Reclaiming The Healing Arts of The Ancient ... - Wacana Seni

65Flaudette May V. Datuinancestral goddess Amaterasu by Takamure Itsue – a pre-war feminist philosopher and historian(albeit with no professional training as one). According to Ueno Chizuko (in Buckley 1997),Takamure proposed the idea of a "maternal self" as a Japanese cultural ideal set in oppositionto the Western "individualist self." By identifying herself and all Japanese women with thefirst, great goddess, she offered a feminist counterpart to a larger anti-Westernisation andcounter-modernism project. Framed by what Ueno described as "reverse Orientalism," thismaneuver led to Takemure's active participation in the war, which she justifies as a "sacredwar" that fights for a rapidly disappearing maternal self, as seen for instance in individualistfeminists' focus on such issues as the woman's vote, rather than on their feminine virtues,power to give birth, raise a family, lead and mediate between the community and individual.Takamure is heir to the tradition of the first maternalist feminist – Hiratsuka Raicho – thefounder of the first feminist journal in Japan. As early as the 1900s – at a time when the firstwomen's association in the Philippines was also being formed – feminism was already presentin Japan, and a debate was already raging between individualist feminists and maternalfeminists, of which Hiratsuka was a key figure. She argued for a Japanese indigenousfeminism distinct from Western individualism by asserting the specificity of womanhood andin more practical terms, by demanding maternal welfare from the state and the community. Ineffect, this debate in the 1900s defines and intimates the contours of similar fissures betweenfeminists from the pre-war (Takemura's time) period till the present, as in for instance"radical" versus "liberal" feminism; between feminists arguing for legal reforms vis-à-visthose who have shifted attention back to the private domain of male-female relationships(Miya Yoshiko in Buckley 1997). There are also present-day "versions" of maternal feminism,exemplified by what Ueno (in Buckley 1997) calls "maximalists" or "ecofeminists," whosecritique of Japanese industrial society resemble the maternal feminists counter-modernist andanti-western idealization of local virtues of motherhood, nature and nation.