Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the influence of the 1953 Japanese translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex on Japanese women writers, who imagined new feminist futures through fiction and essays, ranging from homage to parody, that grappled with the philosophical implications of her arguments.

Paper long abstract:

Japan’s defeat in World War II produced an exhilarating and confusing landscape of opportunity for Japanese women. On one hand, postwar legal reforms granted women an unprecedented array of new rights. But prewar stereotypes of women as “good wives and wise mothers” (actual or potential) continued to dominate the cultural imagination, and sexual discrimination persisted in spite of legal guarantees of equality. And the consolidation of conservative rule under the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) from 1955 threatened to roll back the Occupation-era reforms.

Japanese women spent the first few postwar decades struggling to process these changes and chart a path forward that would reconcile their own ambitions with the reality of this new cultural and political landscape. This paper explores the various ways that female Japanese authors negotiated this new landscape toward the creation of a postwar Japanese feminism that reconciled past and present with foreign and domestic models of liberation for women.

Translation of foreign works provided one source of inspiration in imagining such feminist futures. The appearance of Simone de Beauvoir’s iconic manifesto The Second Sex in Japanese, in five volumes published from 1953 to 1955, was a watershed moment. The text quickly became a bestseller, and its unflinching account of female subordination across human history and culture and bold pronouncements about the possibilities of liberation from patriarchy were hotly debated. Her visit to Japan with Jean-Paul Sartre in 1966 gave her Japanese fans the opportunity to observe the famous pair up close, and further sparked debates about the desirability or feasibility of Beauvoir’s own brand of feminism in the Japanese context. Women writers explored the feminist potential of her arguments in literature, from fictional appropriation of her ideas by writers such as Asabuki Tomiko and Kurahashi Yumiko that ranged from homage to parody, to essays by Takenishi Hiroko and Saegusa Kazuko that critiqued Beauvoir’s thought. As I will demonstrate, these various forms of engagement with Beauvoir’s life and works sparked the creation of new strands of feminist philosophy inspired by foreign antecedents yet embedded in the lived experience of Japanese women.