Tadano Makuzu

Japanese social reformer and philosopher

• Born: 1763
• Died: 1825

Tadano Makuzu’s far-reaching and perceptive philosophical analysis of the nature of gender conflict and the problems of Japanese society earned her the grudging respect of male scholars during an age in which the open participation of women in Japanese political and philosophical debate was rare. She was also a major writer and joined the debate about Christianity in Japan.

Early Life

When Tadano Makuzu (tah-dah-no mah-koo-tsoo) was born, she received the given name of Ayako and had the family name of Kudō. She later chose Makuzu as her pen name and added Tadano, which was her second husband’s family name. She became most commonly known as Tadano Makuzu and signed her works simply as Makuzu. She was born into the lower aristocracy of Edo. Her father, Kudō Heisuke, served as physician to the daimyo, or lord, of Sendai. Heisuke himself was the adopted son of Kudō Jōan, a former masterless samurai or rōnin, who had also been the physician of the Sendai daimyo. Ayako’s mother was the daughter of another physician of the Sendai daimyo, Kuwabara Takatomo. The oldest surviving child of her family, Ayako had two brothers and four sisters.

Ayako was born with a large mole below her right eye, which according to Japanese customary belief was an omen for a life of tears. However, Ayako’s childhood was happy. Her father appreciated her keen intelligence and did not exclude her from the intellectual, philosophical, and political discussions in his house, which also served as the base of his medical practice and as a medical school.

In 1778, when Ayako was fifteen, she became an attendant of Princess Akiko, the daughter of the Sendai daimyo. In 1785, her father’s opposition to the new senior councillor of the shogun, Matsudaira Sadanobu—the de facto ruler of Japan—placed his family in peril. In 1787, when Ayako returned from serving Princess Akiko, she was twenty-four years old, and her father despaired of her prospects for marriage. However, when he forced her to marry an old and sick samurai two years later, she rebelled. Her incessant tears soon ended the marriage, and she returned home.

Over the enusing decade, Ayako saw much misfortune. One of her brothers, two of her sisters, and her mother died. In 1795, her father was placed under house arrest. After her father himself remarried, he arranged a new marriage for her. In 1797, when Ayako was thirty-four years of age, she married the widowed samurai Tadano Iga Tsurayoshi. Her new husband had to work in Edo. During the winter, Ayako traveled alone to her husband’s family home in Sendai, a place about two hundred miles north of Edo—a city that she would never see again. She later called her trip her journey into hell.

During the spring of 1798, Ayako’s husband rejoined her in Sendai, where Ayako was caring for three new stepsons. Her husband, with whom she had never had any children of her own, returned to Edo later in the year and would afterward visit Sendai only rarely. Meanwhile, in 1800, Ayako’s father died; seven years later, she lost her only remaining brother. The Kudō family then adopted a new male heir, who sold everything that had belonged to Ayako’s father. Finally, in 1812, Ayako learned that her husband had died in Edo. By then she was beginning to write and was becoming known as Makuzu.

Life’s Work

In 1812, Makuzu finished her autobiography, Mukashibanashi (stories from the past). Not published until 1925, this work revealed a great deal about the living conditions of lower aristocratic Japanese families during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Makuzu’s reminiscences of her relatives and commentaries on own character make for lively reading. She gave a sympathetic account of her mother and wrote admiringly of her father. The narrative ends with the tragedy of her husband’s death, when Makuzu was forty-nine years old and had another thirteen years to live.

Next turning her attention to the northern Japanese country around Sendai, Makuzu wrote two collections of essays and poems about the people, landscape, and folklore of her new home. Isozutai (1891; along the coast) and Ōshūbanashi (1891; stories fromōshū) were likely written in 1817, when she was about fifty-three. Her keen but sympathetic observations reveal much about life in a region outside Edo, which was the center of Japanese political and commercial life.

Makuzu initially felt despair at the collapse of the Kudō family fortune. After two visions in which the Buddhist goddess of mercy, Kannon. and a male Buddha appeared to her, she believed she had reached enlightenment. The visions instructed her to continue her philosophical writing, even though the fact that she was a woman meant she would face an uphill battle. Makuzu ostensibly declared that she was merely continuing the legacy of her father; however, she was, in fact, creating her own legacy.

Makuzu’s most important work was Hitori kangai (1994; Solitary Thoughts , 2001). Written between January, 1818, and January, 1819, it reflected Makuzu’s philosophical insights at their sharpest. Central to her philosophy was a defiant challenge to male authorities, including the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius, who had held that women, like servants, should not be taken seriously. The very fact of Makuzu’s writing proved such views wrong, and she won grudging respect from her male intellectual counterparts.

Insisting that personal, family and national life should obey what Makuzu called the natural rhythm of heaven and earth, she rejected social and economic politics that unbalanced human lives. Anticipating the work of the Austrian founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and the French philosopher Jacques Lacan, Makuzu commented on male castration anxiety as being irrelevant from the point of view of a woman. She reasoned, as Lacan would more than a century later, that men subordinate women because they consider them lacking a phallus.

Makuzu’s Solitary Thoughts promoted education for women, even though Makuzu wrote that education might make them miserable in a patriarchal world. She preferred Japanese texts over Chinese texts and especially disliked Confucian classics. In the field of social economics, she stressed that human society was built upon struggle, anticipating the English naturalist Charles Darwin’s ideas of the survival of the fittest. Solitary Thoughts contained the shocking observation that townsmen and artisans hated the samurai class for their idleness and sought to exploit them financially to gain revenge. Her economic writings reflected a certain innocence of the laws of supply and demand, as when she questioned why merchants would raise their prices during times of need.

To engage in intellectual discourse, Makuzu sent a manuscript of Solitary Thoughts to the philosopher Takizawa Bakin in late March, 1819. Bakin was initially put off by what he considered her female audacity; however, he was positively surprised by the intellectual quality of her writing. Afterward, the two corresponded. Later in 1819, Bakin finished their discourse with a detailed, paragraph-by-paragraph criticism of Solitary Thoughts, rejecting many of Makuzu’s ideas as anti-Confucian. He then said that he was too busy now to continue their correspondence.

After 1819, Makuzu appears to have ceased writing. She wrote her arguments for rejecting Christianity as a Western system of thought that was likely to disrupt imperial Japanese order in undated essays that were first published in 1994 in her collected works. She was apparently ill, with her writing hand in pain, and was suffering from growing nearsightedness. She thus may have stopped writing for physical reasons.

In 1825, Bakin sent a written apology to Makuzu, belatedly praising Solitary Thoughts for its vigorous spirit. However, his letter arrived too late to reach her. Tadano Makuzu died in Sendai on July 26, 1825, at the age of about sixty-two.

Significance

Most of Makuzu’s writings survived only in manuscript form. The essays and poems she wrote about Sendai were later appreciated for their local color during the Meiji era (1868-1912), when the emperor’s powers were restored and Japanese nationalism flourished. Her autobiography’s publication in 1925 attracted critical attention and was especially treasured by Japanese women writers and thinkers of the modern era.

Makuzu’s major confrontational work, Solitary Thoughts, was kept alive by Bakin’s 1819 commentary and his 1825 apology. Most of the manuscript that Makuzu had sent to him was copied in 1848, and the copy was rediscovered in 1980. Characteristically, however, the copyist dropped strong passionate pro-woman and anti-Confucian passages. Makuzu’s original manuscript does not survive, but the missing portions were restored from Bakin’s critical notes. The last known manuscript containing the first chapter of Solitary Thoughts burned in Tokyo’s great fire of 1923.

In 1936, Eiko Nakayama published Tadano Makuzu (no English translation), a biography containing the opening chapter of Solitary Thoughts. Toward the end of the twentieth century, Japanese women scholars developed a strong interest in publishing all of Solitary Thoughts—a goal finally achieved in 1994. An English translation followed in 2001.

Tadano Makuzu’s determination to follow her self-described journey into hell in 1797 by becoming a passionate and original writer was crowned with success. during the early twenty-first century, with her work finally fully accessible, the power of her arguments and the weight of her sympathetic yet critical analysis of the society of her times and the difficult role of intelligent women in the late Tokugawa shogunate met with international critical interest. To Japanese readers, her autobiography is a classic.

Bibliography

Fister, Patricia. Japanese Women Artists, 1600-1900. Lawrence, Kans.: Spencer Museum of Art, 1988. Briefly mentions Tadano Makuzu and her unusual confrontation of the male scholarly establishment in the context of the difficulties experienced by Japanese women artists of Makuzu’s age.

Gramlich-Oka, Bettina. “Kirishitan kô by Tadano Makuzu: A Late Tokugawa Woman’s Warnings.” Bulletin of Portuguese-Japanese Studies 8 (2004): 65-92. Analyzes Makuzu’s negative view of Christianity, as expressed in her undated philosophical essay, and argues that Makuzu influenced shogunate politics—a remarkable achievement for a woman of her times.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Tadano Makuzu and Her Hitori Kangae.” Monumenta Nipponica 56, no. 1 (Spring, 2001): 1-20. Comprehensive review of the life and work of Makuzu that explores the range of her major philosophical text, a translation of which follows the article and is continued in the next number of the journal. Analyzes her intellectual relationship with Bakin and discusses the survival of her manuscript.