New Books in Japanese Studies

Although scholars have emphasized the importance of women’s networks for civil society in twentieth-century Japan, Women and Networks in Nineteenth-Century Japan (University of Michigan Press, 2020) is the first book to tackle the subject for the contentious and consequential nineteenth century. The essays traverse the divide when Japan started transforming itself from a decentralized to a centralized government, from legally imposed restrictions on movement to the breakdown of travel barriers, and from ad hoc schooling to compulsory elementary school education. As these essays suggest, such changes had a profound impact on women and their roles in networks. Rather than pursue a common methodology, the authors take diverse approaches to this topic that open up fruitful avenues for further exploration. Most of the essays in this volume are by Japanese scholars; their inclusion here provides either an introduction to their work or the opportunity to explore their scholarship further. Because women are often invisible in historical documentation, the authors use a range of sources (such as diaries, letters, and legal documents) to reconstruct the familial, neighborhood, religious, political, work, and travel networks that women maintained, constructed, or found themselves in, sometimes against their will. In so doing, most but not all of the authors try to decenter historical narratives built on men’s activities and men’s occupational and status-based networks, and instead recover women’s activities in more localized groupings and personal associations.Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Known for a tradition of Confucian filial piety, East Asian societies have some of the oldest and most rapidly aging populations on earth. Today these societies are experiencing unprecedented social challenges to the filial tradition of adult children caring for aging parents at home. Marshalling mixed methods data, Beyond Filial Piety: Rethinking Aging and Caregiving in Contemporary East Asian Societies (Berghahn, 2020) explores the complexities of aging and caregiving in contemporary East Asia. Questioning romantic visions of a senior’s paradise, chapters examine emerging cultural meanings of and social responses to population aging, including caregiving both for and by the elderly. Themes include traditional ideals versus contemporary realities, the role of the state, patterns of familial and non-familial care, social stratification, and intersections of caregiving and death. Drawing on ethnographic, demographic, policy, archival, and media data, the authors trace both common patterns and diverging trends across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, and Korea.Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Andrea Castiglioni and Fabio Rambelli's edited volume Defining Shugendo: Critical Studies on Japanese Mountain Religion (Bloomsbury, 2020) presents the newest studies on Shugendō-related practices and traditions from both Japanese and non-Japanese scholars. Contributors in their chapters explore how Shugendō constructed topologies and invented chronologies, how their practitioners were imagined and fictionalized, as well as how the tradition was reflected through materiality and visual cultures. The book also delves into the intellectual history of Shungendō studies in Japan, at the same time reflecting on how mountain beliefs in Japan have been studied in the West. Part One of the book features a chapter by Suzuki Masataka on the formative processes of Shugendō as an institutionalized religious tradition from a historiographical perspective. Suzuki traces how different generations of scholars have presented Shugendō, taking into account the influence of concepts such as "ethnic religion" and "ethnic culture" in the Meiji period and the subsequent reinterpretations of Shugendō with nationalistic overtones in the first half of the Shōwa period. Part Two looks into premodern regional variations of Shugendō institutions and religious practices as four different cultic sites: the Kumano Sanzan area in the Kii Peninsula, Mount Togakushi in Nagano prefecture, Mount Haguro in Yamagata prefecture, and Daigoji in Kyoto. The chapters of this section show how Shugendō centers regulated complex networks based on symbiotic interactions between Shugendō professionals, Buddhist monks, lay members of religious confraternities, and lay devotees. Part Three investigates how narrative strategies were set up to support Shugendō groups and identities in the premodern period. This section examines the foundational narratives of temples and shrines (jisha engi) of the medieval period, as well as how Shugendō practitioners were depicted in Edo period literary sources such as vernacular fictions and dramas. Part Four highlights the role of material and visual culture related to Shugendō, such as copper statues, devotional paintings, stelae, mounds, and paper talisman. The chapters of this section demonstrate that Shugendō materiality allowed for a network of religious interactions between humans (Shugendō practitioners, lay devotees, artisans) and nonhuman agencies (sacred objects) for the formation and diffusion of shared Shugendō discourses in society. Daigengna Duoer is a Ph.D. student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Ken Ruoff’s Japan’s Imperial House in the Postwar Era, 1945-2019 (Harvard UP, 2020), is a revised and expanded version of the author’s The People’s Emperor: Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy, 1945-1995 (2003). The book is an extensive and detailed treatment of the Japanese imperial institution as it enters a new era, Reiwa, with the abdication of the Heisei emperor (Akihito) in 2019. In addition to The People’s Emperor’s discussions of the creation of the postwar imperial institution as a “constitutional symbolic monarchy,” the continued (clandestine) role of Hirohito in politics, the postwar emperors’ approach to Japan’s war responsibility, the “massification” of the imperial family as a kind of model “middle-class” household for the postwar, and various forms of resistance from conservatives, Japan’s Imperial House adds two new chapters and an extensive and important addendum to one other. The two new chapters, respectively, provide a retrospective on the Heisei era (1989-2019) and an overview of the challenges facing the imperial line with Akihito’s son, Naruhito, now on the Chrysanthemum Throne as the Reiwa emperor. The addendum is to chapter 5, which discusses the ways in which anti-democratic and otherwise revanchist forces in postwar Japan coopted the playbook of democratic organizing to achieve (largely symbolic) victories. As we discuss in the interview, Ruoff returns to this topic because his analysis turned out to presage the tactics and successes of Nippon Kaigi, Japan’s most influential nongovernmental ultra-conservative lobbying group, during the Abe Shinzō regime.Terms and names perhaps unfamiliar to some listeners that get bandied about in our discussion include tennō (sovereign, emperor), Yoshida Shigeru (influential early postwar prime minister), Kobayashi Yoshinori (an often-controversial manga artist), and Yasukuni Shrine (which has enshrined prominent Class-A war criminals in addition to the general war dead since March 1978).Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese and East Asian history in the Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame (U California Press, 2010) is an incisive and provocative study of the figures and tropes of “savagery” in Japanese colonial culture. Through a rigorous analysis of literary works, ethnographic studies, and a variety of other discourses, Robert Thomas Tierney demonstrates how imperial Japan constructed its own identity in relation both to the West and to the people it colonized. By examining the representations of Taiwanese aborigines and indigenous Micronesians in the works of prominent writers, he shows that the trope of the savage underwent several metamorphoses over the course of Japan's colonial period--violent headhunter to be subjugated, ethnographic other to be studied, happy primitive to be exoticized, and hybrid colonial subject to be assimilated.Dr. Robert Tierney is professor of Japanese literature in the Departments of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative and World Literatures in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Samee Siddiqui is a former journalist who is currently a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945. You can find him on twitter @ssiddiqui83 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

How did Japanese academics study their "fields" in places like Manchuria and Inner Mongolia in the transwar decades? How did they transform in the postwar, under the US Occupation, and after? Into the Field: Human Scientists of Transwar Japan (Stanford UP, 2019) is the first monograph on the collective biography of this cohort of professional Japanese intellectuals, or in Miriam L. Kingsberg Kadia's words, "the men of one age."Kadia observes that during the transwar decades (1930s-1060s), these "men of one age" jointly embraced a set of unchanging assumptions regarding epistemology that was anchored in the ideal of "objectivity." The scholarship, or gakujutsu, that they aimed to produce were concerned with the quest of universal laws governing human society and the natural world, the use of a comprehensively delineated method to assure rigor in pursuit of "truth," and impartiality. Those who studied the human sciences applied the ideal of "objectivity" to the study of Self and Others in Japanese colonized and occupied lands.Following the lives of these transwar human scientists into the fields, Kadia reveals that these "men of one age," such as Izumi Seiichi, were both creators and creations of imperial epistemology. Kadia points out that although the duration of Japanese imperial control was too short to apply their academic findings to policy in much of the empire, Izumi and his colleagues "enjoyed outsized influence in justifying the empire as a hierarchy of confraternal races ruled for their own benefit by the putatively superior Japanese."The US Occupation in the postwar allowed the continuation of the pursuit of "objective" knowledge for the Japanese human scientists, as well as opening new avenues for them. Kadia argues that "what changed after 1945 were the values understood to constitute objectivity," namely ideals vaunted as characteristically American: democracy, capitalism, and peace. During the Cold War, Kadia reminds us, the US saw strategic potential in Japan's studies of East Asia and Oceania, and the Japanese academics largely "upheld the convenient fiction of their reluctant cooperation with and quiet opposition to the former government." To rehabilitate Japan's scholarly reputation, the Japanese academics were integrated into a new transnational intellectual community that both reflected and supported US hegemony, although some Japanese academics resisted the subordination of domestic progress to grand strategy. Daigengna Duoer is a Ph.D. student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Jürgen Melzer’s Wings for the Rising Sun: A Transnational History of Japanese Aviation (Harvard UP, 2020) traces the history of Japanese aviation from its origins with hot-air balloons in the 1870s until the end of the Pacific War in 1945. Melzer’s narrative centers around three themes: transnational technology transfer and Japan’s efforts to attain technological independence, domestic efforts to mobilize public enthusiasm for aviation development (what Melzer calls “air-mindedness”), and the complicated interplay of aviation with military and diplomatic history. The first chapters take us to the end of World War I, which was a turning point for Japanese aviation. Until that time, Japan had been most interested in French technologies, but the settlement of the Great War at Versailles provided an opportunity to take advantage of German aviation advancements. Parts 2 and 3 contrast the development of aviation in the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy, exposing crucial differences not only between the two services but within each one. Part 4 begins with Japan’s turn to American civil aviation technologies in the wake of the 1931 Manchurian Incident, and the subsequent impact of Japanese aggression and US retaliatory sanctions leading up to Pearl Harbor. The final chapter covers the fevered development of rocket- and jet-propelled aircraft during the war, and therefore in the context of resource shortages and a fast-ticking clock. Melzer, a former Lufthansa pilot, has written a book that will appeal to readers interested in STS, military history, international relations, and Western history, in addition to Japanese history aficionados.Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese and East Asian history in the Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Telling stories: that sounds innocuous enough. But for the first chronicle in the Japanese vernacular, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari), there was more to worry about than a good yarn. The health of the community was at stake. Flowering Tales: Women Exorcising History in Heian Japan (Harvard University Press, 2020) is the first extensive literary study of this historical tale, which covers about 150 years of births, deaths, and happenings in late Heian society, a golden age of court literature in women’s hands. Takeshi Watanabe contends that the blossoming of tales, marked by The Tale of Genji, inspired Eiga’s new affective history: an exorcism of embittered spirits whose stories needed to be retold to ensure peace.Tracing the narrative arcs of politically marginalized figures, Watanabe shows how Eiga’s female authors adapted the discourse and strategies of The Tale of Genji to rechannel wayward ghosts into the community through genealogies that relied not on blood but on literary resonances. These reverberations, highlighted through comparisons to contemporaneous accounts in courtiers’ journals, echo through shared details of funerary practices, political life, and characterization. Flowering Tales reanimates these eleventh-century voices to trouble conceptions of history: how it ought to be recounted, who got to record it, and why remembering mattered.Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Transpacific Correspondences: Dispatches from Japan’s Black Studies, an essay collection edited by Dr. Yuichiro Onishi and Dr Fumiko Sakashita, introduces a little-known, but critical history of Black Studies in Japan. Taking the Black Studies Association (Kokujin Kenkyu no Kai) as its focus, the collection charts the history of members of the Black Studies Association, and the ways in which Japanese scholars and writers studied, translated and disseminated the works of black radical thinkers, and were politically transformed by their engagement with this work. The collection is interdisciplinary in nature, covering important topics that would be of great interest to political theorists, black feminist theorists, historians, and scholars of music and literature. Transpacific Correspondence is an important contribution to the history of Afro-Asian encounters and the globalized field of Black Studies.Felicity Stone-Richards is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a comparative political theorist of Afro-diasporic and Japanese theory, and scholar of contemporary transnational political activism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

In 1800, the Shogun’s chief minister wrote the following about the city of Edo:"Someone said that if Edo did not have frequent fires, then people would be more showy and flash. In the capital or in Osaka they do everything with lavish elegance: people hang up paintings in their homes or put out arrangements of flowers. But in Edo, even in the affluent areas, everything is restrained. People only display a single flower [in a bamboo tube or a simple pot]. The wealthy have fine chess sets, but the box will have paper fixed under the lid to double up as the board. Edo’s sense of conciseness comes from continual fires."According to Professor Timon Screech, author of Tokyo Before Tokyo: Power and Magic in the Shogun’s City of Edo (Reaktion Books, 2020), the city is the source of much of what we consider to be Japanese culture: sushi, Mt Fuji, cherry blossoms. Tokyo Before Tokyo is a rich illustrated volume that presents the vibrant visual history of Edo. The book is presented as a series of vignettes, dealing with key landmarks and districts from the old city, from the Shogun’s castle to the famous red-light Yoshiwara district.In this interview, Professor Screech and I talk about the different vignettes that make up Tokyo Before Tokyo, and the role that Edo played in old Japan. We also investigate his decision to focus on landmarks and districts, and whether any of old Edo can be seen in today’s Tokyo.Professor Timon Screech is Professor of the History of Art at SOAS University of London. He is the author of at least a dozen books on the visual culture of the Edo period, including perhaps his best-known work Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700-1820 (University of Hawaii Press, 1999). In addition to Tokyo Before Tokyo, his other most recent book is The Shogun's Silver Telescope: God, Art, and Money in the English Quest for Japan, 1600-1625 (Oxford University Press, 2020). In 2019, Professor Screech was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Tokyo Before Tokyo. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies