Bluestocking Oxford

by Jasmin Kellmann

In the Global Gender Gap Report 2023, a report published every year by the World Economic Forum, Japan ranks at 125 from 146 countries considered. This is the lowest rank Japan has been awarded in the last ten years of the report. The main cause of the low rank is the lack of gender parity in Japan’s political sphere. For instance, women make up only 10% of Japanese parliament. 

Active and passive suffrage for women in Japan was granted in 1946, after Japan surrendered in World War II and the US occupation took over affairs. 53 years earlier, Ichikawa Fusae was born in Aichi prefecture. She graduated from the Aichi Joshi Shihan school in 1913 and later became a journalist for a newspaper in Nagoya. When Ichikawa moved to Tokyo, she began working for the women’s division of the Yūaikai trade union. At that time, men and women in Japan were perceived as fundamentally different in the respective social roles ascribed to them. The Japanese ideology of the “good wife and wise mother” (ryōsai kenbo), meant women lived in full dependence upon their husbands and had no political rights. Ichikawa later revealed that her father was physically violent towards her mother, which pushed her to fight for political empowerment for women. Her fight for women’s suffrage in Japan and later political education of women determined Ichikawa’s life.

During the somewhat more liberal Taishō era in Japan (1912–1926) Ichikawa and the women’s activist Hiratsuka Raichō (1986–1971) founded the New Women’s Association (Shin Fujin Kyōkai) to challenge Article 5 of the Security Police Law, which came into force in 1890 and prohibited the freedom of assembly and association of women. The NWA developed petitioning and lobbying campaigns, including for women’s suffrage. In recruiting new members, Ichikawa used her contacts from her previous work fields and so they were able to set up over 30 branches all over Japan. Because of internal conflicts the Association was dissolved in 1922. Several Japanese women’s associations were founded after the dissolution of the NWA, inspired by this organization. All of them were united by one goal: the achievement of women’s suffrage. 

Ichikawa would soon be the founder of another influential organization focusing on women’s suffrage, the Women’s Suffrage League (Fusen Kakotoku Dōmei). The women of the WSL, which was a more specific suffrage-organization, consistently condemned rising militarism in Japan after the Manchurian Incident in China 1931. However, the organization turned away from suffrage from 1934 onward and reoriented their activism towards the war in China. The growing nationalism in Japan in the 1930s stood in contrast to the pacifism and transnationalism that had been uphold by Japanese feminists – especially by Ichikawa.

The Japanese women’s suffrage movement until then was eager in international connections, especially with the US women’s movement. Ichikawa travelled to the US between 1921 and 1924 and established friendships with US feminists, such as the leader of the National Woman’s Party, Alice Paul (1885–1977). She studied and evaluated the US women’s suffrage movement to apply its strategies in Japan. Later on, Ichikawa, as a chairperson of the WSL published the English-language journal Japanese Women, which was intended to advocate peace to an English readership. With Ichikawa being the chairperson of the NWA, the first ever campaign for women’s suffrage in Japan was conducted. Its most major achievement, the modification of article 5 of the Security Police Law in 1922, was interpreted by Ichikawa as a necessity for the achievement for women’s suffrage. Hence, the motivation of the NWA-members after 1922 to continue to campaign for suffrage was enormous. Even though women’s suffrage was not granted to women until 1946 – and not within the era of the NWA or the WSL – these groups, founded and led by Ichikawa, were an inspiration and kind of a forerunner for its actual implementation. Japanese women felt encouraged and seen by the bare existence of these women’s organizations.

From 1939, the government included more and more women –including Ichikawa– in state institutions. Ichikawabecame a councilor in the organization of the Spiritual Mobilization Movement (Kokumin Seishin Sōdōin Undō) from 1940, which was a central part of the mobilization for the war. She was also appointed to the Greater Japan Patriotic Speech Association (Dai Nippon Genron Hōkokukai) to oversee press censorship, which eventually would be the reason for her purge from public office from 1947 to 1950, imposed by the US occupation. According to historian Barbara Molony, Ichikawa probably hoped that other women’s groups would adopt the demand for women’s suffrage. She may also have had expected that the future leadership of government organizations would be placed into the hands of women themselves, thus ensuring the long-term participation of women in politics. However, in the wake of WWII, the WSL was dissolved in August 1940. In 1942, after Pearl Harbor, the Greater Japanese Women’s Federation (Dai Nippon Fujinkai) was established and all women’s organizations were placed under state control. 

When the war was over, Ichikawa continued campaigning for women’s suffrage. She and other women organized the Women’s Committee for Postwar Measures (Sengo taisaku fujin i’inkai) and continued to demand women’s suffrage from the government and various political parties. In 1953, she was elected as an independent member into the House of Councilors of the National Diet of Japan. There she campaigned against corruption and for political education for women in Japan and was very popular within the constituency: she was re-elected in 1959 and 1965, lost in 1971, but gained a great deal of votes in 1974.

The fact that she chose a path which led to full support and collaboration with a militarist regime does not negate her efforts and work for the women in Japan. Ichikawa Fusae’s life and work must be seen in an ambivalent way. She was at once a collaborator with the Japanese state during wartime and a great contributor and pioneer to the Japanese women’s movement, especially to suffragism in the early 20^th century and as a parliamentarian after the war, where she continued to commit herself to the women’s cause. 

References

Mackie, Vera: Feminism in Modern Japan, 2003.

Vavich, Dee Ann: The Japanese Woman’s Movement: Ichikawa Fusae, A Pioneer in Woman’s Suffrage, in: Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 22, No. 3/4 (1967), p. 402-436.

Molony, Barbara: From „Mothers of Humanity“ to „Assisting the Emperor“: Gendered Be- longing in the Wartime Rhetoric of Japanese Feminist Ichikawa Fusae, in: Pacific Historical Review 80, No. 1 (2011), p. 1–27. 

Garon, Sheldon: Women’s Groups and the Japanese State: Contending Approaches to Political Integration, 1890-1945, in: The Journal of Japanese Studies 19, No. 1 (1993), p. 5–41. 

Ueno, Chizuko: Nationalism and Gender, Melbourne 2004. 

Tomida Hiroko (2005): The Association of New Women and its contribution to the Japanese women’s movement, Japan Forum, 17:1, 49-68.

Ichikawa Fusae Center for Women and Governance: https://www.ichikawa-fusae.or.jp/, accessed on July 31^st2023.

National Diet Library, Japan: https://www.ndl.go.jp/portrait/e/datas/506/, accessed on August 4^th, 2023.

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