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| Hiratsuka Raicho |
Japanese women’s lives in Meiji era were not really as comfortable as nowadays. There was a thought of domination of men over women, like women did not have right to vote, it was thought that women should be “Good wife, good mother”, and they were told that they should not cut their hair short. Beautiful ladies often could not graduate high school because they had to marry someone.
In Taisho era, there were remarkable movements for women’s liberation which were started by so-called “New Women”, and one of these was Hiratsuka Raicho. “New women” is about ladies who had an independent identity and tried to change the traditional thought of sexual role. Because Raicho grew up in a modern-thinking family, she seemed to have quite forward-thinking kind of thoughts since she was an elementary school student. However, her father turned a Europe family style into traditional Japanese one, and made her go a traditional nationalist high school, so from then she needed to have a rebellious spirit by herself. She seemed to be a humorous person and passed through it by forming a group of skipping out called “The pirate”.
When Raicho was 25 years old, she started to publish a magazine called “Seito”, which contained articles about movements for women’s rights. In this era, it was prohibited for women to join politics and the Seito Company was punished by nationalist men. According to the web site “Kokoroni Kizamu Kotoba” (January, 2014), she wrote proverbs like “Women were originally the Sun but now it turned to Moon” [Editor's note: she continues “... dependent on another, reflecting another's brilliance”]. She was criticized by society, but women supported her. It can say that she made Japanese women aware of their own value.
There were also other women who tried to form their identity in the era. “Moga” were the girls who longed for and were influenced by European cultures in late Taisho era to early Showa era (around 1920), and it is short for “Modern girls”. There were also “Mobo”, a shortened form of “Modern boys”, and both terms included an ironic sense of “easily influenced”, but most others seemed also to have longing for Moga and Mobo. They wore Western styled fashion, and especially Moga cut their hair shorter, drew on eyebrows, and put on lipsticks (Web site “Nihon zokugo zisyo”).
There are some novels in which Moga appear. Katai Tayama’s “Futon” is about a writer who thinks that woman should have a traditional sexual role. He loved a modern girl and changed his thought, but her actions were thoroughly free and modern, and because of it, she went away from him and his heart was broken. There are so many novels (e.g. Ichiro by Soseki Natsume), comics, or animations about Moga (Haikara san ga toru), and I can see that the culture or that kind of people were so familiar then. Moga and Mobo thought like “Yankees” [Editor's note: Japanese “yankii” originally referred to a subculture of delinquent teens in the '80s and '90s. The word is often used in the way we might use “chav” or “white trash”], because their style was new, wicked and also rebellious. I think it is like gals in Shibuya or characteristic fashionable people and I feel like we are in a same race. I do not think about it usually, but females are still struggling or fighting for rights or a better situation, so it is a familiar thing to us and after searching this, I felt that there was a long history.
References
http://kari-kari.net/manmonth/2012/02/post-15.html
http://zokugo-dict.com/35mo/moga.htm
http://search.yahoo.co.jp/search?fr=slv1-snvaio&p=%E5%B9%B3%E5%A1%9A%E9%9B%B7%E9%B3%A5&ei=UTF-8
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