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Beauty in Disarray. Harumi Setouchi
Читать онлайн.Название Beauty in Disarray
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781462901500
Автор произведения Harumi Setouchi
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Серия Tuttle Classics
Издательство Ingram
Though Raicho Hiratsuka's inaugural message, which chanted aloud in soprano-like tones, revealed various logical contradictions in its long passages, it had sufficient charm to arouse in its readers a powerful response:
In the beginning Woman was the Sun. She was a genuine being.
Now woman is the Moon. She lives through others and glitters through the mastery of others. She has a pallor like that of the ill.
Now we must restore our hidden Sun.
The following day Tsuji gave Noe his copy of Seito. The moment she glanced at Raicho's words, she was passionately impressed:
I want, together with all women, to convince myself of the genius that is lying in women. I put my faith only in that one possibility, and I want the heartfelt joy of the happiness which comes from being born into this world as women.
We are no longer waiting for heaven's revelations. Through our own endeavors we will lay bare our natural inner secrets and make these our own spiritual revelations...
On that day we will possess the entire world, everything in it.
On that day we will be Rulers alone throughout heaven and earth, and on our own feet we will become genuine persons who will be self-existent and independent at the very core of Nature without the necessity of self-examination. And we shall know how pleasant and how abundantly satisfying it is to be in splendid solitude and loneliness.
No longer will Woman be the Moon. On that day she will be, after all, the Sun of her beginnings, a genuine human being.
We will erect a huge circular Palace of Gold radiating high on the Crystal Mountain to the east of the Land of the Rising Sun.
Women! Never forget that when you draw your portraits, always select a vaulted ceiling of gold!
Even though I perish midway on our quest, even though I sink to the bottom of the sea like a shipwrecked sailor, I will raise both my benumbed hands and with my last breath cry out, "Women! Advance! Advance!"
As Noe read aloud these words of Raicho as well as Akiko's poem, her jet-black eyes were overflowing with large tears. At this very moment when women were awakening as women, when they were extricating themselves from worn-out customs established long ago, hoisting their own flag and walking bravely by standing on their own feet, she alone was caught up in ancient conventions, bound by the chains of her old household and fettered to a loveless marriage.
Noe felt that the yearning for women's awakening and liberation pervading the pages of Seito would arouse the sympathy of each and every woman in Japan. A vision came to her of all women linking arms and encircling the earth like a garland, and she became so mortified and ashamed in seeing only herself left alone outside that line of women her body trembled.
Tsuji was moved more than he expected by Noe's sensitive response to Seito. Though he wanted to avert the danger of lending a helping hand to the grievances which came from her circumstances, he felt it his duty as her teacher to ease the pains he was witnessing and to lend some assistance to the proper craving of a soul longing for maturity. On their way to school and back or in the deserted music room after classes were dismissed, Tsuji, with Seito as his text, explained to Noe the history of the awakening of women in Japan.
In 1899, when the Girls' High School Decree was promulgated, there had been only about twenty such schools, but that year the number increased sharply to 250. As for colleges, Umeko Tsuda established Women's English College and Yayoi Yoshioka, Tokyo Women's Medical College, both in 1900. The following year Japan Women's College was created by Jinzo Naruse, and the Fine Arts Academy for Women by Tamako Yokoi. Still, even though ways of learning were opened to women in the Meiji era, no more than a handful of the privileged elite had been able to partake of these benefits. Just to receive an education at a girls' high school, how many miracles and how much exertion was needed for girls like Noe, raised in rural areas and in poor families!
On the other hand, before and after the Russo-Japanese War, publishing began to be established as an enterprise, and magazines solely for women were put out in rapid succession. Among them were World of Learning for Women, New Learning for Women, Women's Circle, Women's World, Paragon of Womanhood, Women's Literary World, Mauve, Women's Companion, Women's Review, Women of the World, World of Women, and Women's Pictorial. Yet these magazines were classified first into young women's literary magazines whose quality was low and content tinged with romanticism, and then into those of a practical order to teach housewives home economics. Although these magazines were not viewed as a strong active force in stimulating the advancement and awakening of women, at this time the trend in the European publishing world was to introduce ideas on the emancipation of women.
"Miss Ito, have you read Hideko Kageyama's Half of My Lifer
"No, not yet."
"You'd better read it. Viewed from the history of the awakening of women, Hideko Kageyama is the heroic woman who lit the signal fires for the first time in our country. She's from Okayama, and she was active in the movement for democratic rights."
"Is she living now?"
"Certainly she is. She's fallen in love and been married many times and has given birth to ever so many sons. She even fell in love with a man much younger than she was, Sanshiro Ishikawa, who was her husband's houseboy, student disciple, and comrade in the socialist movement."
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