Imagining Radical Women in Interwar Japan: Leftist and Feminist Perspectives

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between the female body and revolution in Japan during an era of immense social change (1923–31). It focuses on the different ways in which the female body is depicted by the socialist and feminist journals of the era, mainly through the medium of political cartoons. The publications under discussions are the leftist journals Bungei sensen (Literary arts front; 1924–29) and Senki (Battle flag; 1927–31) and the feminist journals Fujin undō (The women’s movement; 1924–41) and Nyonin geijutsu (Female arts 1928–32). In the interwar years, mass migration to urban areas, education for women, and a whole new range of jobs for female workers inevitably meant that women began to appear in the outside world in larger numbers. It was also an era during which women were struggling to redefine themselves in a modern urban society. What role did creativity play in these processes? An examination of how revolution might or might not be embodied in depictions of the female form provides interesting material for thinking about the ways that women were imagined in the revolutionary process and therefore how they might be imagined as part of the evolving modern Japanese state.