Panel Title
"Figuring Modernity: Japanese Women as Agent or Object?"
Paper Title
Nostalgia and the Construction of Childhood: Women
Writing for Children in Taisho Japan
Author's Name, Institution and E-mail Address
Joan Ericson, Colorado College, jericson@ColoradoCollege.edu
Abstract
The retelling of folk tales (otogibanashi) as
children's literature
prefigured the late Meiji revalorization of communal
customs and rural
social relations - what Carol Gluck chronicled as the
adoption of an
"agrarian myth" in the wake of the Russo-Japanese war
of 1904/05,
subsequently developed in Yanagita Kunio's Tono
monogatari (Tales of Tono)
and the founding of folk lore studies. The recovery of
"worlds we have
lost" in stories written for children would continue to be
central to the
mission of the journal Akai Tori (Red Bird), the flagship
of Taisho era
children's literature. Women's contributions to Akai tori
- notably by
Yosano Akiko, Nogami Yaeko, and Tsuboi Sakae -
were prominent, frequent,
and significant. Yet women writers' relation to the
journal's program of
nostalgia suggested a different view of the Japanese
past. How women
wrote for children reflected a gendered approach to
nostalgia and to
alternatives in constructing childhoods. This difference
merits
consideration in appreciating the diversity of responses
in the Japanese
discourse on modernity.
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