Historian and Feminist Kanō Mikiyo: A Lifetime of Writing Against Japanese Imperialism = 加納実紀代の人生と著作： 歴史家とフェミニスト

Abstract:This article provides an overview of Kanō Mikiyo's life and contributions as a historian and longstanding feminist critic of Japanese imperialism. Kanō was arguably one of Japan's most influential scholars of gender, militarism, the emperor system (tennōsei), and nuclearism. As a childhood survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, until the end of her life, Kanō wrote about the relationship between Hiroshima and Fukushima. Her lifework exemplifies a legacy of Japanese feminist criticism that has cautioned against essentializing women as victims and mothers as peaceloving and instead illuminates women's conflicted, contradictory, and heterogeneous responses to state power. Kanō spent her life carefully examining women's participation in Japanese empire and the gendered dynamics of Japanese imperial ideology. This introductory article contextualizes how this translation of Kanō's essay, "The 'Emperor's Heart' and the 'Mother's Heart': What Gave Rise to the 'Mothers of Yasukuni'," is representative of her salient contributions to feminist thought that illuminate the relationship between the Japanese emperor and the maternal. This translated essay remains relevant to understanding the entangled intimacies of motherhood and militarism and how a seemingly natural desire for mother's love was incorporated into a gendered imperial statecraft that Kanō critiqued as maternal (bosei) fascism.