ABSTRACT
In 1913, a year of political upheaval, the debut of the notorious New Woman (atarashii onna) was all the rage in Japan, the vogue for translation evident in journals and bookstores everywhere, and government censors were making no secret of keeping a close eye on both.1 This article takes up these topics by investigating the New Woman’s experience of translation through considering a controversial group known as the Bluestockings (Seitōsha) and their literary journal Seitō (Bluestocking, 1911-16).2 After presenting a brief overview of the group’s history, the diverse texts the Bluestockings translated and the powerful images of the New Woman that emerged there, I narrow the lens to focus on the politics of 1913, when criticism of the Bluestockings pressed the group to shift the focus of their journal to an examination of the Woman Question (fujin mondai), a move that also led to a pronounced change in their choices of texts to translate. Narrowing the lens still further, I focus on the 1913 translations in Seitō by three women who have since become legendary in the annals of Japanese women’s history: Itō Noe (1895-1923), Nogami Yaeko (1885-1985), and Hiratsuka Raichō (1886-1971). Exploring their work shows how the New Woman experienced translation creatively, emotionally, and even physically, and as an imaginative way of forging intimate bonds with the New Woman abroad. It was an encounter that profoundly shaped the translators’ sense of self, their philosophy of women’s liberation, and ultimately, the contours of New Woman discourse in Japan.
