From the Nikutai to the Kokutai: Nationalizing the Maternal Body in Ushijima Haruko’s “Woman”

Abstract

In late 1930s and early 1940s Japan, the maternal body played an important role in nationalist discourse, both as a symbol of the nation and as a vessel for future national subjects. The slogan umeyo fuyaseyo urged Japanese women to “bear children and multiply” for the sake of the nation, underscoring the official expectation of women fulfilling their reproductive responsibilities as mothers.1 Popular women’s magazines of the time, such as Shufu no tomo (Housewife’s companion), contained images of young mothers breastfeeding babies or taking their children to shrines—portrayals that explicitly situated such maternal duties within the context of the war effort and the imperial project.2 Similar representations of motherhood also appeared in the colonies, where officials urged Japanese women in Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan to contribute to empire-building as imperialist mothers.3 However, despite the shared focus on motherhood, the translation of domestic discourses of maternity into the colonial context served different purposes and often yielded varying results. One of the distinctions between maternalist discourse in the metropole and in the colonies consisted of the object of mothering. In Japan proper,4 the government and the mass media urged Japanese women to take care of their biological children and, later, the “sons of the nation,” namely, soldiers.5 Japanese mothers in the colonies were exhorted to fulfill similar responsibilities as well as to support imperial expansion by “taking care of”