The essays in this groundbreaking book explore the meanings of manhood in Japan from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. Recreating Japanese Men examines a broad range of attitudes regarding properly masculine pursuits and modes of behavior. It charts breakdowns in traditional and conventional societal roles and the resulting crises of masculinity. Contributors address key questions about Japanese manhood ranging from icons such as the samurai to marginal men including hermaphrodites, robots, techno-geeks, rock climbers, shop clerks, soldiers, shoguns, and more. In addition to bringing historical evidence to bear on definitions of masculinity, contributors provide fresh analyses on the ways contemporary modes and styles of masculinity have affected Japanese men’s sense of gender as authentic and stable.
Sabine Frühstück is Professor of Modern Japanese Culture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory, and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army and Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan, both from UC Press. Anne Walthall is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. She is the editor of Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History (UC Press) and author of The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Taseko and the Meiji Restoration, among others.
“Recreating Japanese Men is a wonderful and invaluable book. Its interdisciplinary mix of essays opens the door to a new world of scholarship on masculinity in Japan." —David L. Howell, Harvard University
“By considering a wide variety of alternative masculinities throughout Japanese history, these essays reveal the tensions, conflicts and overlapping between competing masculine and feminine ideals and practices in surprising ways.” —Robert A. Nye, Oregon State University
“This gallery of striking but also subtle images of Japanese masculinity both reinforces old and reveals new historical understandings of Japanese political and military institutions, social divisions, and cultural anxieties. Essential reading in both Japan and masculinity studies.“ --Gary Cross, author of Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity.
360 pp.6 x 9Illus: 16 b/w photographs, 3 tables
9780520267381$34.95|£30.00Paper
Oct 2011