Gendering Modern Japanese History (review)

My first reaction when I looked at the table of contents of Gendering Modern Japanese History was "Everyone is here!" It was a pleasure to see the range of scholars included in the volume. Although of course not "everyone" could be included in a single work, by the time I completed the book, my initial impression was confirmed. This is a volume with breadth and depth that contributes to scholarship on a wide array of subjects. On the microlevel it offers something for readers from many disciplines, and on the macrolevel it offers many things for many readers. In its entirety or chapter by chapter Gendering will be used in research and in the classroom by historians and social scientists. It sheds light on many aspects of the long twentieth century in Japan and provides a foundation for the study of the twenty-first. I fully expect that it will become a basic source cited in every related publication.

In their introduction, Barbara Moloney and Kathleen Uno indicate that "this book aims to contribute to both social science and cultural studies of Japan by further historicizing gender construction, gender contestations, and gender ambiguity" (p. 22). They point out that "In Japan's long twentieth century, individuals have constructed and experienced complex, fluid identities, while social institutions and the state have attempted to craft and enforce unitary constructions of gender" (p. 8).

The essays contained in Gendering clearly illustrate the complexities and range of gender construction at the microlevel, whether the "ideal woman" in 1920s mass women's magazines of Barbara Sato's chapter, or the range of individual or local responses to the ryōsai kenbo (good wife and wise mother) definition of womanhood cited by Kathleen Uno. The essays both collectively and individually also delineate the development of the state's definition of gender roles and the political context in which these definitions evolved. Gendering provides both macro- and microlevel insight into the state's interest in identifying gendered behavior at particular historical periods as "modern" or as "traditional" while at all times defining the current gender expectations as "Japanese."

As a whole, the volume takes its place beside such edited collections as Gail Bernstein's Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945 (University of California Press, 1991), Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow and Atsuko Kameda's Japanese Women: New Feminist Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future (New York: The Feminist Press, 1995), and James E. Roberson and Nobue Suzuki's Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Japan: Dislocating the Salaryman Doxa (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). Individual chapters and sections offer an even wider range of scholarship than can be found in these earlier works.

The book is divided into five sections: "Gender, Selfhood, Culture"; "Genders, Bodies, Sexualities"; "Gender, Empire, War"; "Gender, Work, Economy"; and "Theorizing Gender." Each section is filled with new insights on gender and the state. Of particular note, the individual chapters focus on complexities rather than binary analysis, and the authors provide ample cross-references to other chapters, thus tying the book together in a way that is rare in an edited collection. Below, I will illustrate the volume's richness by referring to a few examples from its sixteen chapters.

On the one hand, this book provides a narrative of the construction of gender and gendered citizens in the context of Japan's development from late Tokugawa to the end of the twentieth century. Underlying that more-or-less unitary political macrolevel narrative are the particular and complex cases that comprise each chapter. In the early part of the narrative, the Meiji government was concerned with obtaining international respect. It modernized and produced categories of people (educated women, internationally minded gentlemen) in order to show how civilized and enlightened Japan had become. Yet, at the very core of this institution building, as Martha Tocco's chapter on Meiji women's education shows, boundaries between "traditional" and modern were permeable. Meiji education for women was not so much a...