Tuesday, January 21, 2025 | 6:00-7:30 PM ET | REGISTER FOR ZOOM
Good Wife, Wise Mother: Educating Han Taiwanese Girls under Japanese Rule (University of Washington Press, 2024)
Geographies of Gender: Family and Law in Imperial Japan and Colonial Taiwan (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
Authors: Fang Yu Hu, Assistant Professor of History, California State Polytechnic University Pomona & Tadashi Ishikawa, Assistant Professor of History, University of Central Florida
Discussant: Seiji Shirane, Associate Professor of History, City College of New York
The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Fang Yu Hu (Cal Poly Pomona) and Tadashi Ishikawa (Central Florida), who will be speaking about their new books Good Wife, Wise Mother: Educating Han Taiwanese Girls under Japanese Rule (University of Washington Press, 2024) and Geographies of Gender: Family and Law in Imperial Japan and Colonial Taiwan (Cambridge University Press, 2024), respectively.
In Good Wife, Wise Mother, Fang Yu Hu uses female education and citizenship as a lens through which to examine Taiwan’s uniqueness as a colonial crossroads between Chinese and Japanese ideas and practices. A latecomer to the age of imperialism, Japan used modernization efforts in Taiwan to cast itself as a benevolent force among its colonial subjects and imperial competitors. In contrast to most European colonies, where only elites received an education, in Taiwan Japan built elementary schools intended for the entire population, including girls. In 1897 it developed a program known as “Good Wife, Wise Mother” that sought to transform Han Taiwanese girls into modern Japanese female citizens. Drawing on Japanese and Chinese newspapers, textbooks, oral interviews, and fiction, Fang Yu Hu illustrates how this seemingly progressive project advanced a particular Japanese vision of modernity, womanhood, and citizenship, to which the colonized Han Taiwanese people responded with varying degrees of collaboration, resistance, adaptation, and adoption. Hu also assesses the program’s impact on Taiwan’s class structure, male-female interactions, and political identity both during and after the end of Japanese occupation in 1945.
In Geographies of Gender, Tadashi Ishikawa traces perceptions and practices of gender in the Japanese Empire on the occasion of Japan's colonization of Taiwan from 1895. In the 1910s, metropolitan and colonial authorities attempted social reform in ways which particularly impacted family traditions and, therefore, gender relations, paving the way for the politics of comparison within and beyond the empire. Ishikawa delves into a variety of diplomatic issues, colonial and anticolonial discourses, and judicial cases, finding marriage gifts, daughter adoption, and premarital sexual relationships to be sites of tension between norms and ideals among both elite and ordinary men and women. He explores how the Japanese Empire became a gendered space from the 1910s through the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, arguing that gender norms were both unsettled and reinforced in ways which highlight the instability of metropole-colony relations.
