Marxian Approaches and Women's History in Early Post-war Japan

During the early post-war period Marxian approaches to history in Japan sought to enfranchise women so that they might begin writing their own histories and become participants within the drive toward revolution. History writing was conceived as an existential activity and cultural practice that could help women and the working class become agents of socio-political change. A number of women's history-writing groups found such approaches useful and adapted some of the core methods about history writing originally developed in Marxian approaches between 1945 and 1955. By grounding their approaches to history in terms of 'local' and 'regional' spaces, however, these women's history writing groups would also differentiate their socio-political objectives from those espoused by Marxists concerned with 'national subjectivity' (minzoku jikaku). Instead, through emphasizing the role of inter-class and even inter-gender cooperation within specific representations of the 'local' and 'regional' these groups hoped that such approaches could become models for other women's history-writing groups. This paper will argue that Marxian approaches were both a source of inspiration and difference for such women's history-writing groups in Tokyo, Nagoya and Ehime

The Erotic and the Vulgar: Visual Culture and Organized Labor's Critique of U.S. Hegemony in Occupied Japan

This essay engages the colonial legacy of postwar Japan by arguing that the political cartoons produced as part of the postwar Japanese labor movement’s critique of U.S. cultural hegemony illustrate how gendered discourses underpinned, and sometimes undermined, the ideologies formally represented by visual artists and the organizations that funded them. A significant component of organized labor’s propaganda rested on a corpus of visual media that depicted women as icons of Japanese national culture. Japan’s most militant labor unions were propagating anti-imperialist discourses that invoked an engendered/endangered nation that accentuated the importance of union roles for men by subordinating, then eliminating, union roles for women