Section 7 | History, Politics and International Relations | Opening Session D, Panel
Chairpersons: Ulrike Wöhr (Hiroshima City University) and Andrea Germer (German Institute for Japanese Studies, Tôkyô)
Discussant: Hayakawa Noriyo (Yokohama City University)
Panel organized by the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ), Tôkyô
Much has been written to assert the affinity between Germany and Japan, two versions of the modern nation that are, at the same time, perceived to belong to historically and culturally opposite parts of the world. The culmination of the modern histories of both nations in totalitarian systems and wars of aggression has often constituted the focus of such comparisons, and the history of the relationship between Japan and Germany has been written in the conventional terms of political history, military history and history of ideas. Our aim is to reexamine this relationship from the viewpoint of gender history. We ask how discourses about women and by women helped to establish and maintain the wartime systems of both nations in sometimes similar and sometimes different ways, and how ethnicized images of femininity contributed to construct the ideology of Japanese-German affinity. We address the question of women as "culprits or victims" by deconstructing seemingly monolithic wartime ideologies of femininity and by looking at women as agents producing, modifying and sometimes questioning these ideologies. We also address the issue of how race (or ethnicity) and gender were intertwined in the nationalist and imperialist wartime discourses evolving within and between Germany and Japan.
With regard to concepts of nation and nationalism, feminist historiography and theory are no longer limited to issues concerning the exclusion of women from conceptual and factual domains of power and from decision-making processes. Rather the focus has shifted to the ambivalent integration of women into social, cultural, and political systems. This becomes crucial when examining the roles of women in wartime societies, with regard to the domains of decision making as well as to the discursive ways in which women and gender are addressed to make nationalist claims acceptable and desirable to both genders. In my paper I examine the two political women's magazines that had the highest circulation in wartime Germany and Japan. Nippon Fujin (The Japanese Woman) and NS-Frauenwarte (NS-Women's Outlook) were both organs of their respective states' streamlined women's organizations: NS Frauenwarte was published from 1932 through 1945 as the ideological publication of the Nazi women's organization NS Frauenschaft (NS Women's Organization), and Nippon Fujin, run from 1942 through 1945, served the same function for the official and supposedly all-encompassing Dai Nippon Fujinkai (Greater Japan Women's Organization). The magazines under scrutiny both form historical source materials abundant in text and imagery, that to date have received surprisingly little scholarly attention; this is particularly true in the case of Nippon Fujin. Moreover, although different in terms of length of appearance, quantity of circulation, number of readers, and historically and culturally specific contents, there are nevertheless striking similarities in the ways women are addressed. In this paper, I will examine both magazines with the following questions in mind: How are women represented and what are the models of identification offered to women in the wartime nationalist discourse of both magazines? How do these models of identification change over time? Are specific structures of gendered representation discernible? What are the German-Japanese cross-cultural references, and what role does racist ideology play in both magazines? Finally, how do the results of this case study relate to broader questions about the discursive relationships of gender, nation, and war.
Ulrike Wöhr (Hiroshima City University)
In this paper, I reexamine aspects of the wartime relationship between Germany and Japan from the perspective of "gender and race (or ethnicity)," aiming to contribute to reconstructing the phenomenology of a gendered and racialized German-Japanese relationship. My main sources are accounts by German women who lived in Japan during the war (including interactive texts like records of round-table talks and interviews) and reports about Germany under National Socialism by Japanese authors, both published in wartime Japanese women's magazines. The images of "the German woman" and "the Japanese woman," which I reconstruct from these sources, emerge most clearly in relation to the respective "other." Colonialism and orientalism (on the German side) as well as their counterparts of self-colonization and self-orientalization (on the Japanese side) are important features of these representations. However, the dichotomy of these (self-)imaginations of German women versus Japanese women is only one facet of this discourse. It is necessary to go beyond this dichotomy in order to bring into view the more or less explicit statements made about those "others" which do not seem to be part of the German-Japanese relationship but nonetheless determine the self-images of these two actors as well as their relationship to each other. For the German women these "others" are, primarily, the Jews (or Jewish women); for the Japanese women they are other Asians (or Asian women); and common to both is the military enemy, most often featuring as "the American (woman)." My discussion will contribute to gendering war and colonialism by confirming the importance of gender ideologies for nationalist and colonialist rhetoric, and by pointing to the agency of women as (re-)producers of such ideologies. Moreover, by analysing the parallels and intersections between gendered and colonialist discourse from German and Japanese perspectives, I will draw attention to multiple dimensions of power in the discursive setting of wartime Japan.
Martha Caspers, Historical Museum (Frankfurt am Main)
Fashion and its representation in women's magazines, like film industry and the variety show, were to a certain degree exempt from the rigid censorship that the Nazi regime exercised with regard to other areas of culture. Although Nazi propaganda purposefully denigrated the emancipated femininity that stood for the Weimar Republic, and reduced the "German woman" to motherhood and to her duties as Volksgenossin, with regard to fashion the policy was not to tighten the rope too much. The intention was, on the one hand, to create a modern image that would make National Socialism more easily acceptable for many women. On the other hand, the modern, elegant and international image of fashion and women that was promoted by most of the fashion magazines well into 1944 served to conceal just how much women's everyday lives had changed under the Nazis and since the beginning of the war. In this paper, I examine one Nazi institution - the Frankfurt Fashion School (Frankfurter Modeamt, hereafter: FM) - and representations of its products on contemporary photographs, which were reprinted in many fashion magazines of the time. FM fashion and its aesthetic presentation in the media exemplify the ambivalence characterizing Nazi fashion policy and the Nazi image of women. I will show how the FM alluded to the Weimar ideal of femininity while at the same time clearly distancing itself from this ideal. Other questions to be asked are how Nazi prescriptions of women's roles as reflected in FM fashion changed over time, and how they differed according to class. Subsequently, I will analyze the reception of FM fashion in magazines of wartime Japan. I examine to what end the Nazi images were utilized, and how their meanings changed not only with the different political and cultural back-ground but with how they were rearranged and with the context in which they were presented. This transcultural perspective confirms the ambiguity of Nazi ideals of femininity, throws light on the differences between female role-pre-scriptions in both societies and on how the "German woman" became a frame of reference for identity formation of the Japanese woman at the "homefront."