ABSTRACT

Contributors to this book provide an Asian women’s history from the perspective of gender analysis, assessing Japanese imperial policy and propaganda in its colonies and occupied territories and particularly its impact on women.

Tackling topics including media, travel, migration, literature, and the perceptions of the empire by the colonized, the authors present an eclectic history, unified by the perspective of gender studies and the spatial and political lens of the Japanese Empire. They look at the lives of women in,Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria, Mainland China, Micronesia, and Okinawa, among others. These women were wives, mothers, writers, migrants, intellectuals and activists, and thus had a very broad range of views and experiences of Imperial Japan. Where women have tended in the past to be studied as objects of the imperial system, the contributors to this book study them as the subject of history, while also providing an outside-in perspective on the Japanese Empire by other Asians.

A vital new perspective for scholars of twentieth-century history of East Asian countries and regions.

chapter |7 pages

Introduction

part I|51 pages

The Ideal of Women Delivered by the Empire

chapter 1|11 pages

The Japanese Women's Journals in Colonial Taiwan

Taiwan Patriotic Women and Taiwan Women's World

chapter 2|19 pages

Expressing independence in the midst of collaboration

Female roles in the women's magazine Qi Lin of Manchukuo

chapter 3|19 pages

“Wise wives and good mothers”

Disobedience in disguise under the collaborationist regime in Guangzhou (1940–1945)

part II|51 pages

Women Traveling in and Writing on Asia

chapter 5|14 pages

A Japanese woman's exploration of semi-colonized China

The case of Hayashi Fumiko's travel writing around 1930

chapter 6|18 pages

Women's “language/translation” community in Japan/Korea

Hayashi Fumiko as Japanese imperial novelist

part III|58 pages

Seeking “Imperial Women” in Colonial Asia

chapter 7|19 pages

Japanese women in colonial Taiwan in the 1930s

Their identity formation under the influence of Japanese imperialism by analyzing Taiwan Fujinkai 1

chapter 8|15 pages

An anarchist woman's ideological conversion

How Mochizuki Yuriko became a nationalist in Manchuria

chapter 9|22 pages

Statements of “Nanshin Josei” in the 1940s

The discrepancy between the representation of “Nanshin Josei” and their narratives

part IV|49 pages

The Periphery of Empire

chapter 10|21 pages

Population movements of migrant Okinawan women during the development of the Empire of Japan

Women's migration from Okinawa to the South Sea Islands

chapter 11|26 pages

Population movements of migrant Okinawan women during the collapse of the Empire of Japan

Wartime repatriation and Okinawan women in the South Sea Islands