Recreating Japanese Men Edited by Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall (review)

Two decades on from Gail Lee Bernstein’s pioneering anthology Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945 (also from University of California Press) comes another fine collection of essays, this time focusing on the transformations that have taken place in conceptualizing Japanese manhood, from early Tokugawa-period samurai through to the postmodern era of gendered robots. Like the earlier collection, this volume does not attempt to be comprehensive, nor does it give general overviews of how gender relations shift across various epochs. Instead, each chapter provides a detailed investigation of the meaning of manhood in relation to a set of specific historical circumstances, albeit organized according to three general themes.

The first section of essays, grouped around the theme “legacies of the samurai,” explores how different groups of men have positioned themselves in relation to both the real and imagined military ethos of the samurai. Anne Walthall’s chapter on the addition of guns to the archery and sword-based martial practices of the samurai points out how ownership, use, and proficiency of firearms needed to be integrated with wider conceptions of military masculinity. She notes how, during the long peaceful years of Tokugawa rule, gun ownership featured as a status symbol and firearms and marksmanship were more associated with hunting than martial valor. Luke Roberts’s chapter looks at the same early Tokugawa period but focuses on the experience of the merchant class and on the life of one specific merchant who left a memoir reflecting on the course of his life. In his memoir, Enomoto Yazaemon (1625–86) discusses his “wild youth” where he frequently engaged in acts of violent retribution when he felt his honor to be at stake. His escapades are significant because they show that in the early years of Tokugawa rule, the masculinity of the merchant classes was as tied up with defending honor through violence as was that of the samurai. However, by the time Yazaemon had turned 40 his masculine identity had been reoriented to establishing his family’s success in business which required subservience to and not challenge of the developing status system. This acquiescence resulted in what Roberts terms “the stabilization of the division of labor into hereditary households” (p. 64).

Michele Mason’s chapter looks at bushidō, a term frequently associated with samurai masculinity but which was only popularized in the writings of Nitobe Inazō at the beginning of the twentieth century. Mason usefully argues that discussion of this supposed “code of ethics,” rather than pointing to an actually existing sense of masculine discipline, instead indicates a masculinity in crisis. As she points out, bushidō was largely invented at a time when Western discourse defined Japan as a feminized, uncivilized, childlike country. Mason goes on to look at how the concept traveled into the postwar period through the work of Mishima Yukio and the lesser known right-wing agitator Hyōdō Nisohachi, who again “reinvented” the tradition to speak to a perceived crisis of masculinity brought on by Japan’s defeat and occupation by the United States. The final chapter in this section, by Sabine Frühstück, continues the theme of military masculinity, asking what it means for male members of the Self Defense Forces (SDF) to serve under a U.S.-drafted “peace constitution.” Frühstück’s ethnographically informed argument is particularly effective in pointing to the double sense of alienation that many male SDF career soldiers face. The majority are recruited from “socioeconomically underprivileged backgrounds” (p. 95) and are likely to have failed their exams to enter university. Furthermore, throughout their careers they are soldiers who will never see battle and can only enter the international arena as service providers.

The theme of marginality is picked up in the next grouping in the collection, “Marginal Men,” which offers four chapters that look at modes of masculinity that can be seen as lacking or failing in some...