Defending the Samurai: Alice Mabel Bacon and Meiji Japan at War 侍を擁護して:アリス・メーベル・ベーコンと戦時下の明治日本

Abstract

Alice Mabel Bacon (1858-1918), a friend and colleague of Ōyama Sutematsu and Tsuda Ume, authored three books on Japan and edited the English translation of a Japanese soldier’s war memoir. She and her work cross a wide range of terrain in the gender, diplomatic, and military histories of U.S.-Japanese relations in the Meiji period. In her writing, she depicted the samurai as the driving force in Japanese history from feudalism up to the present. Praising them for their role in developing Meiji Japan into a world power, Bacon identified evidence for her claims in the First Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War. In the United States, she challenged the construction of war reporting as a male domain when she questioned press accounts of a massacre carried out by Japanese troops, utilizing her expertise on Japan to stand her ground against a male reporter who emphasized her gender in an effort to undermine her argument. During and after the war with Russia, Bacon extolled bushido as the samurai ethos, which she depicted as having evolved into selfless devotion to the emperor. She also challenged the construction of war itself as a male domain by emphasizing the sacrifices of women on the home front. Bacon thus worked to familiarize Americans with three discourses promoted by the Meiji state and its supporters: the “good wife, wise mother” ideology, the “human bullet” myth, and bushido.