“Female Students Ruining the Nation”: The Debate over Coeducation in Postwar Japan

After Japan's defeat in World War II, Occupation authorities extended to women a host of new rights that abolished the legal authority of the prewar paternalistic household (ie) system. The U.S.-authored draft of the postwar Japanese Constitution included an article explicitly mandating "the essential equality of the sexes," which required the Japanese to rewrite those parts of their Civil Code that conflicted with this basic precept. 1 As a result, Japanese women were granted many new rights, including the rights to vote and hold office, to choose their own spouses, and to enjoy equal opportunity in education. But while these Occupation-era reforms established a legal basis for gender equality, women attempting to exercise these newly awarded rights found that these efforts conflicted with persistent cultural values and beliefs upholding more conventional roles for women in Japanese society. In the early 1950s, as the Occupation ended and Japan reevaluated its postwar legacy, conservatives began organizing to repeal some of the more progressive legal reforms. They were met with fierce resistance from grassroots organizations of citizens from all walks of life, who feared a return to prewar militarist autocracy and passionately defended the new freedoms granted to them by these reforms. 2 In this heated debate between conservative and progressive camps, the "problem" of new roles for women in Japanese society featured prominently. Men fretted that their wives had become "scary" by failing to behave with due deference to the household patriarch. An influx of women into the workplace incited heated debate about women's role