Abstract
This chapter opens with an account of how Takamure suffered and ran away from domestic violence. Her pure heart, however, sparked an epiphanic transformation in her husband. In the process of overcoming personal crises, she achieved breakthrough growth and developed a highly holistic vision of the world, because she recognized her life experiences as a microcosm of collective socioeconomic phenomena. In the midst of her struggles, her native place—the Land of Fire—became the central metaphor for her unflinching desire to fight and rectify all forms of oppression. Takamure viewed internalized patriarchy, even among women, as a cultural bedrock that gave rise to authoritarian and hierarchical social structures. Hence, she advocated a wholesale restructuring of culture that would replace patriarchal paradigms with matricultural ones. Consistent with this position, her oeuvre was a coherent body of thought, despite the immense complexity and diversity of her claims and undertakings.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
See Kurihara Yōko, Hanryo: Takamure Itsue o aishita otoko (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1999), 110–11.
- 2.
See Ibid., 130–31.
- 3.
Hi no kuni no onna no nikki, in TIz, 10:127.
- 4.
Shō hakumei, in TIz, 8:339.
- 5.
See Ishikawa Junko, Ryō no chibusa o me ni shite: Takamure Itsue nōto (Tokyo: Seijisha, 1980), 26.
- 6.
Ronald P. Loftus, “Female Self-Writing: Takamure Itsue’s Hi no Kuni no Onna no Nikki,” Monumenta Nipponica 51, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 165; Hi no kuni no onna no nikki, in TIz, 10:211.
- 7.
Hi no kuni no onna no nikki, in TIz, 10:169–70; Loftus, “Female Self-Writing,” 162.
- 8.
Loftus, “Female Self-Writing,” 162.
- 9.
Iede no shi, in TIz, 8:318.
- 10.
A full script appears in Roji ura no ki I, although Fujii’s name is editorially hidden. See TIz, 9:227–29.
- 11.
See Kano Masanao and Horiba Kiyoko, Takamure Itsue (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1985), 137–44.
- 12.
See Kurihara Yōko,113–14.
- 13.
Iede no shi, in TIz, 8:306.
- 14.
See Nishikawa Yūko, Takamure Itsue—Mori no ie no miko (Tokyo: Daisan Bunmeisha/Regurusu Bunko, 1990), 111.
- 15.
Ren’ai sōsei, in TIz, 7:87.
- 16.
Roji ura no ki I, in TIz, 9:221.
- 17.
See Ishimure Michiko, Saigo no hito: Shi** Takamure Itsue (Tokyo: Fujiwara Shoten, 2012), 148.
- 18.
See Kano and Horiba, 44.
- 19.
Ren’ai sōsei, in TIz, 7:8.
- 20.
Ibid., 7:11.
- 21.
See Hi no kuni no onna no nikki, in TIz, 10:194.
- 22.
Kurihara Yōko, 98.
- 23.
Ibid., 8, 138–39, 169–70.
- 24.
See Hi no kuni no onna no nikki, in TIz, 10:477.
- 25.
Ibid., 10:479.
- 26.
Kurihara Yōko, 233.
- 27.
See Ishimure, Saigo no hito, 104, 326, 342.
- 28.
Hi no kuni no onna no nikki, in TIz, 10:480–81.
- 29.
Kumamoto City adopted the Higo camellia as its official flower in 1974.
- 30.
Resilient to frost and snow, camellias are evergreen shrubs that keep their dark green lustrous leaves all year round. Wild camellia flowers were adored in the eighth-century Man’yōshū (Collection of Myriad Leaves), the first of Japan’s poetry anthologies. With the rise of decorative arts in the Azuchi-Momoyama period (1573–1603), camellias became cultivated in scenic gardens. As exquisite garden objects, camellias became a vital component of the Japanese tea ceremony as well. During the Tokugawa period, the cultivation of camellias gained popularity among samurai in castle towns. See Hiratsuka Taizō, Higo tsubaki (Tokyo: Seibundō-Shinkōsha, 1964), 103–4.
- 31.
See Ishimure, Saigo no hito, 199; Jitsugetsu no ue ni, in TIz, 8:38; Hi no kuni no onna no nikki, in TIz, 10:13–16.
- 32.
Another striking feature of Higo camellias is that they do not grow in the wild. Under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate, the Higo samurai selectively bred them for medicinal, spiritual, and aesthetic purposes. Hosokawa Shigekata (1721–1785), the fourth lord of the ruling Hosokawa clan, encouraged them to grow camellias in a botanical garden for Saishunkan, the domainal medical school he established in 1756. Camellias, although originally grown in gardens, were styled into potted bonsai trees in the late Tokugawa period. Higo camellias have a single ring of petals with a multitude of pollen-rich stamens arrayed in a sunburst pattern. Their dignity and poise are emblematic of graceful simplicity and serene austerity. Higo samurai cultivators prized delicate single-petaled flowers over ruffled, voluminous ones. See Hiratsuka Taizō, 103, 105–6, 108.
- 33.
See Hashimoto Kenzō and Hobiba Kiyoko, Waga Takamure Itsue jō (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1981), viii. Horiba and Kano visited Hashimoto in September 1974. She posed questions and received answers, mostly by mail, until Hashimoto’s death on May 23, 1976. The questions she wished she could have asked him were three thousand in total, and her initial goal was one thousand.
- 34.
See Ishimure, Saigo no hito, 14, 144.
- 35.
See Hi no kuni no onna no nikki, in TIz, 10:241; Roji ura no ki I, in TIz, 9:223.
- 36.
The English translation is from Laurel Rasplica Rodd, “Yosano Akiko and the Taishō Debate over the ‘New Woman,’” in Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 180.
- 37.
See Hi no kuni no onna no nikki, in TIz, 10:68.
- 38.
Kano Masanao, “Kaisetsu,” in Kano Masanao and Horiba Kiyoko, eds., Takamure Itsue goroku (Tokyo: Iwanami Gendai Bunko, 2001), 18.
- 39.
Takamure Itsue, “Hoero josei (9),” Fu** sensen 2, no. 4 (April 1931): 60–61.
- 40.
Hiratsuka Raichō, Genshi josei wa taiyō de atta: Hiratsuka Raichō jiden (Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten/Kokumin Bunko, 1992), 4:300.
- 41.
See Hiratsuka Raichō, “Genshi josei wa taiyō de atta—Seitō hakkan ni saishite—,” in Hiratsuka Raichō hyōron shū, ed. Kobayashi Tomie and Yoneda Sayoko (Tokyo: Iwanami Bunko, 1987), 17. Hiratsuaka viewed the thunderbird with awe primarily for its “air of calm repose,” because it “lived at an altitude of 3000 meters, subsisting on alpine vegetation.” She also heard that the bird was “indigenous since the Ice Age,” and that it “turned pure white in the winter.” Hiratsuka Raichō, In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun: The Autobiography of a Japanese Feminist (Weatherhead Books on Asia), trans. Teruko Craig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 166.
- 42.
See Josei no rekishi II, in TIz, 5:718.
- 43.
See Hi no kuni no onna no nikki, in TIz, 10:60–61, 68.
- 44.
See Ibid., 10:233–34.
- 45.
See “Waga seishun no ki,” in TIz, 9:145. The Hizen fudoki (Topographical Record of Hizen) provides an account of a mysterious fire that descended from the sky. See Michiko Y. Aoki, Records of Wind and Earth: A Translation of Fudoki with Introduction and Commentaries, Monograph and Occasional Paper Series, Number 53 (Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 1997), 249–52.
- 46.
Tina Passman, “Out of the Closet and into the Field: Matriculture, the Lesbian Perspective and Feminist Classics,” in Feminist Theory and the Classics, ed. Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Amy Richlin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 185–86.
- 47.
Marie-Françoise Guédon, “Introduction,” Matrix: A Journal for Matricultural Studies 1, no. 1 (May 2020): 6, accessed July 20, 2022, https://www.networkonculture.ca/assets/matrix/Volume%201,%20Issue%20I%20(May%202,020)/2%20Introduction%20Guedon/2%20%20Introduction%20(en)%20%20Guedon.pdf.
- 48.
See Josei no rekishi I, in TIz, 4:118–38.
- 49.
See Ibid., 4:226–27.
- 50.
See Peggy Reeves Sanday, Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 30–31.
- 51.
Ibid., 29.
- 52.
Vandana Shiva, “Let Us Survive: Women, Ecology and Development,” in Women Healing Earth: Third World Women on Ecology, Feminism, and Religion, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000), 69.
- 53.
See Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 4.
- 54.
Ibid, 5.
- 55.
See Hashimoto Kenzō and Hobiba Kiyoko, Waga Takamure Itsue ge (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1981), 27.
- 56.
See Andrea Germer, “Continuity and Change in Japanese Feminist Magazines: Fu** sensen (1930–31) and Onna erosu (1973–82),” Gender and Modernity: Rereading Japanese Women’s Magazines (1998): 104, 107.
- 57.
“The Problem That Has No Name” is the title of the opening chapter of The Feminine Mystique.
- 58.
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell, 1964), 15–16.
- 59.
Friedan, 296. The title of Chapter 12 is “Progressive Dehumanization: The Comfortable Concentration Camp.” Friedan compares homes in American suburbs to Nazi concentration camps because both turned their inhabitants into docile, empty, and depersonalized robots.
- 60.
Nihon kon’in shi, in TIz, 6:213–14; Josei no rekishi II, in TIz, 5:998–99.
- 61.
Andrea O’Reilly, Matricentric Feminism: Theory, Activism, and Practice (Bradford, Ontario, Canada: Demeter Press, 2016), 2.
- 62.
Takamure Itsue, “Nihon ni tatsu,” Fujo Shimbun, January 1, 1932: 7 (7). For all articles in this newspaper, there are two sets of page numbers. The first ones refer to a facsimile edition. The second ones, in parentheses, are from the original edition.
- 63.
Diana Fuss quoted Stephen Heath as having written that “the risk of essence may have to be taken.” Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), 18.
- 64.
See O’Reilly, 3–4.
- 65.
See Akiyama Kiyoshi, Jiyū onna ronsō: Takamure Itsue no anakizumu (Tokyo: Shisō no Kagakusha, 1973), 24.
- 66.
See O’Reilly, 15–16.
- 67.
Fuss, 20.
- 68.
Josei no rekishi I, in TIz, 4:4. This is a term that Takamure specifically uses to invoke the need for “mother-child welfare,” a system that prevails in mother-centered societies. See Ibid., 4:68–73. The term has not gained currency in Japan, where maternal practices remain familial responsibilities in the private sphere.
- 69.
Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 177.
- 70.
Josei no rekishi II, in TIz, 5:890–91.
- 71.
Scott, 28–50.
- 72.
Miriam M. Johnson, Strong Mothers, Weak Wives: The Search for Gender Equality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 13.
- 73.
See Nishikawa, Takamure Itsue, 232.
- 74.
Ishimure Michiko, Hi no kanashimi (Tokyo: Asahi Bunko, 1991), 210–12.
- 75.
See Hōrōsha no uta, in TIz, 8:103–6; Hi no kuni no onna no nikki, in TIz, 10:13, 74; Hashimoto and Hobiba, Waga Takamure Itsue ge, 225, 229–40.
- 76.
Takamure, “Hoero josei (9),” 60.
- 77.
See Kurihara Yōko, 15, 21, 242.
- 78.
See Julia C. Bullock, Ayako Kano, and James Welker, “Introduction,” in Rethinking Japanese Feminisms, ed. Julia C. Bullock, Ayako Kano, and James Welker (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2018), 1, 7.
- 79.
Ibid., 3.
- 80.
Strictly speaking, Takamure was a “womanist” rather than a feminist, because she embraced woman-centered feminism and defined her position as a “new womanism.”
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sato, Y. (2023). The Man Who Transformed His Wife into a Matricultural Visionary. In: Takamure Itsue, Japanese Antiquity, and Matricultural Paradigms that Address the Crisis of Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17909-9_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17909-9_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-17908-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-17909-9
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)