Bibliographic Data: Faison, Elyssa. Managing Women: Disciplining Labor in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Bibliographic Data - Review: Review by: Bill Mihalopoulos, The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 69, No. 1 (Feb. 2010), pp. 253-55 .

Main Argument: Family + industrialization = patriarchal authority of the father grated onto the state ==> "corporate paternalism" mode of production centered around integrating women into hierarchical relations by disciplining female workers bodily, fixing of cultural standards of womanhood (i.e. women workers treated more as women than as workers). Capital shapes social knowledge as well as the individual; "capital shapes the capacity to communicate and to feel the content of what we think" (254). Method: Marx + Foucault = feminist revolution?

Bibliographic Data: Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. The Technological Transformation of Japan: From the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

( Technology and development )

Bibliographic Data: Harootunian, Harry D. Overcome By Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

( Overcoming modernity )

Bibliographic Data: Fogel, Joshua A. Politics and Sinology: The Case of Naito Konan (1866-1934). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

( Epistemological imperialism )

Bibliographic Data: Ruoff, Kenneth J. Imperial Japan at its Zenith: The Wartime Celebration of the Empire’s 2600th Anniversary. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010.

( Imperial pagaentry )

Bibliographic Data: Ruoff, Kenneth J. The People’s Emperor: Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy, 1945-1995. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003.

( Popular monarchy )

Bibliographic Data: Kingsberg, Miriam. Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.

( Narco-politics and civilization )

Bibliographic Data: Vlastos, Stephen. “Opposition Movements in Early Meiji, 1868-1885.” In The Cambridge History of Japan vol. 5, ed. Marius B. Jansen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989: 367-431.

Main Argument: Why did the oligarchs prevail? "Put simply, they made tactical concessions that reduced the friction between the emerging middle class and the state but crushed movements by socially marginal classes" (426). Also contextual factors: no new impositions from Western imperial powers in the 1870s; opposition movements arose sequentially rather than simultaneously. Even more importantly, "the Meiji reforms destroyed traditional structures of collective action that, if they had remained in place, would have permitted far broader mobilization against the programs of the Meiji government" (431).

( Popular dissent )

Bibliographic Data: Iriye, Akira. “Japan’s Drive to Great-Power Status.” In The Cambridge History of Japan vol. 5, ed. Marius B. Jansen et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989: 721-82.

Main Argument: Iriye argues that two things distinguished Japan from its fellow rising modern nation-states: "the emperor system and the military's 'right of supreme command'" (731). He argues that the prestige of the imperial institution gave the Meiji government instant legitimacy, and the fact that the military reported only to the emperor gave it free rein. In other respects, however, "Japanese behavior fitted into the general pattern of the modern Western states" (764). Iriye insists throughout that Japanese imperialism cannot be understood irrespective of its domestic context, partly because "the majority of Japan's leaders and public opinion assumed that all viable modern states were also imperialist" (782).

( Why empire? )
Bibliographic Data: Pyle, Kenneth. "Meiji Conservatism." In The Cambridge History of Japan vol. 5, ed. Marius B. Jansen et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989: 674-720.

Argument, Sources, Examples Meiji conservatism was formulated in response to the Japanese Enlightenment, and in particular several of its themes: 1) "negative view of Japan's traditional institutions and the learning that underlay them" (676); 2) stress on "the cultural example of the West" (677); 3) "wholehearted commitment to science, technology, and utilitarian knowledge"; 4) "a new view of humanity with revolutionary implications for society and the state" (678). For the conservatives, the immediate problem was how to anchor traditionalist values: was it confidence in their universal validity, in terms of the new rationalist thought, or was it in a nationalist justification? By the 1890s, Japanese conservatism had become suffused with cultural nationalism, culminating in the jubilation surrounding the Sino-Japanese War. The oligarchs turned to the conservative reform tradition of German thought, since they "needed to find ways to avoid the severe antagonism in society that would undermine the effort to achieve their national goals" (698) and also not coincidentally to legitimate the new order in terms other than natural rights philosophy: thus, the imperial constitution and the emperor-centered state. Economic and industrial policy were also fomented with a clear eye to forestalling social problems (read: Marxism), drawing on the experiences of the West and heavily influenced by Bismarckian ideas. The counterpart of this was a program of conservative reform in the countryside, which Pyle describes as a "pragmatic effort of Japanese conservatives to make limited reforms within a nationalist framework as a means of cushioning society from the traumatic effects of the industrial revolution" and to promote both economic development and social harmony (712). By the end of Meiji, the liberals were in disarray and the conservative reaction had triumphed, because, according to Pyle, "the main themes of the bunmei kaika had lacked a strong social constituency to defend them" (717). Its new social values went against Japanese mores and "above all, were incompatible with the institutions of the countryside where the great majority of the populace had its roots" (717-18), and finally, by the turn of the C20, the West had lost its status as unthinking exemplar. Although the bureaucracy's two fold strategy of pressing for social reforms and relying on local groups to propagate the desired collectivist ethic, overall, "Meiji conservatism methods set a pattern for handling the problems of industrial society that tended under these circumstances to lead to more and more extreme measures" (720).

Further Reading: Bowen, Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji Japan; Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths; Kim, The Age of Visions and Arguments; Fujitani, Race for Empire; Beasley, Japanese Imperialism

Bibliographic Data: Tonomura, Hitomi. “Black Hair and Red Trousers: Gendering the Flesh in Medieval Japan.” The American Historical Review 99:1 (February 1, 1994): 129–154.

Main Argument: Tonomura is looking at the Konjaku monogatari to provide "analysis of the kinds of social scripts that probably influenced the perceptions of gendered relations, especially in areas of sexual practices and sexuality" (132). In other words, she is reading these tales to detect traces of the process by which patriarchy was instantiated in Japan over the course of several centuries, in effect trying to diagnose where that process was at in the early (12thC) medieval period.

Argument, Sources, Examples Although the KM stories are more even-handed in their treatment of gender relations, gendered bodies, and sexual mores than might be thought, Tonomura notes that "the compiler's comments attached to the narratives frequently reduce women to an essentialized category and set up boundaries within which female sexuality must remain" (133). Marriage is still an amorphous institution, and was not necessarily male-centered; at this time there was also apparently no concept of rape as a crime, not even against a woman's male family members, let alone against the woman herself; when assaults occur, the crime is in how the victim's clothes (symbolic of her social position) are treated. Similarly, there is no concept of adultery, and the impropriety of men "taking" women is directly related to their class; "high-ranking aristocratic men seem incapable of violating women" (152). At the same time, patriarchy is visible in the fact that male characters' faults are theirs alone while the faults of female characters engender pontificating on the flawed nature of women. Even this is not a complete process, however, as Tonomura notes; "in these tales, 'the feminine' is problematized and sometimes negatively coded, but it is not yet established as a consistent, uniform, and stable category" (138). Although there is no discourse of virginity or purity, it is noteworthy that men are desirable in toto while the desirable female body is discussed in parts. Relatedly, Tonomura observes that "a sense of collective male identity is reinforced through the sharing of a common male culture centered on the penis," surely the ancestor of the phallocentric culture of the Edo period (144). Indeed, phallocentrism is already visible in the fact that "the text privileges the male sex organ and makes it the cornerstone of a sexual system for both sexes," meaning that "female desire and pleasure disconnected from men fall outside the range of epistemological possibilities" (148). And while men's bodies share in the collapse of power and vulnerability in the genitalia that female characters also experience, "female bodies are inscribed with clearly chaining values and significance according to their age," and they serve, when decomposing "as a pedagogical symbol, a medium through which to convey the Buddhist messages of impermanence" (144, 145). Similarly, female desires are internally generated while men are lured into desire by women; conveniently enough, desire for women "can be a gateway to greater achievement in the Way of the Buddha" (147). Tonomura concludes that

Women in the Konjaku, however, are burdened with the task of managing both their own sexuality and men's basic instincts, not because women are associated with reason but because they have the power to entice men. Consequently, cultural construction rests heavily on the female's shoulders, complicating the anthropological metanarrative that equates men with culture and women with nature. (154)

Bibliographic Data: Colcutt, Martin. “The Zen Monastery in Kamakura Society.” In Court and Bakufu in Japan: Essays in Kamakura History, ed. Jeffrey P. Mass. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995 [1982]: 191-220.

Main Argument: This paper attempts to elucidate the cause of Zen's meteoric rise in Japan in the Kamakura period "by focusing on the sponsorship of Rinzai Zen, especially the monasteries of Kenchôji and Engakuji" (192). That patronage was mainly from the warrior elite for several reasons relating to their new position vis-a-vis old power holders such as the temple complexes and the imperial court, but it is important to note that their interest was not purely in enlightenment: Zen was attractive partly because it was controllable, and warrior elites did not patronize it exclusively.

Argument, Sources, Examples In terms of the question of who patronized Zen in the Kamakura period, "it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that its growth in Japan was due largely to sponsorship by the elite: the Hôjô and the powerful warriors heading the Kamakura Bakufu, the upper echelons of provincial warrior society, and emperors and members of the Imperial Court," partly because Zen studies demanded a high degree of education (199), especially initially. Why? Zen was socially stable (i.e. its adherents had no complaints against the current political order), and for the Hôjô and the warrior elite, its very newness (i.e. not entwined with older aristocratic power structures) was also favorable. It also offered greater chances for advancement to the scions of those warrior elite than did the established temple complexes. Finally, it was a conduit for the transmission of the culture of the Song literati, the mastery of which could also give warriors cultural cachet equal to the members of the aristocracy. And because the Zen monasteries adopted wholesale the highly developed administrative systems of Chan monasteries in China, they were able to make effective use of the rights within the shôen system that their official patrons procured for them.

Bibliographic Data: Mass, Jeffrey P. “Jitō Land Possession in the Thirteenth Century: The Case of Shitaji Chūbun.” In Medieval Japan: Essays in Institutional History, edited by John W. Hall and Jeffrey P. Mass. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988 [1974]: 157-83.

Main Argument: "…beginning in the 1180s the country's non-military absentee proprietors ere forced to absorb into their estates management-level warrior-officers over whom they had no direct control. It was this immunity of the jitô as a vassal of Kamakura that set the stage for the thirteenth century's endemic central-local struggles over land" (157).

Argument, Sources, Examples There were two types of jitô: "those who were longtime residents in their appointment areas, and those who were newly intruded from the outside" (157). Many "confirmatory" jitô were local myôshu who had been invested as "shôen officers" (shôshi); at the same time, most of the great warrior families of the East held their lands outside the shôen system of immunities and so were willing to participate in the bakufu's new system of stewardship, which did confer immunity. In the West, however, things were different; "the basic clash of interests that highlights the 13thC thus became one between Kantô-born jitô and central proprietors of western province estates" (160), often in the form of their personally appointed azukari dokoro, a kind of local deputy. This led to a situation in which "the traditional hierarchy of more or less vertical tenures had now flattened out and divided into two roughly parallel tracks of authority" (163). By the middle of the 13thC, the Kyoto proprietors were on the defensive, evolving such practices as wayo (compromise) and ukesho (receipt guarantees) to try to stanch the bleeding, with the ultimate effect that central powers of proprietorship began to devolve back to the land. Shitaji chûbun, estate division, was a last-ditch strategy to fend off jitô predations. When divisions did occur, moreover, they often did so synthetically rather than naturally, as the shôen as a unit was resistant to such easy territorial breakup. By the end of the 14thC, shugo had totally displaced proprietors and jitô as the final authority at the provincial level, rendering shitaji chûbun obsolete. Sources: Documents. All the documents.

Bibliographic Data: Shapinsky, Peter D. “With the Sea as Their Domain: Pirates and Maritime Lordship in Medieval Japan.” In Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges, ed.y Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Kären Wigen. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003: 221-38.

Main Argument: Shapinsky argues that the "sea lords" of the 15th and 16thC "became integral elements of the 16thC Japanese political and economic order and came to play a vital role in the functioning of the maritime networks of violence and exchange that connected Japan to the wider East Asian maritime world" (224). These sea lords did so by exercising "sea tenure," namely "control over access to the sea and the tools of maritime production such as ships, salterns, and fishing gear" (223). However, they did so in competition with traditional land-based authorities, with the result that "modes of sea tenure thus included both the regulations of state-level entities and the customary practices of local littoral inhabitants" (ibid).

Argument, Sources, Examples Shapinsky argues that the "terracentric" biases of historians and sources have heretofore masked the activity of sea lord-bands in lord-vassal binaries, but that a better rubric is patron-client relationships, which "allows the historian to represent both the autonomy and agency of the sea-lord bands and the land-based patrons' expectations for loyal service" (226). Sea lords thus appropriated and manipulated land-based discourse to gain recognition of their status as equal to that of warrior elites. It is important to recognize that the activities of sea lords were enabled by the disintegration of traditional political authority in the archipelago at the same time as a medieval commercial revolution occurred, rendering the sea a vastly faster and more reliable means of transporting goods and conducting commerce. Sea lords took advantage of this fact to profitably exercise sea tenure: among other activities, they set up fortified toll barriers at various maritime chokepoints and charged tolls to pass; they charged for escort by members of bands or by ships; they charged for safe passage; and in the final half of the 16thC, they sold safe passage flags outright, as their authority at sea eclipsed even that of the unifiers. These practices were productive for commerce as well as predatory. After 1600, however, the new national government brought them to heel, and their day passed.

Bibliographic Data: Nagahara Keiji. “Landownership under the Shōen-Kokugaryō System.” Journal of Japanese Studies 1:2 (April 1, 1975): 269–96.

Main Argument: The shôen-kokugaryô system began to emerge from the ritsuryô system in the 11thC as a multi-layered system of ownership over land. By the C13, difficulties in maintaining cadastral surveys meant that more and more "public" paddies fell into private hands, becoming the basis for peasant landownership. "The multi-layered shiki formed the basis of positions and of rights for both the higher level proprietary lords and the lower level proprietary lords in shôen and in kokugaryô" (287). Under this system, higher level proprietary lords received the lion's share of the profits. Shiki, however, were distributed geographically and did not confer the power to command persons, indicating their limited development. Under this system, however, peasants held cultivation rather than landowning rights, reflecting their underdevelopment, mirroring that of local lords; thus, the shiki were supported by the authority of the central government during this period. The system foundered because local proprietary lords grew in power, because peasant landholding rights strengthened, and the shiki system disintegrated.

Bibliographic Data: Ambaras, David Richard. Bad Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Main Argument:

If delinquency symbolized the dangers of uncontrolled social change and the defects of existing social arrangements, champions of juvenile reform and juvenile protection envisioned an orderly, productive Japan that could master the challenges of the modern era, from industrialization to imperialist expansion to total war. The ideas of these reformers, and the thick, intrusive network of socialization agencies that they constructed, have to this day played a critical role in shaping Japanese experiences of home, school, work, and play, and in fostering the culture of discipline and social vigilance for which contemporary Japan is internationally known. (2)

Historiographical Engagement: Lots of sociologists and Japanese historians

( The kids are(n't) all right )

Critical assessment: This is a well-written, thoughtful study that does what it says on the tin and illuminates one of the most pervasive aspects of modern Japanese society very effectively along the way. I am also very grateful for Ambaras' attempts to recover the politics of everyday life and the reactions of those subjects of these regimes to their workings, even if the evidence is sparse in some respects and he cannot offer a fully polyvocal history.

Further reading: Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense; Kingsberg, Moral Nation; Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales; Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire

Bibliographic Data: Smith, Thomas C. The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959.

Main Argument: In the Tokugawa period across Japan, cooperative farming was displaced by individual family arming, and the individual family "clearly emerged as the center of production organization and economic interest" (ix). The most important cause of this was the growth of the market, which was disruptive. In general, these changes show that Japanese agriculture is dynamic, not sempiternally fixed, and that changes in farming during the Tokugawa period were the very opposite of regressive.

( Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan )

Critical assessment: Tom Smith, ladies and gentlemen. Tom Smith. Fifty-five years on and this book has barely aged--some of the details are sketchy, and see my comments for the question of rural immiseration in the Meiji period and after, but all in all, working mostly from sketchy and unevenly published documents cited in other people's works, he laid it out, and got it right.

Further reading: Vlastos, Peasant Protests and Uprisings in Tokugawa Japan; Smith, Nakahara; Smith, Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization

Bibliographic Data: Gordon, Andrew. Fabricating Consumers: The Sewing Machine in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

Main Argument: "Put to manifold uses with varied meanings, both a tool of home-based production and a high-status object of consumer desire, the sewing machine and its sojourn track the emergence and then the ascendance of the middle class as cultural ideal and social formation, along with the emergence of the female consumer and professional home manager as defining figures in Japanese modern times" (9).

( Fabricating consumers )

Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Gordon reviews his earlier arguments; it is important to note again that "with the birth of the salesman came the birth of the consumer, in Japan as around the world," and that "in the cultural life of the consuming subject or citizen, one sees in Japan as elsewhere a two-sided modernity projected at and anchored in the imagination of a new middle class" (216, 217). In Japan as elsewhere, the sewing machine had many similar effects, including its role affirming the social order and bridging class differences. Gordon finds that local differences in Japan include "the figure of the woman managing home finance with professional attention, struggling to rein in her spendthrift husband's binging on credit tickets, to be a singular one, linked to the singularly enduring influence in high-growth, postwar Japan of the ideal of the professional housewife," and that the preponderance of home sewing in Japan is also a salient difference linked to the survival of that same housewife ideal (223).

Critical assessment: Another excellent book from Gordon, and a welcome focus on women as agents in their own historical stories and in the story of Japan's economic history. He really is an excellent writer, although the press copy editor was asleep at the switch on this one.

Further reading: Skud: Why Is It So Difficult to Make Your Own Clothes?; Mimura, Planning for Empire; Atkins, Blue Nippon

Bibliographic Data: Ravina, Mark. Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Main Argument: There was "a simple fact of early modern politics" in Japan: "the shogunate was peripheral to broad areas of political practice" (2). Furthermore, for a lord, "the moral and economic rejuvenation of his domain" were "the areas where shogunal control and oversight were weakest," at least in the case of the so-called "kunimochi" domains, which were granted a degree of autonomy and prestige not available to most of the 240-odd other daimyo. It is no coincidence that four kunimochi domains (Satsuma, Chôshû, Tosa, and Saga) overthrew the shogunate, but the fact that so many domains were passive in the Restoration points to the federal nature of the system: having ceded diplomatic and "foreign policy" prerogatives to Edo, "daimyo were both fiercely protective of local autonomy and dependent on their union [with Edo] for survival" (15). This "federal" union was the first and indeed the necessary casualty of the Meiji Restoration.

( Three domains, three stories )

Critical assessment: This is an excellent book, and I cannot overstate the degree to which I agree with Ravina's final conclusions.

Further reading: Wigen, The Making of a Japanese Periphery

Meta notes: I cannot overstate the degree to which the United States are is weird historically. The proper comparands for Japan are not the United States but the countries of Europe.

Bibliographic Data: Hardacre, Helen. Shinto and the State, 1868-1988. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Main Argument: Hardacre argues that 1) state Shinto was largely an invented tradition and 2) that it was a radical departure from "anything in the country's previous religious history" (4). Attempting to "explore the significance for popular religious life of the state's involvement in Shinto between 1868 and 1945," Hardacre finds that "it is here that we see the expanding influence of the periphery over the center and the decreasing distance between the two relative to the situation in pre-Meiji Japan" (7).

Historiographical Engagement: Lots of shrine records.

( State Shinto and after )

Critical assessment: This book does what it says on the tin, and for that reason it's no surprise that everybody cites it. Hardacre is not an inspired analyst, but she gets the job done.

Further reading: Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy; Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths

Meta notes: Given that Hardacre analyzes Shinto from within the paradigm of "religion" that was not native to Japan before 1853, and which Shinto priests continued to resist, I do wonder about the question of reflexivity.

Bibliographic Data: Beasley, W. G. The Meiji Restoration. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972.

Main Argument: The Meiji Restoration was a product of political and socioeconomic changes in the bakumatsu period in particular and the Tokugawa period in general, once the opening of the country gave it the necessary push.

( The Meiji Restoration )

Critical assessment: I just want to point out that something being "feudal" and capitalist at the same terms is basically a contradiction in terms--it is definitely so by the Marxist definitions, and arguably so by less doctrinaire definitions. More seriously, I guess I think that Beasley is mostly right in what he says in this book, but I have to disagree on the question of nationalism; or, no, not disagree, but qualify the term "nationalism," which Beasley never does; like Beth Berry, I agree that there was a sense of nation in the Tokugawa period, but I don't know that I would call the Meiji Restoration a nationalist revolution. I would, however, call it a revolution, full stop; not every revolution is world historical: viz the American Revolution, for one.

Further reading: Craig, Chôshû in the Meiji Restoration; Baxter, The Meiji Unification through the Lens of Ishikawa Prefecture; Huber, The Revolutionary Origins of Modern Japan; Kim, The Age of Visions and Arguments

Meta notes: "A little revolution, every now and then, can be a good thing."