Books in the Asia: Local Studies / Global Themes series

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 highly original study provides an entirely new critical perspective on the central importance of ideas about language in the reproduction of gender, class, and race divisions in modern Japan. Focusing on a phenomenon commonly called "e;women's language,"e; in modern Japanese society, Miyako Inoue considers the history and social effects of this language form. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a contemporary Tokyo corporation to study the everyday linguistic experience of white-collar females office workers and on historical research from the late nineteenth century to 1930, she calls into question the claim that "e;women's language"e; is a Japanese cultural tradition of ancient origin and offers a critical geneaology showing the extent to which this language form is, in fact, a cultural construct linked with Japan's national and capitalist modernity. Her theoretically sophisticated, empirically grounded, interdisciplinary work brilliantly illuminates the relationship between culture and language, the nature of power and subject formation in modernity, and how the complex nexus of gender, language, and political economy are experienced in everyday life.

The Rape of Nanjing was one of the worst atrocities committed during WWII. On December 13, 1937, the Japanese army captured the city of Nanjing, then the capital of wartime China. This book considers the post war treatment in China of the Nanjing Massacre and Japan. It examines how the issue has developed as a political and diplomatic controversy.

With its thunderous sounds and dazzling choreography, Japanese taiko drumming has captivated audiences in Japan and across the world, making it one of the most successful performing arts to emerge from Japan in the past century. This book explores the origins of taiko in the early postwar period and its popularization over the following decades.