Gender, Class, and Race in Occupied Japan

Ed’s note: SB below refers to the interviewer, historian Sandra Buckley. KR is K?ra Rumiko. The interview took place in Tokyo, apparently in the mid-1990 when the reputation of K?ra Rumiko (b. 1932) was secure as a poet, novelist, critic, and feminist. She tackles some difficult issues in the interview about Japanese style feminism and maternalism and questions the usefulness of the category of women’s literature, that is literature by women. One important thing, however, which the interviewer does not bring out is the relationship between K?ra Rumiko and her mother, K?ra Tomi. Also, little attention is paid to the wartime and Occupation periods, although they clearly had a substantial impact on Rumiko as a person, intellectual, and artist. K?ra Tomi, was born in 1896., and as was the case with many other young women in that era who aspired to a higher education, she went abroad, earning a doctorate at Columbia University. Upon returning, she became a professor in the 1930s at Japan Women’s College. After the war, Tomi attempted, as early as 1946, to become a candidate for mayor of a town. That failed, but she then won a six year term in the first election for the new Upper House of the Diet, 1947, and was re-elected in 1953. Tomi was identified with left wing activism and was one of the first Japanese to travel to the People’s Republic of China after its establishment in late 1949 Much of this activity occurred when her daughter, Rumiko, was a teenager and preparing for college entrance exams. Additional research in Japanese language sources on both daughter and mother should yield valuable information to complement the following interview.

KR: From the time I was a small child, I was intensely aware of language. I felt even as a child that language was not mine, that I existed outside the language that surrounded me, like a foreigner. The warmth and familiarity of a language that was my own, wrapped gently around me, remained a dream, unknown. In the absence of a language that I could wear comfortably, I took the sounds and words around me and played with them. Language was one of my favorite toys as a child. Yes, it's true that I have always been aware of language as something outside myself and have written about it, and within it, in a very self-conscious way.

KR: In my own experience there has been confrontation, even war, and yet when I try to communicate these experiences, as I remember them, I find only an empty language that cannot accommodate me. I began reading foreign verse and found escape there, especially in French poetry. I came back to Japanese and began to experiment with words, breaking down the boundaries between language and self, allowing words to disappear into me, and me into words, in mo¬ments of struggle and confusion.

KR: This, too, is very much a question of sexuality and language. The woman that is created in the texts of Japan's male writers is a stranger to me. These novels make me angry. There is a difference be¬tween prose and poetry, but maybe we can come back to that later. Mori Ogai, Tayama Katai, Kawabata Yasunari, all the greats, are men. In their time, the gap or barrier between male and female was so great that the two constituted separate social classes. There was no opportunity for these men to interact with women who would meet them on an equal footing. For example, in Kawabata Yasunari's Snow Country, Yukiko lives in a comparatively free environment, and yet her relationship with the protagonist never transcends the inequality of "patron" and "geisha." Contemporary male writers are possibly even worse. They are not mature enough to be able to represent adequately the individual experience of a woman. I can only wonder at the fact that they're so popular. It's frightening. As a Japanese I'm embarrassed at the thought of these male writers being translated and read outside Japan. What does it say about this society? Perhaps it's better that it's all out in the open. Japan has always been most sensitive to pressure from the outside. Certainly no amount of pressure from within has seemed to make any difference. They write on unashamedly.

When I first began writing, I was so troubled by the overt masculinity of the language of so many male writers that I was deter¬mined to try and write in a language that was not bound to my identity as a woman. I had to break away from the "femininity" or emotiveness that is so much a part of the traditional Japanese literary language. I suppose that at the time I equated this with women's speech. I was aiming at some sort of neutral voice while still trying to express the many levels of eroticism that surfaced in my poetry. I wasn't writing specifically about sex, but sexuality was always just below the surface of the poems. Perhaps at this time I still hadn't made a clear link between the two, language and sexuality. With time I came to want to write quite specifically about female sexuality and desire. As a woman, that's only natural, I suppose. I began to speak my own experience as the subject and consciousness of the poems. I was not as concerned with sex as with those other moments in a woman's life when she is deeply aware of her own sexuality and her identity as a woman. I wrote about birth and the experience of mothering. The most deeply erotic moments of feminine experience may be those that occur not in sexual contact but in realizing the eroticism of the female body within the context of nature. This is a much more universal concept of the erotic than anything that is bound to physical sexuality. The source of this pleasure is a woman's experience of her own body. This experience is not achieved through a cor¬respondence between the conscious and the universe, but falls in that space between the universe and nature and can be discovered through the woman's own body as she comes to know herself. This is my understanding of eroticism or a female sexuality.

KR: There is the potential for men to take part in this space, but in this "civilized" society, the only way open to men is for them to forget their bodies, for them to leave the body behind. It's so much easier to forget your body and move on unburdened. A man may perhaps be able to live inside his head, cut free from the memory of his body, but how can a woman do that? Our bodies are constantly shifting, changing, reminding us of our whole selves. A woman's body is a world in miniature. Within this frame that is visible from the outside, there is another world that cannot be seen, a world that can only be experienced in the living of that body. There is a cave within the female body that is the only world known to a new life as it forms and grows. Within this cave-world, there is a sea of life and from that sea a pathway out into the visible world. The first world we know is that other world, and yet it is beyond our memory. As soon as the infant passes through the pathway into the outer world, the inner world of that sea is gone forever. As a fetus grows within a woman, she draws close to her own body, knows herself, knows that she is not the same as men. She is a woman.

KR: I suppose that one sensitive area is the categorization of women's writing under such labels as "women's literature" and "women's poetry." Some argue that these categories are a strategy to marginalize women's writing and that the entire canon of literature should be reevaluated to reflect the role women have played in literature in Japan. You have to remember that it was women who dominated the golden age of Japanese literature in the Heian Period. In that sense, Japanese women writers and poets have a strong tradition of women's literature to draw on. I don't know that I agree with people who argue that these categories are discriminatory. If they exclude women from the mainstream of literature, they also create an exclusive territory of women's writing and language. This might be one situation where separate and different can be redefined positively as a creative space within which women can work free of obstacles. I must admit though that I have felt very strange on those occasions when I was introduced at public functions as "K?ra Rumiko, the woman poet." As more and more women are published, I suspect that the distinction will begin to break down unless women choose to maintain it for their own reasons.

KR: Yes. I think that in Japan it is true to say that poetic language is generally marked as feminine. There are some poetic forms that cultivate the Chinese style, which has traditionally been associated with public affairs and marked as more masculine. However, most poetic language, regardless of whether the poet is male or female, is femi¬nine in that it draws on the kana tradition, which is generally associated with feminine language and the women's literature of the Heian Period. It is designated as a language of the private and not the public world. It is often impossible when reading a Japanese poem to identify whether the poet is a man or a woman. This is compounded by the avoidance of pronouns.

KR: I recently took part in a roundtable discussion on just that subject. I think the situation is slightly different in the case of English and French. These languages are deeply patriarchal. Until the emphasis on unified language and universal education began with the modernization process in the last century, the Japanese spoken language was arguably more feminine than masculine. The trend over the last century has been to disguise the masculinization of the language under the rubric of standardization. The clearly feminine quality of Japanese poetic language poses problems for any translation into English, for that quality is almost inevitably lost because there is no equivalent level of distinction. It is my sense that in English the patriarchal dominance of language is so pervasive that feminists would have to create a whole new space for feminine language. In Japanese we already have a feminine language in place, which is also the language of poetry. You could even argue that poetic language is more immediate and familiar in a society where it is so close to the language of over half the speaking population.

It took me a long time to come to the realization that the language women speak in daily conversation can also be empowered as a language of women's poetry if it is recontextualized, redefined, to speak its own meanings. As with the categorization of women's writing, women's speech need not be negative. It is a beautiful language. Why shouldn't it be a language of liberation and flight instead of one of constraint and limitation?

KR: Why throw out the baby with the bath water? Why not take all these qualities of women's language and work with them on the assumption that they can be something other than negative. In Japan there is a long and deep heritage of women's culture. Within that culture women are not bound only to such qualities as softness, gentleness, emotiveness, but are also often angry, laughing, fighting. This diversity is apparent when you look at the actions attributed to the goddesses in Japanese mythology. It would be a mistake to define the feminine too narrowly. When I think of feminine qualities, I don't think of softness and emotiveness; I think of vitality, synthesism, continuity, and egalitarianism. These are not qualities that are negatively marked. They are the very basis for the future development of society.

KR: The new wave of women's writing you speak of dates from the Meiji Period, with women like Higuchi Ichiyo and Yosano Akiko. I think that certain periods have a cultural potential to generate particular forms of literary production. The Edo Period saw a blossoming of haiku and waka verse, theater, and certain forms of popular fiction. No matter how rich the culture of that period may have been, it was not a period conducive to women's writing. It was a period of oppression for women. The neo-Confucian morals of the period constrained women at every level of their daily lives. My own grandmother was born in 1871, the fourth year of Meiji. She and her husband would regularly hold poetry circles in their house in the southwest of Japan. Women have written, especially short poems, throughout Japanese history, but there have only been two periods that were conducive to the circulation of women's writing in the public domain—the Nara-Heian Period and the modern period. The external conditions affecting women's lives have only allowed for the possibility of a public voice for women at these two times. That women go on writing, even without an audience, should not be forgotten.

KR: It's true that more women writers are being published, but I don't know that it's as true for poetry as it is for fiction. We all risk falling into the trap of believing that an increase in the number of women writers published is a sign of success. If what is being published is of poor quality, then what is gained? I would argue that the very best writing is not taken up by the publishing houses and that what we are seeing on the shelves of bookstores today reflects only what the publishers believe will sell. I seriously question whether the recent wave of women's books marks any progress in women's writing in Japan. Anyone who wants to sell a book today puts the word "woman" in the title. What is this book of yours going to be called?

KR: "Feminism" is quite a different thing. Publishers feel much less comfortable with that than with "woman." Let me just say a little more about the question of women and publishing. There have been some journals established specifically to publish women writers or poets. La Mer is a good example. These journals are important as a focus and stimulus for women's writing, but there is also a risk involved. It is the problem of marginalization again. While these journals can offer an important focus and stimulus for women's writing, they should not develop into a ghetto to which all women's writing is confined. Choice is the real issue. If a woman wants to publish in non-women-specific publications, there should be the freedom to do so with equal access. I think the mass communications industry has been actively encouraging the marginalization of women's writing and other cultural production through the establishment of the karuch?a sent? (culture centers) throughout urban Japan. It's no accident that these are concentrated in the cities and not rural areas. Once it was perceived that women had too much free time on their hands and might begin thinking about the quality of their lives, the establishment devised a scheme to divert their creative energies through endless hours of adult education courses. Most of the courses are on culture—flower arrangement, tea ceremony, French cooking, etc.—or related to their children's education-refresher courses in English, mathematics, etc. Some courses are even on writing and poetry, but these institutions are places of containment and refinement. They are not going to generate politicized creative pro¬duction that might begin to break down the artificial exclusion of women from the public domain. What is needed is a women's writing that challenges and disrupts the dominant male-female roles. That eroticism I spoke of before is not restricted to the individual woman's experience. It is a stream of shared consciousness that flows between women, across boundaries. This feminine eroticism and vitality is a potential political force.

KR: A major problem is the extent to which men have been totally drawn into their role as loyal employees. Work has ceased to be one part of their lives and has become the organizing principle of their entire existence. This is the first thing that needs to change if there are to be any significant developments. Look at the popular political movements in Japan, and you'll find that the majority of the activists are women and the elderly—the two groups excluded from the permanent workforce. There is no time left in men's lives to even begin to think about the conditions under which they're working and living, let alone take any political action for change. As a consequence, it is women in Japanese society who are politically and culturally more astute and aware. This gets back to the strategy of organizing women's free time through karuch?a sent? activities. Even so, women are currently outpacing men in many intellectual areas, and it is women who seem most likely to lead any major political movement for change in Japan. There is no doubt that there is an awareness of this; otherwise, there would be no necessity to monitor women's activities and time so closely.

One problem, however, is that thus far women have chosen to express themselves in the form of literature, in poetry and fiction. A serious female presence in the area of criticism has been missing. The role of hy?ronka remains male in Japan today. A high priority seems to be for women to come out into the public domain and develop a feminist critique of Japanese society. Even our most radical social critics always fail to expand their analysis or critique of a problem into the area of gender. It is up to women to do this. An effective pattern would be first to establish this critical space for women's voices and then to move into the domain of literature. The reverse process seems to have gone nowhere. If the space you speak into remains deaf to the issues you are writing about in your poetry and fiction, then what do you achieve? At the very least the two should be devel¬oped hand in hand.

KR: There are other women doing the same thing. It would not be fair to say women are not trying to move in this direction. The ongo¬ing problem is how women are to achieve a place in the public space of the media. The handful of women who have been allowed entry into that predominantly male domain are often there only because of the relatively unchallenging style of their critique and their willing¬ness to compromise. This is obviously not enough. Women must win their own ground in that public space and speak uncompromisingly.

KR: Oh yes! When I was twenty-three, I took a ship to France. This was right at the time of France's withdrawal from Vietnam. Traveling through Southeast Asia at that time, I was exposed to a Europe that was very different from the fairytale land Japan so envied then. From the perspective of Southeast Asia, Europe was a beast of a different color. I was also forced to recognize the atrocity of Japan's own war crimes in the region. After this experience I felt a deep affinity with the countries of Southeast Asia. As a woman living in Japan, as a mother, I came to recognize increasingly the parallels between the status of women in a male-dominated society and the status of the so called third world in relation to the industrialized capitalist nations.

KR: You mean that the women of a colonized country are already the victims of another form of gender-based colonization within their own society? Yes, I suppose the silence was being generated even before the Europeans arrived. In that sense, the colonization of these regions intensified the level of oppression experienced by the women. The sense that one's own body has been colonized is one more reason why women are potentially more politicized than men. The issue is how that personal experience is translated into political action.

KR: The most obvious answer is language. I described before my sense from childhood that language and experience were incompatible. The struggle was to find ways of playing with language to fit it t0 me, instead of me to it. I don't know if appropriation is the right word for the devaluation of women's speech, but this is the other strong memory I have from my youth. The language that I spoke was women's speech, but it was as if that language could only be heard in certain contexts. Outside those private contexts a woman's voice couldn't be heard. It was like speaking into a void. Things have improved in the wake of the women's movement of the 1970s and 1980s but there is still a long way to go.

KR: It appears to deny any autonomy to women. It may be that the language women came to speak has been historically defined in certain ways. It may even be true that its boundaries were externally determined, but the language itself developed among women and in that sense is the property of women. It is now up to women to defy the boundaries and make this language work for them. To speak the language rather than be spoken. I still believe that women's language is a place of departure and not something to be escaped.

Another important thing to keep in mind is that what we call women's speech began to be spoken beyond the aristocracy only from the fifteenth century. The spread of women's speech into the merchant class came in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The widespread use of honorifics is something we can only trace back over the last two centuries or so. The deep historical roots of women's language, the idea that it is part of the tradition or heritage of Japanese language and society, all this is a well-constructed and well-maintained myth. Put in perspective, the task of dismantling the present status of women's language is much less daunting.

KR: Critics often talk about women's poetry as flowery or emotional, but I frequently get comments such as "Her poems are unusually intellectual for a woman." Of course, when you think about it, the two approaches amount to the same thing in terms of categorizing women's poetry. I must say, however, that male critics have become more sensitized to questions of gender in recent years. It is less common these days to read overtly sexist or discriminatory remarks by the better critics. This doesn't represent any significant conversion of men. What it represents is the lack of any firm intellectual commitment on the part of Japanese male intellectuals, or all Japanese men for that matter. I think this is a fundamental difference between Japanese men and Western men. This lack of commitment means that a phenomenon such as tenk? (turncoating) is widespread and easy among Japanese intellectuals. Some of Japan's most prominent intellectuals shifted intellectual and political alliances two, even three times, in their lifetime. If they just say something often enough—women are emotional, women are there to bear children, etc.–they start to believe it, but it has no roots. If the tide starts to flow in the other direction, they have no particular personal commitment to that view of women and begin to shift again. The motivation for sustaining this construction of gender roles is not rooted in the personal belief system of individual males. It is an external social construction that is internalized by the individual. The whole structure is very fragile in this sense, and that is why there are so many subtle mechanisms of reinforcement in place. That's where your interest in the relationship between culture and ideology comes in.

KR: That's a huge question. We could write a book on it. There has been a tendency over the last ten to twenty years for critics in Japan to argue for the separation of culture or art and politics. This approach defined as political only what was radical or anti-establishment. It failed to acknowledge the pervasive presence of establishment politics across the arts. To put it differently, art that did nothing to disrupt the status quo was considered nonpolitical, while art that was disruptive or challenged the status quo was denounced for mixing art with politics. Of course, the distinction is ridiculous. All art is political; all poetry is political. It's just a question of which politics. To strip politics out of poetry would amount to taking the life out of the poem. Poems don't come from some ephemeral place. Both poetry and politics are the territory of human experience. They should both smell of the bodies that have made them, that inhabit them. That's good poetry. I sometimes try to write such poems. It may be difficult to find anything poetic in a speech by Nakasone, or any other politician for that matter, but there was theater and poetry in the AMPO riots. To say this is not to try to romanticize that very violent period of con¬frontation, but to try to politicize artistic production.

KR: I think the situation is dreadful. The most frightening thing is that everyone seems content just to express their concern and to take no action. It is shocking that the recent attack on the union movement in Japan was allowed to proceed with almost no public outcry. The systematic dismantling of the nationalized railways and the fragmentation, or dissolution, of their unions amounted to a dismantling of democracy. The demise of the unions also represents a significant weakening of the Japanese Socialist Party. It is no coincidence that the unions that came under attack first were those with the closest links to the left, and to the JSP in particular. The whole consensus approach camouflages processes intended to expand the profits of the largest corporations and set in place the political structures necessary to secure the future of the right, regardless of the specific party configuration the conservative alliance takes in the wake of the breakup of the LDP. The nationalization of certain key industries guaranteed at least some degree of redistribution of profits. What we are seeing now is a new differentiation of classes. The victims of this process are the poor, single-parent families, the elderly, the handicapped, illegal immigrant workers, and farmers. If the process continues unchecked, we will see the gradual atrophy of both culture and politics. Living in Tokyo today I sense a listlessness among writers. An entirely new vitality is needed in the face of the current political situation. There are signs of a revival in poetry, but a different, new literature is required in this environment.

KR: There are still people in Japan committed to political causes. There are members of the women's movement, environmentalists, unionists, and so on, but when it comes to the real test at election time, the conservatives always win hands down. The mistake is to think that this represents popular support for conservative politics. Only about a third of eligible voters actually vote regularly. What these election results represent is the level of complacency or disinterest among the Japanese public. Any form of external pressure will always mobilize the Japanese. Look at the way Japan has rallied in the face of criticism over the strength of the yen. In the absence of external pressure, however, there is a general inertia. Complacency is not the same thing as satisfaction. This is an important distinction.

I think that there are historical factors operating here. With few exceptions, there is no tradition of popular intervention in govern¬ment in Japan. Traditionally the "commoner" has been distanced from the political process. There have been isolated instances of democratic movements in Japanese history, but, for the most part, any call for democratic practice was suppressed by the government of the day. Some would argue that the lack of any continuous tradition of popular participation in politics compounds the failure of the modern democratic process in Japan. If I thought that election results reflected a genuine level of satisfaction among the majority of Japanese, I suppose I would have to reconsider my position, but I don't believe this is the case. I think the fundamental problem is that individuals in Japan don't have any real sense of their own worth. They don't value their life as independent from the whole—the society. This is something Japanese have not learned despite more than a century of modernization. If one has no sense of one's own value, then how can one value the life of another individual? Look at welfare for the elderly in Japan. The pension is a mere pittance, just a few hun¬dred dollars a month. In Japan today that is nothing. People start planning their saving for retirement from the time they enter the workforce. There is no sense that welfare is a state issue, that the elderly have a right to support. The same problem flows over into Japan's attitude toward the rest of Asia. There is no sense of responsibility either at the individual level or at the national level. The traditional structures are based on social obligations and contracts, not individual commitment and responsibility. These same traditional structures obscure the exploitation of individuals behind a rhetoric of group cohesiveness. Women raise children. They are located, not necessarily by choice, at the center of the household and the family. This is one place where change can begin. Women's writing—poetry, fiction, and criticism—can create an essential framework of support for that change.

INTERVIEW WITH K?RA RUMIKO, POET AND CRITIC (MID 1990s)

by Sandra Buckley

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