Re: Women in WWII Japan

Iris, I love that you brought in this new information about life as a Japanese empress! What also impressed me about the readings, and what Professor Yamashita mentioned, was how women were on the frontlines in the acts of resistance during wartime. Knowing that a strong word like "defeat" was used first-hand in female's diaries seem to illustrate just how much women felt the effects of the horrors of war. While it is undoubtedly awful to recount the thousands of deaths overseas (like over one hundred eighty-five thousand in just 3 years!), women were the ones at home who had families to protect when the Allied bombings began in 1944. This is without even mentioning the fact that women at home dealt with attempting to feed their families while facing "dwindling food supplies" and tuberculosis/rickets/eye disease from malnutrition (p. 458-459). Unfrortunately, it seems women could not even express themselves as they wished either, as women were forced to dress in "monpe" and even unallowed to have certain types of hair (if it was too Western)...