In the past quarter-century, gender has emerged as a lively area of inquiry for historians and other scholars, and gender analysis has suggested important revisions of the “master narratives” of national histories—the dominant, often celebratory tales of the successes of a nation and its leaders. Although modern Japanese history has not yet been restructured by a foregrounding of gender, historians of Japan have begun to embrace gender as an analytic category.

The sixteen chapters in this volume treat men as well as women, theories of sexuality as well as gender prescriptions, and same-sex as well as heterosexual relations in the period from 1868 to the present. All of them take the position that history is gendered; that is, historians invariably, perhaps unconsciously, construct a gendered notion of past events, people, and ideas. Together, these essays construct a history informed by the idea that gender matters because it was part of the experience of people and because it often has been a central feature in the construction of modern ideologies, discourses, and institutions. Separately, each chapter examines how Japanese have (en)gendered their ideas, institutions, and society.

Contents
Introduction		Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno				1
		i. Gender, Selfhood, Culture
1		Made in Japan: Meiji Women's Education		Martha Tocco	39
2		Thoughts on the Early Meiji Gentleman	 	Donald Roden	61
3		Commodifying and Engendering Morality: Self-Cultivation
		and the Construction of the "Ideal Woman" in 1920s Mass 
		Women's Magazines		Barbara Sato								99
		
		ii. Genders, Bodies, Sexualities
4		"S" is for Sister: Schoolgirl Intimacy and "Same-Sex Love" 	 
		in Early Twentieth-Century Japan		Gregory Pflugfelder	133
5		Seeds and (Nest) Eggs of Empire: Sexology Manuals/	 
		Manual Sexology		Mark Driscoll							191
6		Engendering Eugenics: Feminists and Marriage Restriction 
		Legislation in the 1920s		Sumiko Otsubo						225
		iii. Gender, Empire, War
7		Making "Soldiers": The Imperial Army and the Japanese 	 
		Man in Meiji Society and State		Theodore F. Cook, Jr.	259
8		Reading the Japanese Colonial Archive: Gender and 	 
		Bourgeois Civility in Korea and Manchuria before 1932	 
		Barbara J. Brooks															295
9		Women's Deaths as Weapons of War in Japan's "Final 
		Battle"		Haruko Taya Cook											326
		iv. Gender, Work, Economy
10		Gendering the Labor Market: Evidence from the Interwar 
		Textile Industry		Janet Hunter										359
11		Sorting Coal and Pickling Cabbage: Korean Women in 	 
		the Japanese Mining Industry		W. Donald Smith		393
12		Managing the Japanese Household: The New Life 	 
		Movement in Postwar Japan		Andrew Gordon			423
	
		v. Theorizing Gender
13		The Quest for Women's Rights in Turn-of-the-Century 
		Japan		Barbara Molony													463
14		Womanhood, War, and Empire: Transmutations of 	 
		"Good Wife, Wise Mother" before 1931		Kathleen Uno	493
15		Toward a Critique of Transhistorical Femininity	 
		Ayako Kano																	520
16		Feminism and Media in the Late Twentieth Century: 	 
		Reading the Limits of a Politics of Transgression	 
		Setsu Shigematsu															555 
Index																				591