Crossing boundaries: Gender, ideology and national identity in war reportage by Japanese women writers

Soon after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident (8-9 July 1937), which marked the beginning of Japanese military aggression of mainland China, the Japanese publishing industry sent established writers to cover the conflict, along with professional journalists. Between August 1937 and January 1938, nine members of the bundan (literary circles) set off to China in order to visit the front and to write articles and reportage about the war. Among them there were two notable women writer, Yoshiya Nobuko and Hayashi Fumiko, who also took part to a government-sponsored mission the following year. Their literary war reports were widely read, and some of them became actual bestsellers. Four years later, some months after the attack on Pearl Harbor (7 December 1941) and the beginning of the Pacific War, another Japanese women writer, Sata Ineko, traveled to mainland China to visit the front and console the soldiers, narrating her experience in three war reports. The aim of this paper is to investigate the intersection of gender and nationality in these war reports. Borrowing the concept of framing by the mass communication theory, I argue that such reports are framed by a gender perspective. While they are rooted on the notion of national identity, which was fostered by the government and boosted by public opinion, they nevertheless emphasize the gender identity either validating or reassessing its symbolic boundaries so to fit each writer’s persona and personal agenda. I contend that these reports do not configure national identity and gender identity as competing identities but rather as superimposing identities, where the national belonging sets the tone and the gender gaze provides interpretation.