Tokyo - - Bog - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc - Plusbog.dk

Tokyo: Memory, Imagination, and the City is a collection of eight essays that explore Tokyo urban space from the perspective of memory in works of the imagination—novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and films. Written by scholars of Japanese studies based in England, Germany, Japan, and the United States, the book focuses on texts produced in Japan since the 1980s. The closing years of the Shōwa period (1926-1989) were a watershed decade of spatial transformation in Tokyo. It was also a time (in Japan, as elsewhere) when conversations about the nature of memory—historical, cultural, collective, and individual—intensified. The contributors to the volume share the view that works of the imagination are constitutive elements of how cities are experienced and perceived. Each of the essays responds to the growing interest in studies on Tokyo with a literary-cultural orientation.

Tokyo Rose / An American Patriot - Frederick P. Close - Bog - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc - Plusbog.dk

Tokyo Rose / An American Patriot explores the parallel lives of World War II legend Tokyo Rose and a Japanese American woman named Iva Toguri. Trapped in Tokyo during the war and forced to broadcast on Japanese radio, Toguri nonetheless refused to renounce her U.S. citizenship and surreptitiously aided Allied POWs. Despite these patriotic actions, she foolishly identified herself to the press after the war as Tokyo Rose. This book assembles for the first time a collection of images from American pre-war popular culture that provided impetus for the legend. It explains how the wartime situation of servicemen caused their imaginations to create the mythical femme fatale even though no Japanese announcer ever used the name Tokyo Rose. Further, in spite of the fact that there was only one rather innocuous broadcast by a woman between December 1941 and April 1942, a news correspondent with the U.S. Navy reported in April 1942 that sailors in the Pacific theater routinely listened to Tokyo Rose's propaganda. Using interviews conducted over decades, this biography also explores Toguri's character and decisions by placing her story and conviction for treason in the context of U.S. and Japanese racial views, Imperial Japan, and Cold War politics. New research findings prompt a different perspective on her sensational trial, the most expensive in U.S. history up to that time. Misguided strategy by Toguri's defense attorney and her deceptive testimony about a key event led to the jury's verdict as surely as the perjury suborned by prosecutors. In addition to updated information, this expanded edition discusses Manila Rose, another Japanese broadcaster who lived in San Francisco in 1949 a few blocks from the courthouse where the federal government prosecuted Tokyo Rose. The U.S. Army misstated Manila Rose’s name to the public when it interviewed her in 1945. As a result historians have never turned up her files because they researched this incorrect name. Close discovered the FBI investigation from 1954 in the National Archives and is the first here to reveal the full story of Manila Rose, a woman whose real life parallels that of the fictional Tokyo Rose.

Secret Talks Between Tokyo and Washington - - Bog - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc - Plusbog.dk

Secret Talks Between Tokyo and Washington offers an insider''s perspective of the political, economic, and security-related negotiations of Japan and America between 1949 and 1954. Translated by Robert D. Eldridge, for the first time the memoirs of Miyazawa Kiichi reaches a global audience. This book is a critical link to understanding the views and reactions of the Japanese government, both when it was under occupation and then as a newly independent nation, during which time the young, talented, and international-minded Kiichi played a central role. A firm believer in the ''Yoshida Doctrine,'' Kiichi argued that Japan should play a civilian economic role instead of becoming a military power in order to satisfy its ego, a position that occasionally set him apart from his contemporaries. In this book Kiichi offers valuable insight into the bilateral relationship that has evolved between Japan and the United States from the early post war as he describes in detail the many events, personalities, and ideas he came across during his years serving as then-Finance Minister Ikeda Hayato''s secretary and his own work in the Upper House. Secret Talks Between Tokyo and Washington is an enlightening text that will appeal to those interested in Asian studies and international relations.

Secret Talks Between Tokyo and Washington - - Bog - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc - Plusbog.dk

Secret Talks Between Tokyo and Washington offers an insider''s perspective of the political, economic, and security-related negotiations of Japan and America between 1949 and 1954. Translated by Robert D. Eldridge, for the first time the memoirs of Miyazawa Kiichi reaches a global audience. This book is a critical link to understanding the views and reactions of the Japanese government, both when it was under occupation and then as a newly independent nation, during which time the young, talented, and international-minded Kiichi played a central role. A firm believer in the "Yoshida Doctrine," Kiichi argued that Japan should play a civilian economic role instead of becoming a military power in order to satisfy its ego, a position that occasionally set him apart from his contemporaries. In this book Kiichi offers valuable insight into the bilateral relationship that has evolved between Japan and the United States from the early post war as he describes in detail the many events, personalities, and ideas he came across during his years serving as then-Finance Minister Ikeda Hayato''s secretary and his own work in the Upper House. Secret Talks Between Tokyo and Washington is an enlightening text that will appeal to those interested in Asian studies and international relations.

The Scars of War - - Bog - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc - Plusbog.dk

Takeyama Michio, the author of Harp of Burma, was thirty-seven in 1941, the year of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Husband, father of children born during the war, and teacher at Japan’s elite school of higher education in Tokyo, he experienced the war on its home front. His essays provide us with a personal record of the bombing of Tokyo, the shortage of food, the inability to get accurate information about the war, the frictions between civilians and military and between his elite students and other civilians, the mobilization of students into factory jobs and the military, and the relocation of civilians out of the Tokyo area. This intimate account of the “scars of war,” including personal anecdotes from Takeyama’s students and family, is one of very few histories from this unique vantage point. Takeyama’s writings educate readers about how the war affected ordinary Japanese and convey his thoughts about Japan''s ally Germany, the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, and the immediate postwar years. Beautifully translated by Richard H. Minear, these honest and moving essays are a fresh look at the history of Japan during the Asia-Pacific War.

Function-Based Spatiality and the Development of Korean Communities in Japan - David Rands - Bog - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc - Plusbog.dk

Function-Based Spatiality and the Development of Korean Communities in Japan utilizes the theoretical model of complex adaptive systems and introduces the concept of function-based spatiality to investigate the roles of the urban environments of Tokyo and Osaka in the development of Korean communities in Japan. Analysis of distinct Korean communities allows for the examination of urban factors of each city which contributed to the patterns of Korean immigration and community formation. By utilizing a comparative narrative of the two cities, distinctions between the organic growth of Osaka and the planned city of Tokyo are illuminated. Additionally, the discussion utilizes the concept of function-based spatiality to show how each city interacted with its surrounding regional, national, and global spheres. The functions of Tokyo, as a gateway to Western modernization and center of the Japanese state, shaped the interactions with Korean immigrants. Likewise, Osaka’s functions as a center of mercantilism and second city played a large role in how Koreans were incorporated into the urban ethnoscapes. Taken together, these two examples provide insight to the dynamics of urban systems on the development of immigrant communities.

Black Mercuries - Mark Dyreson - Bog - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc - Plusbog.dk

This book chronicles the struggles and triumphs of African American athletes in the Modern Olympic Games, from 1896 through the 2020 Tokyo Games. It explores the lives and careers of both legendary and little-known Black Olympians as they sought to honor themselves, their race, and their nation on the world stage.

War and Conscience in Japan - Nambara Shigeru - Bog - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc - Plusbog.dk

One of Japan''s most important intellectuals, Nambara Shigeru defended Tokyo Imperial University against its rightist critics and opposed Japan''s war. His poetic diary (1936–1945), published only after the war, documents his profound disaffection. In 1945 Nambara became president of Tokyo University and was an eloquent and ardent spokesman for academic freedom. Among his most impressive speeches are two memorials to fallen student-soldiers, which directly confront Nambara''s wartime dilemma: what and how to advise students called up to fight a war he did not believe in. In this first English-language collection of his key work, historian and translator Richard H. Minear introduces Nambara''s career and thinking before presenting translations of the most important of Nambara''s essays, poems, and speeches. A courageous but lonely voice of conscience, Nambara is one of the few mid-century Japanese to whom we can turn for inspiration during that dark period in world history.

The Urban Planetary and Tokyo Modernity - Christophe Thouny - Bog - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc - Plusbog.dk

Jews in the Japanese Mind - Masanori Miyazawa - Bog - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc - Plusbog.dk

Shortly before releasing deadly sarin gas on the Tokyo subway in March 1995, the Aum Shinrikyo religious cult published a vicious 95-page antisemitic tract that declared war on its Jewish archenemy. The gassing of the Tokyo subway was the culmination of a century of Japanese theorizing about Jews, an important part of which has been antisemitic. In recent years, books blaming Jews for everything from the designs on Japanese currency to the 1995 Kobe earthquake have appeared, and some have sold millions of copies. What explains this virtual obsession with Jews in Japan—a country that has no Jews? In this highly original cultural and intellectual history, David G. Goodman and Masanori Miyazawa show that present-day Japanese attitudes toward Jews are the result of a process of accretion that began nearly 200 years ago. Skillfully tracing the historical development of Japanese images of Jews against the background of the development of modern Japanese culture, they describe how these images reflect the great themes of modern Japanese intellectual life. Spanning fields ranging from politics to poetry, the authors demonstrate how Japanese attitudes toward Jews have had real political and cultural consequences, culminating in the 1995 subway gassing and resonating into the twenty-first century.

Neonationalist Mythology in Postwar Japan - Nariaki Nakazato - Bog - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc - Plusbog.dk

Radhabinod Pal was an Indian jurist who achieved international fame as the judge representing India at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal and dissented from the majority opinion, holding that all Japanese “Class A” war criminals were not guilty of any of the charges brought against them. In postwar Japanese politics, right-wing polemicists have repeatedly utilized his dissenting judgment in their political propaganda aimed at refuting the Tokyo trial’s majority judgment and justifying Japan’s aggression, gradually elevating this controversial lawyer from India to a national symbol of historical revisionism. Many questions have been raised about how to appropriately assess Pal’s dissenting judgment and Pal himself. Were the arguments in Pal’s judgment sound? Why did he submit such a bold dissenting opinion? What was the political context? More fundamentally, why and how did the Allies ever nominate such a lawyer as a judge for a tribunal of such great political importance? How should his dissent be situated within the context of modern Asian history and the development of international criminal justice? What social and political circumstances in Japan thrust him into such a prominent position? Many of these questions remain unanswered, while some have been misinterpreted. This book proposes answers to many of them and presents a critique of the persistent revisionist denial of war responsibility in the Japanese postwar right-wing movement.

Neonationalist Mythology in Postwar Japan - Nariaki Nakazato - Bog - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc - Plusbog.dk

Radhabinod Pal was an Indian jurist who achieved international fame as the judge representing India at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal and dissented from the majority opinion, holding that all Japanese “Class A” war criminals were not guilty of any of the charges brought against them. In postwar Japanese politics, right-wing polemicists have repeatedly utilized his dissenting judgment in their political propaganda aimed at refuting the Tokyo trial’s majority judgment and justifying Japan’s aggression, gradually elevating this controversial lawyer from India to a national symbol of historical revisionism. Many questions have been raised about how to appropriately assess Pal’s dissenting judgment and Pal himself. Were the arguments in Pal’s judgment sound? Why did he submit such a bold dissenting opinion? What was the political context? More fundamentally, why and how did the Allies ever nominate such a lawyer as a judge for a tribunal of such great political importance? How should his dissent be situated within the context of modern Asian history and the development of international criminal justice? What social and political circumstances in Japan thrust him into such a prominent position? Many of these questions remain unanswered, while some have been misinterpreted. This book proposes answers to many of them and presents a critique of the persistent revisionist denial of war responsibility in the Japanese postwar right-wing movement.

Toward an East Asian Exchange Rate Regime - - Bog - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc - Plusbog.dk

" East Asian exchange rates have become a global flashpoint. U.S. policymakers blame artificially low Asian currency values for global imbalances, including America''s ballooning current account deficit. The solution, they argue, lies in some combination of greater exchange rate flexibility and the appreciation of Asian currencies against the dollar. Asian officials recognize the need to let their exchange rates rise, but they fear that would hamper growth and cut sharply into the value of their dollar reserves. Toward an East Asian Exchange Rate Regime offers a timely and comprehensive analysis of the resulting debates, drawing on expertise from China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. The introduction reviews the issues at stake, sketches a variety of proposed exchange rate regimes, and discusses comparisons between East Asia and the West. Subsequent chapters examine the connection between global financial imbalances and East Asian monetary cooperation, China''s potential role in regional coordination, the relationship between monetary and trade integration, and different paths toward regional cooperation. Authoritative yet concise, this is an essential primer on East Asian monetary integration. Contributors include Gongpil Choi (Korean Institute of Finance, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco), Masahiro Kawai (University of Tokyo, Asian Development Bank), Kwanho Shin (Korea University), Yunjong Wang (SK Institute), Masaru Yoshitomi (RIETI,Tokyo), and Yongding Yu (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences). "

Japan as an Immigration Nation - Hidenori Sakanaka - Bog - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc - Plusbog.dk

This book proposes a solution to three interrelated problems facing Japan: the rapidly declining population, a decrease in working age adults, and a lack of social and economic vitality. Hidenori Sakanaka, the former director of the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau, proposes that Japan accept ten million immigrants, including refugees, over the next fifty years, and articulates the benefits of this measure for Japan and its future. The author has spent close to fifty years working in the field of immigration and was one of the first to identify the pending population crisis as early as the mid-1970s. This is the first time his thoughts appear in book-length form in English.

Japan's Past, Japan's Future - Richard H. Minear - Bog - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc - Plusbog.dk

''Win or lose— What matter? We fight for freedom of spirit.'' Thus writes Ienaga Saburo, preeminent Japanese historian and courageous plaintiff in three lawsuits (1965D1997) against the government seeking to end Ministry of Education OcertificationO of textbooks, which even today constrains discussion of Japan''s actions in China and elsewhere in the Pacific. The cases arose specifically from government censorship of Ienaga''s forthright textbook accounts of the Pacific War and of such controversial events as the Nanjing massacre. The questions he has forced into the public arena are central both to the nature of Japanese democracy and to issues of war and memory. They have shaped Japanese politics and frictions with its Asian neighbors and with the United States for half a century. Spanning Japan''s watershed twentieth century, this compelling autobiography traces Ienaga''s childhood, education, wartime experience, academic career, and the two major battles that occupied his later years. One was the fight against the relocation of Tokyo University of Education to a new Oresearch cityO outside Tokyo; the other was the fight against Ocertification.O Neither battle ended in victory for Ienaga, but as he eloquently expresses in the short poem above, defeat did not make them any less worth fighting. Minear provides a masterly introduction of the man and his times and brings the story to the present with excerpts from Ienaga''s court testimony and recent interviews. Illustrated with photos and textbook extracts, this volume brings to life the experience and intellectual odyssey of one of the leading shapers of contemporary Japan. It will be widely read and used by Japan specialists as well as all scholars and general readers concerned with issues of academic freedom and war and peace.

Skateboard - Jonathan Russell (freelance Writer Clark - Bog - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc - Plusbog.dk

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.How did the skateboard go from a menacing fad to an Olympic sport? Writer and skateboarder Jonathan Russell Clark answers this question by going straight to the sources: the skaters, photographers, commentators, and industry insiders who made such an unlikely rise to worldwide juggernaut possible. Skateboarders are their own historians, which means the real history of skating exists not in archives or texts but in a hodgepodge of random and iconic videos, tattered photographs, and, mostly, in the blurry memories of the people who lived through it all. From California beaches to Tokyo 2020, the skateboard has outlasted its critics to form a global community of creativity, camaraderie, and unceasing progression.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic .

Going Critical - Joel S. Wit - Bog - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc - Plusbog.dk

" A decade before being proclaimed part of the ""axis of evil,"" North Korea raised alarms in Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo as the pace of its clandestine nuclear weapons program mounted. When confronted by evidence of its deception in 1993, Pyongyang abruptly announced its intention to become the first nation ever to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, defying its earlier commitments to submit its nuclear activities to full international inspections. U.S. intelligence had revealed evidence of a robust plutonium production program. Unconstrained, North Korea''s nuclear factory would soon be capable of building about thirty Nagasaki-sized nuclear weapons annually. The resulting arsenal would directly threaten the security of the United States and its allies, while tempting cash-starved North Korea to export its deadly wares to America''s most bitter adversaries. In Go ing Critical, three former U.S. officials who played key roles in the nuclear crisis trace the intense efforts that led North Korea to freeze—and pledge ultimately to dismantle—its dangerous plutonium production program under international inspection, while the storm clouds of a second Korean War gathered. Drawing on international government documents, memoranda, cables, and notes, the authors chronicle the complex web of diplomacy--from Seoul, Tokyo, and Beijing to Geneva, Moscow, and Vienna and back again—that led to the negotiation of the 1994 Agreed Framework intended to resolve this nuclear standoff. They also explore the challenge of weaving together the military, economic, and diplomatic instruments employed to persuade North Korea to accept significant constraints on its nuclear activities, while deterring rather than provoking a violent North Korean response. Some ten years after these intense negotiations, the Agreed Framework lies abandoned. North Korea claims to possess some nuclear weapons, while threatening to produce even more. The story of the 1994 confrontation provides important lessons for the United States as it grapples once again with a nuclear crisis on a peninsula that half a century ago claimed more than 50,000 American lives and today bristles with arms along the last frontier of the cold war: the De-Militarized Zone separating North and South Korea. "

Terasaki Hidenari, Pearl Harbor, and Occupied Japan - Roger B. Jeans - Bog - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc - Plusbog.dk

Gwen Terasaki''s Bridge to the Sun, an idealized memoir of her marriage in the 1930s and 1940s to a Japanese diplomat, Terasaki Hidenari, is still widely read as an inspiring tale of a ''bridge'' between two cultures that waged savage war against each other from 1941 to 1945. However, neither this memoir nor charges that Terasaki was a master spy and a double agent are the whole historical truth. In Terasaki Hidenari, Pearl Harbor, and Occupied Japan, Roger B. Jeans reassesses Terasaki Hidenari''s story, using the FBI''s voluminous dossier on Terasaki, decoded Japanese Foreign Ministry cables (MAGIC), and the papers of an isolationist, a pacifist, and an FBI agent and chief investigator at the Tokyo war crimes trial. Jeans reveals that far from being simply a saint or villain, Terasaki, despite his opposition to an American-Japanese war, served as a Foreign Ministry intelligence officer, propaganda chief, and liaison with American isolationists and pacifists in 1941, while using all means to protect Hirohito during the postwar occupation.

Interpreting the Mikado's Empire - - Bog - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc - Plusbog.dk

For more than fifty years, William Elliot Griffis (1843–1928) chronicled a rapidly changing Meiji Japan and its people. He was unequaled in the length of his writing career and the breadth of his work, which illuminated the entire sweep of Meiji history and reached a multiplicity of American audiences. A teacher in the provincial city of Fukui and later in Tokyo, he reported in magazine essays on the last days of feudalism in Japan and its aspirations to become a modern nation. After returning to the United States, he continued to write. In dozens of books and hundreds of articles, he covered topics including the samurai class, daily life, racial theory, empire, and war. Extending his reach even further, he was a tireless public speaker and delivered thousands of lectures on Japan. He described his self-appointed task as “interpreting Japan to America, with voice and pen.” This anthology brings together the best of his writing, offering a dynamic perspective on Meiji Japan through the eyes of a colorful and engaging writer.

Globalization and Urbanization - James H. Spencer - Bog - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc - Plusbog.dk

During the past decade, the world reached the point of becoming more urban than not, as the majority of people on the planet now live not in small towns or villages but in provincial, national, and global cities. Scholars have long been fascinated by so-called global cities, world cities, and the urban engines of the global economy. James H. Spencer argues, however, that such an emphasis misses the central fact that urbanization goes well beyond the usual suspects of New York, Tokyo, London, and Shanghai. The author charts urbanization across the Global South and North, resulting in what he describes as a planetary global urban ecosystem. This concept that challenges us to realize that in daily life, their similar physical and social ecosystems that make cities more understandable to each other than to their own rural hinterlands. Spencer’s vivid case studies of Addis Ababa, Ho Chi Minh City, Honolulu, and New York draw out the commonalities of our intertwined built and social environments and how they express a shared humanity across continents and cultures.

The Japanese Family in Transition - Suzanne Hall Vogel - Bog - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc - Plusbog.dk

In 1958, Suzanne and Ezra Vogel embedded themselves in a Tokyo suburban community, interviewing six middle-class families regularly for a year. Their research led to Japan’s New Middle Class, a classic work on the sociology of Japan. Now, Suzanne Hall Vogel’s compelling sequel traces the evolution of Japanese society over the ensuing decades through the lives of three of these ordinary yet remarkable women and their daughters and granddaughters. Vogel contends that the role of the professional housewife constrained Japanese middle-class women in the postwar era—and yet it empowered them as well. Precisely because of fixed gender roles, with women focusing on the home and children while men focused on work, Japanese housewives had remarkable authority and autonomy within their designated realm. Wives and mothers now have more options than their mothers and grandmothers did, but they find themselves unprepared to cope with this new era of choice. These gripping biographies poignantly illustrate the strengths and the vulnerabilities of professional housewives and of families facing social change and economic uncertainty in contemporary Japan.

Globalization and Urbanization - James H. Spencer - Bog - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc - Plusbog.dk

During the past decade, the world reached the point of becoming more urban than not, as the majority of people on the planet now live not in small towns or villages but in provincial, national, and global cities. Scholars have long been fascinated by so-called global cities, world cities, and the urban engines of the global economy. James H. Spencer argues, however, that such an emphasis misses the central fact that urbanization goes well beyond the usual suspects of New York, Tokyo, London, and Shanghai. The author charts urbanization across the Global South and North, resulting in what he describes as a planetary global urban ecosystem. This concept that challenges us to realize that in daily life, their similar physical and social ecosystems that make cities more understandable to each other than to their own rural hinterlands. Spencer’s vivid case studies of Addis Ababa, Ho Chi Minh City, Honolulu, and New York draw out the commonalities of our intertwined built and social environments and how they express a shared humanity across continents and cultures.

Japan's New Middle Class - Ezra F. Vogel - Bog - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc - Plusbog.dk

This classic study on the sociology of Japan remains the only in-depth treatment of the Japanese middle class. Now in a fiftieth-anniversary edition that includes a new foreword by William W. Kelly, this seminal work paints a rich and complex picture of the life of the salaryman and his family. In 1958, Suzanne and Ezra Vogel embedded themselves in a Tokyo suburb, living among and interviewing six middle-class families regularly for a year. Tracing the rapid postwar economic growth that led to hiring large numbers of workers who were provided lifelong employment, the authors show how this phenomenon led to a new social class—the salaried men and their families. It was a well-educated group that prepared their children rigorously for the same successful corporate or government jobs they held. Secure employment and a rising standard of living enabled this new middle class to set the dominant pattern of social life that influenced even those who could not share it, a pattern that remains fundamental to Japanese society today.

Terasaki Hidenari, Pearl Harbor, and Occupied Japan - Roger B. Jeans - Bog - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc - Plusbog.dk

Gwen Terasaki''s Bridge to the Sun, an idealized memoir of her marriage in the 1930s and 1940s to a Japanese diplomat, Terasaki Hidenari, is still widely read as an inspiring tale of a "bridge" between two cultures that waged savage war against each other from 1941 to 1945. However, neither this memoir nor charges that Terasaki was a master spy and a double agent are the whole historical truth. In Terasaki Hidenari, Pearl Harbor, and Occupied Japan, Roger B. Jeans reassesses Terasaki Hidenari''s story, using the FBI''s voluminous dossier on Terasaki, decoded Japanese Foreign Ministry cables (MAGIC), and the papers of an isolationist, a pacifist, and an FBI agent and chief investigator at the Tokyo war crimes trial. Jeans reveals that far from being simply a saint or villain, Terasaki, despite his opposition to an American-Japanese war, served as a Foreign Ministry intelligence officer, propaganda chief, and liaison with American isolationists and pacifists in 1941, while using all means to protect Hirohito during the postwar occupation.

The Japanese Family in Transition - Suzanne Hall Vogel - Bog - Bloomsbury Publishing Plc - Plusbog.dk

In 1958, Suzanne and Ezra Vogel embedded themselves in a Tokyo suburban community, interviewing six middle-class families regularly for a year. Their research led to Japan’s New Middle Class, a classic work on the sociology of Japan. Now, Suzanne Hall Vogel’s compelling sequel traces the evolution of Japanese society over the ensuing decades through the lives of three of these ordinary yet remarkable women and their daughters and granddaughters. Vogel contends that the role of the professional housewife constrained Japanese middle-class women in the postwar era—and yet it empowered them as well. Precisely because of fixed gender roles, with women focusing on the home and children while men focused on work, Japanese housewives had remarkable authority and autonomy within their designated realm. Wives and mothers now have more options than their mothers and grandmothers did, but they find themselves unprepared to cope with this new era of choice. These gripping biographies poignantly illustrate the strengths and the vulnerabilities of professional housewives and of families facing social change and economic uncertainty in contemporary Japan.