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This book shows the roles that the family and law played in identifying, reforming, and reinforcing gender relations in interwar Japan and colonial Taiwan. Since the late nineteenth century, men and women across the Japanese empire had different lived experiences within the contours of the family and marriage represented by bride prices, daughter adoption, and premarital relationships. In the late 1910s, however, those boundaries constituted forces that incorporated the seemingly private realm of relationships into the larger question of gender in the interwar era. Japanese and Taiwanese officials and nonofficials alike found gender relations to be changing in relation to the continuous tensions over metropolitan Japan’s positions in the world and the colony, to how men should situate themselves with women in and outside the male-centered Taiwanese households, and to the uplifting of Taiwanese women from such households. In other words, Geographies of Gender reveals the unsettled exchange of gendered norms, practices, and ideals about gender relations in relation to empire, domesticity, and personal autonomy in society and law.
Taiwanese masculinity was not defined only by young intellectuals and social elites. Rather, it was constructed, expanded, and complicated by ordinary men as represented by household heads and their family members. This chapter explores their masculinity by revealing the ways in which they continued to negotiate with judges over the treatment of brides and adopted daughters. Household heads had traditionally been free to choose their sons’ brides and preside over any adoptive deals, and thus they established masculinity as tied to household authority. Yet, this unchallenged image of patriarchy began contradicting judicial calls for a more equitable form of the family from the late 1910s. What involved those household heads in judicial reforms was the situation in which two or more household heads competed over the better treatment of brides and adopted daughters, establishing a protective form of masculinity. However, this did not end with the emasculation of male household heads in terms of their preexisting authority; instead, they shifted to a type of masculinity involving collusion between two or more household heads and colonial judges, undermining efforts to address women’s difficulties after the 1920s.
When Japanese people confronted the international community in the interwar era, their concerns and ideals about the fringes of the family and marriage were aimed at not only the Japanese metropole but also its colonies like Taiwan. Metropole–colony relations were not as clear as one might expect in that there was no direct institutional connection between Japan and Taiwan regarding marriage gifts, daughter adoption, and premarital sexual relationships. However, this chapter reconstructs their discursive links and reveals how cultural critics, social workers, jurists, and others simultaneously presented their competing visions of social progress in Japan and colonial Taiwan. In Japan, progress appeared in the visions of assuming and ensuring women’s personal independence, choice, and self-awareness; in Taiwan, Japanese colonizers defined progress as incorporating women into society. Despite the hierarchical divergence of the metropolitan and colonial perspectives, however, they converged on emphasizing women’s expected behavior as members of the family and society in the 1930s. Women became the sole bearers of progress, which ultimately engendered the empire.
This chapter uncovers the unintended trajectory of Taiwanese women’s freedom among younger adopted daughters in the Japanese colonial courts. Family-centric, gender-based physical unfreedom continued to be one of the salient administrative and legal problems in Taiwan from the precolonial period to the late 1910s. Male household heads were not ready to follow the judicial construction of women’s freedom of movement during the early to mid-1920s. However, Japanese judges involved with female litigants shifted their focus to women’s freedom of choice – defined by intent and contractual freedom among adopted daughters – as a new boundary delineating their relationships with households in civil and criminal cases in the late 1920s. Women’s choice continued to be a central point of dispute when adopted daughters became targets of their parents and strangers. These daughters’ ambiguous capacity regarding their age, class background, and sexual integrity was misrepresented to legitimize their adverse labor and life conditions, including sex work. Yet, it was within the flexible contours of choice that the courts protected women’s agency, which, in turn, became a constitutive part of colonial history.
Women’s agency was contingent on the multiple parties concerned with it, and they formed its gendered understandings and practices. This chapter traces those understandings and practices in the courtroom, where Taiwanese women in premarital sexual relationships expressed their interests. From the early 1920s, more women made their voices heard in civil cases on marital affairs and divorce, which revealed changing attitudes toward marriage and premarital sexual relationships among themselves, their partners and family members, and Japanese judges. The judges joined the male litigants in highlighting the formal state of marriage and wifehood against women’s informal personal status and their sexual histories. Meanwhile, Taiwanese women continued to react against the discriminatory treatment of premarital sexual relationships and eventually won the more flexible treatment of premarital relationships as if they were formal marriages in the mid-1930s. However, this result was achieved only when those women agreed to be submissive to their male partners or otherwise considered promiscuous. Changing the direction of their sexual, marital, and family lives took on a gender-specific tone.
This chapter examines how women within the boundaries of the family and marriage became central to interwar Japan’s international relations. Scholars have argued that Japan’s politics, economy, and society shifted from liberalism and internationalism in the 1910s–1920s to conservatism and isolationism in the 1930s. While women’s history has been studied along the same lines, this chapter explores the continued reinterpretations of emerging ideals about gender, emphasizing the continuity and discontinuity of Japan’s modernity spanning those two decades. At the heart of those ideals were informal marital relationships – socialist and companionate marriages – introduced from Soviet Russia and the United States, and global concerns in the League of Nations about human trafficking involving prostitution and daughter adoption. Japanese intellectuals, social leaders, and diplomats continued to engage with reformist ideals to address women’s inequalities in marriage and the family. However, their appeals to progress redefined Japanese women in the preexisting family system and considered them to be promiscuous, reinforcing gendered burdens and sexual differences within Japan’s national contexts.
The Introduction begins by unpacking a 1929 Taiwanese civil case where multiple parties were concerned with the formation of a marriage, showing how the case – and public debates as well as other civil and criminal cases presented in this book – evolved around sociolegal problems across the empire, social customs and new forms of family, masculinity tied to household relationships, and Taiwanese women’s agency. The argument of the circulation of gender ideals is followed using ethnographic and historical backgrounds on marriage gifts, daughter adoption, and premarital sexual relationships in Japan and Taiwan from the late nineteenth century through the 1910s. Grounded in these historical contexts, the Introduction suggests gender was at the center of Japan’s international and colonial relations, the competition surrounding Taiwanese masculinity in society and law, and the contested formation of Taiwanese women’s agency in the colonial courts. The final section outlines the organization of Geographies of Gender by highlighting the shift in narrative from the larger historical circumstances surrounding the Japanese empire to the specific interactions between discourse and colonial law in gendered terms.
This chapter demonstrates how young male Taiwanese elites turned to gendered masculinity in response to colonial redefinitions of women within the family and marriage from the 1920s onward. Taiwanese masculinity derived from the mixture of Han Chinese tradition and Japanese colonialism. Chinese men had developed their masculinity on sociocultural standings and power in and outside of the household. Meanwhile, male Taiwanese elites often received higher education in Japan, and they built Taiwanese nationalism on calls for regulating or ending the practices of bride prices, daughter adoption, and premarital sex among ordinary Taiwanese men and women. In those top-down calls, Taiwanese elites defined themselves as men in terms of their ability to facilitate individual willpower and liberalize society. Far from being personal, their masculinity made it necessary for the elites to work with the colonial authorities to materialize family reforms in the late 1920s. To shore up their sociopolitical standing, those elites held women responsible for obstructing family reforms and painted them in a negative light, constructing masculinity while assigning additional gendered burdens.
Tadashi Ishikawa traces perceptions and practices of gender in the Japanese empire on the occasion of Japan's colonisation of Taiwan from 1895 . In the 1910s, metropolitan and colonial authorities attempted social reform in ways which particularly impacted on family traditions and, therefore, gender relations, paving the way for the politics of comparison within and beyond the empire. In Geographies of Gender, Tadashi Ishikawa delves into a variety of diplomatic issues, colonial and anticolonial discourses, and judicial cases, finding marriage gifts, daughter adoption, and premarital sexual relationships to be sites of tension between norms and ideals among both elite and ordinary men and women. He explores how the Japanese empire became a gendered space from the 1910s through the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, arguing that gender norms were both unsettled and reinforced in ways which highlight the instability of metropole-colony relations.
Glutamatergic neurotransmission via the N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptor is integral to the pathophysiology of depression. This study was performed to examine whether amino acids related to NMDA receptor neurotransmission are altered in the serum of patients with depression.
Method
We measured the serum levels of d-serine, l-serine, glycine, glutamate and glutamine in patients with depression (n=70), and age-matched healthy subjects (n=78).
Results
Serum levels of d-serine and l-serine in patients with depression were significantly higher than those of healthy controls (p<0.001). In contrast, serum levels of glycine, glutamate and glutamine did not differ between the two groups. Interestingly, the ratio of l-serine to glycine in patients was significantly higher than that of healthy controls (p<0.001).
Conclusion
This study suggests that serine enantiomers may be peripheral biomarkers for depression, and that abnormality in the d-serine-l-serine-glycine cycle plays a role in the pathophysiology of depression.