Bad Girls of Japan

by Laura Miller, Jan Bardsley

Are bad girls casualties of patriarchy, a necessary evil, or visionary pioneers? The authors in this volume propose shifts in our perceptions of bad girls by providing new ways to understand them through the case of Japan. By tracing the concept of the bad girl as a product of specific cultural assumptions and historical settings, Bad Girls of Japan maps new roads and old detours in revealing a disorderly politics of gender. Bad Girls of Japan explores deviancy in richly diverse media: mountain witches, murderers, performance artists, cartoonists, schoolgirls and shoppers gone wild are all part of the terrain.

Genres: Japan, Feminism, Nonfiction, History, Sociology, Womens, Academic

234 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Dr. Laura Miller received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1988. As of August 2010, she fills the Endowed Chair in Japanese Studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Dr. Miller is an internationally prominent scholar of Japan studies and linguistic anthropology. She has done fieldwork in Moscow and in Japan (Kansai area, Kanazawa, and Tokyo). After graduation from the University of California, Santa Barbara with BA degrees in Anthropology and Asian Studies, Dr. Miller taught English and supervised an English language program for Teijin Educational Systems in Osaka, Japan (1977-1981). She began teaching college-level anthropology in the 1980s, and has been a faculty member at several universities. At the University of Missouri-St. Louis, she primarily teaches new courses on Japanese culture.

Dr. Miller has published more than fifty articles and book chapters on Japanese culture and language, including topics such as English loanwords in Japanese, the wizard boom, girls’ slang, and print club photos. Three recent peer-reviewed journal articles are “Cute masquerade and the pimping of Japan,” International Journal of Japanese Sociology (2011), “Tantalizing tarot and cute cartomancy in Japan,” Japanese Studies (2011 and “Subversive script and novel graphs in Japanese girls’ culture,” Language & Communication (2011). Her 2004 article, “Those naughty teenage girls: Japanese Kogals, slang, and media assessments” in Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, has been one of the most frequently accessed articles in the American Anthropological Association’s publishing database.


Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Marie-Therese · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 sars.

An excellent collection of fresh, thoughtful, illuminating essays that's also fun to read. A must for anyone interested in the status of women in Japan.

[Mike Graves · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sada Abe is my hero. Any woman that asphyxiates her lover in a fit a passion, cuts off his Jim Dangly so she can take it with her and carves her name in his arm is A-Okay in my estimation.

[Chi Pham · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is of so excellent quality that I have to contemplate starting a history blog and translating certain portions of the books to my own language (and going to hell with the whole copyright thing). As a collection of essays about all the "bad girls" that have existed within Japanese history, the book juxtaposes the bad alongside the good, and rips out the hypocrisy as well as the the anxiety that Japanese society experience over these "bad girls".

My favorite part of the book must be the chapter about the Asian craze for branded luxury. The author formulates a very thought-provoking theory, in which career women choose shopping as an outlet for their femininity, since they could not achieve femininity through a successful career the same way the career men who achieve masculinity. If the above sentence is too vague for you, then I am definitely tormenting you into reading this excellent book.

In the end, all the essays in the book surround on a central question: how do we judge the "bad"? More likely, can we even judge the "bad"? And as the authors answer honestly, there are just no good ways of approaching the "bad", through criticism or through praise.

[Nam Pham · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very thorough study of 'bad' girls in Japan imbued with a strong feminist attitude. There are a bit of drama here and there and sometimes over-estimation of one's critical mind, but overall it's a very nice book with a lot of sympathy for the deviant.

The idea of 'bad' girl shall be portrayed in the dynamic of man-woman relationship and this book did just great. I initially picked up this book after watching Tetsuya Nakashima's Kamikaze Girls and Memories of Matsuko; but there wasn't much on woman gang bikers or gyaru culture (though there is a chapter on the black-faced ganguro girls).

The chapters are written mostly from women perspectives and I can't help but compared their attitude with the stance of male directors such as Kim Ki-duk or Hong Sang-soo. I think I shall go watch The Isle again...

[Mari]

Got this for an assignment on Hiratsuka Raicho. They mentioned her in passing a couple times. Seems like an interesting book. I will have to try and read this another time.

[E.H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

The essays were a bit uneven--some were quite good, but especially the last one in the book seemed to me to miss its mark a bit. The authors' refusal to begin to deconstruct the gender binary was surprising; I don't read a lot of women's studies but if the book had been focused on the US, I would have expected the binaries to be addressed in more detail. The fact that it is talking about Japan and not addressing that is interesting in a way that is somewhat indicative of the way that Western people typically write about non-Western countries. On the positive side, this book made me feel bad for the Americans who are obsessed with Japanese culture qua manga/anima--there's so much more to it than that, and it's fascinating.

[Arielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I learned a lot of things for sure, but it was a bit overwhelming for me.