Modern Girls on the Go: Gender, Mobility, and Labor in Japan ed. by Alisa Freedman, Laura Miller, and Christine R. Yano (review)

Beginning in the early twentieth century, modernity allowed and sometimes required Japanese women to move from country to city or to travel abroad, just as it allowed new opportunities for class mobility. Modern Girls on the Go takes us around Japan and around the world to discover how Japanese women have represented and shaped the technologies of modernity—among them capitalism, print culture, consumerism, and transportation systems—throughout the twentieth century and beyond. Its editors credit earlier work by Miriam Silverberg on the café waitress and the modern girl and Barbara Sato’s work on interwar working women with opening avenues of research relating gender and class to the structures of modernity in Japan (p. 12). And indeed, they have taken advantage of such openings to explore how modern women’s work created the conditions for class and geographic mobility in a volume consistent in the high quality of its scholarship, engaging in its themes, and persuasive in its arguments. This is a book not only important to scholars engaged in the study of Japanese women’s and gender history, but also excellent for classroom use at both the undergraduate and graduate level.

The essays in this volume are structured around the themes of new female occupations (namely, the shop girl, the elevator girl, and the dancehall girl), female transportation workers (stewardesses and bus guides), the contemporary entry of women into male-dominant employment (the military and sports), and the movement of working women abroad. They chronicle women’s often fraught but always productive relationship to modern industrial development and the “modern life” it begot. One of the ways Modern Girls on the Go illustrates how this relationship was both fraught and productive is connected to the use of women’s bodies and images in attempts to naturalize unfamiliar features of modern life. As Laura Miller explains in her essay about women’s employment as department store elevator operators, “[b]y having young women controlling this new vertical transport, those who wanted people to ride in large moving containers were offering a type of assurance about their safety” (p. 48). Thus, the purveyors of modern technologies could make them seem exciting and new while simultaneously safe, comfortable, and strangely familiar by invoking presumptions about the unchanging nature of “women.”

Similarly, Christine Yano notes in her essay on airline stewardesses in the 1960s and 1970s that “Japanese women’s experiences flying for Pan Am [were] a strategic mix of the traditional and the modern, the old and the new—that is, the very modern international stewardess job, rel[ied] on women’s performance of old-fashioned femininity” (p. 86). This reliance on the seemingly timeless nature of Japanese femininity invited (mostly male) passengers to relax and enjoy high-speed travel; but it also promised the women working for airlines an unconventional (that is, nontraditional) way of maintaining upper-middle-class status while working in an ultramodern industry. Pan Am stewardesses ironically relied on the performance of a graceful and self-effacing “Japanese” femininity to become part of an internationalized, global (and mobile) elite.

But as Sabine Frühstück argues, when it comes to military machinery, it is not women who naturalize the technology but rather an array of technologies that must be deployed to reinscribe a safe and familiar femininity. Because the Japan Self Defense Forces (SDF) downplay explicit references to militarism, the growing number of women choosing to work in the SDF—not the sophisticated weaponry—has become the more unsettling effect of military modernity in Japan. Frühstück argues in her essay on female service members that journalistic representations of female SDF members show them in sexualized poses that are familiar to consumers of mass media, “thus reintroducing a measure of conventionality into the narrative and...