Gail Lee Bernstein

"There simply is no other book like this. No other family history presents such a range of insights into the ways in which individuals, women as well as men, have had to cope with changes wrought by the social modernization of Japanese family culture."--James L. McClain, author of Japan: A Modern History "Isami's House is the chronicle of a remarkable family, neither aristocratic nor famous, whose rise and decline seem to parallel Japan's. It makes absorbing reading, affording a panoramic view of a rural family's rise to local prominence at the dawn of the modern Japanese nation state, the expansion of its presence to Tokyo and then the empire, its experience in war and defeat, and finally its postwar reconfiguration as a dispersed urban family."--Norma Field, author of In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: A Portrait of Japan at Century's End

Three Centuries of a Japanese Family

Isami's House

In thirteen wide-ranging essays, scholars and students of Asian and women's studies will find a vivid exploration of how female roles and feminine identity have evolved over 350 years, from the Tokugawa era to the end of World War II. Starting from the premise that gender is not a biological given, but is socially constructed and culturally transmitted, the authors describe the forces of change in the construction of female gender and explore the gap between the ideal of womanhood and the reality of Japanese women's lives. Most of all, the contributors speak to the diversity that has characterized women's experience in Japan. This is an imaginative, pioneering work, offering an interdisciplinary approach that will encourage a reconsideration of the paradigms of women's history, hitherto rooted in the Western experience.

Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945

Haruhiro Fukui

This volume focuses on Japan over the last one hundred years, with special emphasis on the twentieth century and the contemporary period. Chapters on cultural, intellectual and economic history, domestic politics and foreign relations trace the complex and multi-faceted process through which Japan has been transformed from an isolated agricultural society to an economic world power and model for the other developing nations. The authors demonstrate the adaptibility of Japan's native tradition in its encounter with the world beyond its own shores, and show how many aspects of traditional Japanese culture and society have been transformed while others have survived, giving contemporary Japan that distinctive flavour of an old insular culture which continues to delight and baffle foreign and native scholars alike.

Essays on Japanese History and Politics

Japan and the World

Kawakami Hajime was heir of a samurai family, a professor at one of Japan's leading universities, a popularizer of Marxism in Japan, a Japanese Communist on his own unique terms, and, finally, the author of an autobiography that is a classic of modern Japanese literature. Bernstein provides an intimate portrait of Kawakami's complex personality.

Gail Lee Bernstein

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