Gendering Modern Japanese History (review)

With Gendering Modern Japanese History, the Harvard University Asia Center has put out yet another handsome book. Collectively, the volume's essays poignantly make the case that gender matters in modern Japanese history. How so is discussed in 16 chapters that are grouped in five parts on selfhood and culture, bodies and sexualities, empire and war, work and economy, and theories of gender. For the sake of brevity, I will focus on selected chapters. An extensive introduction by the editors Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno broadly describes the trajectory of the historical study of gender in historiography and in the historiography of Japan in particular, emphasizing that modern constructions of gender in Japan were strongly influenced by selected Western ideas as well as by Japanese ideas that were in flux due to Japan's modern development. Men and women were not unitary subjects created on Western models but a shifting blend of characteristics that were called on in different contexts for different strategic reasons and with different agendas in mind. And, it remains necessary to carefully balance the tension between the desire to reify the gendered subject and define woman as a category and the necessity to analytically acknowledge the multiplicity of subjectivity beyond the notion that subjectivity always remains constituted by the categories masculine and feminine, the effects of which no individual has been able to fully escape.

Some authors address this framework directly. In the first part on "Gender, Selfhood, Culture," Martha Tocco challenges the long-established view that women's education in Japan had been conservative by Western standards. Instead, she finds that the education system the Meiji state implemented was "closely compatible with the 'American model'" offered to Japan by American advisers in the 1870s. Donald Roden presents a fresh look at the emergence of the Meiji gentleman which—in following Eiko Ikegami's suggestion—he finds embodying an elaborate hierarchy of etiquette or "gentility of form" in contrast to the "gentility of essence" represented by a samurai class that once had searched for glory on the battlefield through physical strength and endurance. Somewhat complementary in her essay's goal, Barbara Sato discusses the ideal woman according to women's magazines of the 1920s which offered a much more diverse and contradictory range of "feminine characteristics" than the state vision of womanhood would have it.

In the second part on "Genders, Bodies, Sexualities," Gregory Pflugfelder describes instances of intimacy among schoolgirls in early twentieth-century Japan, a discourse that—perhaps unsurprisingly given the paradigmatic quality of that historical moment—rings similar to the anxieties surrounding the sexual attitudes and activities of female teenagers in current-day Japan. In a chapter on sexology, Mark Driscoll finds it necessary to caricature earlier scholarship on the subject in order to make claims that heavily rely on that same scholarship. He pursues that common if tiring strategy with my book, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (2003), by suggesting that it was furthering the notion of "local, late, and lacking with respect to an imagined full and transcendent European precedent." Not I but the sexologists I discuss in the book denounced Japanese tradition as uncivilized and emphasized the authority of Western culture and science as a strategic move to further their own ideas about sex and sexuality. Similarly, my point was not that sex was repressed and liberated throughout Japan's modern history but that the rhetorical figures "repression" and "liberation" frequently reappeared at certain moments in the writings of Japanese sexologists and other critics of their times. In order to claim that Colonizing Sex underanalyzes ways in which Japanese sexologists and historians of sexuality refused and resisted Eurocentrism, Driscoll must suppress chapter two which examines Japanese attempts at challenging Eurocentrism by pursuing empirical research.

In her informative chapter on "Engendering Eugenics: Feminists and Marriage Restriction Legislation in the 1920s," Sumiko Otsubo discusses one of the delicious paradoxes of Japanese modernity. In dissecting Hira-tsuka Raicho...