This autobiography covering the first three decades of the life of Hiratsuka Raichō (1886–1971, née Hiratsuka Haru) is an absorbing read for Asian specialists and for general readers. As Teruko Craig explains in the introduction, she chose to translate only the first two of the four volumes that constitute Genshi, josei wa taiyō de atta: Hirratsuka Raichō jiden (In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun), published in 1971. Craig did not include volumes 3 and 4 of the Japanese edition because they were written by Raichō's secretary based on conversations and an earlier published work. In addition, Craig tells the reader that she corrected “chronological inconsistencies,” substituted her own “chapter headings and subheadings” rather than using “those supplied by the publisher,” eliminated some of the repetition and digression of a work that “originated as an oral narrative,” and “omitted details that seemed unnecessary or irrelevant,” noting each omission (p. xii).
Interventions by translators are necessary, and perhaps of greater interest to scholars than to many readers. Nevertheless, some readers of Craig's volume would have welcomed discussion of the circumstances surrounding the production of the 1971 autobiography, the discrepancies between the Japanese publisher's and Craig's labeling of chapter sections, patterns of repetition and digression in the original, and the nature of the details omitted. Craig's translation is a wonderful resource, yet historians may long for inclusion of some of the omitted material—for example, “rank names, religious names, family crests, and a scroll” (p. 319) and details of the relationship between Raichō and Tokunaga Yuki, a leading (female) social reformer, and information on “disregard for the dangers of infection” in infant care” (pp. 327–28).
Although autobiography is inherently a problematic literary form, one in which the author's intent, position, voice, and even facts are always subject to interrogation, the honesty, logic, and intelligence of Hiratsuka, the fascinating events of her life, and the social and cultural atmosphere of her childhood and youth in late Meiji and Taisho Japan shine through in Craig's well-executed translation. The narrative follows the trajectory of Raichō's life. Increasingly detailed chapters on later events of her life follow an initial chapter on her earliest memories of daily life, ancestors and family, and elementary school. Raichō's grandmother liked to walk, and her new middle-class family went on Sunday strolls and played games together. The texture of Tokyo life in an era before streetcars and automobiles vividly comes to life as Raichō describes in detail routes, shops, errands, and festivals. Readers first glimpse a small, physically weak, shy, and occasionally obstinate primary school student who excelled at study, sewing, and some physical education activities. The effect of her short stature and consequent physical difficulties and weakness is a recurring theme in Raichō's depiction of her childhood years. Although a good student, before entering college she was not a particularly avid reader. Perhaps the occasional flares of stubbornness and her love of going fishing with her father prefigure her later impatience with prevailing social conventions limiting women's activity, rejection of female inferiority, and determination to recuperate women as full social human beings. One detects little hint of self-importance in the autobiography; rather, throughout, Raichō presents herself in candid and sometimes unflattering terms.
The narrative becomes denser as Raichō's life progresses. It recounts events, people, and reflections from her high school, college, and postgraduate years; the three chapters that cover the decade following her graduation from college constitute more than half the text. Despite the prevailing assumption of a young girl's domestic destiny and the teaching of sewing and other domestic crafts at home, family leisure and wealth allowed middle-class girls like Raichō many opportunities to expand their horizons. They attended public or private single-sex high schools; received private instruction in English and music; went to lectures, restaurants, and even pubs; practiced meditation at Zen temples; and participated in literary salons—all a far cry from the lot of less privileged young women whose lives by adolescence were already consumed by paid or unpaid labor.
Raichō attended a top national high school for girls, where, surrounded by paragons of feminine virtue, she found the curriculum's emphasis on the moral training of girls to be obedient wives increasingly stultifying. She also became alienated from her father as he advanced in his bureaucratic career. Bored by the teacher, pedagogy, and subject, she began to cut ethics classes, but surprisingly was not punished for this indiscretion. Raichō's intellectual evolution, social observations, and spiritual growth led her steadily to assume a critical stance toward her father and the Japanese family system's norms of women as good wives obedient to father, husband, and in-laws, and as wise mothers selflessly devoted to household management, child care, and the family's welfare. The autobiography reveals Raichō as a teenager quietly taking note of adult women's difficulties and frustrations, their silent, unsung personal sacrifices and unarticulated dissatisfactions. For example, she writes that her mother, highly accomplished in the arts of traditional Japanese song and dance, gave these up completely after marriage to live with a mother-in-law from the provinces whose great love was raising vegetables in the backyard. Her mother's life was consumed with household management, care for her two daughters, and tending to the needs of relatives who came to Tokyo from the countryside in pursuit of education and other opportunities. Family opposition to her sister's budding romance with a cousin who shared her love of literature and her subsequent arranged marriage to a more “suitable” partner poised to advance in the civil service did not increase Raichō's esteem for the Japanese family system.
Raichō's accounts of her experiences as a student at Tokyo Women's Higher Normal School (Ochanomizu Joshi Daigaku) and Japan Women's College (Nihon Joshi Daigaku) shed valuable light on women's education from the student's perspective. These passages illuminate aspects of pedagogy and administration, academics and sports, commuting and dormitory life, and student friendship that are lacking in institutional studies of Japan's educational system. The reader sees Raichō's gradual transformation into a young woman prone to action based on curiosity and unconventional convictions. The events that made Raichō such a remarkable figure and feminist icon are recounted: the founding of the experimental women's literary journal Seitō (Bluestocking); her failed love affair with the writer Morita Sōhei and the ensuing scandal; her common law marriage and relationship with the artist Okumura Hiroshi, which led to cohabitation and the birth of two children; and her long career of social activism, which involved women's issues such as the debate on protection of motherhood (bosei hogo rosō) and the founding of the Association of New Women (Shin fujin kyōkai) and world peace and consumer movements.
Readers interested in the evolution of a thoughtful, intelligent human being who gradually found herself at odds with society will savor Raichō's lengthy recollections of women at home and at school, her friendships and interactions with men and women, and her pursuit of spiritual enlightenment through Zen, which had a formative influence on her youthful outlook. The autobiography makes her brief and impulsive affair with the writer Morita Sōhei appear much less sensational and lurid than it was reported at the time: more an expression of disregard for ordinary social constraints consequent to her attainment of kensho (Zen Buddhist enlightenment) than the pursuit of an infatuation or sexual pleasure. On being alone in a room in a teahouse with Morita for the first time, she recalls, “Yes, I was aware that there was such a thing as sexual desire but had yet to experience it myself” (p. 108). A note supplied by Craig sheds additional light on Raichō's motives in the Morita affair by drawing on new sources (p. 320).
The reader may surmise that Raichō's personal traits of modesty, iconoclasm, physical endurance, strength of character, and love of peace and humanity may have been strongly influenced by Buddhist principles and the Zen discipline of meditation. In all, Raichō's autobiography seems to suggest that her quest for women's full development as human beings and members of society can be traced as much to the influence of Buddhism and her youthful reaction against the Japanese family system as to her later exposure to Western feminism.
This autobiography, sensitively translated and painstakingly annotated by Teruko Craig, is a fine addition to a constellation of recently published works on prewar Japanese feminism. These include Hiroko Tomida, Hiratsuka Raichō and Early Japanese Feminism (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Jan Bardsley, The Bluestockings of Japan: New Woman Essays and Fiction from Seitō (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies, 2007); and Dina Lowy, The Japanese “New Woman”: Contending Images of Gender and Modernity, 1910–1920 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007). In bringing to light the intimate details of Raichō's life story, Craig's translation illuminates not only the lives of women in prewar Japan but also the human condition of all Japanese during this period. A paperback edition, which could be used in women's history, women's studies, comparative feminism, biography and history, modern Japanese history, and comparative literature classes, would be very welcome.
