Elise K. Tipton

The Japanese police state : the Tokkô in interwar Japan

This is a specialized study of the organization,ideology and activities of the Japanese Special Higherpolice, the Tokko, notorious in pre-war and wartime years for its harassment of opponents of the government. Within a comparative framework, this book explains the elements of Tokko brutality and abuses of authority, analyses police traditions and looks at the Tokkos interactions with other Japanese institutions and the broader sociopolitical climate. Sources include confidential Tokko documents and interviews with former Tokko officials. First published in 1990, this title is part of the Bloomsbury Academic Collections series.

How to Manage a Household: Creating Middle Class Housewives in Modern Japan

During the late 1910s to early 1920s leaders in womens education sought to rationalize and modernize daily life through the promotion of ‘domestic science’. Their writings, aimed at young educated middle class women, focused on ways to reform the running of their households to fit their changing roles as modern women and the changing conditions of Japanese society more generally. They assumed the sexual division of labour, but as reformers, they envisioned that middle class women would play a key role as household managers in the ‘new era’. Following their instructions for efficient, scientific management of clothing, food and housing would ensure young womens social standing as exemplary middle class housewives, to the benefit of themselves personally as well as their families and the nation.

Ishimoto Shizue: The Margaret Sanger of Japan

Abstract Post-1945 Japan is known for its remarkably low birth rate and a heavy reliance on abortion for birth control purposes. What may be less well known is the extensive use of contraceptive methods as well to limit or regulate births and the role played by the prewar birth control movement in making the concept of birth control socially acceptable. The prewar movement owed its origins and much of its success in changing attitudes toward birth control to the efforts of an individual feminist – Ishimoto Shizue. Ishimoto, in turn, owed much support and guidance to the American birth control leader, Margaret Sanger. A study of Ishimoto and the prewar Japanese birth control movement highlights the importance of international cross-currents in feminist thought and practice, for Ishimotos meeting of the dynamic and controversial American leader focused her energies on birth control as a means to bring about womens liberation in Japan. Ishimotos relationship with Sanger continued and grew throughout the f...

Faces of New Tokyo: Entertainment Districts and Everyday Life during the Interwar Years

This study focuses on a comparison of the three most popular sakariba (entertainment districts) in Tokyo of the late 1920s and 1930s to highlight the new role of leisure in everyday life as Japan industrialized and urbanized. The comparison of Asakusa, Ginza and Shinjuku shows that even as Japan became a mass society, leisure practices and patterns became stratified and diversified. This stratification and diversification reflected class, age and cultural tastes. The three sakariba developed distinctive characters and attractions for consumers, raising challenges to mass culture critics’ assumption that the rise of mass culture and commodity culture would lead to homogenization of taste and recreational products and a lack of consumer choice.

Japanese Women and the ‘Cult of Productivity’

Women workers in Japan — costed, not valued. It would be quite easy to paint this picture of Japanese women workers since the late nineteenth century. Until the late 1970s women’s enormous contribution to Japan’s industrialisation was not recognised by historians. In Japan, it was a book by Yamamoto Shigemi (Yamamoto, 1977) written for a popular audience, and later made into a film, that exposed the deplorable conditions of women workers in the early textile mills. Then in the early 1980s Mikiso Hane conveyed the picture to Western audiences to reveal the ‘underside’ of Japan’s economic success story (Hane, 1982). Meanwhile, the wave of women’s liberation movements in the early 1970s had stimulated the emergence of a feminist women’s history that also depicted the exploitation of women industrial workers. But while all these pioneering studies were obviously sympathetic to women, they tended, like earlier labour histories, to portray the women workers as passive victims, uninterested or incapable of protest.

A Review of “Japan in Transformation, 1945–2010”

who ‘goes native’ to discover his ‘inner savage’ by living among aboriginal Taiwanese (pp. 63–64, 66). In Chapter 2, the author explores the impact of ethnographic writing on author Satō Haruo’s oeuvre, specifically his 1923 short story ‘Demon Bird’, which employs the mahafune figure of Ataiyal lore as an allegory for the massacre of thousands of Koreans by hysterical Japanese after the Kanto Earthquake. Satō depicted both as forms of ‘violent elimination of carefully selected scapegoats’ to reinforce social borders and group identities (pp. 102–103), but Tierney deems ‘Demon Bird’ emblematic of the ‘weaknesses of the liberal critique of colonialism’ (p. 107). Chapter 3 is a particularly fascinating account of how the mythical folk hero Momotarō figured into imperial imaginations: whereas for Niitobe the Peach Boy was an ideal propaganda tool for luring youth into Japan’s South Pacific realm, for Akutagawa Ryūnosuke he was a marauding conqueror who plundered and decimated a tropical paradise (pp. 142–143). Chapter 4 focuses on the South Sea writings of Nakajima Atsushi, who openly struggled with an ingrained tendency to view Micronesia through ‘Western-tinted’ colonial eyeglasses constructed, in part, by Robert Louis Stevenson’s oeuvre (pp. 149–150). In the conclusion, Tierney notes that there is much work left to do to recover heretofore suppressed colonial literature by some canonical writers, and that cannibalism replaced headhunting as the ‘main trope for savagery’ in the postwar era (pp. 183–185). It seems only fair to alert the reader to the resonances between Tierney’s arguments and those I make in Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910–1945, which appeared a few months after Tropics from the same press. Using entirely different source bases, we both found compelling evidence of a powerful strain of nostalgic primitivism and anti-modern ambivalence, which contradicted yet coexisted with the better-known assertions of Japanese superiority. We both read ethnographies ‘against the grain’ to learn about their authors, rather than their subjects, and to explore the impact of empire on identity formation, mass media, and artistry in the metropole naichi. Both of us detect what Tierney calls ‘temporal distancing’ as a strategy for simultaneously asserting Japanese superiority over colonial subjects and recovering the presumed purity of the primordial past: as Tierney puts it, ‘Japanese travelers experienced their journey to the [Taiwanese] aboriginal lands as time travel’ (pp. 56–57). Furthermore, we both take pains to frame Japanese imperial practices and ideologies within a broader comparative framework, understanding these as ‘mimetic’ of Euro-American precedents, while still remaining attentive to their distinctive adaptations within this particular imperial setting. Although Tierney’s focus on the trope of savagery is clearly distinct, we nonetheless share a view of Japanese imperialist ideologies as fraught with irresolvable contradictions resulting from Japan’s ambiguous position as both prey and predator in the era of high imperialism (p. 182).

“Readings” in Japanese history and philosophy: issues in methodology

H. D. Harootunian. Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Pp. 488. US

Society and the state in interwar Japan

40.00, cloth; US

The Department Store: Producing Modernity in Interwar Japan

14.95, paper.