| Tamura Toshiko (1884--1945) is considered by most Japanese literary scholars to be the main representative of the Japanese New Woman writer of the late Meiji (1868--1912) and Taisho (1912--1926) eras. She is best known for her depictions of female sexuality and the modern woman's struggle for personal and economic independence. In Japanese or American scholarship, attention is paid only to the gendered meaning of her activity as a New Woman writer in the early 1900s. Tamura also wrote political stories during her brief three-year stay in Japan from 1936 to 1938 at the height of Japan's militarism, after living in North America for eighteen years. Tamura's writings from this period are important because they offer a perspective, not often mentioned in Japanese literary histories, of the returned expatriate to a militarized Japan. Her observations about the racism Japanese immigrants experienced in North America, and her sense of alienation as a returnee, are portrayed in the works she wrote in the late 1930s. Utilizing the post-colonial theory of writers such as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Trinh T. Minh-ha, I will show how, years before ideas of post-colonialism were articulated by these scholars, Tamura performed in literature what Said, Bhabha, and Minh-ha argue for in their social theory. In stories about Japanese immigrants in North America and the disunity of Japanese citizens in militarist Japan, Tamura created a literary depiction of Bhabha's "Third Space" and Minh-ha's deconstruction of the naming process by subverting ideas of civilization, pure race, and unified nation-state. Tamura did this through what I call a stance of "fluid marginality," resulting from her experiences in two societies that assumed cultural supremacy. I show how Tamura disrupts the binary between West and East and creates new permutations of this power paradigm. |
