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Paper short abstract

This presentation maps women's columns in Taishō-era Hototogisu and asks how women’s haiku were presented through paratextual elements such as page layout, adjacency, and typography, reading these elements as thresholds that invite publication yet mediate visibility through a gendered framework.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on original issues of the magazine Hototogisu from the Taishō era (1912–1926), this presentation traces the emergence and transformation of women’s columns (joryūran), investigating how these spaces shaped women’s visibility within the modern Japanese haiku scene. Following Takahama Kyoshi’s (1874–1959) editorial reforms, which recentered haiku as the magazine’s core, a series of recurrent sections dedicated to women’s haiku were introduced in 1913, and a substantial number of women poets soon made their debut in Hototogisu’s pages.

Attending to the conditions under which women’s writing was published and received, I investigate the magazine issue-by-issue, mapping column titles, page placement, adjacency, sequencing, typography, and submission instructions, using these features to trace how the magazine mediated women’s participation. As a lens, I draw on Gérard Genette’s concept of paratext to read these visual elements as a system of thresholds that surround submissions. Moreover, because these elements are often lost in anthologies and text-only formats, the archive preserves context that cannot always be recovered from content alone.

To exemplify how these thresholds operate, I focus on the Kitchen Miscellanea and Family Miscellanea columns. While these spaces offered an accessible gateway for amateur poets without prior ties to the magazine, they also imposed submission requirements—such as restricting haiku topics to domestic themes—that operated beyond poetic content alone: they oriented readers toward how women’s poems should be read, and women toward how to compose, effectively assigning a gendered framework tied to domesticity.

Meanwhile, scholarship has been centered on recovering individual poets’ lives and their works, and less attention has been given to the venues through which women’s haiku emerged as a category. Ultimately, this presentation argues that because paratext operates through spatial and visual elements, the archive itself becomes an interpretive threshold for understanding the magazine’s gendered frameworks of women’s visibility.