politicians to the problem failed. Women didn’t constitute an electoral interest group. Without the vote they had no direct political influence. Thus, out of the initial movement against child prostitution eventually emerged a suffrage movement to obtain the vote for women.
This all happened quite independently of the English or American movements of the same period. Over the ensuing years I think Japanese feminists have learned a lot from Western feminists, but I don’t think they have imitated them. Even the second wave of feminism in the late 96os and 1970s, although it took on the name of “women’s liberation” and was accused in the mass media of copying American women, in fact had its own quite distinct origins in Japan.
Tanaka Mitsu, one of the early leaders of this second wave, said to me once that she can still remember her own sense of amazement when she discovered the existence of women’s liberation in America. She had already found her own identical ground before this. For Tanaka, and other early members of the women’s liberation movement in Japan, the beginnings of the movement, the earliest stirrings of a feminist consciousness, came from our experience of the anti-Vietnam War movement as it was manifested in Japan. At the most basic level there was a discovery that the rhetoric of freedom and liberation did not extend to the lives of the women within the movement. At another level, for me personally, there was a growing sense of doubt about what constituted civilization. Here was a civilized society, a democratic nation, waging warfare in another land, denying the rights of the people of that region, experimenting with various forms of chemical warfare. And all this in the name of democracy and civilization.
I began to question whether women and men would govern in the same way, whether women politicians would make the same decisions. I began to sense the need to open up the way for a reassessment of our society, a new way of seeing the world, from the perspective of women.
blakekathryn
dededos
jbbartram-illu
germansingergirl
janainaart
annaxmalina
discoholicmusic
