Women's History and Local Community in Postwar Japan

by Curtis Anderson Gayle

Overview

This timely look at a neglected corner of Japanese historiography spotlights the decade following the end of World War II, a time in which Japanese society was undergoing the transformation from imperial state to democratic nation. For certain working and middle-class women involved in education and labor activism, history-writing became a means to greater voice within the turbulent transition.

Women's History and Local Community in Postwar Japan examines the emergence of women’s history-writing groups in Tokyo, Nagoya and Ehime, using interviews conducted with founding members and analysis of primary documents and publications by each group. It demonstrates how women appropriated history-writing as a radical praxis geared less toward revolution and more toward the articulation of local imaginations, spaces and memories after World War II. By appropriating history as a praxis that did not need revolution for its success, these women used connections established by Marxist historians between history-writing and subjectivity, but did so in ways that broke rank from nationally-referenced renditions of history and memory. Under conditions in which some women saw history as a field of articulation that remained dominated by men, they put into practice their own de-centered versions of history-writing that continue to influence the historical landscape in contemporary Japan.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415559393
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/08/2009
Series:	Routledge/Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) East Asian Series , #11
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Curtis Anderson Gayle is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Integrated Arts & Social Sciences at Japan Women’s University, in Tokyo. He is the author of Marxist History and Postwar Japanese Nationalism (Routledge 2002) and specializes in modern Japanese history and comparative culture.

Table of Contents

List of maps x

Acknowledgments xi

Select chronology of the postwar period xiv

1 History liberation and difference 1

2 Rewriting local history in the aftermath of World War II 17

3 Women's history in the center: the Tokyo Josei-shi Kenky&ubar;kai 40

4 Ky&obar;do-shi in Nagoya: fusing local pasts and presents 62

5 Chi'iki stirrings in Ehime 85

6 The Ehime Women's History Circle 105

7 Epilogue: local women's history in contemporary focus 127

Glossary of select Japanese words and phrases 143

Notes 144

Bibliography 167

Index 178