Japanese Women’s Poetry from Interwar to Pacific War: Navigating Heterogeneous Borderspace

Abstract

During the opening years of the Shōwa period (1925–1940), Japan embarked upon a mission to expand not only its sphere of influence but the bounds of its national territory, which eventually encompassed what came to be called the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere (Daitōa kyōeiken). The attempt to remake or reconfigure national boundaries had implications for all aspects of Japanese society and culture, not the least of which was the reimagining of the female body. Such a process had been underway since the early Meiji period, when the emperor was restored as head of state after more than two centuries of rule by military government. Adhering to the notion that the emperor was the “father” of the realm, officials of the modernized Japanese nation placed new demands on imperial subjects, including the designation of women as “mothers of the empire.”1 Thus Japanese female bodies were implicated, at least symbolically, in a kind of polygynous relationship with the emperor or, as one scholar puts it, “women’s [maternal] bodies were expected to function in unison with the body of the emperor.”2 Despite being enlisted in the modern nationalist project in terms of their ability to bear, nurture, and care for children, women engaged in a variety of other activities as well. Throughout the early twentieth century and into the 1930s and 1940s, women not only performed various kinds of domestic labor but also undertook work outside the home, in factories and in numerous other industries, and also entered or were sold into prostitution.