Sally A. Hastings

Neighborhood and nation in Tokyo, 1905-1937

This work addresses an important issue concerning the shaping of Japans modern political community prior to World War II. It argues that pre-war Japan, particularly the Home Ministry, encouraged a more participatory political and cultural environment than is generally believed.

Nitobe Inazo: Japan's Bridge across the Pacific

Part 1 Maturation: roots, John F. Howes graduate student and Quaker, Furuya Jun. Part 2 What is a Japanese?: Japan watchers 1905-1931, A. Hamish Ion bushido - its admirers and its critics, Cyril H. Powles Philippine bushido, Grant K. Goodman toward remaking manhood, Donald Roden. Part 3 Japan in the world: colonial theory in pre-war Japan, Miwa Kimitade the Geneva spirit, Thomas W. Burkman. Part 4 Evaluation: journalism - the last bridge, Sato Masahiro mediation between cultures, Yuza Ota the end - 1929-1933, George Oshiro darkened lanterns in a distant garden, Richard Eldridge Copley.

Managing Women: Disciplining Labor in Modern Japan (review)

about film as about literature. Scholars of Japanese literature will benefit most from this book, which, to be fully understood, demands knowledge not only of Japanese literature, history, and cultural studies, but also of critical theories of modernism and modernity. Yet pitfalls of singleauthor studies, which DiNitto strives to avoid through contextualization, include tendencies to oversimplify the literary world and make it seem like history just happens to people. Overlaps and fissures can be overlooked in efforts to extrapolate a single voice. DiNitto’s book encourages the reader to position Hyakken in relation to contemporaries of his who crafted more explicit statements about war, such as Ishikawa Jun. Hyakken’s commentaries on modernity and militarism seem subtle, and I question whether his criticisms might not have been lost on people who were unaware of his goals. DiNitto’s translated excerpts are elegant; perhaps more examples, such as a zuihitsu, part of a war diary, or a complete story, could be added to the book’s Web site. DiNitto’s passion for Hyakken makes the book a labor of love and rewards the reader with a wealth of information.

The Japanese "New Woman": Images of Gender and Modernity (review)

Dina Lowy tells the story of the women who established Seitō, the fi rst literary magazine in Japan by women for women, which they named after the British Bluestockings. She shows how the self-identity of these women and their public reception were linked to the international phenomenon of the “New Woman.” Drawing on her thorough knowledge of the existing historical scholarship, Lowy situates the Seitō women in the narrative of the modernization of Japan. The basic outline of the story she tells about the “New Woman” in Japanese history has been available in English since 1983 in Sharon Sievers’s book, Flowers in Salt (Stanford University Press). Thanks to Sievers, even basic textbooks now make passing mention of the women’s movement of the Taisho era (1912–26) as part of “Taisho Democracy” and Seitō is the usual starting point for the narrative of twentiethcentury Japanese feminism. Until very recently, however, there was little scholarship available in English to deepen our understanding beyond Sievers’s account. Our knowledge of the “Bluestocking” periodical and the organization that published it remained fi xed on a certain few quotations from Hiratsuka Raichō and the poet Yosano Akiko. The importance of Lowy’s topic is highlighted by the number of books recently published on the Seitō organization, which include Hiroko Tomida’s book on Raichō, Teruko Craig’s translation of Raichō’s autobiography, and Jan Bardsley’s collection of translations from Seitō. Even in the midst of this abundance of scholarly work, Lowy makes a distinct contribution. Hers is a careful and thoughtful history rather than a translation, and she has done a great service to students of Japanese history as well as women’s history in making her contextualized account of the events of the 1910s so readable. Lowy guides her reader from controversial dramatic fi gures such as Henrik Ibsen’s Nora and Hermann Sudermann’s Magda, made known to the Japanese public through the New Theater movement, to the emergence of the founders of Seitō as colorful public fi gures, emblematic of the “New Woman.” Lowy’s highly accessible account is all

The Silk Weavers of KyotoThe Silk Weavers of Kyoto: Family and Work in a Changing Traditional Industry, by HarevenTamara K.. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 375 pp.

on affect and is certainly not necessary for happiness. Overall, I see enormous potential for application of dynamical systems in social psychology (compare the recent textbook Dynamical Social Psychology by Nowak and Vallacher) and I would certainly not wish to discourage future collaborations of this type. But The Mathematics of Marriage seems at best a transcript of work in progress—a collection of working papers from an intriguing research program that has not yet achieved its promise.