What Laura Ingalls taught Japan — Part 5

As a matter of fact, GHQ did not have any intention to promote a radical reformation of gender ideology in Japan. As Chikako Uemura points out, GHQ promoted Japanese women's emancipation but never supported women organizing women's movements. In fact, MacArthur did not approve of a feminist movement. In June 1946, when he met the first Japanese female members of the Diet, he "strongly cautioned the women against the temptation to form a women�s bloc to influence legislation." What MacArthur expected was that these women would contribute their domestic wisdom to the overall political structure. In short, Japanese women were emancipated to establish a democratic social system in postwar Japan but only on the premise that women's and men's gender roles were different and women ultimately belong in the home.

Even so, The Long Winter did not disappoint Japanese readers because the family life of the American pioneer described in it was far more liberating for Japanese women, who had long been degraded in the strict patriarchal family system under the old Constitution. Because of the history of oppression, for Japanese women to have a secure place to fulfill domestic roles independently and to have an interdependent relationship with their husbands was already a huge step toward freedom. Thus in the postwar era, when people had lost their sense of what is right and were in search of a new faith to pursue, there was a tendency among Japanese women to view and emulate American women's way of living as their model. Among such women, Shiho Sakanishi, a female Japanese scholar who had studied in the US prior to World War II, described American women's life in detail in her book American Women (published in 1947). While idealizing American women's (seemingly) equal relationship with men, she lamented the degraded status of Japanese women, "who had long been abused and treated like slaves." She noted:

In America, everybody, even a small child, is respected as a person ... We all have our own life, and the life must be respected ... even between a husband and a wife. A husband must recognize his wife's personality and respect her own life, and a wife vice versa ... In a society where a man's personality is respected and a woman's is ignored, democracy can never exist.

Even young girls longed for the democratic life that American women seemed to enjoy. In a letter to MacArthur dated December 1949, a 13-year-old girl asked him to send her to the United States:

We should not give up. We should not be lazy ... I want to go to America and study there and be a great person and finish my life having contributed to Japan ... Please give me a chance to go to America. Please.

The Long Winter showed Japanese readers how Ma and Pa had an interdependent relationship and how Ma actively exercised her creativity within the domestic sphere. Japanese women yearned for such status in the family ... In short, ... The Long Winter gave Japanese readers hope for reclaiming women's status within a very patriarchal family system. According to historian Natsuki Aruga, the Japanese modern ideal of womanhood developed by incorporating the American womanhood ideal into Japan. Japanese women�s rights advocates like Shizue Kato, who strenuously worked for women's suffrage and improvement of women's social status during and after the war, endorsed the traditional ideal of American women as was depicted in The Long Winter. Japanese women's rights advocates held onto the idea that a woman's primary role was to be a wife and mother, yet they also envisioned that women could and should have other roles as members of society ... Such an idea was quite liberating for Japanese women, who had long been forced to give up everything for the family because of their sex.

In the spiritual vacuum caused by a loss of faith and drastic changes after the war, Japanese women and men were struggling to fill the vacuum by learning new thoughts from a different culture. Books in the postwar period were the very resources Japanese people looked to. The Long Winter taught especially important lessons for starting a new life: You need perseverance, appreciation and patience — all familiar to the Japanese mentality.

When a leading women's journal in Japan, Fujin Asahi, requested Wilder and other American women writers to send messages to Japanese women, the Japanese readers read their messages with deep respect and gratitude. The editor even described these messages as "a warm light shining in the total darkness." According to the messages, women all over the world were facing difficulties just as Japanese women did. Specifically, Wilder wrote to the Japanese readers: "The most valuable thing for life never changes by time or place — it is to be honest and cheerful, to find happiness in what you have and to have courage in hardships" as the Ingalls family does in The Long Winter.

In the midst of drastic Americanization of Japan after the war, Japanese readers accepted The Long Winter and other similar books as true depictions of American life. Associated with democracy, the image of the nineteenth century western frontier that The Long Winter created became idealized as the "valuable" thing that "never changes by time or place." The American principles of democratic living that General MacArthur and GHQ aimed to promote in Japan were thus successfully received by the Japanese. In the end, the bygone American frontier crossed the Pacific Ocean and was restored in Japan by GHQ authority, leaving its utopian and mythical images in Japanese memories.