Toshié: A Story of Village Life in Twentieth-Century Japan

by Simon Partner

Sakaue Toshié was born on August 14, 1925, into a family of tenant farmers and day laborers in the hamlet of Kosugi. The world she entered was one of hard labor, poverty, dirt, disease, and frequent early death. By the 1970s, that rural world had changed almost beyond recognition. Toshié is the story of that extraordinary transformation as witnessed and experienced by Toshié herself. A sweeping social history of the Japanese countryside in its twentieth-century transition from "peasant" to "consumer" society, the book is also a richly textured account of the life of one village woman and her community caught up in the inexorable march of historical events.

Through the lens of Toshié's life, Simon Partner shows us the realities of rural Japanese life during the 1930s depression; daily existence under the wartime regime of "spiritual mobilization"; the land reform and its consequences during occupation; and the rapid emergence of a consumer culture against the background of agricultural mechanization during the 1950s and 1960s. In some ways representative and in other ways unique, Toshié's narrative raises questions about conventional frameworks of twentieth-century Japanese history, and about the place of individual agency and choice in an era often seen as dominated by the impersonal forces of technology, state power, and capitalism.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Japan, Asia, Japanese History, Read For School

212 pages, Paperback

First published February 24, 2004

Reviews

[Yusuf · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like reading biographies of everyday people, as it provides you so much depth about a certain time period and place, but you also understand how individuals use their agency to answer change and continuity. In this book the writer does a wonderful job to combine these two aspects and gives you a critical look to rural Japan from 1920s to 1980s. It is an easy read, but this definitely doesn't mean that it is not scholarly invaluable. Actually, this can be the book all qualitative researchers would like to write: it reads like a novel while meeting with the highest academic standards. I will be reading other books of Simon Partner, that's all l know...

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Immensely thick in information while following the story line of a woman in a rural village town in western Japan that did not necessarily prosper, yet neither did it suffer greatly, during WWII. I wished there was more story of Toshie since the book is dedicated to her life, but even in the preface it states how he would reference other major events in the book, so I guess I shouldn't have been entirely thrown off by the density.

I read this for class and enjoyed it. It's refreshing to read a story that isn't flooded with horrific tragedies nor flooded with idealized or romanticized events.

[Shannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part biography and part history textbook this book is invaluable for learning about the time period. To be honest though I didn't really read a lot of it because of time restraints and other homework I had to do. I want to go back to it though because I thought Toshie was a fascinating person. At times this book read more like historical fiction than the dry textbooks and other biographies I've read for school. It's an engaging read and one I will definitely revisit when time permits.

[Winnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most interesting rural history I've ever read. The author treat his subjects with almost tangible loving care, weaving them compellingly into the historical events.