Paper short abstract:

This talk will describe the lives of samurai women of the Mori house in Tosa domain in the Edo period. The abundant Mori family records allow us to reconstruct stories of their lives and also uncover many of the untruths in daimyo government records that were created to image a stable patriarchy.

Paper long abstract:

Telling the stories of samurai women of the Edo period is generally difficult because the paternalistic bias of surviving documentation has silenced most of their activities. Reading government documents makes it easy to imagine samurai women as ciphers who played small roles in the fortunes of their households. This, however, is a discursive artifact that does not reflect the reality of life. This paper reads surviving household diaries, letters, and lineages against the grain of documentary silence to provide a close study of the women of the Mori Kanzaemon lineage of Tosa domain, and pays particular attention to the social networks that these samurai women maintained and used in their lives. In the face of pervasive paternalism, these women played key roles in creating and maintaining social networks; many of them regularly provided leadership that protected the household and advanced its interests, even sustaining it at times when an adult male head was missing. Their networks connected them with their natal homes and their marital homes and included, if to a lesser degree, neighbors, doctors, and female entertainers.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation focuses on the life of Michijo (1806-1858), daughter-in-law of Kyokutei Bakin (1767-1848), one of the most renowned fiction writers of the late Edo period. This presentation reconstructs Michijo's life through an examination of her ten-volume diary.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation focuses on the life of Michijo (1806-1858), daughter-in-law of Kyokutei Bakin (1767-1848, also known as Takizawa Okikuni)—one of the most renowned fiction writers of the late Edo period. Michijo remained with the Takizawa family after her husband's death, raising her children and managing the household. Existing research—which mostly relies on accounts by Bakin himself—has pointed at Michijo's struggles with her father-in-law and at her role in completing Nansō Satomi Hakkenden (The Eight Dog Chronicles, 1814-1842), the longest pre-modern Japanese novel and one of the great works of late Edo fiction. Michijo has been described as a strong-willed woman who persevered through adversity, upholding her household after her husband's death while dealing with the hard-to-please and unrelenting Bakin.

This presentation reconstructs Michijo's life and personhood by focusing on her later years. It does so from an entirely new angle, giving Michijo her own voice through an examination of her ten-volume diary, which was recently published in a modern edition (2012-2013). This novel approach will provide a different picture of Michijo and of the way in which she ran her daily life interacting with family and neighbors. This close reading will allow us to observe the nature of networks connecting lower-ranking samurai families in the city of Edo in the nineteenth century.

Paper short abstract:

I examine how Fukuzawa conceptualized and supported female networking. I interrogate Fukuzawa's vision of women's place in modern society from the perspective of network building, focusing on the practical efforts he himself made to encourage female-driven forms of socialization.

Paper long abstract:

In his An Encouragement of Learning, Meiji reformer Fukuzawa Yukichi famously wrote: "men and women are both human beings." An advocate for the equality of men and women, he argued that women no less than men needed to attain "personal independence" (isshin dokuritsu) and participate fully in society. They too would take the new path Fukuzawa believed had opened up with the end of the feudal regime and the advent of the Meiji era, a path where "personal independence" would lead to "household independence" and eventually to "national independence" (ikkoku dokuritsu). Women were to shape this new society just as much as men. Naturally, this meant that women had to socialize freely and to establish networks.

In this presentation I examine how Fukuzawa conceptualized such female networking and its effects. The Meiji Restoration transformed old networks, causing a shift in patterns of knowledge accumulation that led to a rearrangement of social roles and responsibilities and to the creation of new kinds of relationships. At the same time, it also created new forms of social status, marking the emergence of a new class orientation that was distinct from that of the feudal system. Against this background, I consider patterns of status and ranks among women. I interrogate Fukuzawa's vision of modern society and of women's place in it from the perspective of network building, focusing on the practical efforts he himself made to encourage female-driven forms of socialization.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation will scrutinize the popular image of female workers in the early Meiji period. The examination of records of the Tomioka Silk Mill sheds light on the experiences of these young women and on the role of networks in their lives.

Paper long abstract:

Discussions of Japan's silk industry, which played a leading role in Japan's rapid modernization, often call to mind popular representations of "pitiful" female factory workers as seen in the novel Ā Nomugi tōge (Nomugi Pass). This presentation will scrutinize the popular image of "female workers in training" (denshū kōjo) in the early Meiji period. The details of their day-to-day lives remain largely unknown. However, an examination of Tomioka Seishijō shi (Records of the Tomioka Silk Mill), with a particular focus on Tomioka nikki (Tomioka Diary, 1905)—the memoir of factory girl Wada Ei (1856-1929)—and on the letters of another factory girl, Kasuga Chō (b. 1858), sheds light on the experiences of these young women and on the role of networks in their lives.

Wada Ei and Kasuga Chō, both born in the Edo period, belonged to a group of sixteen young women who arrived at the Tomioka Silk Mill in April 1873 from Matsushiro, Nagano prefecture. The accounts by Ei, the daughter of a domain retainer, and Chō, born into a commoner household, offer insights into the changes that status society was experiencing, the new modes of employment that had materialized for women, and the ways in which young women from different regions in Japan lived their daily lives in the factory.

We learn about group solidarity, which in turn relied on the strength of local networks. The bonds between Matsushiro women helped ease their fears at the time of recruitment and supported them throughout their time at the Tomioka Silk Mill, where they encouraged and pushed each other to acquire the skills of silk reeling.