Abstract
Whether idly spending their free time in Hibiya Park,3 experimenting with the latest hairstyles of the day, gossiping about the cute schoolboys they met on the street, or seriously poking their noses in schoolbooks, “bad” girls from good families did not embody the ideal of Japanese womanhood that their “good” girl classmates epitomized. Following the promulgation of the Girls’ Higher School Order (Kōtō jogakkō rei) in 1899,4 a small number of society’s elite daughters found themselves newly situated within the liminal space of the girls’ higher school. For the first time, wealthy daughters from the provinces were relocating to the city and intermingling with the natives at Tokyo’s best higher schools. Many of these girls, away from the surveillance of family and servants for the first time, were able to form new communities comprised of both Tokyo residents and non-Tokyoites. Precisely due to its liminal characteristics, the fledgling system of the girl’s higher school inadvertently provided the girls with opportunities extending beyond the walls of the classroom. Consequently, the emerging schoolgirl culture made it possible for the girls to position themselves in public spaces that had previously been off limits. As will become evident, it was their negotiation of these new spaces that largely defined their status as “good” or “bad.”
The sound of the bell was loud, and followed by the appearance of a beautiful, well-bred young lady of eighteen or nineteen. The long sleeves of her arrow-feather patterned kimono fluttering in the wind, her hair swept back at the sides and fastened with an innocent white ribbon, adorned in her ebicha hakama,1 she was riding on a Dayton bicycle, her slender shoulders gliding.
—Kosugi Tengai, Makaze koikaze 2
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Notes
Kosugi Tengai, Makaze koikaze vol. 1 (Demon winds love winds, vol. 1) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1999), 9.
See Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, Japan’s Modern Educational System: A History of the First Hundred Years (Tokyo: Printing Bureau, Ministry of Finance, 1980), 118–121.
Average tuition by 1907 standards. See Hoshino Sumire, Gendai jogakusei hōkan (Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Sentā, 1992), 197–206. In 1907, the starting monthly salary was 50 yen for a government official and about 12 yen for a policeman.
See Dōmei Tsūshinsha, Nihon no bukka to fūzoku 130 nen no utsurikawari (Tokyo: Dōmei Tsūshinsha, 1997), 564–593.
Statistics Bureau, Management and Coordination Agency, Jinkō tōkei sōran (Tokyo: Tōyō Keizai Shinpōsha, 1985), 80.
Ministry of Education, Gakusei 80 nenshi (Tokyo: Ōkurashō, 1954), 1049.
For various interpretations of good-wife-wise-mother ideology, see Koyama Shizuko, Ryōsai kenbo to iu kihan (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 1991).
Sharon Nolte and Sally Ann Hastings, “The Meiji State’s Policy Toward Women, 1890–1910,” in Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 171.
While studying English at Seibi Girls’ Higher School in 1908, Raichō was publicly condemned for her so-called love-suicide attempt with Morita Sōhei. See Hiroko Tomida, Hiratsuka Raichō and Early Japanese Feminism (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2004), 115–137.
Rebecca L. Copeland, Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000), 11.
The Meiji government’s revision of the Conscription Ordinance in 1883 made exemption difficult and under the Meiji Constitution of 1889 universal military conscription was established and all subjects were amenable to service. See Shinotsuka Eiko, Josei to kazoku: Kindaika no jitsuzō (Tokyo: Yomiuri Shimbunsha, 1995), 49–51.
Kawamura Kunimitsu, Sekushuariti no kindai (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1996), 123.
For a discussion on Kitamura Tōkoku, see Janet Walker, The Japanese Novel of the Meiji Period and the Ideal of Individualism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
Honda Masuko, Jogakusei no keifū: Saishoku sareru Meiji (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1990), 11.
See Saeki Junko, “Shiki” to “ai” no hikaku bunka shi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1998), 156–167.
Kosugi Tengai, Meiji Taishō bungaku zenshū dai 16 maki (Tokyo: Shunyōdō, 1930), 633.
Kawamura Kunimitsu, Otome no shintai: Onna no kindai to sekushuariti (Tokyo: Kinōkuniya Shoten, 1994), 223.
Hoshino Sumire, Gendai jogakusei hōkan, vol. 3 in Kindai Nihon seinenki kyōkasho sōsho (Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Sentā, 1992), 13.
Otsuki Hisako, Shinsen Tokyo joshi yūgaku annai, vol. 9 in Kindai Nihon seinenki kyōkasho sōsho (Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Sentā, 1992), 4.
Masaoka Geiyō, Shimbunsha no rimen (Tokyo: Shinseisha, 1901), 122.
Nakayama Akihiko, “Shōsetsu ‘Tokai’ saiban no gingakei. Kūhaku no seijigaku,” in Mitani Kuniaki, ed. Kindai shōsetsu no “katari” to “gensetsu” (Tokyo: Yūseidō, 1996), 55–81.
Tayama Katai, Futon (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1998),
Oguri Fūyō, Seishun (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1994).
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© 2005 Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley
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Czarnecki, M. (2005). Bad Girls from Good Families: The Degenerate Meiji Schoolgirl. In: Miller, L., Bardsley, J. (eds) Bad Girls of Japan. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403977120_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403977120_4
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