Hiratsuka Raichō: Feminism and Androgynous Sexuality

Abstract

HIRATSUKA Raichō 平塚らいてう (1886–1971) is known as one of the Japanese feminists and as the editor-in-chief of Seitō 青鞜, the first magazine for women by women in Japan, published in 1911 when Raichō was 25 years old. The opening line in the foreword to its first issue, “[I]n the beginning, woman was the sun” (Hiratsuka 1911), written by Raichō, came to symbolize her ideas or even her identity and was later adopted as the title of her autobiography. According to her autobiography, when she wrote this foreword, she had been practicing Zen Buddhism. Generally speaking, her devotion to Zen tends to be interpreted as a phenomenon of her youth, and her experience with Zen meditation is only mentioned to explain her inclination towards mysticism or spiritualism. It is quite possible that the trend towards Zen meditation among intellectuals at that time was connected in a profound way to the spiritualism modernized by thinkers such as Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). It is interesting that, although Swedenborg definitely belonged to the Christian tradition where he was treated as heterodox, Buddhist thinkers such as SUZUKI Daisetsu 鈴木大拙 (1870–1966) and NISHIDA Kitarō 西田幾多郎 (1870–1945) were intrigued by this movement, referring to it in Japanese as the “mysticism boom.” Suzuki introduced Swedenborg to Japan by translating his Heaven and Hell (1758) into Japanese as Tenkai to chigoku 『天界と地獄』. In this sense, a reexamination of Raichō’s Buddhism, as implicit as it may have been, helps us to understand the context and intellectual milieu of later prominent Buddhist philosophers.