Japanese Women's Transnational Activism

Women’s Studies Spring 2009 Colloquium Series

Rumi Yasutake
Konan University, Japan

Abstract
This paper examines interaction among American and Japanese men and women in the Tokyo-Yokohama area during the 1870s and 1880s, focusing on the inception of a Japanese women's union in Tokyo of the World Woman's Christian Temperance Union(WWCTU), the largest women's organization in turn-of-the-century America.

The Japanese women's union was formed through the efforts of Mary C. Leavitt, a "round-the-world missionary” dispatched by the WWCTU.

By that pivotal moment, Japan had fully recognized the need to Westernize and modernize itself to sustain its integrity from the threat posed by the Western powers.

Preceding Leavitt were American missionary women, who had arrived in Japan along with government officials, traders and industrialists. The presence of American women in Japan, which demonstrated material wealth and advanced technology of America, were welcomed by Japanese men and women in the 1870s and 1880s when Japan looked up to the Western nations for its model for civilization.

From a macro-point of view, American women, who came to Japan for the expansion of their religious beliefs or of their moral movement, looked to be effective agents of American, especially cultural, imperialism. However, when you closely examine interactions between American and Japanese men and women, the seeming expansion of American cultural values and customs appears to be far more complex and illusive.

This paper investigates collaboration and contention among American and Japanese men and women who responded to Leavitt's call to organize a WCTU union in the Tokyo-Yokohama area in the 1880s.

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Center for Women's Studies, Center for Japanese Studies, Manoa Campus

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