| Summary/Abstract |
Much scholarship on gender ideologies under Japanese imperialism remains demarcated by temporal and spatial lines. This article instead conceives the Japanese empire as a continuum, examining writings by women who published in and outside of East Asia, during the imperialist period and after decolonization. Specifically, it examines the femininities constructed in works by Japanese writer Ōsako Rinko (1915–2003) and Taiwanese writer Yang Qianhe (1921–2011), whose lives traversed geopolitical borders and ideological shifts from imperial modernization through decolonization. Showing how colonial modernity influenced gender constructions in different ways depending on the writers’ positionalities, this article illustrates how the writers negotiated happiness and spaces of belonging (whether geospatial locations in which to situate themselves, or daily practices and roles to perform) through their works. Furthermore, the article argues that freedom and happiness described by the two were consistently unattainable and postponed to a geopolitical temporality of dominance – the Japanese metropole, the United States, the imaginary West. The article thus examines gender and power among East Asian nations and the United States throughout the twentieth century.
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