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Sujin Lee
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Differing Conceptions of “Voluntary Motherhood”:
Yamakawa Kikue’s Birth Strike and Ishimoto Shizue’s
Eugenic Feminism
Sujin Lee
Sujin Lee received her Ph.D. in history from Cornell University in 2017 and is postdoctoral fellow
at the UCLA Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies. Her dissertation, Problematizing Population:
Politics of Birth Control and Eugenics in Interwar Japan, explores the impact of various population
discourses among Japanese intellectuals, activists, and bureaucrats on the reconfiguration of
population control, sexual reproduction, and motherhood during the interwar years.
© 2017 by Jōsai International Center for the Promotion of Art and Science, Jōsai University
Yamakawa Kikue (1890-1980) and Ishimoto Shizue (1897-2001, later Katō Shizue
after marrying labor activist Katō Kanju in 1944) were feminist pioneers of the birth
control movement and established the first birth control organization in Japan, the Japan
Birth Control Research Group (Nihon Sanji Chōsetsu Kenkyūkai), in May 1922, led by
Ishimoto. Ishimoto observed Sanger’s birth control movement firsthand during her stay in
New York between 1919 and 1920. After returning to Japan in September 1920, Ishimoto
worked to introduce birth control to Japanese society (Ishimoto 1935 and 1984; Hopper
2004). Organization members included physician Kaji Tokijirō (1858-1930), socialist and
baron Ishimoto Keikichi (1887-1951), socialist and Waseda University professor Abe
Isoo (1865-1949), and labor activist Suzuki Bunji (1885-1946). The group published the
magazine Shōkazoku (Small Family) along with a series of pamphlets promoting birth
control. Although the organization disbanded less than a year later, the birth control
movement continued throughout the interwar period as different actors—social reformists,
proletarian activists, and feminists—agreed on the need to control population size and
improve the “quality” of the Japanese population on eugenic grounds.
I add to the growing body of scholarship in English, Japanese, and other world
languages that has delved into the political dimensions of birth control to address questions
of sexuality and reproduction within broader contexts of modern Japanese society. This
article sheds new light on the history of birth control by arguing that the transnational
discourse of problematizing populations was an integral part of Japanese feminists’
advocacy for birth control. For example, Fujime Yuki (1997), in her comprehensive
analysis of sex and gender systems in modern Japan, locates the prewar history of the
birth control movement within long-term conflicts between state power and individual
sexual freedom. Sabine Frühstück (2003), by focusing on social discourses and knowledge
production about sexuality, broadens the notion of power to include the social control of
sex and emphasizes intellectuals’ roles in normalizing and regulating sexual behaviors such
as artificial birth control. As opposed to these two researchers who address the question
of control in the politics of birth control, Ogino Miho (2008) sheds light on Japanese
citizens’ responses to the political and social control of individuals’ reproductive bodies.
Ogino considers birth control as both a biopolitical technology and the sexual practice of
individuals; she examines the often-overlooked fissures between discourse and practice
in the politics of reproduction. Despite different understandings of power and agency
in the politics of birth control, these scholars all agree with the underlying premise that
social and scientific discourses on birth control exemplify the politics of women’s bodies
in modern Japan. While previous literature confines the history of birth control within
national borders and the politics of female sexuality, my article analyzes the intersection
of population discourses, feminist movements, and transnational birth control campaigns.2
I argue that Yamakawa and Ishimoto, as leaders of the Japanese birth control
movement, played important roles in redirecting transnational birth control debates toward
the feminist critique of domestic socioeconomic structures. Although numerous studies
have examined prewar feminist movements and perspectives on motherhood and have
accounted for the complex relationships between women and the state, production and
reproduction, and gender equality and bodily differences, there has been little attention
to the interplay between population discourses and Japanese feminists’ advocacy for
reproductive autonomy (e.g. Miyake 1991; Molony 1993 and 2000; Mackie 2003; Uno
2005; Otsubo 2005). This article considers the birth control movement, contraceptives, and
eugenics as “population discourses,” namely, languages, movements, and technologies
that problematize, regulate, and govern the population. Through the lens of population
discourses in the interwar period, this article reveals how Japanese feminists actively
embraced birth control and “eugenics” as a scientific means to empower women and
reorder gender relations. As Diane Paul (1998, 19) keenly observes, eugenics has been
“a protean concept” throughout modern history, which has been easily bonded with
humanitarian politics, its goal for biological progress. This article defines eugenics as a
scientific discourse encouraging people with desirable traits to have many children while
regulating the reproduction of racial inferiors.
Sanger’s concept of “voluntary motherhood” epitomizes the interplay between
population discourses and feminism in the United States and Japan during the interwar
years. Voluntary motherhood—a term used by Margaret Sanger in the late 1910s,
borrowed from late-nineteenth-century American women’s suffrage groups and Free
Love groups (Gordon 1973)—was reinterpreted by Yamakawa and Ishimoto in the
Japanese social context of the 1920s. Originally, Sanger used voluntary motherhood
to emphasize women’s self-determination of motherhood and to integrate her feminist
pursuit of reproductive autonomy with Neo-Malthusianism and eugenics. The crux of
Sanger’s birth control movement was to promote women’s reproductive autonomy to
transform the womb from the birthplace of poverty into the birthplace of a healthy race.
In their cross-border circulation of voluntary motherhood, Yamakawa and Ishimoto did
more than simply translate the concept as “bosei” (voluntary motherhood) or “jishuteki
bosei” (autonomous motherhood) or repeat Sanger’s discourse; instead, they reconfigured
the concept in service of the quantity and quality of the Japanese population, an agenda
that was further diversified by Yamakawa and Ishimoto’s opposing political goals.
Accordingly, I will examine the collaborations and conflicts within the Japanese feminist
birth control movement that led to the politicization of women’s reproductive roles, and
conversely to the sexualization of the politico-economic system.
and condemned the capitalist system as being the root cause of socioeconomic inequality;
for example, leading socialist Kawakami Hajime (1879-1946) advocated for the
abolition of the capitalist mode of production as the fundamental solution for population
problem (Kawakami 1927). It should be noted, however, that both Neo-Malthusianism
and socialism shared an economic determinism concerning the relationship between
population and resources. Whereas Neo-Malthusianists believed that the balance between
population and resources could be acquired by reducing population growth, socialists
advocated an equal distribution of wealth or an increase in wealth (Abe 1931; Kawakami
1927). Discussion of reproduction as the bodily experience of women and as an object of
patriarchal exploitation was absent in both kinds of purely economic reasoning. Yamakawa
positioned herself as a critic of Neo-Malthusianism and socialism to remind both groups
of the fact that birth control had to be a permanent goal even after overpopulation or
poverty was resolved by the proletarian revolution (Yamakawa 1921a, 284-286). In her
view, voluntary motherhood could not be reduced to economic determinism but instead
retained its own merit as an expression of individual free will.
Yamakawa basically agreed with the Marxist denunciation of the Malthusian
theory that poverty was caused by rapid population growth and the resultant depletion
of resources as a mechanistic presumption. Yamakawa (1920, 201) pointed out that “[n]
owadays, it is the unfair distribution of products rather than low productivity relative to
population growth that prevents the reduction of poverty encountered in some societies.”
Yamakawa (1920, 201) concluded that the fundamental solution to social problems
should be focused on “the change in the system of production and distribution instead of
that in overpopulation.”
Yamakawa (1921a, 271-282) gave two general reasons for her critique of Neo-
Malthusianism’s causal link between overpopulation and social problems: 1) the socialist
optimism of technology and human progress, and 2) the Marxist understanding of
overpopulation as the necessary condition for exploitation. Yamakawa drew upon
critiques of the population problem by Karl Marx, Peter Kropotkin, and August Bebel
who offered bright pictures of human progress based on technological development and
growing food resources. Drawing on German socialist Bebel’s accounts of production and
reproduction under capitalism in Women Under Socialism, originally published in 1879,
Yamakawa (1921a, 281-282) argued that the idea that a surplus population could outstrip
food resources was mistaken because of a superabundance of yet untapped resources:
Humanity must still multiply considerably to do justice to all the tasks that are awaiting
it. The soil is far from being cultivated as it might be, and almost three-quarters of
the surface of the earth are still uncultivated, because there are not enough people to
undertake its cultivation. The relative excess of population that today is continually
produced by the capitalistic system to the detriment of the working class and of society
will prove a blessing on a higher level of civilization (Bebel 1971, 494; quoted in
Yamakawa 1921a, 281-282).
Christian socialist turned anarchist. Her conflict with her fellow Japanese socialists was
fundamentally due to her recognition of women as both individual subjects and members
of the proletariat.4 To Yamakawa, women’s bodies and reproduction lay simultaneously
inside and outside the domain of the class struggle because women were not only workers
who pursued social equality and liberty but also individuals with freedom of choice.
Reproduction could not be an exception and thus had to be respected as the realm of
individual rights (Yamakawa 1921a, 285). While most socialists incorporated women’s
reproductive rights into the political goals of the proletariat, they not only denied
women’s individual subjectivity but also regarded the feminist advocacy for birth control
as a marginal issue in the proletarian movement.5 Yamakawa (1920, 202) must have been
aware of this disavowal of women’s individual freedom for the ultimate goal of socialism
given her sharp question: “what will happen if society provides welfare for people in
the future so that birth control is no longer needed for economic reasons?” Defining
women’s place at the intersection between individual rights and class interests was deeply
problematic in the socialist debate of birth control.
Evidence of the conflicting definitions of women and reproduction is found in the
debate between Yamakawa and Ishikawa in 1921. This debate on the rights and wrongs
of contraception revealed their opposing views on two issues: first, whether birth control
served the interests of bourgeois ideology or women, particularly proletarian women;
and second, whether birth control would be needed once poverty was solved by the
proletarian revolution.
In regard to the first question, Ishikawa (1921, 34) saw contraception as merely “the
pleasure (dōraku) of bourgeois intellectuals” and a “tricky philosophy born out of modern
decadence.” This objection resonated with his antipathy toward all social and relief works
whose humanitarianism invariably buttressed capitalist and commercialist interests. In
response, Yamakawa (1921b, 244) criticized Ishikawa’s bourgeois mentality in equating
contraception merely with “pleasure” while overlooking women’s burden. In her view,
“women, particularly proletarian women who are working mothers” bore the burdens of
childbirth, parenting, and education which ought not to be ridiculed by an androcentric
indifference to women’s labor (Yamakawa 1921b, 244).
Yamakawa’s critique of women’s domestic labor suggests that women’s
exploitation was mainly defined by their natural motherhood—that is, the gendered
representation of motherhood as biologically predetermined—and class could only
intensify or mitigate women’s sexualized labor. It can be said that Yamakawa was keenly
aware of how the gendered categories of sex and class determined women’s experiences
and thus how particularly difficult proletarian women’s experiences were due to the
dual shackles of feudal patriarchy and capitalism. Her understanding of the intersection
of sex and class contrasts with Ishikawa who overlooked the question of motherhood
altogether. From Yamakawa’s view, Ishikawa was ultimately complicit in the subjection
of women because of the androcentrism common to both bourgeois intellectuals and
socialist activists who excluded sex from socioeconomic domains. In other words, the
bourgeois and socialist circles were ultimately complicit in sexualizing domestic work
and thereby domesticizing women.
The second question further reflects Yamakawa’s and Ishikawa’s opposing views
on the place of women between nature and society, that is, between biological motherhood
and the social relations of capitalism. While Ishikawa envisioned a socialist state in
which the economic burden of childbirth and child rearing would just simply disappear,
Yamakawa asserted that women’s rights to reproductive choice had to be protected even
in a socialist state. Yamakawa (1921b, 247) asserts:
In short, [in an ideal society], people should be able to choose whether to give birth or
not at their free will, just like they do when deciding marriage… I have no doubt that
the difficulties in getting married for economic reasons would be solved in the future.
However, that cannot be directly linked to the conclusion that women will no longer
need reproductive choice. In the same manner, the uselessness of contraception for
economic reasons should be distinguished from the issue of birth control as women’s
rights to decide on motherhood.
to refer to giving birth to a child when one wants to become a parent. However, insofar
as we live in the era of capitalism under which parents’ duty of childrearing is a social
convention, “voluntarily having a child” necessarily pursues the goal of “sanji seigen.”
Therefore, it is inevitably appropriate to translate birth control as “sanji.”6
Thus Ishimoto was careful in defining the terms of the birth-control debate. She translated
voluntary motherhood as “jishuteki bosei,” which in a literal sense means “autonomous
motherhood,” referring to a women’s free choice to have a child. She used the term “sanji
seigen” for birth control when emphasizing socioeconomic reasons for contraception. In
other words, while the term voluntary motherhood was employed to empower mothers
to reproduce at their will; the term “birth control” was often used when addressing the
malaise of capitalism by controlling reproduction. To Ishimoto, the terms “voluntary
motherhood” and “birth control” were not necessarily mutually exclusive but rather
exemplified the multilayered advantages of contraception. The fluidity of terminology
promoted public debate.
Ishimoto ([1921] 2000) writes that the potential for “bunka seikatsu”—or “modern
life,” namely physical health, a high standard of civilized living, and levels of income and
consumption—among European populations decreased as the rates of human reproduction
increased, and she equated Japan’s population crisis to this situation. She reasoned that the
imbalance between population growth and food resources in Japan was worse than that in
European countries due to Japan’s mountainous territory making agriculture difficult and
leading to a high population density. Ishimoto presented Japan’s population problem as a
fait accompli; hence, a solution was required to stem or reverse the increasing size of the
population. Because she saw the uncontrolled fertility of Japanese people as the root cause
of socioeconomic problems, Ishimoto believed birth control to be the preordained solution.
Women’s liberation was another crucial factor in Ishimoto’s advocacy for birth
control. Ishimoto ([1921] 2000, 267) claimed that Japanese women’s social status was
relatively low because they lacked time and money to develop and liberate themselves.
Ishimoto ([1921] 2000, 267-268) believed that this dearth of time and money was a result
of women’s frequent pregnancies and the physical and economic burdens of childrearing
and domestic labor. Ishimoto argued that uncontrolled fertility also had a detrimental effect
on the health of Japanese children, which was one reason that she embraced eugenics.
In her use of eugenics as the expected effect of birth control, the question of whether
genetic or environmental factors was more determinantal to human reproduction was less
important than the goal of eugenics itself: the reproduction of mentally and physically
healthy offspring. She believed that healthy, enlightened mothers who practiced birth
control advanced this goal. Ishimoto ([1921] 2000, 268) concluded that “the only solution
for the population problem in Japan is birth control… It is primarily a women’s issue. It
is not strange at all that the population problem that has troubled great male politicians
so far can be resolved by women.” The goal of women’s liberation was not synonymous
with women’s civil freedom but rather with the rearrangement of gender norms through
an altered meaning of reproduction. To Ishimoto, reproducing healthy children was the
new prescribed norm for women.
The paradox in linking feminism and eugenics lies in the assumption that all
women are mothers. In other words, liberation from “involuntary” motherhood still
depended on women’s reproductive role. Mothers were political subjects only to the
extent that their reproductive role influenced the national population. Initially, Ishimoto
championed women’s liberation as one of the chief principles of birth control while, at the
same time, arguing that voluntary motherhood would strengthen motherhood. In an essay
titled “Women’s Liberation and Birth Control” (Fujin kaihō to sanji chōsetsu), published
in the inaugural issue of Small Family, Ishimoto ([1922] 1993a, 578) summarized this
ambivalence:
The birth control movement is a prerequisite for the issue of women’s liberation.
We women have been ruled by a slave morality and have resigned ourselves to the
forced duty of motherhood. However, times have changed. Motherhood in the true
sense becomes possible only when a married woman who is physically, mentally, and
financially qualified to be a mother gives birth to a beloved baby at her own will. In
light of this, birth control can be interpreted as voluntary motherhood.
of their innate political subjectivity. The differences between the multiple definitions of
“motherhood” depended upon the vision for political subjectivity that each individual
birth control advocate pursued.
The different visions for voluntary motherhood held by Yamakawa and Ishimoto
added a new condition of controllable reproduction to the existing feminist discussions
about whether motherhood was an essential component of womanhood; this fact was
exemplified by the motherhood protection debate (bosei hogo ronsō) in 1918 and 1919.
Sparked by Yosano Akiko’s (1878-1942) critique of women’s dependency on men and
the government in the magazine Fujin kōron (Women’s Review), four female critics—
Yamakawa, Yosano, Hiratsuka Raichō (1886-1971), and Yamada Waka (1879-1957)—had
a heated discussion on the issue of motherhood protection, each representing a different
viewpoint. The motherhood protection debate generally divided Japanese feminists into
two camps: 1) those who argued for the rights of the mother, as represented by Hiratsuka,
and 2) those who advocated women’s rights in general, led in part by Yosano. Endorsing
the Swedish feminist Ellen Key’s (1849-1926) maternalist feminism, Hiratsuka supported
the rights of mothers, whereas Yosano, based on her reading of Olive Schreiner (1855-
1920), advocated women’s economic independence by means of providing more chances
for employment to help them achieve rights in other areas. To Yosano (1918, 85-86),
domestic labor, including reproduction, nurturing, and various household chores, was
nothing more than “parasitism” (iraishugi), and, by the same reasoning, governmental
protection of domestic work would result in an intensification of women’s economic
dependency and servitude. In contrast, Hiratsuka ([1918] 1984, 86-91) argued that the
state should provide social assistance for the protection of motherhood. Influenced by
Key’s view that motherhood is the natural vocation of women, Hiratsuka believed that
the rights of mothers were central to women’s rights. The conflict between the rights of
women and the rights of mothers reveals a fundamental discrepancy in acknowledging
gender equality and difference. To Yosano, gender equality was the ultimate goal,
whereas Hiratsuka believed that gender difference had to be protected to ensure equality.
A few years later, Yamakawa and Ishimoto reframed the question of which should
be prioritized—gender difference or gender equality—by adding the issue of controlling
reproduction. Yamakawa adhered to her socialist feminist perspective on gender and
class. Acknowledging socioeconomic dimensions of women’s distinctive experiences
under capitalism, Yamakawa resisted the idea of reducing women to idealized mothers
or to an abstract, homogenized class. To her, birth control was essentially a revolt against
the capitalist and patriarchal representation of gender difference. However, Ishimoto
advanced notions of gender difference by strengthening women’s distinctive reproductive
roles. It should be noted that Ishimoto did not simply repeat previous feminist arguments
Natsu and Niizuma Itoko, liberal feminists involved in the women’s suffrage movement;
the labor activist Akamatsu Tsuneko; Yamamuro Tamiko, daughter of Yamamuro Gunpei
and a Christian who worked for the salvation army; and medical doctor Yamamoto
Sugiko. The chief aims of the group were to educate women in the specific methods
of contraception, provide medical guidance regarding birth control, and to manufacture
and sell contraceptive devices such as pessaries and jellies. This group operated birth
control clinics in Tokyo’s Shinagawa district starting in 1934. These efforts epitomized
the pragmatic ways in which Ishimoto attempted to transform individual women into self-
conscious subjects of population control.
This shift in the strategies of Ishimoto’s birth control movement, however, did not
necessarily mean the absence of ideological justifications. Motherhood and biological
relationships that had been emphasized in Ishimoto’s eugenic feminism were more
specifically targeted at Japanese mothers. For example, one of the pamphlets published
by the Women’s Birth Control League of Japan, In a World Full of Difficulties (Sechigarai
yononaka ni), illustrates how motherhood and organic bodies were made the basis of
the family and the nation-state (Nihon Sanji Chōsetsu Fujin Dōmei 1934, 130). The
family and the nation-state constituted the two poles of birth control practice in the sense
that the former was the principal unit of reproduction whereas the latter demarcated the
line within which a biological relationship could be considered effective. The slogan of
women’s liberation was replaced with a family-oriented emphasis on the protection of
mothers, particularly the bodies of mothers (botai). What determined the importance of
a mother’s physicality was her reproductive role, that is, giving birth only to the number
of children one can afford and raising healthy children. Moreover, the bodies of mothers
were represented as a basic biological unit on which the health of the nation-state
depended. The above-mentioned pamphlet reiterates the convergence of nationalism and
eugenic feminism, which paradoxically reduced women to breeding machines: “A child
is a family treasure as well as a social treasure. Giving birth to a child is the vocation of a
woman (josei). We, Japanese women, should give birth to strong children for the society,
and to good children for the family” (Nihon Sanji Chōsetsu Fujin Dōmei 1934, 130).
This declaration reveals the complex structure of women’s gender identity premised
both on biological sex and discursive construction of the national subject. The centrality of
reproduction in female sexuality itself was the political-cum-scientific product for creating
the eugenic chain of life which moved from healthy mothers to healthy offspring and
further on to the healthy nation. While Ishimoto previously maintained the ambiguity of
universal bodily categories in her eugenic feminism, the representation of organic bodies
became enclosed within national borders. In place of the ambiguous terrain between
womanhood and motherhood, Ishimoto reconfigured women as mothers—or at least
potential mothers—whose vocation and moral obligation were to have healthy children.
Thus Ishimoto’s eugenic feminism remained consistent in the birth control movements as
she continued to draw both national borders and a biological chain around mother’s bodies.
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Notes
1. One of the pioneering advocates of Neo-Malthusianism was the Malthusian League, a British
organization established in 1877. While these Neo-Malthusian advocates basically agreed with