A Study of Arakaki Mitoko's Yellow Lily: The Background of the Civil Code Reform Movement in Okinawa under the US Occupation

Abstract

In response to the women's movement to revise the Civil Code in US-occupied Okinawa where the old Civil Code still existed, Arakaki Mitoko's newspaper novel The Yellow Lily (1954-55) criticized the feudal system of Okinawan society and presented the plurality of the occupied space, which was not covered by male writers in Okinawa. The contemporary newspaper novel Yamazato Eikichi's The World of Dust and its critique both repudiate the autonomous space for women, however, Arakaki's texts envisage the phases of concubines, wives and mothers divided by sex and reproduction, and shifts the normative family image by depicting a non-normative image of women. This is also evident in Yuriko's feeling of seeing her birth mother Kammy as an object of eros not as someone bound by her duty of reproducing the next generation. In the end, Yuriko's decision of cremating the remains of her ancestors is an act of both accepting and rejecting the traditional customs and shows her desire of a law that could justify her acts by bettering the new Civil Code.