How to Manage a Household: Creating Middle Class Housewives in Modern Japan

Abstract

During the late 1910s to early 1920s leaders in women's education sought to rationalize and modernize daily life through the promotion of ‘domestic science’. Their writings, aimed at young educated middle class women, focused on ways to reform the running of their households to fit their changing roles as modern women and the changing conditions of Japanese society more generally. They assumed the sexual division of labour, but as reformers, they envisioned that middle class women would play a key role as household managers in the ‘new era’. Following their instructions for efficient, scientific management of clothing, food and housing would ensure young women's social standing as exemplary middle class housewives, to the benefit of themselves personally as well as their families and the nation.

Notes

¹Misumi, Fujin seikatsu, 30.

³Bourdieu, Distinction, 466.

²The emergence of the full-time housewife (shufu) has attracted research by a number of scholars. Particularly outstanding is Sato, New Japanese Woman. See also Ishii and Jarkey, ‘The Housewife is Born’. Sand focuses on the construction of bourgeois culture, including women's role in it, in House and Home. On changes in the household division of labour from early modern to modern times, see Uno, ‘Household Division of Labor’; Imai, ‘Emergence of the Japanese shufu’. On the trend toward full-time housewives in urban factory workers' families, see Chimoto, ‘Birth of the Full-Time Housewife’.

⁴von Saldern, ‘Hidden History’, 32–40.

⁵On the introduction of home science in British India and its connection with the nationalist movement, see Hancock, ‘Gendering the Modern’. On the international movement for rationalization of households, see also von Saldern, ‘Social Rationalization’.

⁶Stearns, Consumerism in World History.

⁷Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan.

⁸Bourdieu, Distinction, 483.

⁹Warren G. Breckman found that bourgeois writers in Germany had been attempting to control and manage modern social change, in particular as related to consumption, from before the 1920s. ‘Disciplining Consumption’, 486.

¹⁰Garon, Molding Japanese Minds.

¹¹For a survey of the government campaign, see Nakajima, ‘Taishōki ni okeru “seikatsu kaizen undō”’, 230–263.

¹²Foreword by the editor, Ono Hideo, to Misumi, Fujin seikatsu no sōzō, 1.

¹³von Saldern, ‘Social Rationalization’, 83.

¹⁴Kaetsu, Kasei kōwa, 2.

¹⁵Ibid., 7–8.

¹⁶Ishizawa, Seikatsu kaizen, 9, 20. Ishizawa, a professor at Nara Women's Advanced Teachers' College, was a noted scholar of household management.

¹⁷Abe, Jinkakushugi. On the intellectual group and trends to which Abe belonged, see Mimata, et al., Hito to sakuhin, 2–10, 34–40; Inoue, Individual Dignity, 72–78. For a critical analysis of Taishō individualism and culturalism, see Harootunian, ‘Sense of an Ending’.

¹⁸Inoue, 61–72.

¹⁹Ibid.

²⁰E.g., Nakajima, ‘Taishōki ni okeru’; Sato, New Japanese Woman.

²¹Misumi, Fujin seikatsu, 164.

²²Ishizawa, Seikatsu kaizen, 26–27. The Daily Life Reform League established 10 June as ‘A Day to Commemorate Time’ (toki no kinenbi) in 1920 to raise public consciousness about not wasting time. The date selected commemorated the setting of the first water clock in Japan by Emperor Tenji in 671. Ishizawa praised this effort to make Japanese more aware of the importance of time (25).

²³Ōta, Nichijō seikatsu no kaizō, 350.

²⁴Ishizawa, Kagakuteki kaji seisetsu, 284.

²⁵Ibid., 293. See also Yamawaki, Muda naki seikatsu, 235–237, on drawing up plans and sticking to them.

²⁶Misumi, Fujin seikatsu, 157.

²⁷For an example of this debate, see ‘Shinjidai ni tekiō suru fujin no yōso to riyō to no kenkyū’, 228–255. For the reference to the time-consuming nature of re-sewing kimono, see 235; also, Ishizawa, Kagakuteki kaji seisetsu, 52, and Miyake, Seikatsu kakushin no ki kitaru, 47–49.

²⁸Ishizawa, Kagakuteki kaji seisetsu, 92, 99–155.

²⁹Kaetsu Takako founded Joshi Shōgyō Gakkō in 1903. She was active in the Daily Life Reform League. Her school later became Kaetsu Gakuen; since 2001 it has operated as a co-educational university, Kaetsu University, continuing its tradition of focusing on practical education.

³⁰Kaetsu, Kasei kōwa, 58–61.

³¹Ōta, Nichijō seikatsu, 89; also Tsukamoto, Katei seikatsu no gōrika, 3.

³²Kaetsu, Kasei kōwa, 49.

³³Ibid., 52

³⁴Tsukamoto, Katei seikatsu no gōrika, 64. Tsukamoto taught at women's schools, including Joshi Kōtō Shihan (Women's Advanced College for Teachers, now Ochanomizu Women's University), and in 1900 had published Kaji kyōhon (Housework Textbook), the first textbook on household management for girls' higher schools. She was an organizer of the Hōchi Newspaper Association for the Improvement of Efficiency (Hōchi Shinbunsha Nōritsu Zōshin Undō Kyōkai), and in 1921 was one of four female educators (including Inoue Hideko, later cited) commissioned by the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce to establish the Association of Households (Shotai no Kai) to broaden women's knowledge of consumer economy. Nakajima, ‘Taishōki ni okeru’, 251, 254.

³⁵Ōta, Nichijō seikatsu, 94–100.

³⁶Founded in 1903 and currently Yamawaki Gakuen Junior College. Household management (kaji) was established as a specialized subject in 1908.

³⁷Chimoto, ‘Birth of the Full-Time Housewife’, 59.

³⁸Yamawaki, Muda naki seikatsu, 202, 214–216. The editor of this book stated in the foreword that she compiled this collection of Yamawaki's previously published magazine articles and recordings of her lectures because Yamawaki was too modest to publish a book of her teachings herself; Foreword, i.

³⁹Tsukamoto, Katei seikatsu no gōrika, 9–10.

⁴⁰Ōta, Nichijō seikatsu, 130.

⁴¹Kaetsu, Kasei kōwa, 133–134.

⁴²Different architectural styles of gates had denoted class and authority since medieval times.

⁴³Ōta, Nichijō seikatsu, 149; Kaetsu, Kasei kōwa, 132–136, 149, 156, 169.

⁴⁴Oka, ‘Generational Conflict’.

⁴⁵Hatoyama, Fujin seikatsu, 20–22, 29–30.

⁴⁶Kaetsu, Kasei kōwa, 133–134.

⁴⁷Tsukamoto, Katei seikatsu no gōrika, 9–10.

⁴⁸Nishikawa, ‘Changing Form of Dwellings’, 21.

⁴⁹Sand, House and Home, 29–33.

⁵⁰Ishizawa, Kagakuteki kaji seisetsu, 282–283.

⁵¹Ibid., 302.

⁵²‘Seikatsu kaizen tenrankai shutsuhin posutā,’http://www.kahaku.go.jp/exhibitions/vm/past_parmanent/rikou/Field_8/Detail_805.html (accessed 28 April 2008).

⁵³Sand, House and Home, 73.

⁵⁴For example, one of the most popular and practical was Shufu no tomo[A Housewife's Companion]. On commercial women's magazines, see Sato, New Japanese Woman; Frederick, Turning Pages.

⁵⁵Ishizawa, Kagakuteki kaji seisetsu, 216.

⁵⁶Tsukamoto, Katei seikatsu no gōrika, 18.

⁵⁷Kaetsu, Kasei kōwa, 33–36.

⁵⁸Ishizawa, Kagakuteki kaji seisetsu, 38.

⁵⁹Ōta, Nichijō seikatsu no kaizō, 392.

⁶⁰For example, Ishizawa, Kagakuteki kaji seisetsu, 49, 146; Misumi, Fujin seikatsu, 161.

⁶¹Misumi, Fujin seikatsu, 4.

⁶²A full issue of the pioneering feminist journal Seitō[Bluestocking] was devoted to the play and Nora's putative feminism. Sievers, Flowers in Salt, 170–171.

⁶³Hatoyama, Fujin seikatsu, 5.

⁶⁴Ibid., 63.

⁶⁵Ōta, Nichijō seikatsu, 298–308; Miyake, Seikatsu kakushin, 49; Yamawaki, Muda naki seikatsu, 263–282.

⁶⁶Misumi, Fujin seikatsu, 24–26.

⁶⁷Tsukamoto, Katei seikatsu no gōrika, 37, 41, 56.

⁶⁸Miyake, Seikatsu kakushin, 122.

⁶⁹Tsukamoto, Katei seikatsu no gōrika, 55.

⁷⁰Misumi, Fujin seikatsu, 168.

⁷¹Hatoyama, Fujin seikatsu no kaizen, Foreword 2, 130, 137, 139, 180. For discussions about the self-cultivation boom among middle class women, see Sato, New Japanese Woman, and among female industrial workers, see Faison, Managing Women.

⁷²For example, Ōta, Nichijō seikatsu, 414, 433. Miyake Yasuko, in contrast, believed that after the earthquake it became necessary for middle class women to help support the family, and thus urged schools to produce more women who could earn a living. Miyake, Seikatsu kakushin, 11–15.

⁷³Kaetsu, Kasei kōwa, 237–241.

⁷⁴An illustration entitled ‘The Latest in Daily Life Improvement’ from the October 1934 issue of Ie no hikari[Light of the Home] shows how the government-sponsored movement spread from urban to rural target audiences. Reproduced in Garon, Molding Japanese Minds, 12. On the dissemination of domestic science in rural areas, see Kataoka, Nōson kaseigaku.

⁷⁵Inoue, Kasei shinron, 445–446.

⁷⁶For example, Kaetsu University's website: http://hello.kaetsu.ac.jp/outline/ (accessed 4 October 2008); Yamawaki Gakuen Junior College's website: http://www.yamawaki-gakuen.ac.jp/rekisi.html (accessed 4 October 2008).