The history of modern waste control in Japan goes back to the turn of the last century: In 1899, the state implemented the Dirt Cleaning Law (obutsu sôji hô), which identified sewage and waste control as the foundation of national hygiene, and designated local administrative bodies to be responsible for the task of waste control. In 1930, the state revised this law and recommended that the local governments of cities (shi), wards (ku), and towns (chô), in this order of descending scale, “incinerate” (shôkyaku) trash. Yet in the early twentieth century, civil engineering in Japan had not yet reached the level of engineering available in Europe. Moreover, waste materials came in different kinds—kitchen garbage, paper, rags, metal, wood, rocks, sand, and so forth, most of which could be “recycled” for resale. The fact that people could make a profit out of trash invited numerous small-scale businesses, including millions of rag pickers, to engage in sanitation works. Hence, in all coastal cities in Japan, including Tokyo, reclaiming the waterfront with trash remained the dominant mode of waste control throughout the first half of the twentieth century (Mizoiri Reference Mizoiri1988). Yet this method of waste control, which is still practiced in Tokyo Bay today, leaves vast areas of trash landfills open for long periods of time, as reclaiming tracts of land from the sea takes years and decades. It is this problem that the prewar Japanese state tried to solve for the purpose of improving national hygiene.

In 1929, six years after the Kantô earthquake devastated the city (and produced a colossal amount of debris), the Tokyo city government built a technological showcase of the period, a waste disposal factory equipped with a large-scale incinerator, in Fukagawa Ward. Fukagawa, which has now been integrated into Kôtô Ward, is located at the mouth of the Sumida River, on its east side. In contrast to the regions west of the river, which grew rapidly in the late nineteenth century under the state slogan of “civilization and enlightenment,” the regions east of the river, according to Edward Seidensticker, were the “saddest victims” of modernization (Reference Seidensticker1983, 214). Since long before the waste incinerator was introduced, Fukagawa residents had been suffering from fumes, offensive odor, and swarms of flies originating in the open trash landfills. In fact, built as it was on the reclaimed land of trash, Fukagawa's association with waste was already an established fact by the early eighteenth century (Yada Reference Yada1975, 152–54).Footnote ¹ Now, Fukagawa residents were forced to breathe “yellowish smoke that smells like burning human corpses” from the chimneys of this waste disposal factory. Once the wind began to blow to the south, smoke covered the entire ward of Fukagawa. When this happened, “the residents could not open their eyes and mouths, and streetcar drivers were unable to see beyond twenty meters even during daytime …. At Heikyû Elementary School, located just south of the factory, smoke came through the cracks between windows and walls. Hence teachers could not see the faces of students and were unable to distinguish one child from another” (Tokyo Asahi 1933a). It was this problem of waste control in Tokyo into which suffragist women ventured. Yet for them, “waste” was not only the waste to be burned in the incinerator; it also meant the corrupt officials of the Tokyo prefectural and city governments whom the suffragist women were eager to eliminate.

In this article, I examine the way in which early twentieth-century Japanese suffragist women, who actively participated in the local politics of Tokyo, joined in the production of two mutually related sets of discourses. The first is about prewar democracy, which, as Sally A. Hastings has correctly pointed out, has hardly attracted scholarly attention until recently. For the past twenty years or so, however, several scholars of Japan have shifted their focus from political parties (which failed to maintain control of the cabinet) and liberal thinkers (who were either isolated or co-opted) to the political participation of ordinary people at the municipal level (Garon Reference Garon1997, Reference Garon and Wilson2002; Gordon Reference Gordon1991; Hastings Reference Hastings1995, 1).Footnote ² These scholars have challenged the hitherto dominant view of prewar Japan—a society that lacked democracy and eventually chose the path to fascism—and shifted their attention to the way in which state officers and civilian bureaucrats tried to “transform the Japanese people [of middle-class background] into active participants in the state's various projects” under the emperor–state system (Garon Reference Garon1997, 5–6).Footnote ³ These projects included “the movement to improve daily life” (seikatsu kaizen undô), in which moral reforms (such as eliminating election scandals) and hygiene (such as controlling waste) were among the major elements. In other words, “democracy” in prewar Japan was manifest primarily in the way in which the state encouraged the middle-class men and women of urban municipalities to participate in the improvement of citizens' daily lives. Yet seen from the perspective of the state, such democracy represented a means of “social management” (Garon Reference Garon1997, 3–22). Here, I examine the way in which suffragist women gendered (“gender” as verb) this set of discourses on democracy through the idea of “purity” (jôka) (Mackie Reference Mackie and Wilson2002, 42; 2003, 63–65). In other words, I am interested in the way in which these women foregrounded gender (“gender” as noun) in the discourse of democracy by appropriating the divide between women and men (see Molony and Uno Reference Molony and Uno2005, 1–3, 7–13; Pflugfelder Reference Pflugfelder and Yôichi2002): Women are “pure,” while men are “impure”—hence women are better suited for cleansing social ills.

The suffragist women, however, participated in the making of yet another set of discourses in the name of “purity”: about hygiene and the environment more generally, and about waste control in particular. Nonetheless, these women of middle-class background (who lived to the west of the Sumida River) were unable to resort to the same idea of a gender divide for the problem of environmental pollution. The residents of Fukagawa, who lived next to the waste disposal factory and open trash landfills, were both women and men of the working class. The thesis that women are pure while men are impure did not work east of the Sumida River.Footnote ⁴ In other words, the idea of pure women as crusaders for democracy and hygiene failed to pay attention to the intricate relations among gender, class, and space in Greater Tokyo. After all, suffragist women, clad in expensive kimonos, could merely “visit” Fukagawa as enlightened middle-class women; they never chose to live east of the Sumida River.

Following Michel Foucault, I analyze these two sets of discourses on democracy and waste control with the following questions in mind: “What rules permit certain statements to be made; what rules order these statements; what rules permit us to identify some statements as true and some as false; what rules allow the construction of a map, model or classificatory system; what rules allow us to identify certain individuals as authors; and what rules are revealed when an object of discourse is modified or transformed” (Philip Reference Philip and Skinner1985, 69). Restated, I have identified suffragist women as the “authors” of the discourses of democracy and waste control, and will explore what rules they created in speaking about these political and social agendas in prewar Japan.

The suffragist women who appear in this article were members of the League for the Attainment of Women's Political Rights (fujin sanseiken kakutoku kisei dômeikai), which was established in 1924 and later renamed the League of Women's Suffrage (fusen kakutoku dômei). Although they demanded political power within the existing system, they hardly formed a unified voice. Furthermore, the voice of each one of them also changed. For example, Hiratsuka Raichô (Haru), one of the founding members of the Bluestockings (Seitô), which defied the boundary of women's domestic space of home, later advanced the idea of women as mothers to society and the state (Garon Reference Garon1997, 131; Mackie Reference Mackie2003, 45–49). While Ichikawa Fusae called for gender equality and suffrage (but later sought welfare measures to protect mothers and children), Yamada Waka defended the “family” as the basic unit of society (Garon Reference Garon1997, 142; Mackie Reference Mackie2003, 56). Socialist members believed that women's problems did not stem from men's desire but from capitalism. Yet even these socialists did not form a unified voice: While some worked within the legal system supporting proletarian parties, others were involved in underground movements (Garon Reference Garon1997, chap. 4; see also Large Reference Large1981; Mackie Reference Mackie1997). Some suffragists, such as Hiratsuka, called for state protection of mothers, while others criticized such state intervention in women's affairs as too “bourgeois” (Mackie Reference Mackie2003, 55–58). It is true that the League for Women's Suffrage “enrolled a mere 1,511 members, clustered in Tokyo area” at the height of the suffrage campaign in 1930. Furthermore, as the war against China progressed, some of the socialist and anarchist members eventually left the group and chose to go underground or, like Yamakawa Kikue, withdrew from public life (Mackie Reference Mackie2003, 106; see also Hane Reference Hane1988). Yet we should not isolate this organization from other women's groups. Instead, we should see this organization in relation to many other, more powerful (measured by the number of membership) women's groups of largely middle-class background, such as the Japanese Women's Christian Temperance Union, the Federation of Women's Associations of Western Japan, and numerous local women's associations throughout Japan built by the state. Indeed, in 1933, the League for Women's Suffrage created, with other six national women's organizations, the Women's League for Purifying Tokyo City Politics. Therefore, I will use “the League” to refer to both of these organizations throughout this article.

To examine how the suffragist women deployed the concept of purity in matters of democracy and waste control, I will closely read the League's official publication, Fusen (Women's Suffrage), which was published monthly between 1927 and 1935.Footnote ⁵ The main purpose of this article, however, is to read the scripts of two one-act plays published in Fusen in 1931 and 1933. They are Women's Suffrage Is the Key (fusen wa kagi desu), which was meant to instill the idea of “democracy” in adult women, and Miss Oharu's Dream (Oharu-san no yume), which aimed to educate not only middle-class housewives but also female household servants about how to dispose of waste (Kaneko Reference Kaneko1931, Reference Kaneko1933). Both plays were written by Kaneko Shigeri (1899–1977), one of the most prominent and multitalented suffragists of modern Japan.Footnote ⁶ As Vera Mackie (Reference Mackie and Wilson2002, 38) states, scholars interested in political cultures have significantly expanded the range of primary sources lately. The scripts of plays, however, have hardly been explored, even though suffragist women used theater as one of the primary means of spreading their ideas to ordinary women and men.

Before reading these scripts, a brief history of Tokyo since the Meiji Restoration is in order. Tokyo was first a prefecture, called Tokyo-fu, which consisted of the former Edo and its neighboring villages. In 1878, the state separated the area surrounding Edo Castle from the rest of Tokyo Prefecture and divided the former into fifteen wards (ku). In 1888, these fifteen wards became Tokyo City, called Tokyo-shi. In 1932, twenty new wards, carved out of areas previously administered as counties (gun), extended the city limits to the area of today's Tokyo. This, then, marked the birth of Greater Tokyo (dai Tokyo) (Kodama and Sugiyama Reference Kodama and Sugiyama1978; see also Hastings Reference Hastings1995, 10). It is in this Greater Tokyo that members of the League were most active, yet they also brought plays (while themselves acting as amateur actresses) to other cities and towns throughout Japan.

Women's Suffrage Is the Key

The plot of this one-act play is quite simple. The curtain rises; the audience sees the structure of a house in the center of the stage. The house is messy, in a state of shambles, and weeds are growing everywhere in the yard. This is a house where only men live. From time to time, women come to the tightly shut gate outside the house, knock on the gate repeatedly, and ask the men inside to let them in. Each woman shouts, “Hello, hello. Please open the gate,” until she loses her voice. These women, eleven of them, want to weed the yard, clean up the house, do laundry, and cook tasty food for the men. In short, they “want to do the work that only we women can do,” and for this purpose alone, they would like to obtain the keys to the side and main gates and to the door of the house. Yet they do not get any response from the men inside. The following scene begins after the last four women, wearing towels on their heads and carrying brooms and buckets, come onstage and join the rest of the women.

The men inside are still suspicious of these women's intentions and decide to ignore them. Yet the sound of knocking intensifies, and the men notice that some of the women, including a woman carrying a child on her back, crumble in front of the gate, tired of knocking.

Man 4 finally comes out of the house and walks toward the gate. Yet he tells the women, “No. I'm not going to open the big gate but just the side gate, and I'll open that for you part way. Why don't you come in one at a time in a row? In any case, we've decided that you can come in as far as the yard.” This response does not satisfy every woman. Those women who wish to obtain the key to the house begin to argue with other women of a different opinion.

After the curtain goes down, the narrator comes out from the side of the stage and reads the following epilogue:

In the foregoing passage, I suggest that the English translations of kômin and kômin-ken are “citizens” and “civil rights,” respectively. Yet here we should recall, albeit briefly, that the history of “citizen” in English suggests the following: A citizen is a member of a political community, originally a city or town, but now usually a country. Indeed, in early twentieth-century Japan, kômin referred to those men and women who actively participated in the politics of their municipalities—towns, wards, and cities—but not necessarily of their country, Japan. In other words, after the Universal Manhood Suffrage Act of 1925, those kômin who had the right to vote in national elections included only Japanese male citizens twenty-five years of age and older, except for those men who received public or private assistance.Footnote ⁷ By the 1920s, however, women of urban middle-class background, such as suffragist women, had also become kômin who actively participated in the governance of their municipalities: They collaborated with local officials, particularly in the areas of hygiene and welfare. Nonetheless, these women did not have the right to vote in national or local elections. Thus, in this play, the suffragist women seek all of the following: restrictive civil rights to vote in local elections, complete civil rights to run for seats in local assemblies, and suffrage to vote in national elections.

Then, on January 6, 1930, the national newspapers reported that the Home Ministry was ready to offer restricted civil rights to all women twenty-five years of age and older who resided in the six major cities of Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, and Kôbe. Indeed, similar bills for women's civil rights, which would enable them to vote and hold office in local governance, passed the House of Representatives in 1929, 1930, and 1931, only to be rejected by the House of Peers (Fusen-2 1930, 13; see also Garon Reference Garon1997, 134; Maruoka Reference Maruoka1985, 82).Footnote ⁸ Earlier, in 1925, these suffragist women, together with the members of other organizations, successfully repealed Article 5 of the Public Peace Police Law, which had barred women and minors from political organizations and from attending political meetings (Nolte 1984, 2). Though they gained the rights to attend, speak at, and hold political meetings, they wanted more. Reading Women's Suffrage Is the Key in light of this reality, we now understand that while some women first aimed to obtain the right to participate in local governance (the keys to the side and main gates), members of the League sought to obtain, from the start, complete political rights to vote and hold office at both the local and national levels (the key to the door of the house). Although their wish was not granted until 1945, evidence suggests that members of the League actively participated in local governance, through which they also participated, albeit in a restricted manner, in national governance.Footnote ⁹ Thus, one such member, Kubushiro Ochimi, states that the suffragist women “sought for suffrage as the citizens of local administrative bodies and of the Japanese nation” (Ichikawa Reference Ichikawa1974, 145). On this particular order of participating in local governance before participating in national governance, another member, Ichikawa Fusae, writes, “Unlike national politics, local politics covers education, hygiene, water service, sewage and so on, which concern the everyday life of women,” and that “these are all plain and ‘squalid’ (gomi gomi shita) matters” (1935a, 5). Restated, according to the members of the League, women were by nature interested in “squalid matters,” and this was the reason they were more enthusiastic about participating in local politics than in national politics.

Until the end of World War II, the general trend in local government in Japan since the Meiji Restoration had been for the gradual “expansion of local decision-making authority in areas of local concern and the fuller participation of citizens in the local processes.” In Tokyo, the Local Autonomy System (chihô jichi seido) of 1888 established the units of prefecture (fu), city, ward, and town as “juristic persons” that should administer their own affairs “subject to the supreme control of the central government.” The Prefectural Code and the District Code of 1890 further consolidated the Local Autonomy System. While certain positions of local governments, such as prefectural governors and city mayors, were still appointed, popular election became the rule for choosing members of prefectural, city, ward, and town assemblies (Kôdansha Reference Kôdansha1983a, 62–71). This process, however, was not free from numerous cases of political scandals, and Tokyo city politics was by no means an exception to this rule.

Between 1925 and the outbreak of war with China in 1937, there were three elections for representatives to the Tokyo City Assembly (1929, 1933, and 1937) (Hastings Reference Hastings1995, 161).Footnote ¹⁰ Yet in 1928 alone, there were more than a dozen cases of political scandals, involving a large number of prefectural and city assemblymen who had received bribes and kickbacks from politicians, merchants, and businessmen (Ichikawa Reference Ichikawa1974, 201; see also Tokyo Hyakunen-shi Henshû Iinkai Reference Tokyo Hyakunen-shi Henshû Iinkai1972). The number of arrests and indictments remained almost constant, so that by December 1928, thirty-one seats of the Tokyo City Assembly had become vacant. For this reason, the Home Ministry disbanded the assembly and, resorting to the discourse of purity, ordered the (male) citizens of Tokyo to elect new members to create a “purified city assembly” (jôka shikai). Note that after the implementation of the Universal Manhood Suffrage Act, proletarian parties became strong in metropolitan Tokyo because the passage of universal suffrage incorporated working-class men into the registered population.Footnote ¹¹ Still, the 1929 election failed to eliminate similar scandals (see Hastings Reference Hastings1995, 161–62; Ichikawa Reference Ichikawa1974, 168). In 1933, the payment of a large sum of money by the Tokyo Gas Company to Tokyo city assemblymen was revealed. Other political scandals erupted concerning the construction of a municipal cemetery, housing, and public baths. Among the thirty-two Tokyo city government officials who had been arrested for having accepted bribes, twenty were city assemblymen (Fusen-3 1933, 44–45). Female citizens were aware that bribes and kickbacks were exchanged between their husbands and the officials of major political parties and businessmen. Hence, despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that they were barred from voting, the suffragist women became quite active in “purifying” corruption by closely watching men's political conduct during the time of national and local elections.

At the time of the popular elections for Tokyo City Assembly in 1929 and 1933, members of the League conducted extensive research on each candidate. For the 1929 election, they mailed questionnaires to all of the candidates, asking them for their views on election scandals, education, and trash disposal, as well as women's civil rights and suffrage. Based on the candidates' responses, the League chose eight whom the group would support throughout the campaign period. These candidates included two education specialists, three medical doctors (one of whom had a clinic for the poor), two members of proletarian political parties, and one member of the House of Peers. Next, the League organized numerous meetings for ordinary citizens, in which members made speeches in support of these eight candidates. Seventeen members of the League, including Kaneko and Ichikawa, made a total of sixty-three speeches in every ward in Tokyo City (Ichikawa Reference Ichikawa1974, 204; Fusen-4 1929, 2–3). For the 1933 local election, they refrained from supporting individual candidates. Yet, when they found certain candidates to be of “those dirty kinds” (shûrui), they visited these candidates' homes with an ultimatum, asking the candidates to withdraw from the election. On such occasions, members of the League took newspaper reporters and cameramen along with them. Articles about and photos of “those dirty kinds” were then published in the major newspapers in the next few days (Fusen-5 1933, 13–14). Furthermore, the League created inventive slogans, such as “You have one sacred vote to cast. Don't abuse it. Don't throw it away. Please fulfill your obligation to purify the city assembly” (Fusen-4 1929, 2–3); “(Male) Citizens, do not elect those dirty kinds”; or “Men and women, let's build Greater Tokyo together” (Fusen-5 1933, 16). The League then printed these slogans on leaflets, posters, and standing signboards, and placed them everywhere in Greater Tokyo. For the 1933 election, the League held six meetings on four consecutive days just before the day of election, attracting about 200 to 500 people each time, of whom about 30 percent were housewives. At these meetings, members of the League spoke of the need for women to gain complete civil rights in order to purify Tokyo city politics. Of course, under the Peace Preservation Law, several policemen attended each of these meetings. Still, without being interrupted, suffragist women could shout from their podium, “Let's get rid of those dirty kinds” (Fusen-5 1933, 15–19). Finally, on the day of the popular election for Tokyo City Assembly, March 16, 1933, the League distributed 50,000 leaflets in Greater Tokyo that printed the following slogan: “March 16 is the day of a general house cleaning! Let's sweep out those dirty kinds!” (Fusen-5 1933, 19).

Though these activities took place only within the microcosm of Tokyo city politics, the results of the suffragist women's efforts were astounding.Footnote ¹² In the 1929 election, six out of eight candidates whom the League supported won seats in the Tokyo City Assembly, with one being elected its chair (Ichikawa Reference Ichikawa1974, 205–6). In the 1933 election, six out of ten candidates who had refused to accept the suffragist women's ultimatum to withdraw from their candidacy lost the election. In addition, two candidates who had opposed both restricted and complete civil rights for women lost their seats in local assembly (Fusen-5 1933, 20).

In their efforts, members of the League aimed at “purifying” Tokyo city politics by eliminating “those dirty kinds” from the political scene. Yet what does the notion of “purity” entail? Why did these women believe that they were able to “purify” not only corrupt officials, but also, as we will see later, adult men in general who were eligible to vote? In the article “Round Table Discussion on Women's Suffrage,” published in Fusen in 1930 (Fusen-6), members of the League responded to these questions in the following way:

• • Women are by nature more sincere and innocent than men.

• • While men work outside, we housewives get together everyday by communal wells in our neighborhood communities to talk about social problems.

• • Although men have universal suffrage, they have never received proper education as to how to use their political rights. While male farmers and laborers have now gained the right to vote, many of them are happy to receive bribes from their local candidates. For this reason, when men say that we women are ignorant about politics, they are utterly wrong.

• • If we are given suffrage, the number of voters will double. Facing such a large number of voters, “those dirty kinds” will find it impossible to bribe us citizens.

• • If women participate in the public life, those “maggots” (uji) that breed in garbage will disappear.

At this round table discussion, the category of “maggots” included not only those who gave or received bribes and kickbacks, but also those who had concubines, those who heckled speakers at political meetings, and those who owned or visited brothels. It also included all the male registered voters who supported “those dirty kinds.” Furthermore, the women implied that all adult males potentially belonged to the category of “maggots,” for they had never received proper education on democracy. Thus, Hiratsuka Raichô wrote, “[M]aggots are everywhere in the Tokyo City Assembly, but the ones who vote for those maggots constitute only one half of the Tokyo residents…. I can say with my utmost confidence that we women, who have hardly been influenced by the dirty politics led by men, have hearts much purer than those of men. We are indeed burning with righteous indignation against political scandals” (Reference Hiratsuka1933, 43).

Returning to the play, Women's Suffrage Is the Key seems to present women and men as polar opposites and supports the common thesis that has long dominated the scholarship of Japan: Women, who suffered from gender-biased laws, finally resisted state power and ideology in early twentieth century through democratic movements. This popular view, however, cannot be supported, for two reasons. First, by making those men who owned brothels and concubines “pollute,” suffragist women excluded certain women, namely, prostitutes and concubines, from the category of “women” (see Mackie Reference Mackie2003, 64). By so doing, they weakened what we may call, following Gayatri Spivak, “the strategic use of essentialism,” separating “women” from “men” for a certain political goal (Reference Spivak and Harasym1990, 11–12; see also Fuss Reference Fuss1989, xi–xii).Footnote ¹³ Second, while these suffragist women emphasized the divide by gender, in reality, they had already been co-opted by the state, or, more specifically, the civil bureaucrats of the Home Ministry (and the Ministry of Education), who also tried to “purify” political corruption and election scandals at both national and local levels. Using radio, conferences, and other means, these bureaucrats stressed the vice of money politics. They created a committee in every prefecture to “purify” political corruption and election scandals that consisted of a governor, mayors, assemblymen, police officers, school teachers, businessmen, and journalists (Ichikawa Reference Ichikawa1935b, 29–32). Furthermore, in 1929, they created a private foundation in Tokyo called the Tokyo Municipal Research Council (Tokyo shisei chôsakai), which led a movement for the reform of the Tokyo City Assembly (Hastings Reference Hastings1995, 166). In 1935, this council conducted a five-month-long study on the state of corruption in order to discern why more than half of Tokyo male citizens abstained from casting their votes in the local elections of 1929 and 1933 (see Ichikawa Reference Ichikawa1935a, 4). Under this council's guidance, some retired politicians and university professors created private foundations for the same goal of “purifying” local and national politics. All of these groups, from the Home Ministry to small private foundations, cooperated with the suffragist women to lead their movements. Still, suffragist women criticized these male-dominated groups, arguing that rather than making an attempt to eliminate corruption, they were actually promoting it. After all, these women wrote, the political environment hardly improved despite these men's efforts, largely because the men tried to “purify” men, and this was the reason, they wrote, why, during the time of nationwide popular elections for local assemblies between 1933 and 1935, 7,037 male citizens were arrested for violating rules (Ichikawa Reference Ichikawa1935c, 5).

Nevertheless, as Sheldon Garon has persuasively demonstrated, “official policy in fact changed considerably between 1890 and 1941 in its attempts to define gender roles” (1997, 116). Garon thus states,

Waste control, then, was an important component of civic life: The state promoted it in order to realize modern hygiene and instill the idea of frugality in the minds of its populace. Predictably, suffragist women resorted to the same discourse on purity and to the divide between women and men for the purpose of improving trash control. Yet in this case, they faced different kinds of divides: between themselves and those who lived in Fukagawa, and between themselves and their female servants.

Miss Oharu's Dream

I have so far examined the metaphors associated with waste, trash, or dirt—the opposite of what purity represents—that frequently appeared in the suffragist women's discourse on prewar democracy. I have also examined how these women “gendered” this set of discourses on democracy through the same metaphors. Let us now return to Fukagawa Ward, where the waste disposal factory was built in 1929.

In the early twentieth century, Fukagawa was home to about 200,000 inhabitants. Although its scenic shore attracted some rich men (who built their second houses and gardens there), the area was largely occupied by the so-called sai-min, poor folks who lived in tenements or cheap lodgings. Hence, while the incinerator was the first and the largest one in Asia in the eyes of the makers of the Japanese empire, it was imposed upon the people of Fukagawa: They were asked to dispose of tons of waste daily produced by the residents of Greater Tokyo. Note also that many Fukagawa residents worked as rag or trash pickers, cart pushers (to transport trash), rickshaw men, itinerant merchants, street entertainers, and day laborers (Haga Reference Haga1992, 226–27).Footnote ¹⁴ The most destitute residents thus relied on trash to make a living, selling “old nails and empty bottles” that they found among the trash (Kida Reference Kida2000, 64).

Members of the League, however, did not live in Fukagawa Ward: They lived in the hilly side of uptown Tokyo, a semicircle to the west of the Imperial Palace—a place of palace, shrines, temples, and dwellings for upper- and middle-class people (Seidensticker Reference Seidensticker1983, 8). The spatial division between uptown Tokyo and downtown Tokyo, then, constituted (and still constitutes) a socioeconomic division (Kondo Reference Kondo1990, 57). Hence, it seems fitting that when Kaneko wrote a script for another one-act play, Miss Oharu's Dream, she set the scene in Yotsuya Ward in uptown Tokyo. In the play, the middle-class housewives of Yotsuya seem to be utterly unaware of the existence of the waste incinerator and open landfills located in Fukagawa. Yet they are taught to reduce their volume of waste, not so much for the sake of Fukagawa residents as for the goal of enlightening themselves.

Two of the characters, both housewives, are not particularly enlightened. Housewife A, for example, appears on the stage with a colander full of watermelon rind. She says, “At our house, watermelons are so popular that the kids won't hear of it unless we crack open at least one a day. But then the garbage fills up immediately. Since those rinds are damp, we get flies. I can hardly stand it, so I always dump them in the ditch out front.” Housewife B then asks Housewife A, “Doesn't the ditch get clogged?” Housewife A replies, “Luckily, it's on a slope here, so that isn't a problem. You know, you should dump spoiled rice in this ditch too so you won't get flies.” To her remark, Housewife B happily concurs. Oharu also would like to concur with A and B, but she is a servant of the Yamanaka family, and Mrs. Yamanaka, unlike A and B, is quite an “enlightened” housewife. She is happy to purchase an expensive container designed specifically for kitchen garbage from her ward association to separate wet waste from dry waste (so that trash burns well in the incinerator). She then tells Oharu,

But Oharu finds disposing of trash in this manner quite bothersome. She would rather dump watermelon rinds and all the other household waste in the ditch. On that night, however, Oharu has a dream—a nightmare—about a protest march of household waste, including such characters as “fish bone,” “cabbage leaf,” “empty can,” “face powder jar,” “newspaper,” “watermelon rind,” “natto [fermented soybean] wrapping,” “tea leaves,” “rock,” and “dirt.” What follows is the beginning of this protest march in Kaneko's play.

After the stage darkens, Oharu wakes up and apologizes to Mrs. Yamanaka for her attitude the previous day. Now, she is no longer an unenlightened family servant. She now goes out and tells all the other unenlightened housewives and servants in her neighborhood, “If we don't work really hard and take care of the trash, we'll get laughed at by the trash!”

Yet in the 1930s, who would have gone to see Miss Oharu's Dream? In staging the play and later on producing a movie on “waste control” set in the same Yotsuya Ward, Kaneko was greatly assisted by members of the Yotsuya Women's Association. While the members of this association were the mistresses of middle-class households, they hardly included their female servants. Restated, women such as Miss Oharu did not go to see the play.

In the prewar labor market, live-in girl servants, most of whom worked in cities, wards, and towns in urban Japan, occupied a large share of the female labor force. According to the first national census of 1920, the number of such servants was about 580,000 and increased to about 700,000 in 1930. In other words, excluding those women who worked for family-based industries of agriculture, fishery, and commerce, one out of every six employed women was a household servant. The only category of employed women that surpassed the number of household servants was “cotton factory girls” (Shimizu 2004, 4). The discourse on “girl household servants,” however, had already been in flux since the late nineteenth century. To see how such discourse changed, let us read the following passage from Japanese Girls and Women, written by Alice Mabel Bacon, an American teacher of English who visited Japan in 1888 and 1900.

This passage suggests that during the last decade of the nineteenth century, maids assisted their mistresses in order to “learn” the art of household management, while their mistresses were by no means free from household chores. These maids were not necessarily from poor families; in the absence of institutions that would have offered them formal education, they worked for the mistresses of upscale families before marriage.

By the 1920s, however, such maids whom Bacon met were no longer of the mainstream. The success of the Industrial Revolution and the ensuing economic depression changed the characteristics of both girl household servants and their employers. On the one hand, household servants were replaced by either one of the following two types: young women who assisted their mistresses in housework but demanded free time so that they could attend school, or young daughters of poor families who came to work as maids in the cities after the Great Depression. Their employers, on the other hand, were no longer the mistresses of rich landlord or business families—they were replaced by the housewives of the newly expanded middle-class families of government officials, military officers, company men, teachers, and so forth. Yet, in such large cities as Tokyo, this rapid expansion of middle-class families created a dire social problem—the shortage of girl servants. Hiratsuka Raichô, whose girl servant quit her job just three months before she wrote the following essay, was one of those “victims” of the shortage of maids. She states,

Hiratsuka does not mention what type of maid she eventually hired. Returning to the play, we may safely assume that Mrs. Yamanaka is like Hiratsuka, an enlightened housewife, while Miss Oharu is a live-in servant from a poor family. In this respect, Oharu is an “outsider” in the bounded household. Here, the following passage by Jordan Sand is extremely insightful:

Thus, Miss Oharu should be instructed not to bring “invisible germs” into her employer's home from the space beyond uptown Tokyo. Yet now that Miss Oharu lives with Mrs. Yamanaka and her family, the play conceals how class differences played out spatially in early twentieth-century Tokyo, between those who lived in uptown Tokyo, including Miss Oharu, and those who lived in Fukagawa but could not afford to employ servants or might themselves have been employed by uptown housewives.

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The new incinerator in Fukagawa could burn only one-third of the entire volume of trash, about 900 tons a day, that was brought to the site. As a result, in 1932, two more incinerators were added. Together, these three incinerators were called the Tokyo Municipal Waste Disposal Factory, and they eventually employed several thousand residents of the ward (Mizoiri Reference Mizoiri1988, 229). While these residents benefited from the newly built factory as they gained employment, they also suffered from environmental pollution. Facing increasingly ominous air pollution, the Tokyo city government asked a team of scientists, including Iwahashi Motosuke, who had designed the incinerators, to investigate the matter. The problems, they concluded, were that, first, the temperature inside the incinerator failed to rise high enough to burn all the waste materials. Second, with the falling price of recyclable items (such as rags and paper) after the Great Depression, the waste sent to the incinerators was a mixture of all sorts of different materials. For this reason, they recommended that housewives in Tokyo separate combustible trash from noncombustible trash. Based on some of these recommendations, the city government ordered the waste disposal factory to cut the volume of trash to be burned in half. The city government also ordered the factory to reduce the number of hours of operation, from 8:00 in the evening to noon the following day. This change in hours, however, immediately met with protest from brothel owners in the Suzaki pleasure quarter in Fukagawa: With so much smoke blowing into their direction at night, no patron would be interested in visiting the brothels (Tokyo Asahi 1933b).

For the residents of Fukagawa, then, there was only one solution: to air their anger, not only against the city government but also against all the citizens of Tokyo, and to get rid of the incinerators by moving them elsewhere. Honda Ichirô, a Tokyo city assemblyman elected from Fukagawa Ward, thus argued the following:

In both 1932 and 1933, the Fukagawa ward assembly met numerous times to discuss the matter. On such occasions, the ward assembly issued a statement such as the following: “The existence of a waste disposal factory and open landfills in our ward damages, both directly and indirectly, our wellbeing. They also prevent us from reclaiming waterfront. Thus, we ask the Tokyo City Government to remove them immediately from the ward.”Footnote ¹⁷ The bureaucrats in Tokyo city government, however, were not interested in moving the incinerators to another ward. After all, they claimed, the site of Fukagawa in itself was a landfill—it stood on ground that had been filled in with soil, rocks, and other waste materials since the seventeenth century. Instead, the Tokyo city government chose to collaborate with the suffragist women who, relying on the same discourse of “purity,” tried to improve the environmental condition in Fukagawa.

With a troupe of amateur actresses, some of whom were members of the League, Kaneko tirelessly toured throughout Greater Tokyo to “clean up” the city. She also visited other industrial cities with the same mission of cleaning them up. In 1934, she visited Ashiya, Nada, Kôbe, Kyôto, Kure, Hiroshima, Osaka, and Kanazawa. In each city, she and her troupe performed Miss Oharu's Dream. For the children in the audience, they performed a picture play (kami shibai) version of the same piece. As she had produced a movie, Many a Little Makes a Great (chiri mo tsumoreba), prior to her visit to these cities in collaboration with the civil bureaucrats of the Tokyo city sanitation department, Kaneko also showed it to the audience after the play.Footnote ¹⁸ In all of these cities, each performance attracted more than a thousand people, most of whom were women and children. These performances, then, provided with Kaneko and other suffragists with opportunities to connect the purification of the city environment to the purification of corrupt politicians. In Kyoto, Kaneko made a speech in which she asserted, “We have no right to vote. Nevertheless, we can clean up not only our household waste but also the maggots that men have bred.” In Hiroshima, she told the audience, “Let's send those dirty kinds, not to Ichigaya [where the Tokyo City Assembly was located], but to the open trash landfills in Fukagawa” (Kaneko Reference Kaneko1934a, 24; Reference Kaneko1934b). On such occasions, however, Kaneko was aware that most women came to see the play to entertain themselves and their children, and that they were less interested in suffrage. But there was something that Kaneko was insensitive to: The people of Fukagawa had no wish to accept “those dirty kinds” in their ward. Still, she ended her travel report with the following declaration:

Thus, by collaborating with the civil bureaucrats, suffragist women made steady inroads into the politics of local affairs. They made two more movies, The Clean Capital (kiyoki miyako) and The Town Is Shining (machi wa kagayaku); they held a workshop with the sanitation department's officers about how to clean the rivers and canals throughout metropolitan Tokyo (Fusen-7 1935, 28–29); and they assisted the same group of bureaucrats in formulating policies for epidemic eruption that might be caused by environmental degradation (Fusen-8 1933, 36–39). In so doing, they also made major headway in raising the consciousness of Tokyo citizens about hygiene.

The discourse on waste of the 1930s, however, contains several different ideas. First is the legacy of the feudal era—the idea of “good citizenry conducts.” Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, the practice of discarding trash in an open (communal) space, ditch, or river was made illegal, first in large commercial cities such as Edo (Tokyo) and Osaka and then throughout the country.Footnote ¹⁹ Second is the idea that profit could be made by recycling waste materials. That is to say, trash was a source of income for trash collectors—the impoverished folks—until well into the 1970s in Japan. Their livelihood depended upon recycling rags, metal, paper, glass bottles, kitchen garbage (for fertilizer), and anything still combustible (for fuel). Soon landlords, who owned tenements and cheap lodgings, began to claim their share of the profits—the profits, which resulted from the trash that their tenants had discarded, now belonged to landlords. Thus, landlords and trash collectors were soon involved in contractual relationships. In such relationships, trash collectors paid certain fees to landlords to obtain trash from tenants. Yet another idea is modern hygiene. In Japan (as in Europe), the eruption of cholera epidemics in the late nineteenth century transformed the system of trash disposal. Along the way, those who controlled trash collection changed, first from private trash collectors to the Home Ministry and police offices and, second, to local administrative bodies such as the Tokyo city government (see Haikibutsu Gakkai Reference Haikibutsu Gakkai2003; Kôtô-ku Reference Kôtô-ku1997; Mizoiri Reference Mizoiri1988; Suginami-ku Kyôdo Hakubutsu-kan Reference Suginami-ku Kyôdo Hakubutsu-kan1997; Tokyo-to Seisô-kyoku 1977, 2000; see also Narita Reference Narita and kai1990, 1993). And it was in the affairs of such local administrative bodies that suffragist women claimed their power.

The discourse on waste of the 1930s, however, fails to “spatialize” (or foreground “space” in) the problem of waste control. It is, then, such people as the residents of Fukagawa who spatialized it in demanding “spatial justice” for them. David Harvey argues that “differences in ecological, cultural, economic, political and social conditions get produced (particularly through those human activities that we are in a position in principle to modify or control)” (1996, 5). Here, those human activities that constituted the cause of spatial injustice for Fukagawa residents were the following: The middle-class residents of uptown Tokyo, including civil bureaucrats and suffragist women, transported trash (that they discarded) east of the Sumida River so that they would not see a single fly in their homes. The practice of suffragist women—that is, sorting trash and reducing its volume and teaching such practices to other women—must have contributed, albeit to a limited extent, to ameliorating air pollution in Fukagawa. Yet they so did primarily in order to become enlightened women who were conscious of national hygiene: In the space of an entire nation (and eventually empire), Fukagawa remained a tiny spot where its residents were destined to accept other people's trash—the reason why there was no mention of Fukagawa in Miss Oharu's Dream.

Members of the League often visited the office of the Tokyo sanitation department (in uptown Tokyo) with flowers. On such visits, these suffragist women were greatly surprised by the uncleanliness of the office, where “dust and paper clutter are piled up on the floor and desks,” and attributed this to the fact that only men worked in the office (Fusen-9 1933, 44). This episode suggests that suffragist women's “strategic use of essentialism” dividing “clean” women from “dirty” men worked only in uptown Tokyo, say, in the office of the Tokyo sanitation department. The residents of Fukagawa did not need flowers to decorate their rooms; they needed steady sources of income.

It is, then, this binary and class-blind discourse of gender that seems to have failed in solving the problem of environmental pollution in Greater Tokyo. In Fukagawa, trash did not represent “corrupt politicians” or “men”; it represented a source of living and a nuisance. While the suffragist women cherished the divide between women and men, the Fukagawa residents could not afford to separate trash from themselves.