‘The Inner and the Outer Domain’: Sexuality and the Nation-State in Japanese Feminist Historiography

Abstract

'The inner and the outer domain' are the key terms of a model by Partha Chatterjee, with which he theorizes the conceptualization of colonial and postcolonial histories: The inner domain refers to the concept of the nation and the outer domain to the concept of the colonial or postcolonial state. Taking on this theoretical distinction, this article analyzes feminist historiographies of 1950s through 1970s Japan, namely the works of Takamure Itsue and Yamazaki Tomoko that deal with the categories of sexuality and the nation-state. I argue that both authors dealt with the sexual politics at work in premodern and modern Japan, and were theorizing history from a position that would nowadays be called postcolonial, depicting women and children as victims of sexual exploitation in a framework of domestic Japanese or international trafficking in Asia.