Akiko Uchiyama

Japanese girl's comfort reading of Anne of Green Gables

Girl Reading Girl provides the first overview of the cultural significance of girls and reading in modern and contemporary Japan with emphasis on the processes involved when girls read about other girls. The collection examines the reading practices of real life girls from differing social backgrounds throughout the twentieth century while a number of chapters also consider how fictional girls read attention is given to the diverse cultural representations of the girl, or shojo, who are the objects of the reading desires of Japan’s real life and fictional girls. These representations appear in various genres, including prose fiction, such as Yoshiya Nobuko’s Flower Stories and Takemoto Nobara’s Kamikaze Girls, and manga, such as Yoshida Akimi’s The Cherry Orchard. This volume presents the work of pioneering women scholars in the field of girl studies including translations of a ground-breaking essay by Honda Masuko on reading girls and Kawasaki Kenko’s response to prejudicial masculine critiques of best-selling novelist, Yoshimoto Banana. Other topics range from the reception of Anne of Green Gables in Japan to girls who write and read male homoerotic narratives.

The politics of translation in Meiji Japan

Information and knowledge transfer has traditionally played a vital role in social, cultural and political institutions in Japan, with the country being largely a recipient of imported thought. China, for example, had a major influence on pre-modern Japan, and much of this influence came through reading Chinese works in the original or in annotated form. Modern Japan was shaped under the influence of Western knowledge and technology, and translation played no small part in this importation of foreign ideas. Japanese history is closely connected to its cultural history of knowledge transfer and translation. In the long history of cultural exchange, the magnitude of the role that translation played is particularly notable in the Meiji period (1868-1912) when the country rapidly transformed itself from a feudal society into a modern nation after a long period of isolation. This chapter provides some insights into socio-political aspects of the translation practised at that time of great social upheaval by examining how Meiji translators negotiated the foreign and the domestic - or the foreign and the national, in the sense of building a nation in the international context - when introducing unfamiliar concepts from the West.

Review of Women Miners in Developing Countries: Pit Women and Others. Edited by Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Martha MacIntyre

This is a well-crafted, nuanced, and evocative history of Chinese clothing from late imperial times to the present day. Antonia Finnane, a historian of China who is an expert in this area, has produced a definitive study not only of what the Chinese have worn in the course of the past two hundred years but also of why they have worn it and how changes in dress related to the more general historical context and debates about modernity, gender, class and revolution. The Western view that, because Chinese society did not undergo a process of change and development similar to that experienced in Europe from the time of the Renaissance, it was largely static or unchanging has long since been discarded by historians. Finnane identifies a related tendency to argue that fashion was a peculiarly Western phenomenon, and then shows that in fact there is considerable evidence of changing styles and tastes in urban clothing in China from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. It is generally recognised that clothing styles changed dramatically when China became a republic after the 1911 revolution. However, Finnane shows that there is evidence of a sharp rupture with traditional taste as early as the last years of the nineteenth century, as loose wrapping garments gave way to clothes that were tailored to fit the body. Change accelerated in the twentieth century under the Republic, with the determination to build a strong modern nation that would be respected internationally. Finnane argues convincingly that, in this struggle for modernity, ‘‘clothes, and indeed the very bodies of people in China were implicated’’. Already under the Qing dynasty, the military had adopted tailored Western-style uniforms; next the suit became normalised for men’s wear among Chinese Christians, businessmen and returned students from the West. Yet there were alternatives available for men. The gown lingered on as acceptable male attire throughout the period of the Republic, and the Sun Yat-sen suit, which itself developed from a military uniform, became regarded as indigenous, and was, perhaps for that reason, the preferred garb of government officials. Outfits for ‘‘modern women’’ moved from the close-fitting jacket and skirt of the early Republic to the qipao [or cheongsam], a twentieth-century invention that somehow attained the status of ‘‘national dress’’ for women. Asian Studies Review September 2008, Vol. 32, pp. 429–456