Post #3

In the reading Manchu Girl by Koizumi Kikue, we could see that the little girl Li Guiyu came to a Japanese house to work. And Koizumi tried to educate this girl to lessen her hatred of Japan and wanted her to adapt to both Chinese and Japanese cultures. From the way of them getting well with each other, we could notice that Japanese females had positive effects on fixing the relationship between Chinese and Japanese people. The reading in Lecture 8 presents the high expectation to the females in colonial place at that time because giving birth to and raising a kid were the responsibilities of all the females in that society, according to “the practice of motherhood- giving birth to and bringing children- was reformulated as an integral part of Japanese women’s responsibility to their nation” (Komo, 226). Hence, Japanese females had influences on society as mothers and citizens. They could promote national harmony, and produce more soldiers for the countries. Although we saw Koizumi and Li were happy with each other, the action of Koizumi’s husband of buying a girl was an act of violence. And the way of Koizumi treated the twenty-one-year-old woman, because of her inability of Japanese, could be seen as unfair treatment to Chinese people. These are both violent as colonial people.

The film Osaka Elegy also points out the difficulties of women at that period. The director presents the strong and tenacious female character Ayako Murai with her experiences. She became the mistress of her boss because of her father’s debt. And later, she slept with another rich person Fujino for her brother’s tuition fee. Therefore, we could see the importance of females in a family in that period.

In 1937–1938, Nanjing Massacre, which was a mass murder committed by Imperial Japanese against the people in Nanjing, happened. This was serious colonial violence towards the Chinese. The males in China or Japan all went to become soldiers to fight for their countries, the females were staying at home to take care of the families. Here, men could be seen as the leader of the country and families since they ruled and fought for their future with their lives. Females were waiting for their men to come home and live a happier life in the future. The role of females was different from males. The males fought with their bodies. However, the females fought with their words and actions with housework and other things. Hence, we could say that the males were fighting outside of the house, and the females were fighting inside the house.