Gender, Nation and State in Modern Japan ed. by Andrea Germer, Vera Mackie, and Ulrike Wöhr (review)

Gender, Nation and State in Modern Japan. Edited by Andrea Germer, Vera Mackie, and Ulrike Wöhr. Routledge, London, 2014. xx, 315 pages. $168.00.

This is a volume no student of gender or of the historical formation of the modern Japanese nation-state should fail to read. It is an unusually wide-ranging collection that includes 14 essays based on empirical evidence; a very fine introductory essay by editors Andrea Germer, Vera Mackie, and Ulrike Wöhr; a comparative essay on gender, state, and nation in European political philosophy; and an informative and moving speech by a major Japanese feminist activist. The contributors to this anthology represent a variety of disciplines and national locations, working in Japan, the United States, Australia, and Germany. The editors do an excellent job of rendering the translated chapters into accessible English. This volume will be of interest both to scholars and to advanced undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of Japanese gender studies and political history. I shall address the two contributions not based on Japanese archival data first.

Andrea Germer’s translation and annotation of the 2004 keynote speech by feminist environmental activist Iijima Aiko at the International Conference on Gender and Nation: Historical Perspectives on Japan is an unusual addition to a collection of essays largely based on archival work. But in a remarkable way, this speech (with Germer’s helpful annotation) draws the book’s other essays together and essentially answers the “so what?” question we scholars all ask ourselves when embarking on a research project. That is, Iijima shows us why scholarship about gender, nation, and the state matters. I commend the editors for including this somewhat atypical chapter in the book.

While it is more common for collections of essays on a single non-Western country to include a comparative essay grounded in the European or U.S. experience (though less likely that a collection of essays on a Western country would include a comparative essay by an Asia specialist), the essay by Sidonia Blättler is particularly helpful. She analyzes one French and two German political theorists whose ideas framed the creation of the modern nation-state. Blättler explains these political philosophers’ gender ideology in succinct and accessible language. Her essay serves as an excellent anchor, at the end of the book, to the introduction at the beginning.

The editors seamlessly knit together the collection’s varied themes in their introductory essay. They discuss the dualism of Japan’s nation-state formulation, noting, as does Hayakawa Noriyo in her chapter on the creation of modern imperial Japan, the ambiguous gendering of the Japanese emperor as father and mother of the nation. The editors also connect the themes addressed by the collection’s contributors, including the gendering of “subjects,” the role of military conscription in the molding of modern Japanese masculinity, the patriotic functions of women, the gendering of the workplace, gendered ethnicity, sexuality and reproduction, women and the state in the postwar era, and the shift during the Meiji period from the stratification of society by status to social stratification by gender.¹ The editors also expand on some of the critical issues in gender and the Japanese state that receive perhaps insufficient coverage in the book’s chapters. One such discussion included in the introduction concerns the timely issue of military sexual “comfort women.”

In a variety of ways, the chapters address what feminist scholars frequently analyze as “agency,” although only Ilse Lenz (p. 218) and Jason Karlin (pp. 50, 51) use that term. In most cases, it is feminine agency under consideration, but men’s agency is also addressed in this book. Karlin’s chapter offers an original analysis of heroic men in Meiji-era publications for boys; interestingly, these men, who were held up as models of masculinity in their defense of the nation, often defined heroism in their defiance of authority, their rejection of feminine aspects of society, and their expansive imperialism. Romit Dasgupta also uses popular media—film—to examine masculinity. His...