Overview

This spirited and engaging multidisciplinary volume pins its focus on the lived experiences and cultural depictions of women's mobility and labor in Japan. The theme of ""modern girls"" continues to offer a captivating window into the changes that women's roles have undergone during the course of the last century. Here we encounter Japanese women inhabiting the most modern of spaces, in newly created professions, moving upward and outward, claiming the public life as their own: shop girls, elevator girls, dance hall dancers, tour bus guides, airline stewardesses, international beauty queens, overseas teachers, corporate soccer players, and even female members of the Self-Defense Forces. Directly linking gender, mobility, and labor in 20th and 21st century Japan, this collection brings to life the ways in which these modern girls-historically and contemporaneously-have influenced social roles, patterns of daily life, and Japan's global image. It is an ideal guidebook for students, scholars, and general readers alike.

Full Product Details

9780804781138

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Reviews

[A] serious contribution to intercultural studies and gender sensitivities - scholarly, well written, and often moving... Highly recommended. - R. B. Lyman Jr., Choice Wave goodbye to your stereotypes of Japanese working women. This innovative and insightful collection reveals how stewardesses, dancehall girls, and other women in motion challenged social norms and reshaped gender roles in Japan's modern transformation. Written by leading scholars from a range of disciplinary perspectives, these essays are sophisticated, eye-opening, and endlessly fascinating. - William M. Tsutsui, author of Godzilla on My Mind This interdisciplinary volume pays serious attention to women's occupations that have been given short shrift. From shop girls to soccer players, these essays show women venturing out across the decades, with the meaning of 'modern' changing as the women themselves challenge the times in which they live. Through these pages, one can see how Japan's 'modern girls' of the historical past still resonate in the present. - Glenda S. Roberts, Waseda University Wave goodbye to your stereotypes of Japanese working women. This innovative and insightful collection reveals how stewardesses, dancehall girls, and other women in motion challenged social norms and reshaped gender roles in Japan's modern transformation. Written by leading scholars from a range of disciplinary perspectives, these essays are sophisticated, eye-opening, and endlessly fascinating. - William M. Tsutsui, author of Godzilla on My Mind

This interdisciplinary volume pays serious attention to women's occupations that have been given short shrift. From shop girls to soccer players, these essays show women venturing out across the decades, with the meaning of 'modern' changing as the women themselves challenge the times in which they live. Through these pages, one can see how Japan's 'modern girls' of the historical past still resonate in the present. --Glenda S. Roberts, Waseda University

Author Information

Alisa Freedman is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature and Film at the University of Oregon. Laura Miller is the Ei'ichi Shibusawa-Seigo Arai Professor of Japanese Studies and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Christine R. Yano is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.

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