The most obvious and pernicious form of discrimination against students has been that directed against women. At the elementary school level there has been segregation within the classes if not a complete absence of coeducation. Above the level of the elementary school there has been little or no coeducation. The secondary schools for girls (k?t? jogakk?), the women's normal schools and higher normal schools (shihan gakk? and joshi k?t? shihan gakk?), and women's colleges (semmon gakk?) have been notoriously inferior in quality. The curricula for girls' schools have continued to follow the Confucian philosophy of the social inferiority of women and to perpetuate the feudal ideals of womanhood expressed in the Onna Daigaku ("The Greater Learning for Women"), compiled from the D?shikun, written by KAIBARA Ekken (died 1714). A woman must "look to her husband as her lord and must serve him with all reverence and worship." A few women have in the past been admitted to the Imperial universities in Sendai, Fukuoka, and Sapporo, but the true measure of equality, admission to the highly desirable Imperial universities in Tokyo and Kyoto, has been denied. In 1944, for example, there were only 40 women in Imperial universities as compared with 29,600, or about two tenths of 1 %. Of the 12 government universities only two (T?ky? Bunrika and Hiroshima Bunrika) admitted women. A few private universities (notably Waseda, Hosei, Meiji, and Nippon) admitted a few women students each year. But the ratio was kept very low. T?ky? Bunrika, for example, had graduated only 1 woman to 38 men. Although women outnumber men in Japan 100 to 89, their political, legal, economic, and intellectual influence has until recently been virtually nil. Educational discrimination has been only a small, and relatively innocent, part of a great pattern of sex discrimination which has reduced the Japanese woman from her pre-eminent position in Court and public life a millennium ago to a position of pallid subservience to her husband and indifference to the social and political questions beyond her home. In 1011 MURASAKI Shikibu completed Genji Monogatari ("Tales of the Genji"), immortalizing both herself and woman's position in Japan of that period. In 1909 the Minister of Education, Baron KIKUCHI Dairoku, said that the purpose of education for women was to prepare them to be "good wives and wise mothers." Silent acquiescence to the male will in the family and devotion to the drudgery and esthetics of the home appear to have been the mark of the "good and wise." The old Japanese expression hakoiri musume (box-enclosed maiden) needs no interpretation.

The fight for equality of educational opportunity for women has been inseparably linked with the fight for the political and social emancipation of women. It cannot now be considered without a brief note on the larger pattern of sex discrimination and the suffrage movement it evoked. Before the Occupation women in Japan were not permitted to vote nor to hold public office. They were bound to the family system and virtually were a chattel of the head of their own or their husband's family. Except in rare instances and with great limitations on their free control they were not permitted to hold real property, especially real estate. In even wealthy families, with servants in greater proportions than in most Occidental families, the woman was expected to perform innumerable household tasks which occupied her time to the exclusion of outside interests. Although Occidental observers, frequently missionaries or persons from the New England tradition, have exaggerated its extent and importance, the mores of Japanese society permitted and encouraged the existence of a double moral standard with its consequent humiliation and subordination of the wife. The Japanese woman traditionally had almost nothing to say about her choice of husband, frequently not meeting her fiancé until immediately before the wedding ceremony. If widowed, divorced, or discarded after a trial marriage (consummated by a religious ceremony but not officialized by recording at the local government office) the woman was faced with the choice of living on the charity of the male head of her husband's family or of returning to her father's or, if he be dead, to her brother's home. If such a woman had been fortunate enough to bring forth male issue, she might expect a respected position as the mother of her all-important son, but if not, she was a dead and useless branch on the family tree, one that should be pruned. Economic necessity and social custom usually demanded an immediate remarriage, almost certainly to a lower social level which would be willing to accept such used and damaged goods in order to have a connection with the more influential family. If she were past the age of the law permitted her the choice of her husband, or even a single life supported by her own efforts, a choice seldom adopted by the daughter of a respectable family. The Japanese nation is founded on its family system. The family name (sei) was and is the most treasured possession. Families will even force a son-in-law to enter the family by adoption and assume the name if there is no legitimate male descendant, thus perpetuating this vital link with the ancestors of the past. Japan has been a feudal state and primogeniture is at the basis of its entire legal and social system. This is the greatest sex discrimination.

It would be improper to give the impression that Japan in the Occupation, or even immediately before the war, was still rigidly bound to all these old prejudices and mores. Japan was an industrial nation and the masses of people concentrated in cities and working in factories had eroded many of the traditional conventions. Young women were educated for employment, as clerks, typists, teachers, factory workers, skilled artisans, and in limited numbers as professional people. Young women in the cities frequently had all of the personal freedoms enjoyed by girls in the United States. They attended dances, saw motion pictures, read sentimental novels, attended parties, and had "dates" unchaperoned, worked in industry, traveled, and chose their husbands or lovers. At times their feverish and callow exercise of the Anglo-Saxon freedom made them both ridiculous and the target of official and conservative censure. The few leaders of the suffrage movement in Japan frequently engaged in the distasteful exhibitionism which seems to be an inevitable concomitant of any revolutionary movement. The war in Japan, as in all the nations of the world, wiped out conventions and forced a new participation in public efforts upon the women. They were evacuated, they worked in war plants, they served in auxiliaries to the armed services, they lived nervous, exhausted, disillusioning lives, they were forced by necessity to assume family responsibilities in the absence of fathers, brothers, and husbands.

The Occupation did not lessen the impact with old traditions. Japanese women for the first time came in contact with large numbers of men who were in general respectful and considerate of their sex. They were barraged with propaganda urging on them the right to vote, the right to choose their profession, the right to social equality, the right to choose their mate. They were given the right to vote, and saw it written into Article XV of the new Constitution. They were assured the right to hold public office by Article XLIV and saw women seated in the National Diet. They were granted absolute equality under the law by Article XIV and saw the basic institution of primogeniture outlawed. They were given the right to organize and to bargain collectively by Article XXVIII and saw women elected officials of labor unions and educational associations. They were given freedom and suddenly the equality of education which had been promised them became vitally important. Unless they were educated to use this new liberty it would be a Pyrrhic victory.

On 4 December 1945 the Ministry of Education released a document entitled, "The Women's Education Renovation Plan." That portion outlining practical measures to be taken during the following academic year is quoted:

If this program were actually carried out, the provisions of Article XXVI of the State Department (and FEC), "Policy for the Revision of the Japanese Educational System," which says, "Equal opportunity for both sexes should be provided at all levels of education-primary, secondary, and tertiary," would be implemented, and the provisions of Article XXVI of the new Constitution would be accomplished.

In August 1946 the first two women officials at a policy-making level in the Japanese Ministry of Education were appointed to serve in the School Education Bureau and the Social Education Bureau. When the schools opened in April 1947 all official textbooks for girls were identical with the corresponding textbooks for boys, and the number of classroom hours spent on similar courses were made identical. All tax-supported universities have become co-educational and in the first year, 1946, Tokyo Imperial University admitted 19 out of 66 applicants, Kyoto Imperial University admitted 17 out of 71 applicants, Osaka Imperial University took 3, Tohoku Imperial took 8, and Kyushu Imperial took 4. Yamaguchi K?t? Gakk? was the first of the boys' higher schools to become co-educational in 1946, and all public institutions of this level will eventually be converted. By March 1946 at the time of the visit of the United States Education Mission, 23 new private women's colleges had been founded. The famous Tsuda College, Tokyo Women's University, and Tokyo Women's Christian College, all in Tokyo, Doshisha University in Kyoto, and Miyagi College in Sendai, which in the past have been outstanding in their higher education of women, are serving as models and are providing from their graduates many of the instructors. In September 1946 the Japan Association of College Alumnae, later renamed the Association of Japanese College Alumnae (Daigaku Fujin Kyokai), was organized "to unite college women for work on the educational and social problems of the country." This organization has undertaken the major task of nonofficial accrediting and curriculum supervision of the women's schools. The Educational Reform of 1947 provides for coeducation through the ninth grade. The former laws prohibiting co-education from the third through the sixth grades--Article LI of the Regulations Relative to the Enforcement of the Elementary School Ordinance, Ministry of Education Ordinance No. 4 of 14 March 1941--were repealed in October 1946 and co-education above that level has been made permissive.

Discrimination against women on the grounds of sex has been thoroughly legislated, and is in the process of being actively implemented, out of existence. In the law the woman student shall be granted equal educational opportunity. But discrimination is a matter of public opinion and social organization. As long as Japanese society makes the economically self-sufficient woman the rarity-and the household drudge or carefully protected devotee of the flower arrangement and the tea ceremony the usual -discrimination will continue in spite of the law. An editorial, "For the Emancipation of Japanese Women" in the 13 July 1946 issue of the Nippon Times, points to this danger:

The women of Japan have received the right to equality of educational opportunity. Now they must seek the right to use the education they have won.

Hall, Robert King. Education for a New Japan. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949, pp. 418-423.