Hist 131 Changing Lives Ch. 5

Kanamori Toshie b. 1925 so a few years older than Yoshitake and Kishino. She also worked for a newspaper, the very prestigious Yomiuri which has been embroiled in a significant strike in the late 1940s.

 

But what do we NOT see in Kanamori's narrative that was a part of both Yoshitake and Kishino's?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MIA:

--She was older and already married, so no ordinary residential college experience;

 

--No Theatre or Zengakuren Student radicalism

 

--No radical unionism mentioned, no strikes, no unfortunate consequences.

 

--No reported involvement in the student Joint Struggle Movement.

 

--No Ampo stories,

 

--No mention of WLM,

 

--No Komashaku Kimi or Tanaka Mitsu or similar encounters

 

--No dramatic moment in a movie theater watching a film which made her realize how much she was sacrificing to get ahead as a woman;

 

--No sense that her recollections and memoir-writing were a way to bring about a transformation in her life, linking her reflections to things in the real world.

 

--So he had NO Need to "Reposition" herself and declare that she was now standing on the side of "oppressed" women

 

 

 

 

-- No aha moments reading Simone de Bouvoir, Kate Millett, Betty Friedan

 

 

--No Lib Camps, etc., No Lib Center stuff;

 

--No visible talk about feminine consciousness

 

--Finally, Kanamori did not seem to struggle or suffer at her workplace as both Yoshitake and Kishino did. In fact, she rose to a high position of the only Woman Department Head (bucho).

 

 

 

 

But does this mean she was not a feminist?

 

Remember the definition:

Feminism is a belief that women and men are inherently of equal worth. Because most societies privilege men as a group, social movements are necessary to achieve equality between women and men, with the understanding that gender always intersects with other social hierarchies.

Or, as the American Heritage Dictionary puts it, Feminism is:

 1. Belief in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.  

2. The movement organized around this belief. (American Heritage Dictionary)

 

 

Kanamori was active in grassroots women's movement in Kanagawa Prefecture and helped bring about the creation of the Kanagawa Women's Center.

 

Plus, she wrote regularly about women and women's issues for her newspaper.

 

 

 

What was the prevailing norm for a gender-based perception of the division of labor in Japanese society?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

--"men go to work, women stay at home;" could be traced back to ryosai-kenbo

--when women did join the workforce, they faced a thick wall of discrimination. And Kanamori wrote about this (149-150)

 

 

 

 

To what does the phrase "11 to Zero" refer?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

=the ratio or Men to Women represented in textbook biographies

--What was the image of women in textbooks at the time?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

--textbooks continued to depict women in helping or suportive roles to men;

--the old values dictated that women were to be raised to be feminine (onna-rashii shitsuke kyoiku); how is this like that "stereotypical image of women" that Yoshitake encountered? (154-55)

--How does Kanamori see these kinds of values and attitudes?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-- as steeped in the past; and

--with the power to crush individuality and to

--erase the potential that could be developed in young women

 

 

--with the demographic crisis looming, what does Japan need in Kanamori's estimation? (157ff)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

---a humane family environment in which individuality in both men and women can be nurtured -- see p. 161

 

 

Two Pillars:

--work is very important for women. Why?

--on whom does the burden of both childcare and elder care fall?

--what needs to be transformed in Japanese society? what do women need to learn to do? (161-164)

 

 

 

--what are Kanamori's 4 things that she believes we all need in life?

 

 

 

 

Family

Work

One's Local Area

Oneself (164)

 

 

 

 

--what are some takeaways from Kanamori's story about the death of her husband from cancer? (169ff)

 

 

 

 

--how important did she feel that her job/career was to helping her get through her ordeal?

 

 

 

--how do some of the things that Kanamori talks about seem to reflect back upon the experiences of Yoshitake and Kishino?

 

 

 

 

--how is her text different from theirs?

 

 

 

 

 

Instructions