During the Meiji and Showa Periods

201). It was an indigenous, agricultural-oriented set of customs, replete wagh truthful sexual mythology, practical attitudes toward family (i.e., farming as a accommodative effort), and a casu completelyy sensual approach to conjugal relations (Smith, pp. 201-206). The samurai and nobility depended upon agricultural productivity as the basis of their have financial security; there was slender attempt make to interfere with the peasantry's ways - even if they contradicted "official" morality and codes of conduce on many points. As Meiji administrators prep ard a gracious Code in the 1890s to bring Japan "up" to what they perceived to be the standards of Western civilization, it was pointedly noted by Hozumi Yatsuka, a major figure in the reform, "The customs of farmers are not to be made general customs" (Smith, p. 201).

Who was interested in these changes in gender ideology, then? There were deuce-ace levels of literate society with whom consideration of the issue carried any weight. foremost and foremost concerned were the feudal nobility of the Tokugawa era, who were later to pose the first-rung officials of the Meiji Reformation and the pre-World War II Showa imperial governments. The nobility explicate official decree, promulgating

Since I was running(a) with photocopies, in several cases I did not have memory access to dates (n.d.), pages (no pages), publishers (n.p.) and even book titles (n.t.).

There was a layer of misogyny laid over those ideals, however. Danson johi was the axiom: "Revere the male, despise the young-bearing(prenominal)" (Nolte, p. 5). Women, by their sensual nature, were defined as inherently a temptation. "Woman's nature is passive. This passiveness macrocosm the nature of night is dark," Kaibara wrote in his popular instructional guide for young, middle-class women (p. 45). Consequently, there was little use in educating women - and it was a good idea to clear them from men as much as possible (Kaibara, pp. 34-35). Thus, during the Tokugawa era, relations between men and women were put on a strictly familial, as opposed to conjugal, basis.

The emphasis was upon the extended family - the husband's family: a woman entering a marriage would join the household of the husband's parents, encounter her conjugal duties for the purpose of childbearing only (male children, it was always hoped for), and later on that sublimate her own personality to the ways and wishes of her parents-in-law (Kaibara, pp. 37-38; Moser, p. 3). In all realms - familial, legal, social - the male was assumed highly superior to the female.

As Japan entered the 1930s, large-scale mobilization for war shifted the family emphasis from laminitis to mother as all able-bodied males were put at a lower place the scrutiny of the draft (Miyake, p. 270). Faced with the need to motivate the population, the Nipponese government directed its educational system and propaganda machinery to revise the " lay" family to wartime purposes. As outlined in The Cardinal Principles of National order and similar government decrees/publications of the period, the woman's crucial role in preserving the family-state anatomical structure of Japanese society was emphasized. A "sacred war" was being fought, imagery of fecundity and warmth of blood relations associated wit
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