Books by Marcia Yonemoto

Early modern Japan was a military-bureaucratic state governed by patriarchal and patrilineal principles and laws. During this time, however, women had considerable power to directly affect social structure, political practice, and economic production. This apparent contradiction between official norms and experienced realities lies at the heart of The Problem of Women in Early Modern Japan. Examining prescriptive literature and instructional manuals for womenas well as diaries, memoirs, and letters written by and about individual women from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth centuryMarcia Yonemoto explores the dynamic nature of Japanese women's lives during the early modern era.

This elegant history considers a fascinating array of texts, cultural practices, and intellectual processes-including maps and mapmaking, poetry, travel writing, popular fiction, and encyclopedias-to chart the emergence of a new geographical consciousness in early modern Japan. Marcia Yonemoto's wide-ranging history of ideas traces changing conceptions and representations of space by looking at the roles played by writers, artists, commercial publishers, and the Shogunal government in helping to fashion a new awareness of space and place in this period. Her impressively researched study shows how spatial and geographical knowledge confined to elites in early Japan became more generalized, flexible, and widespread in the Tokugawa period. In the broadest sense, her book grasps the elusive processes through which people came to name, to know, and to interpret their worlds in narrative and visual forms.