The experience of the magazine "Women’ voices" ("Nusheng", 1942-1945) in Shanghai

The paper discusses the activity of the Japanese female writer Tamura Toshiko (1884-1945) as a chief editor of the Chinese magazine Women’ Voices ( Nusheng, 1942-1945). In 1910-1918 Tamura Toshiko gained the high rating of the prose writers, she was considered one of first professional female writers in Japan. Due to some personal and political reasons, she moved to Canada in 1918 and then came back in 1936. In two years, being unsatisfied with the literary and ideological situation in her country, the writer had to move again, now in China, where she worked until her death in Shanghai in 1945. Started as a correspondent in Beijing, she wrote some articles on her impressions on China of that time. The paper discusses her look at the Chinese as the specific intelligent people different from those in Japan. After her move to Shanghai, Tamura Toshiko got to work of an editorin-chief of the Chinese magazine Nusheng and she had to balance between her duty as a militarist propagandist and her duty of the female writer anxious about lives of Chinese female readers of her magazine. The magazine published Chinese translations of children’s stories of Miyazawa Kenji and Toyoshima Yoshio, the novel Love and Death written by the writer of the humanistic trend Mushanokoji Saneatsu. The paper deals with the interpretation of some Chinese translations from Japanese works like children’s stories of Miyazawa Kenji and short stories of Mushanokoji Saneatsu, with the detailed explanation of readers’ response and their interest to these writers. The paper also attempts to evaluate the activity of Tamura Toshiko as a chief in 1942-1945 in Shanghai, the paper compares it with the short Renaissance in the Chino-Japanese literary relations in 1920- 1930, with active period of communication of such writers as Lu Xin (1881-1936), Zhou Zuoren (1885-1967) and Mushanokoji Saneatsu (1885-1976). Chinese researchers partly consider the publications of Nusheng as the odious propaganda of the Japanese militarism; some literary critics notice weak attempts to understand each other. Meanwhile in the time the discussed members of the Chinese Communist Party did not refuse to co-work with the Japanese editors of Nusheng. For example, the Chinese poetess and writer Guan Lu (1907- 1982), who was at the same time a member of the underground Communist organization, helped Tamura Toshiko a lot. The role of the Japanese female writer Tamura Toshiko, the editor-in-chief and a kind of mediator between the Japanese occupational localities and the Chinese female readers is under the research in the plane of both Chinese-Japanese cultural relations and in the plane of the art history of these Asian countries. Taking into account the experience of the writer’s life in emigration, her work in the atmosphere of other culture shows her tolerant attitude to the culture different from her own one, which proves the necessity to reassess the works of the Japanese writers who lived in China during the WWII as only to the militarist propagandists.