Gender in Modern Japan

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History · 2026-04-10

Abstract Gender issues have remained critical to the analysis of Japanese society. Great strides have been made since the activists of the Freedom and People’s Rights movement of the 1870s and 1880s demanded not just women’s rights but also a single standard of sexual morality. The Meiji revolution of 1868 marked one beginning of the transition from a decentralized military regime to a mixed constitutional and absolute monarchy, leading to the formulation of the constitution of the Empire of Japan, which remained in place from November 29, 1890, until the Postwar Constitution replaced it on November 3, 1946. Penned by American civilian officials during the occupation period and announced by the emperor, the new constitution provided the universal right to vote and the principle that all people are equal under the law, forbidding “discrimination in political, economic or social relations because of race, creed, sex, social status or family origin” (Article 14). It also established that marriage is to be based only on “the mutual consent of both sexes [author’s emphasis] and it shall be maintained through mutual cooperation with the equal rights of husband and wife as a basis” (Article 24). Ever since, Japan has been a remarkably stable democracy. Japanese women’s life expectancy is the highest in the world, and the vast majority of Japanese women remain healthy until very late in their lives. Reproductive rights are solidly secured. Nationwide marriage equality is within reach. And yet, at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, women’s financial and political inequality in Japan more closely resembles that of women in Mauritius, Jamaica, and Greece rather than the relative equality of women in Australia, Belgium, and Denmark.

Crafting nostalgia: Emotional capital and the <i>randoseru’s</i> victory

Journal of Material Culture · 2025-03-13

Since its initial adaptation from the army knapsack in the late nineteenth century, the randoseru, a specific style of elementary school bag in Japan, has come to signify an inherent contradiction of capitalist culture, namely the intimate interconnections of consumer acts and emotional life, and to facilitate the expression and experience of nostalgia. Describing its means of production—from its beginnings in the Imperial Japanese Army of the late 19th century to Afghani children at the beginning of the 21st century—is the goal of this essay. I propose that this nostalgia has been crafted through the social relations by which the randoseru is being circulated and mobilized while reiterating specific notions of craft and childhood.

Watered-down LGBTQ ‘understanding’ bill shows how far Japan’s parliament is out of step with its society – and history

2023-06-17

‘Made in Taiwan’: Global Storytelling, Childhood Memories, and Undergraduate Research in the Twenty-First Century

International Journal of Taiwan Studies · 2023-11-09

Abstract ‘Made in Taiwan’ is a platform and archive of life-course interviews of people who grew up in Taiwan, designed to teach about Taiwan, one childhood memory at a time. We hope that it will spark conversations about childhood memories around the world and inspire similar projects elsewhere that bring together university instructors, undergraduate students, and local communities in an effort to learn from one another, experience knowledge production as a collective project, encounter the university as an active player in and a resource for the community, and empower undergraduate students to conduct their own investigations into other people’s lives.

Unstable Statuses, Fleeting Identities: Re-introducing East Asia's Children

Journal of the history of childhood and youth/˜The œjournal of the history of childhood and youth · 2023 · 2 citations

• Sociology
• Gender studies
• Sociology

Historians of East Asia, particularly those based at Western institutions, have only just begun to study children and childhoods in earnest. This Special Issue considers three young authors' approaches to the historical study of children within and right at the institutional edges of religion, pedagogy, and nation building. Rather than reinforcing binary opposites between flesh-and-blood children on the one hand and symbolisms of childhood on the other, the present authors carefully ponder where on various continuums the children they study ought to be placed––of children as autonomous actors or victims of discipline and punishment, as objects or agents of Christian proselytizing, sexual desire, and revolutionary nation building. My critical introduction aims to highlight how these histories matter and how they ought to complicate the histories of pretty much everything.

Building the Nation and Modern Manhood

Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-03-24

Chapter 1, “Building the Nation and Modern Manhood,” examines the tense negotiations over different types of men, manhoods, and masculinities – spanning the early processes of nation-state formation and empire-building, through defeat and democratization, to the current challenges of a globalizing society and straining economy. Following the empire’s defeat in 1945, the soldier almost immediately lost his status as a hegemonic icon of masculinity. That role was taken on by a dramatically different kind of man: the white-collar, middle-class worker – who for decades was hailed not as the successor of the Imperial Army soldier but as the “modern samurai.” Two generations of men strove to embody that ideal manhood, but the heyday of the salaryman came to a crushing end in 1992. A new sense of vulnerability in the wake of the March 11, 2011 triple disaster – earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown – has fed into the processes of a rapid diversification of masculinity that continues to this day.

Sexing East Asian History

Journal of women's history · 2022-06-01

Sexing East Asian History Sabine Frühstück (bio) Todd A. Henry, ed. Queer Korea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 400 pp.; ill. ISBN 9781478001928 (cl); 9781478002901 (pb). Howard Chiang. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 416 pp.; ill. ISBN 9780231185783 (cl); 9780231185790 (pb); 9780231546331 (ebook). Howard Chiang, ed. Sexuality in China: Histories of Power and Pleasure. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018. 272 pp. ISBN 9780295743462 (cl); 9780295743479 (pb). Recently, the flagship Journal of Asian Studies devoted a substantial portion of its November 2020 issue to reflections on the impact of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) on the historiography of gender and sexuality in Asia over the last thirty years. Three of that historiography's leading pioneers—Gail Hershatter (China), Tamara Loos (Southeast Asia), and Geeta Patel (South Asia)—uniformly acknowledge the game-changing quality of Butler's book.1 In a parallel recent move, the historiography of gender and sexuality has been more frequently deployed regarding regional rather than either national or global frameworks, in part due to the fact that "global history" has lost its initial glamor. Conversely, it is more difficult to determine what impact the historiography of gender and sexuality out of Asia has had on Euro-American theory. Although its representative reach is minimal given both the quantity of scholarly production in the region itself and the size of its population, a range of publishing venues suggests that the history of gender and sexuality out of Asia is in the process of securing a place within the larger field. In addition to its solid footprint in this journal, it is featured in recent issues of The Journal of Homosexuality and, slightly less substantially, The Journal of the History of Sexuality. The works reviewed here make powerful contributions to the field of gender and sexuality studies at large—as well as (in part) to women's history and, of course, Asian Studies. Until recently, queer sexualities have been notoriously underacknowledged in both Korea and China—in contrast to the increasing devotion to interstitial loci and queer identities in current scholarship that recognize the troubled nature of sex and gender elsewhere. Indeed, when sexuality in Korea has been the focus of academic and public attention, it is often with regards to either the victimized (heteronormative) female former sex slaves of the Japanese empire or the globally prominent male [End Page 153] representatives of K-pop's sexualities. Queer Korea, by contrast, is a collective, multidisciplinary pursuit with two goals: to queer the field of Korean Studies, which editor Todd A. Henry, a rising star in the field, (uncontroversially) diagnoses as "nationalistically heteronormative;" and to critique the field of queer studies that has remained stubbornly Euro-America-centric (8). As Henry notes in an exemplary introduction, Christian rhetoric in part informs the frequently aggressive posturing of South Korean conservatives against sexual and gender minorities; one result of such posturing has been that individuals characterized by their non-normative sexualities and gender variances are denied full citizenship rights. Korean conservatives frame their refusal to grant those rights with respect to "past traditions, especially by highlighting the purported lack thereof" (4). It is worth noting that, even on the superficial level of conservative rhetoric, this position differs from that of the country's (largely non-Christian) neighbor and former colonial ruler Japan; Japanese conservatives evoke traditions with an added declaration, stating that traditional Japan has always been "accepting" of such individuals and practices and, thus—to the chagrin of Japanese queer rights activists—there is no need to explicitly formulate rights for non-normative genders and sexualities.2 Henry's introduction suggests that it is primarily fundamentalist Christians who enact reactionary speech and politics in South Korea. But in so doing he downplays the degree to which militarization both governs homo- and transphobia and helps to conceal the fragility of heteronormative masculinity. Few able-bodied men in Korea escape the country's mandatory military service—which is sustained in part by the continuing threat of a hostile regime in the North, and in part by the shadow of military...

Redefining Womanhoods

Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-03-24

The beginning of the twentieth century was also an experiment in how to be female, male, or something in between – far beyond the matter of reproduction. Chapter 3, “Redefining Womanhoods,” examines the new roles some carved out for themselves amid the emerging modern mass culture in the early twentieth century. After a long period of nation- and empire-building – largely characterized by the embrace and adaptation of what became construed somewhat monolithically as “western culture” – the 1910s and 1920s experienced a shift to critical attitudes toward the West that was promoted by both conservative and progressive representatives of the intelligentsia. This chapter focuses on just how new women and modern girls (and modern boys) navigated this turbulent time, a period complicated by the dramatically increasing academic interest in knowing and, eventually, controlling women – as well as the politics of gender relations; the antagonistic relationship between nationalism, imperialism, and internationalism; and the multiple inventions of Japanese traditions

Introduction

Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-03-24

The introduction provides the theoretical and methodological framework of the book and explains key terms, concepts, and historical shifts.

Response to Diamant &amp; Bender, Where Are All the College Faculty?

2022-07-29