The Japanese Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was born in 1886 when Mary C. Leavitt, a round-the-world missionary dispatched by the World's WCTU in Evanston. Illinois, came to Japan and inspired Japanese Christian women to fight collectively against social evils, especially alcohol-related problems. After Leavitt's successful tour, the World's WCTU sent missionaries one after another to Japan and attempted to rescue the Japanese by exporting what it believed was a universally applicable, prohibition-first policy. The Japanese Christian women who gathered around the emissaries from the WCTU, however, rejected accepting uncritically the American temperance scheme instead, they always rewrote and nativized the ideas and strategy of its mother organization in their own terms. When they translated the term “temperance” into Japanese, they chose “kyo^^-fu^^-”（reforming customs),”not “kinshu (prohibition)” and adopted an anti-prostitution-first policy. The Japanese women especially targeted the licensed prostitution system more eagerly than alcohol-related issues, although the missionaries preferred to focus on the latter over the former. This essay reveals the process whereby the Japanese women negotiated with the WCTU missionaries over the preference of “kyo^^-fu^^-”or the “kinshu” and how they transformed the late-Victorian temperance strategy according to their own cultural and social situation.
Woman's Christian Temperance Union
gender
Japanese social history