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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
Providing historical context for contemporary political issues relevant to women and gender in Japan, this first article examines gendered power structures in the U.S. Occupation of Japan (1945-1952). Occupational policies targeted Japanese women and the ideal of gender equity to remake Japan as a democratic nation. The Constitution of Japan, enacted May 3, 1947, states that “All of the people are equal under the law and there shall be no discrimination in political, economic or social relations because of race, creed, sex, social status or family origin” (Article 14). In addition, women received the right to vote and to mutual consent in marriage based on the “equal rights of husband and wife” (Article 24). Although drafting and revising the post-WWII constitution involved numerous political actors including a few Japanese women, historical accounts of this complex process often celebrate General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) as a generous patriarch who “granted” rights to women in Japan. Similarly, historians in the U.S. and Japan credit women working for the occupation forces, such as Beate Sirota Gordon (1923-), for “giving” Japanese women gender equality. Depicted as a liberator who helped to rescue Japanese women from feudalistic traditions, Lt. Ethel Weed (1906-1975) encouraged women to “pull themselves up by their geta straps to pioneer in democratic procedures.”
1 From the English translation provided on the Prime Minister and Cabinet of Japan website, http://www.kantei.go.jp/foreign/constitution_and_government_of_japan/constitution_e.html
2 Comment from Ethel Weed recorded in 1948, cited in Koikari (1999, 348CHECK) and as a header quote for the introduction to her book, Pedagogy of Democracy (YEAR).
1 Douglas MacArthur, “A Fourth of July Message,” Life, vol. 23, no. 1 (1947), 34. There are a number of excellent studies that examine U.S. colonization of the Philippines from critical gendered perspectives. See, for example, Vicente Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000) and Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippines- American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). U.S. colonization of the Philippines was invoked as a showcase of America's benign and beneficent rule in subsequent U.S. interventions abroad. See, for example, Mark Bradley, “Slouching toward Bethlehem: Culture, Diplomacy, and the Origins of the Cold War in Vietnam,” in Christian Appy, ed., Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945 - 1966, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000).
2 Douglas MacArthur, Reminiscences (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 305.
3 Obituary, “Earnest Hoberecht, Popular Novelist in Occupied Japan, is Dead at 81,” New York Times, September 26, 1999.
4 Raymond Higgins, From Hiroshima with Love: The Allied Military Governor's Remarkable Story of the Rebuilding of Japan's Business and Industry After WWII (Phoenix, Arizona: VIA Press, 1995).
5 For one of the earliest discussions of “imperial feminism,” see Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmer, “Challenging Imperial Feminism,” Feminist Review no. 17, July 1984. For a review of subsequent scholarship on imperial feminism in the U.S. and Europe, see my discussion of feminist colonial and postcolonial studies below.
6 For discussions on Japanese women's complicity in prewar and wartime nationalism and imperialism, see, for example, Suzuki Yūko, Feminizumu to sensŕ : fujin undŕ ka no sensŕ kyŕ ryoku (Tokyo: Marujusha, 1988).
7 For earlier reviews of occupation scholarship, see John Dower, “Occupied Japan as History and Occupation History as Politics,” Journal of Asian Studies 34, no. 2 (1975), and Carol Gluck, “Entangling Illusions - Japanese and American Views of the Occupation,” in Warren Cohen, ed., New Frontiers in America -East Asia Relations, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
8 John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton and Company/The New Press, 1999); Yukiko Koshiro, Transpacific Racisms and the U.S. Occupation of Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
9 Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 10. For another important study that provides a history of American constructions of “Orient” and “Orientals” (Asian Americans as well as Asians) within the context of Western colonial racism and culture, see Robert Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999).
10 Dower, Embracing Defeat, 211.
11 Koshiro, Transpacific Racisms, 16. In this study, Koshiro sheds important light on the genealogy of racism in the United States. As she documents, despite a shift in American academic discourse of race that moved away from the notion of physical and biological superiority versus inferiority based on skin color to one of cultural and sociological differences and diversities in the 1940s, the physical and biological notion of race persisted. While the American authorities increasingly adopted cultural and sociological discourse of race to facilitate alliance making with Japan, the notion of physical and biological racial differences continued at the grassroots level, informing everyday U.S.-Japan encounters in covert and overt ways.
12 Susan Pharr, “The Politics of Women's Rights” in Robert Ward and Yoshikazu Sakamoto, eds., Democratizing Japan: The Allied Occupation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), 222 - 223, 248.
13 Uemura Chikako, Josei kaihÅ• o meguru senryÅ• seisaku (Tokyo: KeisÅ• ShobÅ•, 2007). Though published in 2007, the book is based on a series of articles Uemura published in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For studies that characterize the occupation as positive for Japanese women with personal accounts of Japanese women who were involved in gender reform, see Nishi Kiyoko, ed., SenryÅ• ka no Nihon fujin seisaku: Sono rekishi to shÅ• gen (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 1985), and Sakai Harumi, “GHQ de hataraita joseitachi,” Joseigaku KenkyÅ« no.3 (1994). For a study that focuses on constitutional revision as the foundation of Japanese women's liberation, see KyÅ• ko Inoue, MacArthur's Japanese Constitution: A Linguistic and Cultural Studies of Its Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Recent scholarship on the occupation has begun to offer far more nuanced and critical accounts of American gender reform and its consequences for Japanese women. For a study that examines occupation-time labor policies targeting women, see Toyoda Maho, SenryÅ•ka no josei rÅ•dÅ• kaikaku (Tokyo: KeisÅ• ShobÅ•, 2007). For a study that examines occupation-era education policies targeting women, see Tsuchiya Yuka, Shinbei Nihon no kÅ•chiku: Amerika no tainichi jÅ•hÅ•, kyÅ•iku seisaku to Nihon senryÅ• (Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 2009).
14 Jane Haggis, “Gendering Colonialism and Colonising Gender? Recent Women's Studies Approaches to White Women and the History of British Colonialism,” Women's Studies International Forum 13:1/2 (1990).
15 Beate Sirota Gordon, The Only Woman in the Room, A Memoir (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1997).
16 Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 44 - 46.
17 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 4 - 5.
18 Dorinne Kondo, About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater (New York: Routledge, 1997), 149.
19 As Chandra Mohanty succinctly points out in her discussions on women, imperial politics, and production of knowledge, such imperial feminist discourses continue to inform Western feminist scholars’ analysis and result in binary understandings of emancipated and autonomous Western women and oppressed and victimized non-Western women. Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in Chandra Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
20 Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn of the Century China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Ian Tyrrell, Woman's World, Woman's Empire: The Woman's Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880 - 1930 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Tracey Jean Boisseau, White Queen: May French-Sheldon and the Imperial Origins of American Feminist Identity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).
21 Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, eds., Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 2.
22 Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 11 - 12.
23 Tani Barlow, “Introduction: On ‘Colonial Modernity’” in Tani Barlow, ed., Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 10.
24 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Laura McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Guy Oaks, The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Christina Klein, Cold War Orienatlism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945 - 1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, eds., Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2009).
25 May, Homeward Bound, xxi.
26 ibid., 10 - 12.
27 Nor was the significance of domesticity in imperial expansionism limited to the Cold War era. For discussions of domesticity as a site of racial conquest and national-imperial expansionism in the mid-nineteenth century, see Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002), especially Chapter 1 “Manifest Domesticity.” For the continuing significance of domesticity in American imperial expansionism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, see Rafael, White Love, especially Chapter 2 “Colonial Domesticity: Engendering Race at the Edge of Empire, 1899 - 1912.”
28 Robert Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty: Exhibiting American Culture Abroad in the 1950s (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), especially see Chapter 6 “Men's Gadgets, Women's Fashions, and the American Way of Life.”
29 Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945 - 1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 78.
30 May, Homeward Bound, 90 - 93.
31 Oaks, The Imaginary War, 80.
32 Examining Cold War U.S. culture where containment narratives were repeatedly articulated at various sites, Alan Nadel argues that such “repetition of tropes… facilitates narratives that by virtue of their repetition seem ‘natural,’ like clichés, and like ‘common sense,’ refer to what everyone ‘knows’ is true.” In the context of the Cold War where much remained unknown and unknowable and fears, anxieties, and ambivalence prevailed, “the rampant performance of narratives, in such a variety of sites and forms” helped “create the illusion that national narratives were knowable and unquestionable realities,” thus facilitating successful mobilization of the American public to the Cold War. See Nadel, Containment Culture, 8. For a documentary film that illuminates the significance of repetition as a sense-making practice in the Cold War U.S., see Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, and Pierce Rafferty, “The Atomic Café” (New York: Docudrama, 2008).
33 May, Homeward Bound, 96 - 98.
34 ibid., 81.
35 ibid., 86.
36 For studies that examine sexual containment as a central theme of Cold War culture, see Geoffrey Smith, “National Security and Personal Isolation: Sex, Gender and Disease in the Cold War United States,” The International History Review 14, no.1 (1992); David Harley Serlin, “Christine Jorgensen and the Cold War Closet,” Radical History Review 62 (1995); Allan Berube, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Free Express, 1990); John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940 - 1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). As Gayle Rubin argues, sexuality has its own institutional dynamics and hierarchy: the normative sexuality is heterosexual, marital, monogamous, and reproductive, and noncommercial, while other sexual activities and identities are defined as “bad,” “abnormal,” or even “unnatural.” These other forms of sexuality are further assigned hierarchical evaluations. Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Carole Vance, ed., Pleasure Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (London: Pandra Press, 1989), 280 - 281. During the Cold War, not only homosexuality but also various other expressions of intimacy which fell outside the normative notion of sexuality came under intense social surveillance.
37 Venereal disease has historically been a major issue for U.S. military operations both domestically and internationally. See, for example, Allan Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
38 Naoko Shibusawa, America's Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2006); Caroline Chung Simpson, An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar American Culture, 1945 - 1960 (Durham: Duke University Press, 20010); Michael Molasky, The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory (New York: Routledge, 1999); Yuki Tanaka, Japan's Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the U.S. Occupation (New York: Routledge), 2002.
39 Indeed, emerging “feminist” analyses tend to simplify the occupation-era sexual politics, reproducing an essentialist and universalistic notion of women (and men) which prevents nuanced and complicated understandings of women and power. For instance, Yuki Tanaka argues that postwar controversies over prostitution are examples of masculine-military violence that is part of the universal pattern of male domination, and thus constructs women as victims under patriarchal oppressions. Tanaka, Japan's Comfort Women, 6. Examining Japanese postwar nationalist literature, Michael Molasky also characterizes the sexual politics during the occupation as the male or masculine domain where a “distinctly male perspective” that utilizes “metaphors of linguistic and sexual subordination” of women as the narrative vehicle prevailed. As a result, he argues, women writers were “less deeply invested in the gendered rhetoric of Japanese nationalist identity” and avoided the trope of gendered nationalist narratives. Molasky, The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa, 2, 132. Far from being outside the problematic operations of power, however, Japanese women, especially middle-class women leaders, were deeply invested in a gendered and sexualized understanding of nation, national body, and women played extremely active and problematic roles in sexual regulation and containment of “fallen women” during the occupation. For a recent excellent study that avoids the pitfall of essentialist or universalistic understandings of women and provides historically- and contextually-specific understandings of U.S. military and women's agency in diverse geographical sites including Japan, Okinawa, South Korea, and Germany, see Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon, eds., Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.)
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