An exercise in good government: Fukuzawa Yukichi on emigration and nation-building

Fukuzawa Yukichi penned a series of articles from 1884 to 1896 on why the Japanese must emigrate and settle abroad. Most striking is Fukuzawa\u27s opposition to any legislation preventing the movement of Japanese subjects abroad, including rural women who migrated with the purpose of engaging in prostitution abroad. According to Fukuzawa, the challenge facing Japanese government policy makers was not at what point do you say &quot;no&quot; to poor rural women migrating abroad, but the opposite, at what point should you say &quot;yes.&quot;<br /

Imamura Shōhei: Betwixt fiction and documentary − an introduction

'Betwixt fiction and documentary’ reveals Imamura’s development as a filmmaker through reference to historical events that shaped the style and form of his work. Imamura traces his quest for an authentic cinematic to his involvement in the black market in the years immediately after Japan’s surrender and occupation. ‘Betwixt fiction and documentary’ also gives the background to why Imamura turned his back on commercial film making for most of the 1970s

Rethinking the Maria Luz Incident: methodological cosmopolitanism and Meiji Japan

This chapter adopts methodological cosmopolitanism to revisit the Maria Luz Incident (1872), a colourful diplomatic episode that involved two civil suits brought before a court created for the specific purpose of adjudicating whether the ship’s captain’s ill-treated and abused his Chinese ‘passengers’ while the ship was anchored for repairs in Yokohama Port. The chapter argues that the Maria Luz Incident was not a seminal moment when rights talk was introduced to Japan. Rather, the incident was due to a lack of consensus in international law whether the “coolie trade” was free labour or slavery. The research traces how international law and narrow ideas of freedom (the freedom to enter contracts) became aligned with the workings of Japanese licensed prostitution

The Never-Ending Pacific War: Imamura Shohei on the Ruse of Memory

This article focuses on three documentaries made by the acclaimed director Imamura Shōhei (1926–2006) for Tokyo Channel 12 between 1971 and 1973. The three documentaries – In Search of the Unreturned Soldiers in Malaysia (1971), In Search of the Unreturned Soldiers in Thailand (1971); and Outlaw Matsu Returns (1973) – challenge contemporary accounts that valorise the Japanese state as the ultimate political agent of progress. Imamura presents his documentaries as exposés into the actual operations of collusion between the Japanese ruling elite and business, and the ongoing linkages between militarism, autocracy and Japanese prosperity. Each of the three documentaries interrogates how Japan's relations with other Asian nations are deformed by the ruse of memory, by focusing on Japanese war responsibility and the unfinished history of the Pacific War: a war that is not a problem of yesterday but of the today. In his documentaries, Imamura investigates how the spectre of the war lies heavy on the present, not only for the Japanese people, but also for the peoples who inhabited the regions occupied by Japan that became the bloody battlefields of the Pacific War

Gendered Japan: Law, Empire, and Modern Girls on the Go

Multi-book Essay: "Gender and Law in the Japanese Imperium." Edited by Susan L. Burns and Barbara J. Brooks. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. "Modern Girls on the Go: Gender, Mobility, and Labor in Japan." Edited by Alisa Freedman, Laura Miller, and Christine R. Yano. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013. "Women Adrift: The Literature of Japan's Imperial Body." By Noriko J. Horiguchi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Mediating the good life: prostitution and the Japanese Woman\u27s Christian Temperance Union, 1880s–1920s

This article examines how the Japanese Woman\u27s Christian Temperance Union, in the name of promoting liberty and rights of women in their relations with men, constructed hierarchies to ascribe value to themselves through moral condemnation. The JWCTU used extramarital sex as a political issue to strengthen the position of the legal wife in the household as opposed to the concubine and prostitute. Their efforts to prohibit Japanese women from going abroad as prostitutes, while understood as an attempt to end a system of slavery that violated the inherent rights of Japanese womanhood, was actually a desire to regulate the behaviour of the poor. The JWCTU based its moral reform agenda on the importance of premarital chastity, strict monogamy and the obligation to work for the good of the nation. Its construction of prostitution as evil represents an important strand in the history of the relationship between prostitution and family as a socio-political issue in modern Japan

Podcast with Dr Gabriella Lukács on her new book "Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan's Digital Economy"

n the podcast Dr Lukács talks about her research on online content sharing and social networking platforms and the work female photographers, net idols, bloggers, online traders, and cell phone novelists do to make Japan's digital economy profitable. Dr Lukács discusses how women were drawn to Japan's fledgling digital economy by the promises of freedom and enhanched opportunities for fulfilling and meaningful work; and how this promise stands in relation to the new forms of gendered labour precarity that have emerged in Japan since the turn of the century