“Whether my Body Breaks or the Plum Tree Withers”: Iwanaga Maki, Social Welfare Pioneer, and the jūjikai Women's Religious Order

Abstract

Maria Iwanaga Maki (1849–1920) was 23 years old in 1873 when she returned home after a community exile and persecutions of more than 3000 people carried out by the Meiji government. Historians in the public record refer to Iwanaga as otoko‐masari (man‐nish) when she stood up to a representative of the Shogun, while in her public work she became known as the sister of the intersection. She was a social‐work pioneer, believed to have cared for upwards of 900 children. During her family's imprisonment in Bizen (Okayama), Iwanaga's younger sister, Fui, and her father died. Iwanaga and her compatriots started the jūjikai Cross Society, that was the first Japanese Catholic women's order post‐persecution in 1879, working to assist those affected by epidemics and beginning one of, if not the first orphanage in the Meiji era in Japan. In this article by including a family tree, I consider how memory and emotion is transmitted across generations, drawing on Marianne Hirsch's “postmemory,” in the light of the narratives about Iwanaga. I examine three primary sources, including two spoken records and a photograph, to better understand the emotional person of Iwanaga, and her institution of onnabeya, or women's rooms.