여학생의 ‘우정’을 둘러싼 제국 일본 담론과 대동아공영권 -요시야 노부코(吉屋信子)의『여성의 우정』『여교실』과 미디어 담론을 중심으로-

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate and reveal how the concept of “friendship” that began in Nobuko Yoshiya’s girls novels is distorted with the coming of the Sino-Japanese War and the rise of “the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.” First, the “friendship” among Imperial Japan’s schoolgirls unfolded in the background of a dichotomy between the perversion of “homosexuality” and “friendly affection”. With the backdrop of this sharp dichotomy in her novels, Yoshiya concentrates on forming a community of girls by accenting their innocence in the form of “pure love” and provoking an emotional response from the reader. By the 1930s, their “friendship” was expanding itself into the area of women’s solidarity against men. It went against the common notion of the day that women could not have true friendship among themselves. Now women could have a feminine type of “friendship” which had been monopolized by men up to that date. Another of Yoshiya’s works, The Women’s Classroom, which came out of the era of the Second Sino-Japanese War, portrays the “friendship and “solidarity” of women that goes beyond the boundaries of the Japanese Empire and seeks to establish itself as the “femininity” and “maternity” of the entire human race, and also “solidarity” across national and racial barriers. The universal appeal of such “friendship” and “solidarity” of women acts as a mechanism for establishing “the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere” under the pretext of “friendship” and “peace” and furthermore conceals the true motive for the Japanese Empire’s invasion of its neighbors.