Treacherous Women of Imperial Japan

Patriarchal Fictions, Patricidal Fantasies

Helene Bowen Raddeker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781134696185
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Kanno Suga and Kaneko Fumika were both found guilty on different occasions in 1911 and 1926 of conspiring to assassinate the Japanese emperor. Kanno was executed and Kaneko hanged herself whilst in prison, but both women maintained their defiance of the state even in the face of death. Through examination of their own life stories and writings, Helene Bowen Raddeker brings to life the women's own interpretations of their lives and their attitudes to death, with the associations of political martyrdom, heroism and notions of immortality. She finds that their self-presentations became weapons in an ideological war of words about social and political realities and their deaths were a means of self-empowerment within their historical context.

Part I
Preliminaries

1 Treason and treachery, documents and discourse

EULOGIES

Would anything at all remain for us of what they have been, in their violence or their singular misfortune, if they had not, at a given moment, collided with power and provoked its forces? After all, is it not one of the fundamental traits of our society that destiny takes the form of the relation to power, of the struggle along with or against it? The most intense point of lives, the one where their energy is concentrated, is precisely there where they clash with power, struggle with it, endeavour to utilise its forces or to escape its traps. The brief and strident words which come and go between power and the most unessential existences, are doubtless for the latter the sole monument that has ever been accorded to them; these words are what gives to them, in order to travel through time, the brief flash of sound and fury which carries them even to us.¹

The ‘in-famous’ individuals spoken of here by Michel Foucault, in an essay entitled ‘The Life of Infamous Men’, were not so much notorious as obscure people whose ‘crimes’ were remarkable mostly for their ordinariness. Amongst these petty ‘criminals’ we find the ‘scandalous monk’, the ‘battered woman’, the ‘inveterate and raging drunkard’ and the ‘quarrelsome merchant’, but there are none accused of anything so grim as plotting regicide.² We find amongst them no allegedly treasonous subjects of the like of Kanno Suga (1881–1911) and Kaneko Fumiko (1903–1926). In another part of the world, Japan, at least a century and a half after Foucault’s citizens collided with power, these two women achieved real ‘infamy’ when they were charged within fifteen years of each other, with conspiring to assassinate the reigning emperors. And, questions of their guilt or innocence of high treason aside, the conduct of both during the trials revealed them to be treacherous indeed. For Suga and Fumiko³ were guilty of more than failing to honour the allegiance to the sovereign expected of modern Japanese citizens: each dared either to criticize or soundly condemn this ‘godly father of the nation’ or, rather, his creation and use as such for political ends in the name of the modern nation-state. In proudly taking up the name of ‘traitor’ – Suga as an anarchist, Fumiko as a nihilist – each of these undutiful daughters of the emperor set herself up in direct antagonism to the modern emperor-system.

The clashes with power that brought Kanno Suga and Kaneko Fumiko infamy were not as brief as those of Foucault’s petty criminals – the brief ‘monuments’ to whose existences amount to no more than petitions (to the king), judgements and internment records. The first of the two Japanese legal cases lasted eight months, while the second extended over a period of two and a half years. Thus, the records of their exchanges with prosecutors and judges amount to rather more than a few ‘brief and strident words’. In both cases, moreover, particularly Suga’s, pre-imprisonment texts are extant. Yet despite the comparatively extensive documentation, we could still ask whether anything would have remained of them if not for their ultimate collisions with state power. Surely Kanno Suga would have been restored to history for other reasons: she was one of the first feminist-socialists in the early socialist movement in the Meiji era (1868–1912) and also one of the first female journalists in Japan. If the movement in recent decades to restore women to history had not occurred, her romance with Kōtoku Shūsui, the undisputed leader of the radical wing of the Meiji socialist movement, would have ensured her a place, albeit a small one, in the history books. Indeed, she was for a time treated as a romantic heroine largely by virtue of that relationship.⁴

In Kaneko Fumiko’s case, on the other hand, it is doubtful that she would be known to history if she had not clashed with power. There was little amongst her activities before her imprisonment to suggest that even her name would be known to us today, if not for her subsequent notoriety. No doubt Fumiko would be amused by the irony of her accusers’ securing her a place in history, something which few of them would be accorded. The mostly nameless police, prosecutors or judges involved in the case could not have foreseen that in one sense ‘victims’ like her would have the last say: power ‘marked [her] with a blow of its claws’, certainly, but it also ‘instigated the few words which are left for us’ of her life and her resistance.⁵ Almost all of the available written and oral texts by Fumiko were produced in prison or the courtroom.

Yet there is another reason for the restoration to history of these two ‘traitors’: the manner of their deaths. For Suga and Fumiko not only collided with power, but died in the impact. The first was found guilty of lèse majesté and executed a week later on 25 January 1911; while the second was likewise sentenced to death in March 1926 but had her sentence commuted to life imprisonment soon after. This was a few months before her suicide, on 23 July 1926, was reported by prison authorities. It has been said that history is about dead people, and in one sense Suga and Fumiko could not be more dead to us – their deaths have defined them because scholars commonly associate them with political martyrdom. Their collision with power, therefore, is not in itself enough to account for the extent to which they are now known and respected in some circles in Japan as revolutionary heroes. And, of course, scholars have also contributed to the revolutionary immortality that is typically accorded someone who died at or in the hands of the state.⁶

TREACHERY RECONSIDERED

Whilst I shall discuss in detail in Chapter 2 the aims of this work, and its structural logic and methodology, I would make one further point both to effect a temporary closure to these preliminary reflections on ‘eulogies’ and open the way to later theoretical discussion. This is that the subjects’ deaths have had a marked influence upon both the fact of their restoration to history and the ways in which they have been restored. Their deaths have been central to biographical reconstructions of their lives (and ascriptions of meaning to their lives), though this has not been acknowledged by those doing the restorations. When in prison each woman did present herself as either a self-sacrificing political ‘martyr’ only too happy to die for the Cause (Suga), or a self-assertive ‘nihilistic’ rebel who not only defied death but demanded the death penalty (Fumiko), but what we cannot forget is that this was resistance directed at an audience that included police, prosecutors, judges and other political opponents. Hence, my core question in Part II concerns not only the meanings that Suga and Fumiko themselves ascribed to their own deaths, but more the degree to which their participation in a public construction of their coming deaths was a political project.

What follows from this central focus is firstly the fact that, strictly speaking, while this book is about two women, it is not a work of gender analysis, even if social constructions of gender will often claim my attention. Furthermore, the book is about two individuals (women) whose political commitments were deemed by many contemporaries to be particularly ‘treacherous’, for a range of reasons that certainly included but also extended beyond their treasonous acts or ideas. Thus, it is not specifically about treason cases, even if I will be ‘reading’ texts, many of which (particularly in the case of Kaneko Fumiko) were produced within the context of trials for high treason. Nor, for that matter, is the focus of the work Japan’s prewar and wartime emperor-system, though this too has an undeniable contextual importance. Broadly speaking, moreover, it might be about the lives and deaths of two individuals, yet it is not a developmental (narrative) work about the lives and ideas, the political careers of two individuals. It is not political biography. My structural inversion in Parts II and III of (engagements with) death followed by life (narratives) is the conscious opposite of linear, often teleological, life-narratives. Of more interest to me are the subject-positions constructed and claimed by Kanno Suga and Kaneko Fumiko in relation to the meanings they attributed to their own deaths and lives – and, further, how their self-presentations were weapons in an ideological war of words about social and political realities. More will be said subsequently about my theoretical inspirations and the ‘structural’ logic of the work. Firstly, however, some background detail about the two treason cases is called for in order to set the ‘scene’ for Part II.

THE HIGH TREASON INCIDENTS

The well-known Meiji High Treason Incident of 1910–1911 represented the culmination of a government policy of suppressing the young socialist movement. This policy was particularly severe during Katsura Tarō’s second term as prime minister from July 1908 to August 1911. Therefore, of the well-known socialists who escaped the police drag-net in mid-1910, quite a few were already in prison and thus could not be accused of conspiracy. Ultimately, twelve out of twenty-six defendants were executed after being found guilty of contravening Article 73 of the Criminal Code, which read:

Every person who has committed, or has attempted to commit, a dangerous (or injurious) act against [the person of] the Emperor, the Emperor’s Grandmother, the Empress Dowager, the Empress, the Emperor’s son, the Emperor’s Grandson or the Heir to the throne shall be condemned to death.⁷

Twelve more of the accused first received the death sentence, but then had it commuted to life imprisonment through an imperial pardon, while the remaining two received lesser sentences. As F. G. Notehelfer points out, unfortunately for the defendants, the word translated here as ‘attempted’ (kuwaen) was ambiguous: it could be, and was, taken by the prosecution and judges to mean ‘intended’; and this, in turn, meant that the trial would ‘focus not on concrete acts, but on the question of “intent” … ideas, not facts.’⁸

Suga, the one woman amongst the twenty-six, had been involved in an anti-imperial plot unlike most of the defendants. On the grounds of intent, there is no doubt that she was guilty as charged. During the trial Suga not only spoke of receiving a letter from Miyashita Daikichi in January 1909 about his research into making bombs, but also about Uchiyama Gudō’s visiting at about that time, saying he had managed to get hold of explosives from some miners.⁹ According to Suga, Miyashita was one of the five defendants really involved in plans for an imperial assassination attempt; the others being Niimura Tadao, Furukawa Rikisaku and Kōtoku Shūsui.¹⁰ Though she included Kōtoku in the number, she insisted that he had been sympathetic to the idea only at first.¹¹ Suga was actually referred to by defence lawyers then as the ‘ringleader’ of this ‘conspiracy’, even if prosecutors and judges had assumed the leader to be the well-known theorist of ‘direct action’, Kōtoku.

The defence lawyer, Hiraide Shū, believed that Suga and three others who had been involved in the plot should be sentenced to death, while Kōtoku and one other defendant should receive life imprisonment. There were five more defendants he thought deserving of five years’ imprisonment, which leaves fifteen he apparently believed to be innocent.¹² It is easy to see why authors continue to refer to the case as a ‘frame-up’, or even suggest that Suga was one of those ‘martyred’: she had not, after all, actually done much at all. Still, the material evidence of ‘anarchist chemistry’, the trial testimonies of the co-conspirators, and also their personal testimonies (Suga’s letters and prison diary, for example) make it clear that there was a conspiracy of sorts involving no more than a handful of people.

The less known and researched case of Kaneko Fumiko and Pak Yeol (J. Boku Retsu, legal Korean name Pak Choon Sik) is complicated by the issue of the atmosphere in which they were taken into ‘protective custody’ – each within a few days of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1 September 1923.¹³ Over a dozen members of their mainly Korean group of anarchists and nihilists, which they therefore ironically called the Futeisha (Malcontents’ Society), were soon arrested as well. In the atmosphere of panic after the earthquake in which much of Tokyo and Yokohama was levelled, the infamous massacre of Koreans and other potential ‘subversives’ was already under way: several thousands were ultimately murdered by mobs of Japanese civilians, vigilantes, and civil or military police.¹⁴ Unlike the Futeisha, many of the ‘potential troublemakers’ taken into protective custody did not survive it.

Fumiko and Pak Yeol were charged with vagrancy at first and detained for twenty-one days.¹⁵ In the atmosphere of paranoid suspicion of ‘futei senjin‘ (malcontent Koreans), the authorities were taking no chances. Richard Mitchell observes that the ‘vagrancy’ charge was trumped up since police actually created Pak and Kaneko as vagrants to hold them while finding something else to charge them with. Police, it seems, urged their landlord to find new tenants and sell off their possessions because they wouldn’t be back!¹⁶ Thus, on 20 October 1923, Kaneko, Pak, and the rest of the Futeisha¹⁷ were charged with an infringement of the Public Peace Police Law (Chian Keisatsu Hō), to which a violation of the Explosives Control Law was added the following February. At this time all other members of the Futeisha but one were released. The one exception was Kim Choon Han who was charged with the explosives violation but not high treason. Kim Choon Han’s lover, Niiyama Hatsuyo, first incriminated them, referring to Pak’s attempts to procure bombs from Shanghai or Korea to use on the imperial family. Fumiko soon confessed to this in January 1924 (before Pak did).

Pak and Fumiko were specifically accused of trying to procure bombs from a Korean independence group based in Shanghai (K. Ūiyōldan, J. Giretsudan: ‘Righteous Fighters Band’). This was through a comrade in Korea, apparently for the purpose of an attempt on the life of the emperor and crown prince. But in neither the Pak Yeol-Kaneko Fumiko treason case of 1925–1926 nor the Meiji High Treason Incident fifteen years earlier was material evidence (of acts or intent) deemed fundamental by investigators, prosecutors or judges. Certainly, Fumiko and Pak were sentenced mainly on the basis of their own confessions.¹⁸ Fumiko had not bee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Preliminaries
• Part II Engagements with Death
• Part III Life-narratives
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Select Bibliography of Japanese Sources
• Index