Definition. Activism is used here in the special sense of demonstrations, protests, or discourse in public spaces. Since the ideal for Japanese women in the early postwar period continued to be that of a compliant and yet self-reliant daughter or wife within the household, female participation in the public crowd was frowned upon by social critics. For women to display agency was not seemly behavior: to speak out in public, to dissent openly, or to march in demonstrations. Regardless of social mores, many Japanese women, if not the majority, did summon the courage to assume a public role. Moreover they had predecessors in women's movements to inspire or educate them and sometimes male colleagues to support them.

Prewar Legacy. The urban factory or mill is one of the first places to look for activism by women in modern Japan. Though rare, female textile workers in the 1880s had engaged in strikes, the first some say, in newly industrializing Japan. These Meiji era mill workers were young, unmarried, temporary employees. If they survived the dreadful conditions within the textile factories, they returned to their villages after serving three to five year contracts and generally got married. From the late 19th century, Japanese women were moderately activist in asking for protective marriage laws, protesting abuse within the home, seeking opportunities for higher education, searching for a cultural and artistic voice, and, to a lesser degree, asking for the vote. Since they were limited by law from the 1890 until 1922 from engaging in public political debate, they used and continued to use journalism and literature to voice discontent.

In the 1920s, young, unmarried women were still the main work force in the urban textile industries, but older, married and somewhat better educated women were prominent in small-scale industries, especially in Tokyo. In a wave of protests—in fact the term "protest culture" has been used by historian Andrew Gordon to define the 1920s—women laborers joined men in asking employers for respect and better working conditions. Occasionally, they could be seen, together with men, in photographs or on news film. The response of management was often to shut down factories in a contest of wills; generally employers won at the expense of workers, with the exception of skilled blue collar males. The state passed legislation in the late 1920s to curtail the night hours of women and children but did not legalize collective bargaining or the right to strike. The protective laws were both welcome and unwelcome: welcome in the sense of curbing hazardous conditions for women and minors, but unwelcome in the sense of closing off jobs which women were capable of fulfilling. In a famous case in 1930-31, shortly before the Mukden Incident precipitated Japanese aggression against China, laborers at the Tōyō Muslin mills in the working class Tokyo ward of Honjō erupted in violence. Women workers took to the streets to express discontent. One of the most famous female labor militants from the prewar period, a true rebel or fighting woman, was Tanno Setsu, daughter of carpenter and widow of a Japan Communist Party leader killed by police during a stopover in Taiwan, 1927. The story of her later life in the Occupation years has yet to be told in Western sources.

Militarist Japan of the late 1930s and after did not countenance agitation by the urban working man, let alone women. Female activism was re-channeled after 1937 from drives for suffrage or the spread of birth control information into patriotic compliance with the goals of the state through compulsory membership in wartime associations. Housewives organized in tonarigumi (neighborhood associations) acted outside of the home as local monitors of rationed food, clothing, and housing or as fire wardens. Many young women, both married and unmarried, were forced to comply with increasingly tough labor conscription laws which shifted them from the home or school into war related work, though not to the same extent as in Britain, the Soviet Union, or the United States. Propagandists touted young women workers, often high school or junior college students, but the state never fully championed a Japanese version of America's "Rosie the Riveter." Film director Kurosawa Akira managed, however, to glorify them in his 1944 film, The Most Beautiful.

Activism Renewed. In Occupied Japan, 1945-1952, Japanese women and women's groups refashioned and strengthened this prewar legacy of activism. Suffragists immediately resumed their quest for the vote, greatly assisted by early Occupation reforms and personal pressure from General MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, in conversations with Prime Minister Shidehara, October 1945. The fight was won quickly in December, when the Diet passed new electoral laws and lowered the voting age for men and women to the age of twenty. Activist women exhorted eligible women to use their vote wisely and even to run for electoral office themselves. Women continued to press for entry into prestigious institutions of higher learning, including the Universities of Tokyo and of Kyoto and national universities. Only a few passed the entrance examinations and made it through the doors, but the procession of women into male educational institutions had begun, together with the upgrading of women's junior colleges into four year institutions. Japanese women, aided by sympathetic Japanese men and supportive occupiers, successfully agitated for revised civil and criminal codes to accord with the new Constitution and fought back against the efforts of male conservatives in the 1950s to retract these gains.

Kitchen Politics. Early in the Occupation, housewives, joined by men and children, took to the streets in Tokyo, mid-May 1946, to protest food shortages. The best and most wide-spread example of women’s activism was the Housewives Federation, founded in October 1948 to fight black market prices and curtail sales of shoddy merchandise in a still impoverished economy. This newly fashioned form of activism by middle and lower class women drew upon experience in the Asia/Pacific War. It was led for many years by Oku Mumeo, a 1920s political activist turned social worker in the 1930s. Elected in April 1947 to a six year term in the first House of Councilors under the new constitution, Oku's goal was to put the kitchen into politics and to gain respect for and brighten the lives of ordinary women. Housewives all over Japan voiced their anger in public halls and parks. They marched against defective goods, waving banners and carrying rice ladles, and they boycotted dishonest merchants. By the end of the Occupation, the Federation counted three million members by one estimate and went on in the 1950s and 1960s to become a powerful consumer movement in increasingly prosperous Japan. Kurosawa's film Ikiru (To Live), released in 1952, satirizes an indifferent mayor and local bureaucrats, hopelessly caught up in red tape, while honoring the persistence of housewives in winning their fight for a small neighborhood park with the help of a dying municipal official.

Multiple Causes. Women, both famous and unsung, spoke out for many other causes. Long-time birth control advocate Katō Shizue, who had ventured into public speaking earlier in the 1920s, once again faced the public in running for the Lower House in 1946 and after. She also returned with a vengeance to her prewar crusade to control population growth by dissemination of sex information rather than resort to abortion. Though many Japanese women of lesser fame than Katō, including public health workers, backed birth control, leadership in the Diet would be assumed by male gynecologists who ensured that abortions were performed by medical professionals. In another battle, Katō and Oku, together with Ichikawa Fusae and other women elected to the Diet, joined forces with reformist women's groups in back legislation to end legalized prostitution. 1955-57, an outcome, however, not appreciated by sex workers.

As the Occupation progressed, many middle-class women's groups became involved in disputes with Occupation authorities over the bar and brothel culture around U.S. and Allied bases in Japan. They also protested, but to little avail, against the spread of homegrown pornographic Japanese literature and art. Too few, perhaps volunteered to support orphanages or to back equal treatment of children of mixed Japanese and foreign parentage, especially children fathered by African-American soldiers. War widows and their families organized for expanded welfare and relief measures. Wives of war criminals in Sugamo Prison signed petitions pleading for the release of breadwinner husbands. Families of Japanese captured in Manchuria and held in Soviet Union labor camps, 1945-1955, were vocal in approaching the Japanese government, American officials, and the United Nations. Japanese women not only joined new religions but in some cases created and led them. Nuns of established Buddhist sects also asked for equal rights with monks and priests.

The Labor Front. Meantime, early postwar Japan struggled with the shift from wartime to peacetime industries and the incorporation of returned soldiers into the ruined economy. Labor unions grew rapidly, as did protests. Although labor leaders and members tended overwhelmingly to be male, many urban working women joined marches, went on strikes, or formed women's labor auxiliaries. Research on the nature and extent of participation by women in early postwar labor agitation is slim, but there is scattered evidence in the form of petitions, polls, interviews, and photographs and film footage. Women workers, for example, were involved in agitation leading up to the abortive general strive of February 1, 1947. They struck against newspapers and movie studios. Prostitutes also organized a union in self-protection. Socialist and Communist women participated in annual May Day demonstrations, which were peacefully resumed in 1946. Photos of demonstrations indicate that women marched in separate or auxiliary contingents. Few seemed to have been involved in the violence of the May Day riots in 1952, shortly after the Occupation had ended. Although the Ohara Institute for Social Research, Hōsei University, Tokyo, has unearthed a treasure trove of posters illustrating the early postwar labor movement, including May Day anti-war pronouncements during and after the Occupation, only a few of these visuals contain women. If so, they tend to be smiling young women or sad-faced mothers holding children, whereas men are almost always depicted as strident, tough, fierce, or angry, often with fists or arms outstretched in defiance. Occasionally, women workers pose alongside male colleagues, but in real life there is little evidence that they were treated equally or held much authority. When the thousands of young women employed by the Ōmi Mills struck in 1954 for labor rights and human rights, few women anywhere in the industrialized world enjoyed equal employment opportunities or equal pay.

Women's History. Another form of activism was raising consciousness of and respect for Japanese women's history. A great contribution would be made by Takamure Itsue (1894-1964), an academically untrained writer who rarely left her home in suburban Tokyo (House in the Woods) in the 1930s and depended on her husband for financial support, housework, and trips to the library for research materials. Up to this point, feminist activism had generated little serious interest in Japanese women's history as a special field of study, and it was virtually ignored by make scholars. This began to change during the Occupation period when, first, a research group of academic women was organized in early 1946 to study women's history and women's causes and, second, when Marxist historian Inoue Kiyoshi published Nihon no josei (History of Women), 1948. Though written from a male perspective, Inoue made a strong feminist declaration in his book's opening.

Women are also human beings. Almost all Japanese people have forgotten such a simple and plain fact. Women had been considered to be men's possessions and had certainly been treated like slaves. And almost all the scholarship of Japanese history before 1945 was not the history of ordinary men and women, who accounted for over ninety percent of the population, but the history of a very limited number of men who had dominated ordinary people. Accordingly, it was a common practice for the majority of women to be omitted in history.

Inoue's work was a huge success and became a best seller. The previous year, Takamure had published Nihon josei shakai (Social History of Japanese Women) to less immediate but ultimately greater fame when women's history was legitimated by a new wave of Japanese feminism in the 1970s. Born in rural Kumamoto in 1894, Takamure had a brief early career as a factory laborer and an assistant teacher in her father's village elementary school. Moving to Tokyo in the 1920s but unable to pursue higher education, she gained recognition as a poet and anarchist writer. Though she abhorred marriage as an artificial institution and despised the role of good wife/wise mother, she married her lover, Hashimoto Kenzō, in 1922 and for a few years lived the life of a loyal but unhappy wife. Feeling stultified, she abandoned the role but not the marriage in 1925, resumed writing, and became, 1930-31, one of the leaders of the Proletariat Women Artists' League and a contributor of anarchist-feminist essays to its magazine, Fujin sensen (Women's Front).

In 1931, age 37, when she and her husband exchanged conventional gender roles, Takamure turned exclusively to the early history of Japanese women. Using Japan's first extant histories, myth cycles, and folklore as primary materials and working full time, she concluded that marriage in ancient Japan was originally matrilineal and that men and women were equal—arguments foreshadowed but not documented in her earlier work of 1926, Ren-ai sōsei (Genesis of Love). Since matriarchy was undone, she believed, by the arrival in Japan of Confucianism and the import of Chinese style patriarchy, it was obvious that patriarchy was not the original way of the Japanese people and must be resisted. Her findings were published in 1938 as Bokeisei no kenkyū (Research on the Matriarchal System). How war and occupation personally affected her daily life is obscure. Apparently she stuck to her strict writing schedule of ten hours a day. After the Occupation ended, Takamure produced what would become a classic—four volumes in 1954-58 of Josei no rekishi (History of Women), aimed at general readers. However, along with great respect for Takamure as a feminist pioneer in Japanese women's history, Japanese feminist scholars have raised serious questions about the validity of her arguments on a matriarchal past and view her as overly patriotic and complicit in Japanese colonialism and aggression, 1931-45. In the meantime, the women's research group mentioned above came through during the Occupation years with seminars, workshops, and a survey history of Japanese women, published in 1952.

Pacifism. Toward the end of the Occupation, as peace and security treaties were under discussion and the Korean War underway, an older and extremely famous feminist from the early 20th century re-appeared in the public arena. This was Hiratsuka Raichō, a founding member of the Blue Stockings (Seitōsha) in 1911, first editor of the group's magazine, participant in the post World War I Motherhood Protection Debate, and co-founder with Ichikawa Fusae and Oku Mumeo of the Association of New Women, 1918. With a handful of like-minded women, June 1950, she submitted a petition in support of the peace clause in the postwar peace constitution to John Foster Dulles, newly arrived in Japan as the chief negotiator for the US-Japan peace treaty. She continued to serve the cause of pacifism until her death in 1971. Before the general election of 1952, the first since the Occupation, housewives in Tokyo circulated leaflets opposing the election of supporters of rearmament. In 1955, following the death of a Japanese fisherman from the fallout of a nuclear test in the Pacific, members of the Mothers Convention took part in a world movement to ban nuclear weapons. Although the role of housewives was vital in collecting millions of signatures on peace petitions, their mentors were often enlightened men, such as Yasui Kaoru, a former international law professor at the University of Tokyo and a peace educator in the Suginami Ward Community Center, Tokyo. The representation in 1955 of women and children on numerous anti-war posters throughout Japan brought back memories of the victimization of the pure and defenseless on the homefront. Media coverage that year of the Hiroshima Maidens, twenty-five severely disfigured young women who were brought to New York for reconstructive surgery, reinforced Japanese feelings of victimization but also raised American consciousness of the human tragedy of the bomb.

Environmental and Social Protest. As concerned citizens and mothers in Occupied Japan and even more so after Japan's return to sovereignty in the 1950s, women began taking an interest in industrial pollution, especially when children were born disfigured and disabled. An extreme case occurred in Minamata, a port city in Kyushu where a chemical corporation dumped waste into the waters and contaminated fish and human life. Medical examinations in 1956, beginning with a five year old girl, led to the discovery of mercury poisoning. Protests in the courts would take decades to resolve. Urban housewives would become indispensable in the management of local garbage or waste disposal. Women of various backgrounds joined fellow citizens in pressuring Japanese courts on the legality of the Japanese Self-Defense Force and continued presence of U.S. bases in Japan, or the need to punish American soldiers for crimes against Japanese citizens, ranging from hit-and-run accidents to rape and murder. This animosity culminated in 1958-1960, when tens of thousands of women from Tokyo and elsewhere marched as housewives, professional women, laborers, office workers, entertainers, and students, together with male counterparts, in increasingly large street demonstrations against renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty or to protest the autocratic politics of Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, popularly considered to be a militarist and even a war criminal. The only person to die was a female student at the University of Tokyo, accidentally crushed to death by the protesters. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, farm women were vociferous, even riotous, in attempting to block construction of a new international airport at Narita at the expense of their rice lands. In 1971, a woman terrorist would form the Japanese Red Army and soon flee the country with a handful of followers to escape arrest and possible imprisonment.

Epilogue. In these early postwar years, far more Japanese women stayed out of the public fray than plunged into it. Although increasing numbers of Japanese women took initiatives in reconstructing their roles as members of the community, radical and middle-class feminism would still have a painful rebirth in the 1970s. Japanese women, including activists, tended to advocate a different, often more gradual and less confrontational way of social protest, one which they said was better suited to conditions in Japan but which seemed overly defensive, cautious, and indirect to Western middle-class feminists. Ordinary housewives continued their modest participation in national and local politics, both as educated consumers and, to use the inspired phrase of Robin LeBlanc, as "bicycle citizens."