A Report on Panel 2: “Women, Bodies and Power in the Asia-Pacific”
Yukako Nagamura
Ph.D. candidate, Sophia University
Examining women’s history from a global/transnational historical perspective is one of most important subjects in recent years. On December 15th, 2018, a panel titled “Women, Bodies and Power in the Asia-Pacific,” organized by Professor Noriko K. Ishii (Sophia University), was held on the second day of a three-day symposium entitled “Practicing Power in the Global Asia-Pacific: Environments, Migrants and Womanhood.” This panel examined the complex historical situations during the time of modernization in the Asia-Pacific and tried to describe a transpacific history including gender, race, and US-Asia relations from the turn-of-the-century to the early period of the Cold War. Four speakers explored women’s experiences as essential components in understanding the circulation of people, materials, and thoughts. Thus, we could observe how women of dominant countries and dominated societies were embedded into the worldwide structure of power relations and the global movement toward westernization.
Through four presentations we learned from different perspectives, although each shared the theme of reconsideration of westernization with a critical point of view. Professor Laura R. Prieto (Simmons University) and Professor Ishii focused on transnational religious circulation, Professor Rumi Yasutake (Konan University) discussed local female networks across different social segments in Hawai‘i, and Dr. Jeong Min Kim (New York University, Shanghai) focused on the social structure of the US base in Korea during the Cold War, which was doubly layered by gender and power inequality in international relations.
Imperialism and religious circulation
Professor Prieto discussed maternal care and education in colonial Manila, in the Philippines. She studied a women's mission hospital, focusing on the period from 1906 to 1940, and demonstrated that the modernization of medicine and women’s education in the colonial territory was a process of Americanization. The US colonial state expressed great concern over high infant mortality rates, using such statistics to justify the period of “benevolent tutelage” they imposed on the Philippines before granting independence to the archipelago. Professor Prieto’s presentation depicted the process of religious and medical evangelism, which leads to a “better Filipina womanhood” and adoption of American gender ideals. In this way, medical knowledge was adapted to Filipina culture and the women’s personal ambitions.
Professor Ishii examined the circulation of female missionaries in the Asia-Pacific and the formation of their religious identity that was negotiated through their wartime experiences. During the 1930s and 1940s, when the US and Japan were moving toward war, an American female missionary and her Japanese convert developed different visions of egalitarian cosmopolitanism and remained loyal to their Christian faith as the states of Japan and the US demanded more conformity to their wartime notions of patriotism. Charlotte B. DeForest, the last missionary president of Kobe College, who struggled with questions regarding shrine visits and racism against Japanese Americans, managed to shape a new hybrid identity of herself as Christian and “supernational.” The case of Takeda Kiyoko, who was DeForest’s student, demonstrated how Christian faith appropriated to Japanese culture in reconciliation with Asian traditions. In these Christian women’s experiences, the ingenuity of religious thought brought a humanitarian vision and mediation of two cultures.
In these periods, the spread of western religion provided an opportunity for women’s education in Asia, which challenged local cultures with respect to the modernization of gender roles. One of the remarkable comments from Professor Motoe Sasaki (Hosei University) concerned an awareness of the missionaries’ gender. Future research could explore in detail how western gender culture was transmitted and adapted to local societies by focusing on each female missionary’s agency.
Local society encountering westernization
Professor Yasutake examined western women’s social activism when western systems prevailed in the Pacific through analyzing the struggle of the women’s suffrage movement in Hawai‘i from 1912 to 1922. The crusade was initiated by native Hawaiian women from the privileged class and developed into a mass women’s movement. Professor Yasutake’s presentation observed the complex relationships among three groups of women in Hawai‘i—native Hawaiians, white settlers, and non-white female settlers—and their interactions with one another and with US mainland suffragists regarding the “suffrage” issue. It is possible to consider that the collaborative suffrage movement among women from different cultural backgrounds was the result of early modernization. Professor Sasaki commented that more attention to mixed marriages and racial and cultural hybridity in Hawaiian society would be effective in understanding the process.
Dr. Kim analyzed the unequal relationship between local women and US soldiers based on the hierarchy of gender and international relations during the Cold War period. Exploring the transaction of both bodies and army supplies between Korean women and US soldiers during the Korean War, she observed the process of commodification of bodies and goods. There, army supplies were treated as a quasi-currency, and their exchange value was set on the market through the mediation of women’s sexual and physical labor. From her presentation, we could see how local women’s social lives were embedded into the worldwide structure and hierarchy of gender and race, and what women’s labor did for the workings of the wartime political economy. Professor Sasaki noted the importance of paying attention to a society’s reaction under the traditional local cultural system to deepen the theme.
In the discussion section, the audience debated whether the cases introduced in the panel were wartime exceptions and considered the possibility of comparative analyses with similar cases in different periods or geographical regions. Inspired by these exciting papers, we can start to reconstruct our recognition regarding the past. In closing, I would like to appreciate this valuable opportunity to participate in the Sophia University symposium and rethink global history through varied frameworks.