By Sarah Danielzadeh
Japan’s Meiji period in the late 19th century was an era of rapid modernization and social upheaval and it was greatly influenced by Western scientific, philosophical and political ideas, said Smith College historian Marnie Anderson in a UC Santa Barbara virtual event last week.
Marnie Anderson, a history professor at Smith College, joined UCSB’s East Asia Center to discuss her talk, “Starting Over in Meiji Japan.”
Anderson uploaded a virtual talk “Starting Over in Meiji Japan: The Lives of a Former Samurai and his Ex-Concubine.” She recounted how two reform-minded individuals, Nakagawa Yokotarō and Sumiya Koume, were both offered a fresh start to create new identities due to the cultural shift in Japan from feudal to modern.
UCSB’s East Asia Center hosted a small group discussion with Anderson in a follow-up to her pre-recorded talk.
In 1871, Nakagawa, an eccentric bureaucrat and samurai bought out Sumiya’s geisha contract and made her his personal concubine, but their relationship ended nine years later when Sumiya converted to Christianity. Both became involved in social reform groups such as the Freedom Party democracy movement, the Protestant Christian church, and education advocacy, especially for girls.
Nakagawa worked closely with missionaries to adopt practices of Western medicine while Sumiya pursued education at Kobe college, where she fostered connections with missionaries. Women had newfound opportunity to focus on such reform efforts rather than solely running households.
“The bulk of my paper is dedicated to illuminating their subsequent paths. Their stories can tell us something about how gender roles and subjectivities changed across the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” Anderson said during her talk.
“In the 1910s, we see Sumiya engaging in mixed-sex networks around the Okayama church, but she is also involved in a number of women-only groups,” Anderson said.
These women-only groups became increasingly popular throughout the Meiji period and while some were explicitly political and focused on reform, other groups were devoted to the task of “enlightenment and moral suasion.”
After she left Nakagawa, Sumiya became involved with a local women’s group known as the Okayama Women’s Friendship Society, where a group of 40 women met twice a month to discuss political ideas, give speeches and found a school.
Anderson also spoke about how single women reformists, like Sumiya, were very modest about the reform work they did for their communities. She said that these women were very careful about the way they talked about what they were doing and how they wanted others to talk about them, due to the values of Christian modesty.
For example, when Sumiya was asked to be a co-founder of an orphanage in Okayama, she asked to do it anonymously. Anderson said that this was not unusual for women who entered realms that were formally off limits. “There was tension between what people were doing, which was a whole lot, and what they would speak on publicly,” she said.
Anderson found studying the “single ladies” to be an intriguing part of her research. “They didn’t talk much about themselves, but they had role models like Florence Nightingale and single foreign missionary women who were present in Okayama,” she said, adding that these women took advantage of their single status to do good works. “They had more time to do things because they weren’t running households.”
Sarah Danielzadeh is a fourth year English major and Professional Writing minor. She is a Web and Social Media intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.