H. Tonomura
Since then, more than eighty scholars have engaged with questions generated by L’histoire,
and produced a six- volume essay collection titled Onna to otoko no jikū: Nihon joseishi saikō (“Time
Space of Gender: Redefining Japanese Women’s History”). Volumes 2 and 3 deal with the medi-
eval period. A comprehensive timeline of Japanese gender history, with notations for keywords
and key characters, appeared as a separate volume. Yet another title, Rekishi no naka no jendā
(“Gender in History”), assembled additional thoughts inspired by L’histoire, focusing especially
on female literacy, sexuality, the body, spirituality, and pollution.^8
Another recent trend in Japanese women’s history seeks connections with the geopolitical
space of Asia. “Gender in Asian History: Women, Family and Inheritance,” a special issue of The
International Journal of Asian Studies published in 2006, for example, features two articles on gender
in medieval Japan.^9 Unquestionably, the broad sweep of international women’s and gender
studies has interacted with and mutually enriched the study of Japanese women’s history. But,
it was the early and mid- twentieth century historians who laid down its solid scholarly
foundation.
Early twentieth- century scholarship on family and women
In the early 1900s, decades before “women’s studies” emerged, scholars in Japan were already
building what would become a rock- solid foundation for the historical study of women. Women
and family were viable subjects of historical investigation amidst the rapid pulse of modernity
that marked the new age of global competition in the Meiji period (1868–1912). For many, the
past history of women was a testimonial to the high level of Japanese civilization, and Meiji intel-
lectuals eagerly wrote about women in Japan’s antiquity. Sudō Motoma, in his 1901 Nihon joshi
(“Women’s History in Japan”) and 1905 Buke jidai ni okeru joken no hogo (“Guarding Women’s
Rights in the Age of Warriors”) focused first on the spiritual authority of the Sun Goddess. He
then discussed the political power of Hōjō Masako, the wife of the first shogun, and women’s
property rights as specified in the laws of the Kamakura warrior government (1183–1333), which
confirmed many customary rights of women—for example, to hold property independently and
to adopt their own children for transmitting those rights.^10
In 1905, Miura Hiroyuki, a legal historian, wrote Oyako kankei o chūshin to shite no kazoku seido
(“Family System Centered around the Relationship between Parents and Children”), which
examined the law codes pertaining to households and kinship relations from classical through
early modern times. As in Sudō’s work, the emphasis rested on Kamakura law codes (comp.
1232) that granted equal authority to mother and father vis- à-vis children. To Miura, the overall
fairness of the laws and the associated judicial system assured that “the Japanese need not lament
that they lack the essential capacity to be governed by modern laws.”^11 The strong legal position
women enjoyed in the Kamakura period (1183–1333) became the subject of his subsequent
article, “Joseishijō no ōgon jidai” (“The Golden Period in Women’s History”).^12
Although a multitude of scholars have studied and written about the Kamakura codes and
justice system since then, Miura’s reading of the laws has met little dispute and only refinement.
In 1932, for example, Okada Akio expanded on the previous findings by detailing the lifetime-
only inheritance provisions that began to reshape the property rights of women by limiting their
ability to alienate to their heirs. Western scholars also followed, leading to publications by Joyce
Ackroyd in 1959 and, in 1989, by Jeffrey P. Mass, who emphasized the fairness and rational
nature of the law and justice, and myself, focusing on the laws’ relationship to women’s rights
and meaning of marriage in warrior society.^13
A special issue of a journal, Rekishi kyōiku (“Historical Education”), published in 1937 by the
Association for the Research on Historical Education (Rekishi kyōiku kenkyūkai), illuminates a