Recreating Japanese Women is a comprehensive collection of the essays of sixteen powerful contributors that thoroughly examines the challenging transformation of the Japanese female. The primary issues concerned include the working world, the domestic life, and the complex levels of variation in these between classes. Religion, education, and psychology are discussed amidst the other issues, and emerge as a useful means of comparison between Japanese women of the Tokugawa era, and the Japanese women after the Meiji restoration, as well as their Western counterparts. This book charts the distinction of the “Good wife, Wise mother” role, challenging traditional assumptions of women’s sexuality, work desires, gentracide and other notions that others have found in the belief system of the Japanese.
The variety of essayists provide a wide range of theory as well as concrete information, as each is divided into a time period, 1600-1868, and 1868-1945. Information such as graphs, charts, and direct interviews allow the reader to better grasp the facts behind the text. The issues themselves are a powerful motive, intrinsically tugging on a reader’s moral sense of justice, but the authors often attempt to approach the topics without bias, and manage to do so in ways that lull the reader into an understanding, rather than a dramatic opinion. As quoted from the review by Gary D. Allinson, University of Virginia, states:
| They effectively adapt the methods of social history to the raw materials of Japanese society. They also create nuances of occluded opportunity, restricted mobility, and pervasive inequality with laudable sensitivity to the constantly changing conditions of Japanese women. Their findings are both illuminating and compelling…as well as documentary. (Allinson) |