Gender, Nation and State in Modern Japan

Bringing together international scholars from various disciplines, this study takes an interdisciplinary perspective on the formation of the modern Japanese nation-state.

References to gender relations are deeply embedded in the historical concepts of nation and nationalism, and in the related symbols, metaphors and arguments. Moreover, the development of the binary opposition between masculinity and femininity, and the development of the modern nation-state are processes which occurred simultaneously, the product of a shift from a stratified, hereditary class society to a functionally differentiated social body. This book considers these processes by paying attention specifically to the Japanese case. Women and men in Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were told that the fate of the nation depended on their fulfilment of the gender role assigned to them. The predominant female gender ideal was that of the a ~Good Wife and Wise Mothera (TM), an invented tradition which was presented as traditional, uniquely Japanese, and natural.

Tracing the idea of womena (TM)s and mena (TM)s gendered contributions to the nation and the state through contemporary concepts of citizenship, ethnicity, sexuality, work and everyday life, Gender, Nation and State in Modern Japan makes an important contribution to the literature on the formation of modern nation-states.

Andrea Germer is Associate Professor of Gender Studies, Japanese Studies and Visual Culture at Kyushu University and the author of Historische Frauenforschung in Japan [Women’s History in Japan], 2003. Research interests include gender and nation, feminist theory, propaganda, visual history and transcultural aesthetics.

Vera Mackie is Professor of Asian Studies in the Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts at the University of Wollongong and Research Leader of the Forum on Human Rights Research. She has published widely on cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies and feminist history.

Ulrike Wohr is Professor of Japanese Studies and Gender Studies at Hiroshima City University and the author of Frauen zwischen Rollenerwartung and Selbstdeutung, a historical reading of Japanese feminist thought of the 1910s. Research interests include gender and feminism in modern Japan, from a transnational perspective.