JAPAN'S 36,000,000 WOMEN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 132, 2 January 1942, Page 38

JAPAN'S 36,000,000 WOMEN

(Adapted from an article in "News Review")

HERE are 36,000,000 women in Japan. Without their assistance Japan cannot hope to succeed in her schemes of Pacific domination, but there is little likelihood of such

assistance being withheld, for the women of Japan make up "the world’s greatest and most abject slave population," A recent Government edict announced in sharp contradiction to the plea of lebensraum, that Japan must increase its population from 73,000,000 to 100,000,000 to man the projected " Coprosperity Sphere of East Asia." Each woman must therefore produce at least five children. The marriageable age was lowered by three years, Government match-making agencies were set up, and Spartan schools established for training the prospective brides of Japanese settlers. That this edict did not produce a storm among the kimonos is largely explained by two things: (1) It was a demand not from their husbands alone but from the Emperor, (2) The old deep-rooted tradition of abject female obedience. Still taught to infant girls in Japan is the ancient law, "It is better for women that they should not be educated, because their lot through life must be one of perfect obedience, and the way to salvation is only through the three obediences, obedience to the father when yet unmarried, to the husband when married, and to the son when widowed."

No Higher Schooling How rigidly this servile status is maintained to-day is shown by the fact that the typical girl gets no higher schooling. Her marriage is arranged for her by parents and by neighbours who act as go-betweens. Her husband, whom she may not have seen before her wedding day, can divorce her in three lines, but she cannot divorce him unless his infidelity "leads to criminal consequences." If her husband sacrifices face and sends her to work, the wife has no right to any wages she may earn. One of the few women who rebelled against this state of affairs was the Baroness Shidzue Ishimoto, the daughter of a noble family, who had been carefully trained to be submissive, decorative, and unemotional. But her husband had pronounced liberal tendencies. Together they studied social conditions and later both went to Néw York, where the Baroness studied economics and became a suffragette. Back in Japan she ‘made speeches to coal miners, opened a campaign for birth control, and ap‘peared in a Miami bathing suit at a beach resort packed with men. This was too much for the Baron. He Te-espoused the reactionary traditions, joined the militarist party, and ordered his wife to drop her career. The Baroness Refused Almost greater than the Tokio earthquake was the sensation the Baroness caused when she refused, and, lacking the power of divorce, left her husband. In Japanese law a woman who leaves

her husband is brought back by the police. For some years the Baroness’s rank protected her, but the Tokio Police Bulletin for December, 1937, shows her name among "370 trouble-makers, arrested to purify the country from traitors." Nothing more has been heard of her. But she is still remembered. At the beginning of Japan’s invasion of China two women’s organisations sprang up with the avowed object of keeping the home fires burning and brightening the lot of the soldiers. In the winter of 1940 trouble started. Campaign of Protest To meet the mounting. costs of the war the Government had adopted a policy of*sending the best textiles abroad

and reserving only the shoddiest for the home market, and suddenly the two women’s organisations began a campaign of protest. They organised demonstrations of the worthlessness of the "patriotic fibres" and sponsored indignation meetings over the islands. But the Government, suspecting that the uproar had more to it than the objection to poor kimonos, socks, and towels, and aware that through the protest women were achieving a new political solidarity, closed down on the movement. But all is not lost. The women who fought under the Baroness’s banner still keep her portrait, and their daughters in Japan’s factories are rebelling in a less political but none the less far-reaching way. The younger women show little interest in emancipation, but a great deal in Western fashions, in open-air sport, and above all, in the right to choose their own husbands. To a skilful and enterprising propagandist those secretly rebellious daughters represent a load of dynamite which might well blow up the imperialist plans of their taskmasters,