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209 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1. I agree with Veena Das, who argues: “The anthropologist must appear not in the role of an observer but that of a hearer, and the subject must correspondingly appear in the role of a speaker.” Replacing “vision” or “gaze,” a “voice” is “expected to be more open to the fragmented and multiple character of social experience” (1995, 18). 2. Mikiso Hane writes: “The number of silk filatures increased rapidly [in the late nineteenth century] and, before long, the region around Suwa Lake in Nagano prefecture became a flourishing center of silk production. By 1891, Nagano prefecture was producing 19 percent of the nation’s raw silk, and, by 1911, 27 percent” (1982, 173). Okaya is located right on the west edge of Suwa Lake. 3. Nagano is not exceptional for the presence of these women’s groups. In his Fujin, josei, onna: Josei-shi no toi (Women: Questions of women’s history), Kanò Masanao introduces us to a variety of women’s groups whose members study the women’s histories of their own localities (1989, 176–209). Matsubara Nao’s chapter “Josei-shi o manabò nettowaaku ” (The network to study women’s histories) is a more practical guide for those who are interested in joining the group activities throughout Japan (1987, 198–213). 4. Vicente Rafael uses “textual strategy ” in the context of the early colonial history of the Philippines. He has explored the possibility of reading missionary texts that were written by the Spaniards in Tagalog against the grain of their ostensible meaning, that is, “in terms of how they might have been received by the Tagalogs who heard them” (1992, 71). I paraphrase his explication of this “textual strategy” for my own purpose. 5. I conducted field research at several different times between 1984 and 1991. The length of each field research period varied. In 1984, I stayed in Tabata in the southern part of Nagano prefecture for three months. From 1988 to 1989, I lived in the same community for approximately a year. In addition to these two relatively long-term stays, I visited and stayed in the same general area during the summers of 1985, 1986, 1987, 1990, and 1991, for about one month. Place names appearing in this book are the actual names of towns and villages within Nagano prefecture. As the name of the prefectural capital is also called Nagano, I use the “town of Nagano” for the capital and “Nagano” for the entire prefecture. 6. In truth, Tabata is now a hamlet that is a part of the administrative unit of Minami-minowa village. Its residents, however, still refer to Tabata as their “village.” Hence I will retain this term throughout this book. 7. This argument reminds me of the argument proposed a long time ago by Notes Yoshimoto Takaaki, one of the postwar scholars of Japanese nationalism. Yoshimoto asserts that the experiences of the Japanese masses during the wartime period and the memories of those experiences that they later write or speak are different in nature and that memories cannot recuperate the past experiences. He suggests that we should rely on “popular songs” (taishû kakyoku), which can potentially reveal everyday, but unconscious, experiences during the wartime period (1964). 8. In modern Japanese history, there was another moment when a group of distinguished intellectuals, academics, and critics proclaimed the “overcoming of the modern.” It was 1942, only months after the outbreak of the Pacific War. “The modern,” then, largely meant the West which they thought had afflicted the “traditional” way of Japanese life. Hence they conceptualized World War II as the “agent capable of finally conquering the modern” (Harootunian 1989, 69; see also Takeuchi 1983; Sakai 1989). 9. In The Texture of Memory: Holocaust, Memories, and Meaning, James E. Young argues for the need to break down the notion of “collective memory.” Instead, he prefers to examine “collected memories ,” an aggregate collection of people’s many, often competing memories (1993, xi). While I agree with him, I also emphasize the need to see the emergence of a “collective memory” whenever we can identify such a process. 10. Ortner’s paper “Resistance: Some Theoretical Problems in Anthropological History and Historical Anthropology” was first published in 1992 for the Program in the Comparative Study of Social Transformations (CSST) at the University of Michigan. She later revised and published it in Comparative Study of Society and History with the title of “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal” (1995). In both...

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