Browsing by Author "Partner, Simon"

This paper seeks to contribute to the study of early postwar Japanese women’s history by focusing on rural women, a group that has received relatively less attention in recent scholarship. It aims to understand the changes in the lives and worldviews of Japanese farm women from 1945 to 1950 as shaped by the ambitious initiatives of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), the Japanese government, and the local reception and internalization of new ideologies. Through the lens of women-and-lifestyle-related content in Ie no hikari 家の光 (Light of the Home), the most influential rural family magazine in prewar and postwar Japan, this paper intends to explore how the magazine tailored official campaigns to the rural context with the help of local activists and farm women themselves, leaving both tangible and intangible impacts on the daily lives of women and their families. It also investigates the various ways in which local women responded to and interacted with the official new life campaigns that promised them concrete improvements in material lives and social status. As the magazine served as a middle ground where top-down initiatives intersected with local efforts to internalize official languages in the late 1940s, it also provides access to the local voices of farm women at the time. These precious voices, however limited, allow us to better situate rural women within the tabulating social milieu of early postwar Japan and to delve deeper into their daily lives.

This project will explore Meiji Japan’s reception of right training its sights on Nishi Amane 西周 (1829-1897)’s discussion of the concept in Meiroku Zasshi. The importation of numerous western political concepts, which had not existed in the Japanese language, naturally entailed intellectual efforts to come up with new words, or neologisms, and political ways of thinking. In this project, from the understanding that right as in Nishi’s analysis resulted from the Dutch political economic thinking in the nineteenth century, I intend to examine both the historicity of the concept and semantic clash involved in Meiji Japan’s translation of right as ken權. From the exploration of Nishi’s ken, illuminating epistemological shifts that occurred both in the target and source languages, I hope to observe the originality with which he attempted to articulate the new political economic make-up of the new Japanese state.