Adaptations of "Changes in Woman's Life Cycle - 1920" by Hirota Hisako. Reprinted by permission Japan Information Service. "Excerpts from Japanese Women: Constraint and Fulfillment," by Takie Sugiyama Lebra, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, HI, 1984. (pgs. 141-44; 300-311; and 266.)

a. Changes in Woman's Life Cycle - 1920

b. Japanese Women: Constraint and Fulfillment
... the majority of women, especially in prewar and wartime generations found their primary role and identity in the domestic sphere. Education was geared, foremost, for feminine accomplishments for a wife and a mother. Marriage was a necessary step for a woman toward her fulfillment, and in motherhood her personal identity was fused into the motherchild double identity... The stigma of female singlehood in Japan is such that almost every women over the "marriageable age" is eager to marry even without love. Once married, [differences in roles] could so sharpen that husband and wife would have nothing in common...

Schools operated under the assumption that the students' mothers are homemakers and always available to the children; companies expect their employees to be looked after by their homebound wives so that they, the husbands, will maintain their full-time or overtime dedication to the companies

. ... [There is a sex-based hierarchy.] Social structure dictates that women be inferior, submissive, more constrained, and more backstaged than men; that they be lower in status, power, autonomy, and role visibility. [In public, men act superior to women.] A husband who appears henpecked disturbs a sense of social order and thus invites ridicule from women as well as male peers.

The following are interviews with older women relating to their experiences in Japan in the period before WW II.

1. "What was most unbearable even to a patient daughter-in-law was the overt or covert restriction on the amount of food she could have... I was always the last to eat the meal. When I was going to have a second bowl of rice, my husband's sister asked her mother if there was enough for lunch. The mother said, 'Men go out to work, therefore they must eat a lot. Children, too, need a lot because they are growing up. But women are just playing in the house, they don't have to eat.' The daughter-in-law withdrew her rice bowl. Apparently all this was not witnessed by her husband; in an interview he stressed how harmonious the relationship between his mother and wife had been."
2. "The in-law relationship is stronger than blood parenthood. Many aspects of my mother-in-law are living with me. She was uneducated but knew many proverbs... 'Hard at night, then easy in the morning.' Finish the work at night says the lesson, however painful, so that you will have an easy time next morning..."