In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Sex in Japan’s Globalization, 1870–1930: Prostitutes, Emigration and Nation-Building by Bill Mihalopoulos
  • Barbara Molony
Sex in Japan’s Globalization, 1870–1930: Prostitutes, Emigration and Nation-Building. By Bill Mihalopoulos. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011. 208 pages. Hardcover £60.00/$99.00.

Sex in Japan’s Globalization, 1870–1930 joins a wave of works published during the past few years on gender and sexuality in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Japan.1 This compact and accessibly written monograph exhaustively mines archival [End Page 121] resources that have, to date, not been used in English-language works on the Japanese overseas sex trade. Mihalopoulos neatly integrates the issues of Japan’s nation-building, labor migration in the context of a global workforce shaped by imperialism as well as by industrial modernization, and the reification of standards of ideal womanhood in Japan. In the process, he takes issue with some long-accepted notions, especially that of the downward diffusion of samurai values to all of Japanese society in the construction of Meiji womanhood, gender, and sexuality. His major contentions are bold and, given his control of archival resources, convincing. This is a book with which all students of Japanese modernity, of the construction of sexuality and gender, and of the creation of the nation in a globalizing world should engage.

The book’s five main chapters cover the conditions that encouraged women to migrate in pursuit of sex work overseas during the period 1870–1930; government policy and popular attitudes toward sex work that molded (and were molded by) the collection of data by consular officials; the role of prostitution in reshaping the concept of the family held by the Japan Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU); the attitude toward overseas sex work of one of Japan’s most noted advocates for women, Fukuzawa Yukichi; and the initially influential community roles of Japanese sex workers in Singapore. The book’s conclusion summarizes a topic that runs throughout the whole work: the intersection of globalization, gender, and poverty.

The first chapter details the conditions that encouraged young Japanese women in the sex trade to migrate overseas in the late nineteenth century. Britain’s development of colonial industries in East and Southeast Asia drew such women to these areas in two ways: First, the ships that carried coal from Kyushu to the colonies for use in powering their enterprises also at times transported young women passengers, whether as stowaways or as ticket-buying passengers. Second, the single men from south China and India who formed the overwhelming majority of laborers in the colonies were a ready clientele for sex workers. Conditions in Japan, too, encouraged the migration of women. Mihalopoulos notes that women in the Amakusa region, from which many prostitutes migrated, had long been encouraged to find profitable work to pay for a portion of their dowries and help support their families. Sex work that served these important family goals was not seen as degrading, while failure to make money was, on the other hand, seen in a negative light. On the national level, however, sex work was seen as something undertaken by lazy people, making the Japanese look bad in foreign eyes. Thus, Mihalopoulos argues, Amakusa’s export of prostitution created a clash of two aspirations: the enhancement of women’s social capital at the local level through fulfillment of economic duties to the household versus the building of a nation that embraced female chastity.

In his next chapter, Mihalopoulos introduces an excellent data set—records collected by consular officials at overseas ports. He uses this data to address the lack of archival resources expressing the voices of the women emigrants themselves, and the resultant analysis produces new insights into the development of Japan’s gendered emigration policy in the Meiji period. Because unequal treaties made import substitution [End Page 122] difficult, Mihalopoulos argues, the government sought instead to encourage exports. To get a sense of potential markets, it directed consular officers to gather data on local conditions. Around 1885, consular reports began to comment disparagingly on Japanese prostitutes in Asia and Hawaii and on the west coast of North America, describing them as shūgyō (unsightly...

pdf