The Modern Era. In earlier centuries, Japanese court women played a prominent role in the creation of Japanese literature—fiction, poetry, miscellaneous jottings as well as diaries and autobiographical works. Moreover, much of this has been translated and subjected to scholarly examination and analysis. A long period of little public recognition followed; some have even termed it a long silence. Women writers regained their public voice as creators of Japanese fiction and poetry after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, especially from the 1890s. By the 1920s and 1930s, several women writers, including essayists, had gained popularity with Japanese readers. In the years of empire and militarism, they wrote about the colonies and reported the Asia/Pacific War. Nevertheless the modern literary world of authors and critics remained a male bastion. Males s set the standards, awarded the prizes, and decided what was good or great literature. With few exceptions, the tendency was to categorize poetry and fiction by women writers as women’s literature, not “pure” or mainstream. Separate and lesser awards were created for female authors.

By the late 1960s, following the Occupation years and full-scale economic recovery, Japanese feminist scholars began giving more emphasis to women’s creativity. They too used the rubric of women’s literature but for different reasons. This time, it was out of a sense of pride as well as to help rescue or give recognition to work by women. New anthologies or special collections appeared in Japanese and in translation which featured fiction or poetry solely by women. At the same time, ironically, women were critical of the tendency in literary scholarship to consign women authors to a separate and by definition secondary place. Another approach in the postwar years was not only to embrace literature by women writers but also fiction and poetry about women, whether by male or female authors. In this new atmosphere, women began winning a large number of the major literary prizes.

Occupation Period. The purpose here is to probe the ways in which war’s aftermath and the Occupation years helped to foster the creative energies of new and established women writers or to inspire self-confidence (elsewhere, there will be a similar look at performing arts and visual arts). The focus is on women writers but with full recognition of the accomplishments of such established male authors as Nagai Kafu, Dazai Osamu, Kawabata Yasunari, Sakaguchi Ango, and Ooka Shohei (all now well-translated) and newer ones on the literary scene, such as Mishima Yukio and Abe Kōbo. Their publications and views were integral to the creative landscape. They could, both directly and indirectly, nurture, belittle, or ignore women writers. Did Japan in fact in the aftermath of war and defeat offer a liberating atmosphere in which both male and female writers could flourish? What topics or themes would be predominant among women writers? Did they deal with issues of war guilt and war responsibility? Or tend to focus on domestic themes and problems of daily survival? How much did the demise of prior Japanese literary censorship, only to be replaced by Occupation censorship and guidance, temper the creation of fiction and poetry by women as well as by men? Did they mirror social ills or take a hammer to them? For those who read Japanese, another important avenue to explore is the representation of women’s speech, including deferential words and phrases. To provide answers and examples is a daunting task since women’s Occupation literature and poetry in translation have received relatively meager attention. There has been a tendency to notice the major authors and to skip lightly over the period and proceed to the mid-1950s and after. If we include literary women of Okinawa in our search, the task is even harder.

A Literary Quartet. By 1945, there was a ready-made quartet of important literary women: Miyamoto Yuriko, Hayashi Fumiko, Sata Ineko, and Hirabayashi Taiko. All had liberal or leftist leanings prior to the Asia/Pacific War, and two had flirted with membership in the beleaguered Japanese Communist Party. All experienced unhappy early marriages and divorce.

First, by age, is Miyamoto Yuriko (1899-1951). While still very young and a first year student at Japan Women’s College, she had won considerable acclaim in 1916, including praise by male critics, for a novel, A Flock of Poor People, ”a reflection on the lives of poor farmers. She followed this in 1926 with Nobuko, a highly successful semi-autobiographical novel based in part on her unhappy life in New York and Japan with her first husband. He was an older Japanese man and would-be-literary scholar (Araki Shigeru) whom she had met in New York while auditing classes at Columbia University. Though he was her personal choice, not her family’s, the marriage proved to be a mistake, and they divorced in 1924. Though from a privileged landlord background (her father was an architect and one of her grandfathers a large landholder), Miyomoto was influenced by the proletariat movement in 1920s Japan. She was curious about Marxism in theory and practice and lived in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s with a woman companion, lesbian writer Yuasa Yoshiko. Upon her return to Japan in 1930, she became a member of the outlawed Japan Communist Party and began a long association with the journal Hataraku fujin (Working Women). By 1934, she also produced a novel in the socialist-realistic vein, The Family of Koiwa. The main story line follows an impoverished family from Hokkaido which undergoes consciousness raising through the leftist activities of one of the sons and learns to work together in order to survive. In 1932, Miyamoto’s second marriage was to Miyamoto Kenji, a prominent young Japanese Communist. Their time together was short. He refused to undergo tenkō, a public confession of conversion from leftist views to state loyalism, and was jailed as a political prisoner from 1933 to 1945. She too was frequently questioned by the police during those years and was briefly imprisoned in 1942. She managed to gain release because of poor health and the need to care for her mother. Did she also, however reluctantly, accept tenkō?

In the first months of the Occupation, Miyamoto was reunited with her husband, who regained his freedom under the Civil Rights Directive of October 1945. The following year, she was a central figure in organizing a new, leftist literary group (Shin Nihon bungakukai) and magazine. In rapid succession, Miyamoto began to publish once again semi-autobiographical fiction in serial and book format: The Banshū Plain (Banshū heiya), 1946; The Weathervane Plant (Fūchisō), 1946; Two Gardens (Futatsu no niwa), 1948; and Mileposts (Dōhyō), 1947-50. The themes of Banshū Plain and Weathervane Plant are particularly relevant to the early postwar years. The first work deals with the end of war and early stages of foreign occupation, and the second reflects the renewal of married life with her husband. She also edited and wrote numerous essays for the revived journal, Working Women, in which she exposed the continued exploitation of women factory workers. Because of her leftist views, she was a frequent target of Occupation censors. She was closely monitored by U.S. counter-intelligence, and her mail was opened. Also, she was not overly impressed by the participation of women in the April 1946 elections. The following June, she commented in a leading women’s magazine, Fujin kōron (Women’s Forum), as Beth Katzoff has pointed out: “Only now do we realize that what the established political party demands from women representatives is that they add a bit of color to their public relations. They do not expect women’s social and political growth, nor do they hope for women’s substantial participation in politics.” Miyamoto was active too in encouraging women to participate in peace movements. If under the previous militarist regime, women could not oppose war (she left wives and mothers off the hook), there was no excuse for not doing so after 1945. The Miyamotos had no children, but apparently the added strain of taking care of a husband and household in an impoverished economy may have further drained her energy. Death came in January 1951 at age fifty-one. Though Miyamoto’s importance has long been recognized, only fragments of her earlier and later literary work have been translated into English (see excerpt from Banshū Plain, 1946).

Hayashi Fumiko (1903-1951), who figures prominently as one of the persons on this site, also wrote at a furious pace in the early postwar years and retained, indeed enhanced, her place in the affection of Japanese readers. She wrote numerous short stories, produced serialized novels for newspapers, participated in published zadankai (round-tables), and reissued older works with new commentary. In addition to her own literary drive, she had an adopted child to support. In early postwar polls of Japanese readers, she emerged in readers’ surveys as Japan’s most popular writer. In new collections of her works, either she or her publisher, perhaps eager to seem democratic, eliminated much of her wartime reporting, such as accounts of the China front. She fell afoul of Occupation censors on at least two or three occasions, enough perhaps to encourage circumspection about taboo topics in her new fiction. One example involved critical comments she made about GI fraternization during a round table discussion in 1946 with fellow panelist Sakaguchi Ango. He was a friend and newly lionized for his short story, “The Idiot,” set during the April 1945 Tokyo fire bomb raid. Hayashi also lost a few lines from a magazine essay that year for openly criticizing censorship. This incident helps to verify that Japanese writers were indeed upset by the contradictions between American professions of free speech and the actuality of repression. Hayashi avoided direct mention of the Occupation or of foreign men (GIs) in her growing output of postwar stories and novels. She concentrated on domestic themes of wide concern, especially the economic, social, and psychological hardships experienced by Japanese women in early postwar Japan. Her female characters are sexual beings whose relationships are strictly with Japanese men. Hayashi’s female characters did not interact with “foreign men” until late 1949, when she began to serialize her novel, Floating Clouds. By then, it was safe to do so since Occupation print censorship was ending. However, her lead characters in the novel, civilian repatriates who had been illicit lovers in Japanese occupied Southeast Asia, show little sense of war complicity or remorse. Hayashi, too, was dead by 1951, age forty-eight.

Sata Ineko (1904-1998) is another established writer dating back to the prewar years. From the underclass, she was much more disadvantaged in her origins than her friend, Miyamoto. Her birthplace was Nagasaki, and her mother, only fourteen years old, died of tuberculosis a year later. Her early poetry and fiction dealt with exploitation and class struggle, something she knew well from her impoverished youth and varied work experiences in Tokyo as a young factory worker, waitress, and clerk. Though she gained recognition as a proletarian writer in the late 1920s and 1930s, for example with the short story, “From the Caramel Factory,” and became a Marxist, Sata underwent tenkō conversion and accepted literary assignments in wartime China, including participation in an official conference of East Asian writers in Beijing in 1944. Her marriage in 1926 to fellow proletariat writer Kubokawa Tsurujirō, a second marriage for her, ended in divorce in 1945, leaving her with a child to support. After the war, she made her Occupation debut in 1946, age forty-two, with the first installment of My Map of Tokyo. This novel met considerable acclaim and would restore her to fame when published as a book in 1949. Otherwise, she seems either to have evaded or avoided Occupation censorship. However, because of her complicit wartime activities, something she herself criticized and did not try to hide, she was not in full favor with Japanese Communists and was twice expelled from the party. Her short story, “Memory of a Night,” set in 1951, tells of a women writer’s psychological stress over recent expulsion from the Japan Communist Party. In later years, Sata, who was not a hibakusha or an A-bomb survivor but was from Nagasaki, would write an atomic bomb masterpiece, the short story, "Colorless Paintings," 1961. She lived a long life with considerable literary output and won prestigious awards. Though regarded by the public and scholars as a literary giant, little of her work is represented in English translation.

Hirabayashi Taiko (1905-1972), too, had achieved considerable stature as a proletarian writer by this period. She was born to a faming family in Nagano prefecture and migrated to Tokyo as a young woman and made her living for a time in one of the vocations open to women, a telephone operator. She had off and on relationships with Japanese anarchists, including a troubled marriage, ran into trouble with the police, and tried life for a time in Manchuria. In the late 1930s, she was jailed for several months. A bout with tuberculosis halted her output. Hirabayashi resumed her literary career after the war and won the Japan Women’s Literary Prize in 1946. Her few translated works from the Occupation period include a stunner, “Blind Chinese Soldiers,” in which she shows a sense of war responsibility and exposes Japanese abuse of Chinese Prisoners of War. Another is “The Goddess of Children,” which deals with sexuality. In 1951, Wallace Stegner, a prominent American novelist then visiting Japan, acquired a must list of ten top short stories chosen by a group of Japanese writers and critics for translation into English and promotion of cultural exchange. Only two women were honored--Hirabayashi Taiko and Hayashi Fumiko. Though Hirabayashi was considered to be a leftist in prewar Japan, her stance changed after 1945. Americans would come to view her during the early Cold War years as safely liberal, or as “our kind of writer.” Her apparent involvement with a CIA front in Japan is not well-known, in this case the magazine Solidarity, a Japanese counterpart to the CIA funded English language magazine, Encounter (in which, incidentally, a few translations of Japanese short stories appeared in the 1950s). This connection did not stop Hirabayashi from joining other writers and journalists in exposing the bar and brothel culture around American bases in post-1952 Japan or in questioning the continued presence of American troops. She joined other feminists in 1955 in opposing legalized prostitution in Japan.

With a much wider sample in the future of women’s fiction during the Occupation years, it would be useful to test this recent generalization by Sharalyn Orbaugh: “The fiction produced by women during this period tends to focus on the day-to-day realities of life—the difficulty of surviving and caring for children alone in the ruined cities, in the midst of food shortages worse than any of wartime.” It also includes “the new types of families being created after the chaos of war.” Though we will continue here with notable women writers, it is important to stress that women’s magazines should not be overlooked for the Occupation period. They served as an outlet for the famous and near famous but also for many other women, perhaps housewives, farmers, or factory workers, who wished to express themselves in fiction and had many things to say about the early postwar years, mundane or otherwise. Japanese women’s magazines are an enormous but neglected source for re-envisioning and re-evaluating the Occupation years. The Gordon W. Prange Collection at the University of Maryland is a prime place to begin such investigation.

Other Established Literary Women. Another well-known woman writer from the prewar and wartime years who should be mentioned is Yoshiya Nobuko (1896-1973), who had gained a large and loyal following for her children’s works and patriotic family fiction. Along with Hayashi Fumiko, she was selected to join an official Literary Brigade of famous authors to visit wartime China in 1938. Yoshiya remained out of the limelight during the Occupation period, perhaps by choice or fear of censorship. In fact, some of her literature from the war years was on the list of the Civil Censorship Detachment for confiscation as militarist propaganda. Yoshiya gradually re-emerged after 1952 and partially regained her reputation; she was, for example, featured in a column on women in the Nippon Times in 1953. She is also one of the few literary women to be identified as a lesbian. She lived openly with a woman all of her adult life but does not seem to have suffered greatly from social ostracism. Gender studies on homosexuality in Japan is at the present much more advanced for men than for women, perhaps because of the rich lode of homoerotic fiction from the Edo period and preoccupation with samurai sexuality.

Other eminent female writers who deserve mention in this selective introduction include Enchi Fumiko (1905-1986). She returned to writing in the final stages of the Occupation following the death of her husband. In doing so, she shifted from drama, her first love, to fiction. She is the epitome of an angry woman. Her new writing, which dates from the last years of the Occupation, are devastating in their embittered denunciation of patriarchal dominance, a reflection of her own deeply unhappy marriage. Ota Yōko (1903-1963), an established writer before the war and a survivor of Hiroshima, is credited with writing the first atomic bomb novel, Town of Corpses. It was heavily censored prior to publication in 1948 and restored in full only after the Occupation had ended. Several atomic bomb works followed, including the novel, Human Rags in 1951; she died from breast cancer in 1963. In future years, Hayashi Kyoko (born 1930), a fourteen year old survivor of Nagasaki, would devote her literary life almost solely to the bomb. Also in the firmament is Uno Chiyo (1897-1996), a rebel against conservatism in the 1930s as a writer, editor, and publisher. A younger woman, Shibata Yoshiko (b. 1914 during World War I), would find postwar success as the author of radio scripts and continued ventures into fiction. Fortunately, these particular women writers and others are represented, but just barely, in recent anthologies or in separate translations. In the field of drama, Japanese women were more notable as stage and film actors in this period than as writers or directors.

Above all, as a bridge or link between these distinguished literary women and future, though not necessarily younger postwar writers, there is Ariyoshi Sawako (1931-1984), who has her own place in modern Japanese literature and is one of the persons featured on this site. Born in Japan, she was taken overseas to Java (Indonesia) as a child, grew up in wartime Japan, and graduated from college as the Occupation was ending. She soon embarked on an extremely productive and successful literary career, one featuring numerous prizes and awards. Such themes as war and Occupation appear in her first novel, The River Ki (1956), a multi-generation family chronicle told primarily through the experience and viewpoint of women. The atomic bomb would figure in at least two of her short stories.

A New Female Literary Quartet. Of considerable relevance to this site is a second literary quartet of women who were born in the late 1920s and early 1930s and grew up during the Asia-Pacific War and Occupation but who, unlike Ariyoshi (born in 1931), began publishing for various reasons at later periods in their lives: Kono Taeko, Oba Minako, Kurahashi Yumiko, and Takahashi Takako. This, too, is a selective list and others deserve mention. Its main criterion is to focus on a generational cohort, one shaped by in large part by the Occupation. Of course, in what sometimes seems to be a game of musical chairs, literary editors have their favorites for dictionaries and anthologies. Translators make independent and often idiosyncratic choices as to whom or what they deem worthy of translation. This particular quartet of literary women, though sharing a common history of war, defeat, and foreign occupation, emerged during the 1960s and 1970s. Other circumstances besides the aftermath of war were important in their lives. Some turned to writing only after marriage and motherhood. However, once they began to publish, they challenged male dominance in the choice of themes, depictions of characters, and mastery of language. They wrote about ordinary Japanese men and women but in radical ways. For a time in the 1980s, women authors of this generation even monopolized major literary prizes.

In this second quartet, Kono Taeko, who was born in Osaka in 1926, is noted for sado-masochistic fiction in the tradition of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, one of Japan’s greatest modern writers. She entered Osaka Women’s College in 1940 and was a government worker in the postwar period. After overcoming health and psychological problems, she made her debut as a writer in 1961 with “Toddler Hunting,” set during the war, and won the Women’s Literary Prize in 1967. Oba Minako, born in Tokyo in 1930 but living near Hiroshima in 1945, was a teenage member of a work force recruited to assist victims of the atomic bomb. She left Tsuda College to marry and spent many years in Alaska (1959 to 1970) with her husband and family, earning a bachelor’s degree during that time at the University of Washington, Seattle. She published her first short story, “The Three Crabs,” as a new writer in 1968 and was rewarded with prizes. Other stories followed in the 1970s when she was in her forties. Her story, “Smile of a Mountain Witch,” 1976, is a stab at the conventional view that women exist to read men’s minds and to please them and has become a classic. Oba gives us a good idea of her stance in “A Happily Married Couple:”

Takahashi Takako, born in 1932, is identified with surrealistic fiction and stories of women in frightening straits. Her university training was in French literature at Kyoto University, where she earned a B.A. in 1954, and a master’s degree in 1957. Her first story, “Honorable Child,” was published in 1969. A few years after the death of her novelist husband in 1971, she converted to Catholicism. Kurahashi Yumiko was born in 1935 in Shikoku, where her father had a dental practice. As a student at Meiji University, she too would major in French literature. At the time of the anti US-Japan Security Treaty riots in 1960, she won a fiction competition with, “Party,” a satire on slavish devotion to the Communist Party. The youngest of this particular group, she is associated with experimental literature and fiction of the fantastic. Eleven of her self-styled “cruel” and “creepy” stories from the mid-1980s are translated in The Woman with the Flying Head and Other Stories (1997). Erotic is another adjective that comes to mind in describing her work. A case could be made that Japanese women’s fiction at this postmodern point is no longer a dismissive term or a segregated category, in large part because of these women. Japanese women writers today exist in great number, among them Yoshimoto Banana (b. 1964 in Tokyo), and have become as famous or controversial as their male counterparts. In Yoshimoto’s case, they have attracted a large international readership.

Selected translations of works written by many of the above authors, either during the Occupation or as close as possible to the period, appear on this site. Users are also encouraged to seek out further examples of works by these remarkable women writers.