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‘Devoted wives and wise mothers’: The irony of Kita Ikki’s suffrage reform in relation to Choson Korea and Qing China

In 1919 Kita Ikki, in response to an apparent national crisis ‘unparalleled’ in Japan’s history, proposed a series of reforms for which he believed could propel Japan to leadership in the Asian continent, thereby expunging the toxins of western imperialism that threatened the culture and livelihood of the Asian nations[1]. Universal suffrage was one such reform, declared by Kita as an ‘innate right of the people’, necessary to protect the Japanese people against subjugation by an oppressive ruling class[2].

However, paradoxically, Kita proclaimed that “women will not have the right to participate in politics”, because Japanese women have “continued to be devoted wives and wise mothers” who have looked down upon politics as a realm of verbal warfare and violence not suited to their natural aptitudes[3]. This trope of the ‘devoted wife and wise mother’ evokes a particular irony with regards to Kita’s attempt at reform, most notably because it was an idea embodied within the societies of Choson Korea and Qing China, which were dynasties both subject to foreign humiliation: a scenario that Kita’s reform steadfastly desired to avoid.

For example, in Choson Korea, women were denied access to the civil service and public life more generally[4]. A woman’s role was conceived as participating in the moral education of her children, and more importantly, in creating a stable order at home, which was considered the sine qua non of female virtue[5]. In addition, any attempt to transcend this repressive order, such as through education, was generally chastised, and perceived as an ominous sign of misfortune within the family[6]. Furthermore, in Qing China, a chastity cult flourished that idolized this idea of the ‘devoted wife and wise mother’. Absolute fidelity to one’s husband, refusal to remarry after the death of one’s husband and even committing suicide after his death were behaviours considered central to the idea of the perfect woman[7]. In addition, women were denied access to public life, meaning they could not participate in the political sphere or even gain an education equivalent to their male counterparts[8].

By no means was Kita Ikki’s vision for a new political and social order for Japan as repressive as those exhibited above. For example, Kita believed that boys and girls should have the right to same education and work prospects (excluding politics), but also that the rights of women within marriages should be protected, such as by outlawing adultery and prostitution[9]. However, the significant factor that links these three phenomena is their veneration of the ‘devoted wife, wise mother’ type of woman. All three social orders exclude women from the political process and stress the importance of such concepts as chastity and devotion to one’s husband. The great irony here is that Kita Ikki was attempting to reform Japan into a progressive and modern state, capable of repelling western imperialism. Yet, Choson Korea and Qing China were relics of the past, and states that were subject to great amounts of foreign interference and humiliation (as Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910 and China suffered at the hands of the both the west and Japan in the Opium wars and the Sino-Japanese War of 1895). By invoking the idea of a ‘devoted wife, wise mother’ Kita appealed to an image that was indicative of more backward societies, antithetical to the image of Japan that he was trying to create. His logic here appears self-defeating, as not only does the exclusion of women from politics negate the notion of ‘universal’ suffrage, but the veneration of such a trope as ‘devoted wife, wise mother’ subverts the more progressive elements of his reform such as equal education, as it emphasizes a woman’s supposed proclivity to the domestic sphere.

 

[1] Ikki, Kita, ‘An Outline for the Reorganization of Japan’, in Wm. Theodore De Bary, Carol Gluck and Arthur Tiedemann (eds), Sources of Japanese Tradition 1600 to 2000 (New York, 2005), p.961

[2] Ibid., p.964

[3] Ibid., p.964-965

[4] Martina Deuchler, ‘Propagating Female Virtues in Choson Korea’, in Dorothy Ko, JaHyun Kim Haboush and Joan Piggott (eds), Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan (Berkeley, 2003), p.152.

[5] Ibid., p.153

[6] Ibid., p.153

[7] Fangqin Du and Susan Mann, ‘Competing Claims on Womanly Virtue in Late Imperial China’ in Dorothy Ko, JaHyun Kim Haboush and Joan Piggott (eds), Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan (Berkeley, 2003), p.220.

[8] Yi-Tsi Feuerweker, ‘Women as Writers in the 1920s and 1930s’ in Margery Wolf, Roxanne Witke and Emily Martin (eds), Women in Chinese Society (Stanford, 1975), p.144.

[9] Ikki, Kita, ‘People’s Right to a Livelihood’ in Brij Tanka (ed), Kita Ikki and the Making of Modern Japan: A vision of Empire, (Kent, 2006), pp.197-203.

‘National Spirit’ in the revolutionary agendas of Liu Shifu and the Guomindang.

 

As argued by Maggie Clinton in Revolutionary Nativism, nationalism can be a ‘Janus-faced’ phenomenon[1]. In the early twentieth century, Chinese revolutionaries looked to their nation’s past to ‘remap’ the present by invoking the idea of a ‘national spirit’[2]. Apparently existing from time immemorial, ‘national spirit’ would be the source of China’s modernisation, facilitating the social, political and cultural revolutions necessary for China’s national rejuvenation. This article examines two somewhat contradictory notions of ‘national spirit’- the Guomindang’s (GMD) invocation of Confucianism and Shifu’s appeal to Buddhism- arguing that such notions were imagined to support specific revolutionary agendas and to create a unified sense of Chinese identity in the face of foreign imperialism.

Liu Shifu was an anarchist of the early twentieth century who, disgusted by the moral decline and subservience of China to foreign powers, endeavoured to initiate moral reform for the purposes of strengthening the Chinese nation. In 1908, after being sent to prison for a failed assassination attempt, Shifu wrote his ‘prison essays’ which contained his thoughts on the ‘national essence’ of China[3]. Shifu blamed Confucianism for the supposed moral decline of China, arguing that it legitimized the self-serving Manchu government[4]. Furthermore, he detested the fact that Confucianism claimed sole heritage of the classics and that it was regarded as the fount of all wisdom in China[5]. For Shifu, the ‘national essence’ or spirit of China could be found in the precepts of Buddhism, from which one could discern universal values that would aid social reform[6]. One such value was gender equality, which Buddhist scriptures supposedly buttressed by arguing that women are more in tune with their spirituality than men and can thus more easily acquire the Buddha-nature[7].

This invocation of Buddhism as exemplifying the ‘national spirit’ of China is the antithesis to the GMD’s notion that it should reflect Confucian ideals. The GMD, who ruled China from 1927 until the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945, sought to revive Confucianism from the attacks levelled against it by revolutionaries such as Shifu, but also from the New Culture and May Fourth movements which sought wholesale cultural and social revolution[8]. They viewed Confucian principles such as filial piety and interpersonal obligation as necessary to cultivate citizens who would devote their lives to the nation[9]. Confucianism also fostered social harmony, thereby uniting China’s myriad ethnic groups together under a singular national spirit[10]. According to Clinton, this idea of social harmony also sanctioned violence against those people who threatened national cohesion, thereby legitimizing the militarist regime that the GMD were seeking to create[11].

The social harmony indicative of the ‘national spirit’ therefore gave the GMD a prism through which to oppose western encroachment on Chinese culture and identity. Hence, a key similarity between the GMD and Shifu’s conceptualization of a singular Chinese spirit is that they saw it as necessary to revitalize the Chinese civilization after a period of marked decline. For example, Shifu idolized Buddhist monks such as Yuekong of the Shaolin monastery who fought with 3,000 soldiers against the Japanese at Songjiang, thereby exemplifying the ideal of ‘daring to die’ for the nation: a key principle if China was going to truly withstand foreign interference[12].

Ultimately, the contradictory contents of these ideas of ‘national spirit’ are indicative of its malleability as a concept. Both the GMD and Shifu cherry-picked aspects of China’s past in order to support their respective revolutionary agendas. The expediency of the idea of a ‘national spirit’ is particularly true if we consider that Buddhism was a foreign import to China, which is an irony that anarchists such as Shifu were willing to ignore[13]. Nonetheless, despite the artificial nature of such an idea as ‘national spirit’, its utility is evident as a rhetorical device to help unify the Chinese nation, and more importantly, to construct an independent essence of Chinese identity that stood in opposition to foreign intervention.

[1] Maggie Clinton, Revolutionary Nativism: fascism and culture in China, 1925-1937, (Durham, 2017), p. 64.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Edward Krebs, Shifu, Soul of Chinese Anarchism, (Lanham, 1998), p.47.

[4] Ibid., pp.47-50.

[5] Ibid., p.50.

[6] Ibid., p.51.

[7] Ibid., pp.51-52.

[8] Clinton, Revolutionary Nativism, p.67.

[9] Ibid., p.73.

[10] Ibid., p.10.

[11] Ibid., p.11.

[12] Krebs, Shifu, pp.57-58.

[13] Ibid., p.49

The Buddhist-Imperialist Nexus: How Buddhist Doctrine Conformed to the Imperial Ambitions of Japan in the Early Twentieth Century.

In the early twentieth century, Japan sought to assert itself as a great power. Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 dismantled any notion of ‘white invincibility’, launching Japan into an imperialist odyssey whereby it attempted to become the hegemon of East Asia. Arguably, such hegemonic ambitions were achieved, for by 1942, according to Aaron Moore, Japan had secured one of the largest empires ever known in the history of the world[1]. Yet, the effects of Japan’s militaristic expansion were devastating, especially in China, whereby Japan’s territorial conquest resulted in some 14 million Chinese deaths[2]. Given such seismic consequences, how did Japan legitimise its imperialist expansion? Rana Mitter and Jeremy Yellen argue that Japanese imperialism was an attempt to rival the ‘west’: a quest to be considered equal to Great Britain and the United States[3]. Yet, such explanations overlook important cultural factors, most notably, the malleability of Buddhist doctrine in supporting Japan’s imperial ideology. As Brian Victoria notes, Zen Buddhism was viewed as the ideal doctrine for a modernizing Japan, and thus an explanation of Buddhist justifications for Japanese imperialism merits further exploration[4].

An interesting point of departure in our analysis is what Christopher Ives describes as the ‘accomodationism’ of Japanese Buddhism. For Ives, Buddhists in the 1930s interpreted concepts such as ‘on’, which is a debt of gratitude owed to those from whom one gets a favour, as representative of the categorical imperative of self-sacrifice central to a militaristic, imperialist regime[5]. Furthermore, citing a Buddhist journal called Chūō Bukkyō, Ives argues that Buddhist authors equated Japan’s imperial mission with the bodhisattva: the state of Buddhahood whereby one seeks to alleviate the suffering of others, not just oneself[6]. Evidently, Buddhist doctrine was used in myriad ways to justify the multitudinous aspects of Japan’s imperial regime and justified the pursuit of empire by framing it in terms of a virtuous and compassionate mission.

In addition, in Zen at War, Brian Victoria exposits the arguments made by the eminent scholar of Zen Buddhism Ichikawa Hakugen. Hakugen identified twelve Buddhist precepts that were receptive to imperialist interpretation, and thus, in turn, became the cornerstone of Buddhism’s collaboration with the militarist regime[7]. For example, the ideal imperial subject was conceived as being someone who sacrificed their individuality in order to become a servant to the state, intent on actualizing Japan’s modernizing and imperial mission[8]. This concept was supported by the Buddhist ideas of selflessness, but also the middle way doctrine[9].  For example, the middle way doctrine entailed the search for constant compromise, thereby avoiding confrontation, meaning that the imperial subject ideally accepted the prevailing social order in order to avoid conflict with others[10]. Moreover, the concept of karma, with its concomitant idea of retribution, justified inequalities in the social order, as good or bad fortune in this life was explained in terms of one’s conduct in a previous life[11]. Hence, the predicament of colonized subjects may merely be due to their bad conduct in previous lives, thus justifying their occupation. There were, of course, many other examples of Buddhist precepts that fostered imperialism. However, the crux of Hakugen’s argument is that this connection is deep rooted within the history of Buddhism, and thus the existence of a Buddhist-imperialist nexus in the early twentieth century is undeniable.

Hence, Japan’s pursuit of hegemony was not simply conceptualized in political terms, as Buddhism provided fertile ground upon which religious and moral justifications for empire could be made. Therefore, given that Japan’s imperial conquests are still a sore point in East Asia, particularly in China where anti-Japanese sentiments are rife, it seems surprising that the majority of Buddhist sects have failed to acknowledge their role in facilitating Japan’s military endeavours of the early twentieth century[12].  Yet, their role is evident, and should be uncovered if we are to truly understand this period of history.

[1] Aaron Moore, Writing War: Soldiers Record the Japanese Empire, (Cambridge, 2013), p.9.

[2] Rana Mitter, China’s War with Japan 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival, (London, 2013), p.5.

[3] Ibid., pp.24-26. Jeremy Yellen, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire met Total War, (Ithaca, 2019), p.3.

[4] Brian Victoria, Zen at War, (Oxford, 2006), p.58

[5] Christopher Ives, The Mobilization of Doctrine: Buddhist Contributions to Imperial Ideology in Modern Japan, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 26:1, (1999), p.101.

[6] Ibid., pp.89-90.

[7] Brian Victoria, Zen at War, (Oxford, 2006), p.171

[8] Ibid., p.172

[9] Ibid., pp.172-173

[10] Ibid., p.173

[11] Ibid., pp.171-172.

[12] Ibid., p.152.

Modernising China: Why Discourses Surrounding Love and Sex were Central to Republican China’s National Rejuvenation.

In Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China Prasenjit Duara maintains that the nation is often conceived as the primordial subject of history: the foundation upon which a multiplicity of social, political and economic phenomena may be analysed[1]. As such, historiography surrounding nationalism has often taken a ‘top-down’ approach, suggesting that the reification of nationalist sentiments is instantiated by governing bodies or international events[2]. Hence historians such as Lloyd Eastman, Maggie Clinton, Frederick Wakeman Jr., and William Kirby have analysed China’s quest for modernity as a response to the dynamic rise of fascist states in Europe, as Germany and Italy’s rapid national rejuvenation provided a model for nationalists in China who coveted national development[3].

However, these analyses provide an impoverished account of China’s ineluctable path to modernity. Most notably, they overlook how apparently superfluous cultural phenomena such as love, and sex could contribute to China’s national development. Frank Dikötter’s Sex, Culture and Modernity in China provides a necessary response to such historiography by demonstrating how ideas related to sex and sexual desire contributed significantly to China’s modernising discourse[4].

Dikötter argues that in Republican China interest in the subject of sex grew exponentially, as evidenced by the proliferation of new periodicals such as The sex periodical, The sexual desire weekly, The sex journal bi-weekly and ‘The sex journal’[5]. This interest was grounded in the belief that the control of sexual desire was somehow integral to the restoration of a strong China, for if ‘evil’ sexual habits could be eliminated, then Chinese citizens could sacrifice their attention to the development of the nation[6]. For example, great interest was placed upon reproductive health and the procreative behaviour of couples, as medical scientists sought to understand the optimum conditions with which healthy offspring could be produced, as such offspring could then be successfully integrated into China’s fledgling industrial workforce[7].

Contra Eastman, Clinton, and others, one cannot fail to see that discourses around sex and China’s national well-being were inextricably linked. Chinese nation-building was not simply a process of emulating Europe, rather, it embodied certain indigenous cultural transformations such as more open discourses surrounding sex and changing attitudes towards love. Haiyan Lee develops this argument in Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950 in which she demonstrates the significance of love in the discourses surrounding national development. The May Fourth Movement (a political and cultural movement emanating from Beijing in 1919) is one such example, where love and its free expression became symbolic of equality and autonomy from foreign interference[8].

Therefore, an intellectual history of the discourses surrounding China’s national development in the Republican period cannot and should not overlook these cultural factors. The history of Republican China should not be a history of competing political ideologies, viewing Chinese nationalism as a tabula rasa upon which a European creed could be imprinted. The Chinese path to modernity is more complex than this, and, in like manner to Dikötter and Lee, explanations which reflect these complex cultural and social dynamics are imperative.

[1] Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China, (Chicago, 1995), pp. 27-29

[2] Jing Tsu, Failure, Nationalism, and Literature: The Making of Modern Chinese Identity, 1895-1937, (Stanford, 2005), p.1

[3] Lloyd Eastman, Fascism in Kuomintang China: The Blue Shirts, The China Quarterly, 49: 1 (1972), pp.1-31. Maggie Clinton, Revolutionary Nativism: Fascism and Culture in China, 1925-1937, (Durham, 2017). Frederick Wakeman Jr., A Revisionist View of the Nanjing Decade: Confucian Fascism, The China Quarterly, 150: special issue: Reappraising Republican China (June, 1997), pp.395-432. William Kirby, Germany and Republican China, (Stanford, 1984)

[4] Frank Dikötter, Sex, Culture and Modernity in China, (London, 1995), p.2

[5] Ibid., p.1

[6] Ibid., p.2

[7] Ibid., pp.62-71

[8] Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China 1900-1950, (Stanford, 2007), p.5