Gender in the Meiji Renovation: Confucian 'Lessons for Women' and the Making of Modern Japan

Abstract

From the early Tokugawa period onward, the expression, ‘The hen does not announce the morning. The crowing of a hen in the morning indicates the subversion of the family’ from the Shujing (Book of Documents) was frequently called upon as a warning. At the height of the Tokugawa period, Ogyū Sorai deployed the authority of the Confucian Classics to subject the daimyo houses' ‘inner quarters’ (oku) to a scorching critique. But in conjunction with the Sannō Gaiki (Secret History of the Three Rulers), attributed to his student Dazai Shundai, Sorai's Seidan (Discourse on Government) could also be perceived as targeting the house of the shogun. While the anonymous author of the Sannō Gaiki meant to expose the sorry state of the shogun's rule, Sorai's Seidan offered a vision of what government ought to be like. Calls to remove ‘the hens’ from the inner sphere of power now rapidly grew in volume. Against this background, the ‘Meiji Renovation’ (Meiji ishin) must also be understood as an attempt to eliminate, in the diction of the times, ‘the power of the women’ (joken) from the deep recesses of the government's power structure, and to reaffirm the power (of men) which alone was considered legitimate. Thus, after their seizure of power, the imperial restorationists hurried to crush what they called ‘the power of women already lasting for centuries’ and moved an empress who ‘does not poke her beak into matters of government’ to the front instead. Ultimately, a program to educate ‘good mothers and good wives’, drawing on examples from Japan, China and the West alike, was embarked upon with the empress at its head.