Saturday 7 June 2008

Too damn hot

Yes, it's still hot. Not quite as bad as it was, but it's been hot for so long that I'm feeling really worn down and light-headed most of the time. So, hiding out in my room reading rather than going out at the weekends, which means not much in the way of news.

Himself has been wonderful and ordered my new mp3 player, headphones and USB headset for me. Can't wait to see him next weekend.

Still trying to drag myself through this feminism nationalism translation. If nothing else it's turning into an interesting impromptu history lesson as I try to place some names - female anarchists executed for treason in the Meiji era.

Quote for the day: "Not unusually, tradition in Japan held that femaleness and an individual identity and destiny were oxymoronic. Thus, when the Tokugawa (1603-1867) authorities chose to execute a woman, she would be given a man's name. This was not unlike the view of progressive medieval Buddhists that enlightenment was not, after all, out of the reach of women. In male bodies, transformed at the point of death through the grace of Amida Buddha, they might gain immediate entry to the Pure Land. Either style of 'annihilation' meant dying a 'man'. However, after the Meiji imperial restoration of 1868, Western-style modernity brought with it a new view of women as modern citizens. The Meiji Constitution, Civil Code and political assembly laws fell far short of according them equality in terms of their rights or duties to the nation, yet the new criminal code promulgated in 1880 spelt a certain equality for women in granting them equal access to criminality."

From 'Resistance to Difference: Sexual Equality and its Law-ful and Out-law (Anarchist) Advocates in Imperial Japan' by Hélène Bowen Raddeker

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