The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan (Asia-Pacific.)

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating subject, poorly constructed book
Review: The author has found a very interesting topic and assembled a good array of source material. Unfortunately her style, while thankfully relatively free of jargon and theory, fails to develop her ideas and jumps around so the thinking does not develop.

Instead she endlessly repeats that there was a connection between concepts of modernity, consumerism and the 'moga'/'modern woman' without developing how this simple idea played out in Japan in different ways to the similar phenomenon elsewhere at the same time. She does not develop the historical background in a coherent fashion - e.g. the role of World War 1 , given that Japan was the only wartime ally who did not engage in significant fighting but economically gained huge benefits and colonies, all of which had various social impacts. The development of her colonies, particularly Manchuria, is not analysed on her theme.

Most significantly, she fails to put her ideas into the essential political and economic context without which the theme of the book is rendered almost meaningless. It would be impossible from this book to know, for example, that Japan suffered two major economic depressions (at the end of world war 1, and from 1927) during the period covered - what impact did that have? We learn right at the end that even after the war the number of 'love marriages' rather than arranged marriages was still only 15% - so how much social impact had the aims of the new woman really had?

The reason why the author fails to grasp some of these broad themes is that she does not put the 'new woman' into the wider issue - how did the 'new man' of the 1920s and 1930s respond to the aspirations of newly liberated women? How did political discourse engage and change because of these social developments - e.g. from this book it would almost be impossible to understand that Japan invaded East Asia and provoked a world war - what was the 'new woman' doing whilst all that was going on?