During the Asia/Pacific War, the ideal modern Japanese woman was expected by her family, society, and the nation to be “feminine.” This can be said even though ideas about masculinity and femininity had under much change in real life. Whether a farm girl, a mill-hand, or a wife and mother, a woman was to be modest, unassuming, gentle, polite, submissive, loyal, and hard-working. Above all, she was to be compliant; certainly not coquettish or flirtatious. She was envisioned as good wife and wife mother. She was to produce and nature boys for the army and girls for the home.

Though we might assume that Japan’s long past was influential in the shaping of the intricate mixture labeled the ideal modern woman, in fact the 1890s were pivotal in re-conceptualizing gender roles. Moreover, Japanese men of the former samurai class had more to do with selecting notions of the ideal Japanese woman and ideal home than Japanese women. Japanese feminist historians have even argued that late Meiji men invented the submissive housewife and converted her into a legal nonentity by placing married women under the full control of a family patriarch in the 1898 Civil Code. In real life, many Meiji women protested. The new woman of the early 20th century and the modern girl (and modern boy too) of the 1920s opted for more self-reliance, self-hood, sexuality, and creative expression. Militarists in the 1930s did their best to blunt these trends.

Confucian Legacies. Fixation on such notions of the feminine ideal, or on the presumed natural role of the female sex, owed much to the legacy of orthodox Neo-Confucianism, which emerged as official ideology in mid-17th century Japan and was fostered by samurai rulers and intellectuals. As elsewhere in East Asian societies, the past lived on in the three submissions for women: to father, to husband, to adult son. Within the Edo hereditary class system—samurai, farmers, artisans, and merchants, in descending order—people know their places and roles. The sexes were sharply demarcated, with men in positions of power in the family, society at large, and in business and politics. From Edo popular culture came the term, onnarashisa (womanliness). The ideal was personified on the all male Kabuki stage by the demeanor of onnagata (male specialists in women’s parts), and by transmission to all classes of an early 18th century tract, Greater Learning for Women, and similar homilies. However, such learning had more to do with middle and upper class samurai wives or wives of wealthy merchants and farmers than the productive and reproductive roles of ordinary rural women. Gendered life in farm households, which comprised the bulk of the population, was more diverse, interactive, and ribald than often imagined. Moreover, for men, the erotic body was not the wife but the geisha, courtesan, or prostitute. Also desirable was the young boy. Samurai lives included male bonding and homoeroticism, especially liaisons of older men with beautiful boys. Similar relations existed among Buddhist priests.

1898 Civil Code. While undertaking rapid Westernization and modernization, Japanese leaders also engaged in selective transmission of privileged standards, values, and aesthetics from Japan’s recent past—the late Edo period. Legal scholars, most of whom had been trained in France, Germany, or England, conducted a lengthy debate prior to Japan’s adoption of a new Civil Code in 1898. In essence, it deprived married women of economic and marital rights. As daughters, wives, and mothers, they were legally part of an ie or household controlled by a male patriarch, usually the eldest adult son. They were also daughters-in-law and mother-in-law. As adult married women, they were no longer identified with their birth families and had to learn how to get along with each other in the mandated family system. Simultaneously, there was growing acceptance of the new slogan, “good wife, wise mother,” which drew heavily from Neo-Confucian attitudes held by former elite samurai households as well as from assumptions, not always correct, about contemporary Victorian married life. Romantic love or sexual passion was for men outside of marriage, though the ideal of companionate marriage made some headway.

Gender Roles. The main point, which scholars of Japanese women’s history stress, is that the slogan, with few exceptions, was made to apply to all Japanese women, regardless of their backgrounds, occupations, circumstances, education, or personalities. Farm women, women in mines and factories, office girls, waitresses, school teachers—young, single, or married—were held to the same legal standards and societal expectations as were the wives of officials (most of whom were of samurai background). The ideal was reinforced in compulsory elementary education for girls, where emphasis was given to home arts and submissive patterns of speech. At the core was a gendered division of labor seen as natural and the expectation that the good wife, wise mother should be, not surprisingly: demure, modest, passive, resilient and, above all focused on children and home life. She was monogamous, not sexually adventurous. If a widow, she was chaste. She was, of course, loyal to the modern nation state. She might, if young and unmarried, work at a low-paying job, but not, married or not, pursue public life or a profession. To help achieve the ideal, women of refinement practiced the arts of the tea ceremony, flower arranging, traditional dance, or traditional musical instruments. Even then, the masters of these arts were invariably men.

The focus of the good wife, wise mother was initially on the wife, the woman in the interior (okusan) and her household duties, but in the early 20th century and continuing to the Asia/Pacific War, more attention was given to mother (okaasan). The term shufu (housewife) also came into common usage for middle-class women married to salaried bureaucrats or businessmen, as reflected in the new magazine, Shufu no tomo (Housewife’s Friend), founded in 1917. It gave tips on cooking, savings, sewing, improving family life, and wholesome hobbies and other diversions. Talk of equal rights or women’s liberation (men’s too) was taken up in other vehicles for women, such as Seitō (Bluestockings), 1911-16, or Fujin kōron (Women’s Forum), 1916. The beautiful Japanese family system was praised by Japan’s militarists during the Asia-Pacific War. As it turned out, feminine traits under male management were as conducive to work in war plants as they had been in the mines and textile mills.

Death of the Ideal? Japanese women were not monolithic. They could not be compressed into one pattern of behavior. If they were poor and had to work, whether married or unmarried, the expectations made little sense. The ideal would be tested as Japan continued to industrialize and urbanize. In addition, we have been warned to keep our minds open and to be careful about applying standards or theories from Western women’s history or drawing the line too sharply in referring to gendered division of labor: women in the domestic sphere and men at work (as though housework was not labor). The Japanese housewife’s space, the home, was demanding. Though dependent on men, she had a large responsibility within her sphere. If her husband was salaried, she might also control the purse or at least manage some personal savings. Another caveat is that many Japanese women, perhaps most, found fulfillment, destiny, or challenge in their gendered role.

Individual women and women’s groups, though small at first and representative of the middle classes, nevertheless often played the family game while seeking to improve women’s lives within the home. They demanded more protection in marriage, particularly from spousal abuse or claims by illegitimate children. In rare cases of a divorce or break-up, Japanese couples sometimes found informal ways for mothers to continue nurturing young children; but too often ties were broken when fathers assumed legal rights under the 1898 Civil Code. In the 1920s, activist women engaged in debates on motherhood protection and the role of the state. In wartime, although Japanese women were increasingly mobilized for factory work, their prime role was as patriotic housewives in neighborhood associations. Nevertheless, when the war ended in 1945, women had a history of protest and objection.

Renewed Challenge. At first, Occupation officials were not particularly anxious to join debates on gender equality. It was one of those things that Japanese should work out for themselves. They quickly changed to support of equal rights and education for women. After all, Japanese women were making demands. In addition, Japanese men were not perceived to be gentlemen in their daily behavior toward women, including their wives. They did not offer seats to women, especially elderly women, on trains, subways, and buses. They did not open doors for women. They did not walk beside women. The criticism was ironic, considering the behavior of foreign officers and soldiers in Occupied Japan. For Japanese women, coming from many backgrounds and facing all kinds and types of privation in Occupied Japan, what could all of this have meant? These were years of physical and spiritual loss, of daily hardship in keeping a family together—in many cases a growing family during a postwar baby boom or a family without adult men.

In self-protection, Japanese housewives founded their own movement in 1948. They were aggressive and demonstrated in public against shoddy products and blackmarket prices. They shamed uncooperative merchants. In the midst of the debris, as women recovered their creativity in the literary and performing arts, they renewed feminist beliefs about women’s roles, women’s bodies, and women’s lives. They vented frustrations at oppressive male-female relations. Something curious was happening. In postwar men’s literature, poetry, and film, we can often find arresting portraits of women, including wives as well as bar hostesses or prostitutes. But Japanese women’s literature, from the early 20th century and picking up again in the Occupation and well beyond, rarely depicts a likeable or positive Japanese husband or other male character. Novelist Miyamoto Yuriko welcomed her husband home in October 1945 from a long stint in prison as a political prisoner but was bound to tending to their homelife as she resumed her own creative life. Enchi Fumiko, who had kept silent during an unhappy prewar marriage, created an abusive husband when she resumed writing in the late 1940s under the new Civil Code, shifting from drama to fiction, and published The Waiting Years in 1957. Ariyoshi Sawako’s female fictional leads in, River Ki, 1959, alternate between canny acceptance of the good wife, wise mother role in the early 20th century; whole-scale rebellion against it in the 1920s; and varying degrees of acceptance and rejection in the 1930s to 1950s. It never becomes wholly irrelevant.

The good wife, wise mother ideology had great staying power in early postwar Japanese society, even as roles were re-imagined, re-invented, and challenged. With high economic growth, the ideal woman would be re-embodied in the family of the postwar suburban housewife and salaryman husband. The wise mother might even be satirized or demeaned as a kyoiku mama (education mama, obsessed with getting her children into the right schools). In the early 1970s, radical Japanese women would once again have their say in attempting to reshape the ideal from feminine to feminist but like their Bluestocking predecessors in the 1910s would suffer a bad press. Women had to find less outspoken, less aggressive or more manipulative ways to get what they wanted. To unduly challenge or embarrass a male, as in many other societies, could be counter-productive. Within ordinary households, lines would continue to blur as housewives entered public spaces—limited public spaces—to fight against pollution, poor garbage disposal, or bad products. It remained hard to challenge the feminine ideal, to live only as good wife and wise mother, and to widen the spaces.