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The hapless wife had not only to keep house, bear children and submit to her mother-in-law's tyranny, but also try desperately to hold her husband against the competition of "pillow" geishas, concubines and casual prostitutes. The tea ceremony, the fan, the kimono, flower arranging, the obi, the intricate hairdo, the beautifully mannered deference—all became subtle weapons of allurement. The kimono was cunningly cut to reveal the nape of the neck, a feature that to Japanese men seems more erotic than bosom or thigh.
At its best, this training in submission and subtlety produced the kind of woman who has moved men of the West as well as of the East to rhapsody. Carried away, a writer in the Encyclopaedia Britannica described her: "She is entirely unselfish; exquisitely modest without being anything of a prude; abounding in intelligence which is never obscured by egotism; patient in the hour of suffering; strong in time of affliction; a faithful wife; a loving mother; a good daughter; and capable, as history shows, of heroism rivaling that of the stronger sex."
But history also shows that Japanese women strongly resented being turned into mindless dolls who could achieve nothing except by yielding gracefully, as the bamboo bends before the gale. There have been few Joan of Arcs or Molly Pitchers in the annals of Japan. Even the brilliant Lady Murasaki, who wrote the famed Tale of Genji early in the 11th century, felt it necessary to conceal her accomplishments. The only heroic-sized woman known to the Japanese is the legendary Empress Jingo, who supposedly conquered Korea in A.D. 200—but Koreans indignantly assert that absence of records proves she never existed. Until 1923, Japanese law declared that "women, children and mental defectives shall not be associated with political activities."
The Quake. It was no accident that this repressive law was modified in the year of the great Tokyo earthquake. A current Japanese joke says it took an earthquake to start the emancipation of women, and the atom bomb to set it going again. The 1923 temblor destroyed 60% of the city, killed 143,000 people and ruined many of Tokyo's upper and middle classes. In its aftermath, the educated daughters of these families (education for women dates from the Meiji Restoration in the 19th century) discarded their kimonos, bobbed their hair, donned Western dress and became sales clerks, elevator operators, bus conductors, teachers, journalists, lawyers, even company presidents. Bluestocking females campaigned furiously for women's suffrage and human rights.
This emancipation lasted scarcely ten years. The rising militarists, in destroying so much else, clamped down on women, and reasserted male superiority. But once Japan had plunged into war with the U.S., it was these same militarists who insisted that woman's place was in the factory. Even geisha girls were rounded up for munitions work, and housewives organized into "patriotic" associations to sew uniforms and make bandages. When the war ended in humiliating defeat, the men were totally discredited, and the young women ripe for transformation into mambo-garu—generally to the distress of their mothers, who had already forgotten that, as "daughters of the earthquake," they too had once been all for emancipation.