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초록
Most of the works written during the Manchukuo period by Haruko Ushijima, a leading writer of Manchukuo Japanese literature, have a male character as the protagonist or central character. The first novel she wrote with a female protagonist is "Woman"(1942). Consisting of three chapters, the novel takes place around the outbreak of the Pacific War as its temporal background, depicting the emotional changes of a pregnant woman who stillborn her child. The novel ends with a scene in which the woman is moved by the news of the fall of Hong Kong, which she heard on the radio one week after the stillbirth, and becomes aware of her role as a mother who gives birth to a child in order to carry out the "Greater East Asia War. This work also brings to the fore the author's own identity as a "subject" of Imperial Japan, which was waging an all-out war under the slogan "Give birth, and you shall multiply," and as the wife of a Manchukuo official and a "military mother". The "Maternity Protection Controversy," which was centered on Akiko Yosano and Raicho Hirasuka during the Taisho period, occupies an important place in the study of Japanese women's history, and the arguments for maternity protection made by Hiratsuka in that debate determined the direction of the mainstream women's movement in Japan. As Japan entered the war system, "motherhood" became associated with the patriarchal ideology of good wives and wise mothers, and evolved into a celebration of motherhood and its use by the state, a trend that expanded nationwide in the 1930s as the need to mobilize women increased. It is undeniable that Haruko Ushijima's "Woman" is a propaganda piece promoting the national policy of the "Greater East Asia War." However, it can be read as a text that expresses her consciousness as a woman, containing the "protection of motherhood" as a line of the Japanese women's movement and her constant search for the subject in order to write novels in Manchukuo.