Reviewed by: Coeds Ruining the Nation: Women, Education, and Social Change in Postwar Japanese Media by Julia C. Bullock Diane Wei Lewis Coeds Ruining the Nation: Women, Education, and Social Change in Postwar Japanese Media by Julia C. Bullock. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. Pp. xvi + 227. $79.95 cloth, $24.95 paper, $24.95 e-book. In 1872, the Education System Order (Gakusei 学制) prepared the way for Japan’s modern school system, calling for compulsory education and a national network of public schools. By 1907, all Japanese children—irrespective of gender—were required to attend school for at least six years. Educational mandates had a particularly significant [End Page 341] effect on Meiji women’s literacy and employment rates, which continued to rise in the Taishō period. Girls’ schools not only produced new teachers in the expanding school system; they also gave women the rudimentary education to become store clerks, bus drivers, clerical workers, waitresses, and telephone operators. This increase in women’s educational rates contributed directly to the explosive growth of women’s magazines and the rise of the new urban middle class.1 However, women still faced formidable barriers, for, despite increased access to education, the Meiji Civil Code (1898) and doctrine of “good wives, wise mothers” (ryōsai kenbo 良妻賢母) cemented expectations that education should prepare women for their domestic and reproductive roles. These expectations persisted during wartime—and even increased, despite a deepening labor crisis.2 After 1945, the Allies introduced policies to suppress militarism and eradicate “feudal” tendencies in Japanese society. Women’s education and political participation became a top priority, although during this period, too, expectations that women’s primary responsibilities lay in homemaking and child-rearing guided policy. General Douglas MacArthur famously voiced support for “emancipation of the women of Japan through their enfranchisement—that, being members of the body politic, they may bring to Japan a new concept of government directly subservient to the well being of the home.”3 The Allies mandated that compulsory education be coeducational to ensure equality between the sexes and facilitate democratization—but this “equality” was subtly gendered. Taking the longer history of women’s education in Japan into account, Julia C. Bullock examines arguments for and against post-war coeducation in Coeds Ruining the Nation: Women, Education, and Social Change in Postwar Japanese Media. This lucid and compact study draws on materials from the Gordon W. Prange Collection (University [End Page 342] of Maryland) to analyze popular discourse on coeducation (danjo kyōgaku 男女共学) from the immediate postwar period to the mid-1960s. In particular, Bullock traces how the ideology of gender complementarity—“separate but equal” (p. 14) social roles for men and women—influenced educators’, parents’, and students’ attitudes toward coeducation. First, Bullock argues that “the ideological underpinnings of this good wife, wise mother system of education stressed an idealized form of complementarity in sex roles that remained influential in the postwar decades, in spite of Occupation-period reforms that sought to promote equality of educational opportunity” (p. 23). Second, she points out that while objections to coeducation reflected fears that such arrangements would lead to sexual experimentation among youth, there was in fact deeper concern for “the potential for coeducation to erode gender norms and role distinctions” (p. 31). Third, she contends that young people who navigated the transition to coeducation were generally more open to the possibilities of this new arrangement than their parents and other adults were. The book begins with an overview of preparations and negotiations related to the Fundamental Law of Education (FLE, 1947), drafted at the behest of the Allies, which mandated nine years of compulsory and coeducational schooling. The finished law also provided (weak) endorsement for coeducation beyond mandatory schooling, at the high school and university levels. Following the introduction and a background chapter on the FLE (chap. 1), each chapter focuses on a distinct kind of print material: newspaper articles (chap. 2), cartoons (chap. 3), students’ essays in youth-association and school newsletters (chap. 4), roundtables featuring student participants (chap. 5), and literature, magazine articles, and films that fueled the mid-1950s moral panic surrounding juvenile delinquency (chap. 6). It is worth noting that chapters 2...
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Oct 7, 2024
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