"Good wife, wise mother”

Talks in Chinese Humanities: "Good Wife, Wise Mother” – Assimilating Han Taiwanese Under Japanese Rule

In 1897, two years after Japan began its half-century rise as an imperial power, it inaugurated an ambitious experiment to make modern Japanese citizens out of Han Taiwanese schoolgirls in its first overseas colony, Taiwan. The goal of the segregated education was to train Taiwanese boys and men to become government clerks and teachers, and girls and women to become “good wives, wise mothers” (ryōsai kenbo).

This gendered education was part of dōka, the Japanese assimilation program, as it sought to make everyone in the empire “Japanese” as equals by teaching the Japanese language and imperial ethics with gendered roles. Constructed by engaging with the cult of domesticity in the West that envisioned the home as a private space for women and the workplace as a public space for men to build strong nation-states, “good wife, wise mother” emerged in Japan in the 1890s and was introduced to Taiwan in the same decade.

Using periodicals and Japanese language textbooks, this talk examines the discourse and implementation of this ideal womanhood in Taiwan. This ideal of womanhood was crucial to the civilizing mission of the colonizers. Japanese colonial authority used gender to increase the supposed distance of civilizational levels between the colonizer and the colonized. By introducing gender into the discussion on dōka in Taiwan, this talk shows that the promise of equality and inclusion from dōka became even less attainable and thus slowed assimilation to the supposedly superior Japanese civilization when colonial officials and educators characterized the colonized as feminine and depicted colonized women as the symbol of Taiwan’s “backwardness.”

Fang Yu Hu is Assistant Professor of History at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona where she teaches Chinese, Japanese, and world history classes. She received her Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2015. Professor Hu has published articles in the journals ERAS of Monash University and Twentieth-Century China. Her podcast interview on the popular Taiwanese film, Cape No. 7, was published in 2021. She recently published her book, Good Wife, Wise Mother: Educating Han Taiwanese Girls Under Japanese Rule, with the University of Washington Press in September 2024. Her current research focuses on overseas Taiwanese in mainland China and Southeast Asia in the first half of the twentieth century.

"Talks in Chinese Humanities" is co-presented by the China Studies Centre, the Discipline of Chinese Studies and the Australian Society for Asian Humanities at the University of Sydney and the UNSW Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture's Judith Neilson Chair of Contemporary Art.

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