Women and Political Life in Early Meiji Japan: The Case of the Okayama Joshi Konshinkai (Okayama Women's Friendship Society)

Abstract

The Formation of Women’s Groups in Meiji Japan In 1882, one Murasame Nobu, a woman from Aichi prefecture, sent a letter to Itagaki Taisuke, the leader of the Liberal Party, and included 5 yen from her home employment (naishoku), which was making fireworks, to support the Party. Murasame would go on to become one of the founding members of a local women’s organization, the Toyohashi Fujo Kyōkai (Toyohashi Women’s Cooperative Association), about which most information has been lost. She later met famous liberal male activists and was even arrested for her involvement—along with her husband and other activists—in a failed uprising against the government (the Iida Incident), although she was eventually released due to a lack of evidence. Years later, she wrote a preface for the activist Ueki Emori’s Tōyō no fujo (Women of the East), revealing her commitment to raising women’s status, her high level of education, and her deep knowledge of famous women in Japanese history.1 What is surprising about Murasame’s story is that it happened at all, for the links between politics and masculinity in Japan have deep roots, and women’s political involvement has largely been cast as a twentieth-century tale focused on the quest for suffrage.2 Even in contemporary Japan, women can and do play a political role, but as Robin LeBlanc has demonstrated, female politicians and activists tend to highlight their femininity and “mak[e] creative use of the widely accepted stereotype that women are closer to the home than men are.”3 Obscured in the emphasis on the masculinity of