Female Cross-Dressing as Subversive of the Gendered Division of Labour in the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Household

In 1832 and 1837, magistrates of the Japanese military government sentenced a woman self-named Takejirō (circa 1814-1838) for dressing and behaving like a man, finding the defendant guilty of corrupting the “customs” (fūzoku) and “disrupting the human community” (jinrin wo midashi). Existing research argues that, in the judges’ opinion, Takejirō’s adoption of male attire and gendered conduct threatened to break down three supporting pillars of the socio-cultural order: the gender differences between men and women, the economic differences between the two sexes, and the survival of the ie, the patriarchal household. However, available scholarship has not fully investigated the fact that the authorities saw in Takejirō’s cross-dressing a fourth way this practice might have blurred the polarity between femininity and masculinity and posed a risk to the survival and perpetuation of the ie: in fact, Takejirō refused to do “women’s work” (joshi no shogyō), i.e. domestic activities such as weaving and cooking, and instead chose to do “men’s work” (otoko no shogyō), i.e. extra-domestic activities such as a career in a public office. By reading Neo-Confucian essays that posited the gendered division of labour as a cornerstone of the household and the whole society and culture, examining the verdicts passed against Takejirō, and analysing a sumptuary law enacted in 1843 to forbid parents from dressing young girls in boys’ guises, this paper aims to better understand an additional aspect of the complex social, political, economic, and cultural reasons for which the military magistracy fought against female cross-dressing as an ostensible menace to the socio-cultural order.