Mumeo Oku, a rare woman in the politics of Japan, died on July 7th, aged 101
SOMETIMES Mumeo Oku would recall what it was like campaigning when women were new to Japanese politics
Mumeo Oku, a rare woman in the politics of Japan, died on July 7th, aged 101
SOMETIMES Mumeo Oku would recall what it was like campaigning when women were new to Japanese politics.
“Yours is the voice from the kitchen,” she would tell her audience.
The voices from the kitchen were rather subdued. In the years immediately after the second world war, the idea of Japanese women daring to intrude into this previously male world was still daunting. Simply attending Mrs Oku's meeting, having first received the permission of a husband or a father, required a certain amount of nerve, particularly as women in politics was a notion that came from the American victors.
“What about rice?” Mrs Oku continued.
There were rumbles among the audience that rice was in short supply, and the government should be doing more about it.
Mrs Oku banged the table. “That's politics,” she said. “Your life is what politics is about.”
Women were elected to the Diet, Japan's parliament, for the first time in 1946. A surprising 39 made it to the lower house. In 1947 fresh elections for the lower house and an upper house were held under a new constitution drafted by the Americans. The result was a disappointment for women: only 15 were elected to the lower house and three, one of them Mrs Oku, to the upper house. Despite their best efforts, Mrs Oku and her colleagues had persuaded relatively few women to vote and those that did preferred men. Perhaps the novelty had worn off, perhaps after all they decided to confine their powers to the kitchen.
Mrs Oku was saddened but not dismayed. She saw that she was an exception in Japan. Her father, who sold farming tools, had believed that women should be educated. After graduating in 1920 Mumeo Oku worked in a clothing factory and helped to run a home for poor women. In 1923 she started a magazine, Working Women, and founded a group campaigning for women's rights. Such campaigning women, though, were hardly popular in militaristic pre-war Japan. Some of their aims, such as abortion by choice, brought them into conflict with a regime that said it was a woman's patriotic duty to have a large family to provide soldiers and colonise the country's expanding empire. Mrs Oku had two children. “Quite enough,” she said.
When the victorious Americans arrived, they gave women, at least on paper, equal rights in politics, education and employmen