Teaching & Learning Guide for: Women’s Bodies, Women’s Minds: One Way of Rethinking Japanese Women’s History
Authors: Walthall Anne 
Published: June 2007

Author’s Introduction

This essay argues that in our increasingly violent world, it is worth re‐examining the past to uncover the different forms violence can take. Japan provides a good case study because it combines extremes of violence in the service of aggressive war with the successful acquisition of a modern state, economy, society, and culture. The author of this piece suggests that a focus on Japanese women can illuminate the links between violence and state‐building.

Focus Questions

What are the different levels at which violence involving women can be found?

Compare how violence involving women is structured in pre‐modern and modern Japan.

Do you think that violence, especially that involving women, is a necessary component of modernity? Why or why not? Don’t forget to define what you mean by modernity.

Author Recommends

* Yuki Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the US Occupation (Routledge, 2002).

This book provides a concise history of how Japan’s military decided that it needed prostitutes to maintain discipline and protect soldiers from STDs and demonstrates the complicity of men from various countries in supplying the women it required. Short excerpts from women’s memoirs put a human face on what Tanaka calls a crime against humanity.

* William Johnston, Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star: A Woman, Sex, and Morality in Modern Japan (Columbia University Press, 2005).

This is the biography of Abe Sada, told in several versions, including a translation of the transcript of her interrogation. Johnston places her story in the context of the changing conditions for people at the bottom of society in prewar Japan.

* Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno, Gendering Modern Japanese History (Harvard University Press, 2005).

In sixteen chapters, most on women’s issues, the authors cover education, morality, sexuality, eugenics, labor and the household, and feminism. Chapter 9 by Haruko Taya Cook is titled ‘Women’s Deaths as Weapon of War in Japan’s Final Battle’; Chapter 16 by Setsu Shigematsu focuses on ‘Feminism and the Media in the Late Twentieth Century: Reading the Limits of a Politics of Transgression.’

* Masuda Sayo, Autobiography of a Geisha, translated by G. G. Rowley (Columbia University Press, 2003).

An excellent antidote to the fantasies created by Memoirs of a Geisha, this chilling account of a woman who had to live by her wits provides a gripping picture of life in Japan across the wartime divide.

Online Materials

1. National Women’s Education Center, Japan

http://www.nwec.jp/English

Sponsored by the National Women’s Education Center in Japan, this site provides links to useful databases, books and journals, and Japanese government publications. It focuses primarily on issues of concern to women today, but it also lists materials in both Japanese and English on historical topics.

2. Women’s Studies, Japan: Resources at Duke

http://www.lib.duke.edu/iac/eac/women.html

Although this site lists resources at Duke University for Japanese women’s studies, it is useful because it is particularly well organized and the materials can generally be found at other libraries as well. Included are bibliographies, dictionaries and handbooks, journal indexes, journals and magazines, women’s studies journals and yearbooks, surveys of women’s history and links to web sites.