What do women’s experiences in the colonies reveal about the historical reality of Japanese colonialism and war? What do women’s autobiographical accounts of the colonies demonstrate about the relationship between identity and memory? In their autobiographical writings about Shanghai and Manchuria, Hayashi Kyōko, Sawachi Hisae, and Miyao Tomiko provide readers with a glimpse of family life and women’s physiological experiences in the colonies amidst the historical background of military and social conflicts. Their accounts show that colonial memories participate in a complex narrative process of selecting, arranging, and interpreting past experiences to give shape to present identities and subjectivities.

Introduction

The largest human migration in Japanese history occurred in the early 20th century when millions of Japanese citizens settled overseas in Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, and Shanghai following the economic and territorial expansion of the Japanese empire throughout Asia. With the end of World War II, most of this overseas population had returned to Japan in an organized reverse migration called hikiage (repatriation) by the end of 1946. In postwar Japan, there emerged a great number of literary works reminiscing about civilian Japanese’s colonial and war experience in overseas territories. Although many of these works were written by women, there have been few studies that systematically examine them from a woman’s or gendered perspective. As a starting point for understanding the unique experiences of women in the colonies and the rich literary representation of those experiences by Japanese women writers, this essay examines the autobiographical writings of Hayashi Kyōko, Sawachi Hisae, and Miyao Tomiko. Their writings represent the diversity of women’s colonial experience as well as the multitude of genres, narrative foci, and styles that women writers have used to reconstruct their personal experiences in the colonies. Through autobiographical stories, memoirs, and novels, these three authors recount lives lived as young girls or as young wives and mothers and how their respective colonial experiences transformed their lives and identities after the war. Together, these three women authors not only tell the concrete colonial history lived by women, but also highlight the private emotional lives of women in the colonies through their autobiographical accounts.