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"Manners and Mischief is a cohesive, stimulating volume. Reading these essays and the editors' enlightening introduction was a joy: I learned a great deal, smiled and laughed with uncommon regularity, and marveled at the quality of this remarkable collection." -William M. Tsutsui, author of Godzilla on My Mind "This book is full of fascinating insights. Well-written and often witty, it captures a detailed snapshot of Japanese society in the early 21st century. I would say this is the most insightful book on modern Japan I have read in years." -Liza Dalby, anthropologist and novelist
Maiko Masquerade explores Japanese representations of the maiko, or apprentice geisha, in films, manga, and other popular media as an icon of exemplary girlhood. Jan Bardsley traces how the maiko, long stigmatized as a victim of sexual exploitation, emerges in the 2000s as the chaste keeper of Kyoto’s classical artistic traditions. Insider accounts by maiko and geisha, their leaders and fans, show pride in the training, challenges, and rewards maiko face. No longer viewed as a toy for men’s amusement, she serves as catalyst for women’s consumer fun. This change inspires stories of ordinary girls—and even one boy—striving to embody the maiko ideal, engaging in masquerades that highlight questions of personal choice, gender performance, and national identity.
The Bluestockings of Japan introduces English-language readers to a formative chapter in the history of Japanese feminism by presenting for the first time in English translation a collection of writings from Seitō (Bluestockings), the famed New Women's journal of the 1910s. Launched in 1911 as a venue for women's literary expression and replete with poetry, essays, plays, and stories, Seitō soon earned the disapproval of civic leaders, educators, and even prominent women's rights advocates. Journalists joined these leaders in ridiculing the Bluestockings as self-indulgent, literature-loving, sake-drinking, cigarette-smoking tarts who toyed with men. Yet many young women and men delighted i...
Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan offers a fresh perspective on gender politics by focusing on the Japanese housewife of the 1950s as a controversial representation of democracy, leisure, and domesticity. Examining the shifting personae of the housewife, especially in the appealing texts of women's magazines, reveals the diverse possibilities of postwar democracy as they were embedded in media directed toward Japanese women. Each chapter explores the contours of a single controversy, including debate over the royal wedding in 1959, the victory of Japan's first Miss Universe, and the unruly desires of postwar women. Jan Bardsley also takes a comparative look at the ways in which the Japanese housewife is measured against equally stereotyped notions of the modern housewife in the United States, asking how both function as narratives of Japan-U.S. relations and gender/class containment during the early Cold War.
Throughout written history and across the world, women have protested the restrictions of gender and the limitations placed on women's bodies and women's lives. People-of any and no gender-have protested and theorized, penned manifestos and written poetry and songs, testified and lobbied, gone on strike and fomented revolution, quietly demanded that there is an "I" and loudly proclaimed that there is a "we." The Book of Feminism chronicles this history of defiance and tracks it around the world as it develops into a multivocal and unabashed force. Global in scope, The Book of Feminism shows the breadth of feminist protest and of feminist thinking, moving through the female poets of China's T...
Are bad girls casualties of patriarchy, a necessary evil, or visionary pioneers? The authors in this volume propose shifts in our perceptions of bad girls by providing new ways to understand them through the case of Japan. By tracing the concept of the bad girl as a product of specific cultural assumptions and historical settings, Bad Girls of Japan maps new roads and old detours in revealing a disorderly politics of gender. Bad Girls of Japan explores deviancy in richly diverse media: mountain witches, murderers, performance artists, cartoonists, schoolgirls and shoppers gone wild are all part of the terrain.
Comics and the punk movement are inextricably linked--each has a foundational do-it-yourself ethos and a nonconformist spirit defiant of authority. This collection of new essays provides for the first time a thorough analysis of the intersections between comics and punk. The contributors expand the discussion beyond the familiar U.S. and UK scenes to include the influence punk has had on comics produced in other countries, such as Spain and Turkey.
Analysing major interwar women's magazines - the literary journal 'Ladies' Review', the popular domestic periodical 'Housewife's Friend', and the politically radical magazine 'Women's Arts' - this book considers the central place of representations of women for women in the culture of interwar-era Japan.
This book focuses on the historical construction of language norms and its relationship to actual language use in contemporary Japan.
This spirited and engaging multidisciplinary volume pins its focus on the lived experiences and cultural depictions of women's mobility and labor in Japan. The theme of "modern girls" continues to offer a captivating window into the changes that women's roles have undergone during the course of the last century. Here we encounter Japanese women inhabiting the most modern of spaces, in newly created professions, moving upward and outward, claiming the public life as their own: shop girls, elevator girls, dance hall dancers, tour bus guides, airline stewardesses, international beauty queens, overseas teachers, corporate soccer players, and even female members of the Self-Defense Forces. Directly linking gender, mobility, and labor in 20th and 21st century Japan, this collection brings to life the ways in which these modern girls—historically and contemporaneously—have influenced social roles, patterns of daily life, and Japan's global image. It is an ideal guidebook for students, scholars, and general readers alike.