Word: japanized
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This emancipation lasted scarcely ten years. The rising militarists, in destroying so much else, clamped down on women, and reasserted male superiority. But once Japan had plunged into war with the U.S., it was these same militarists who insisted that woman's place was in the factory. Even geisha girls were rounded up for munitions work, and housewives organized into "patriotic" associations to sew uniforms and make bandages. When the war ended in humiliating defeat, the men were totally discredited, and the young women ripe for transformation into mambo-garu-generally to the distress of their mothers...
...embarrassed silence while kazoku guests addressed each other loudly over his head, complaining at the way things were going, and blaming all their troubles on the nouveaux riches and the "postwar millionaires." Ultranationalists threatened to "wipe out" the entire Shoda family. The police, aware of how often in Japan assassination has been a means of political or emotional protest, keep the Shoda house under constant guard...
...always be regarded as 'the girl from outside.' " Old women giggle that the Shodas come from the Kanto Plain, the proverbial home of "high winds and nagging wives." An elderly businessman tells his friends: "Enjoy the royal wedding; it is the last one you will see in Japan...
...Malady of Silliness. What is vanishing in Japan is the good old days when women lived by the precepts of the 17th century Onna-Daigaku (Great Learning for Women). A sample: "The five worst maladies that afflict the female mind are indocility, discontent, slander, jealousy and silliness. The worst of them all, the parent of the other four, is silliness." The duty of a wife was simply to produce children-sons, not daughters. For 250 years under the Tokugawa Shoguns, Japan's population was kept stable largely by female infanticide.* Of the girls permitted to live, those who became...
...history also shows that Japanese women strongly resented being turned into mindless dolls who could achieve nothing except by yielding gracefully, as the bamboo bends before the gale. There have been few Joan of Arcs or Molly Pitchers in the annals of Japan. Even the brilliant Lady Murasaki, who wrote the famed Tale of Genji early in the 11th century, felt it necessary to conceal her accomplishments. The only heroic-sized woman known to the Japanese is the legendary Empress Jingo, who supposedly conquered Korea in A.D. 200-but Koreans indignantly assert that absence of records proves she never existed...