Nationalism and Gender

by Chizuko Ueno, Beverly Yamamoto (Translator)

This is written by a sociologist and Japan's "most famous feminist", Chizuko Ueno. A discursive battle over how Japan's history should be remembered constitutes the most recent, and perhaps the most explosive, round in a struggle over the legitimacy of different "narrator's" understandings of the past and its focus on the "comfort women" issue. Feminist theorist Chizuko Ueno confronts head on, in her usual lucid and hard-hitting style, the various actors in the debate. She skillfully cuts through the argument of the neo-nationalist "historical revisionists" who have attempted to deny or minimize the reality of the former "comfort women". Ueno's equally biting treatment of her natural allies - left-wing historians and feminist supporters of the "comfort women" - has also made the book highly controversial.

Genres: Japan, Feminism, Japanese Literature, Nonfiction, Sociology, Japanese History, Gender

263 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Chizuko Ueno is a Japanese sociologist and Japan's "best-known feminist".

Her research field includes feminist theory, family sociology, and women's history. She is best known for her contribution to gender studies in Japan. As a public intellectual, she played a central role in creating the field of gender studies in Japanese academia. At the same time, her radical tendency and strong character has invited criticism (she described herself as "critical, assertive, and disobedient").

Ueno is a trenchant critic of postwar revisionism and criticizes the whitewashing of Japanese history, which she claims attempts to justify its colonialism, wartime atrocities, and racism both before and after World War II. In particular, she has defended the compensation of Korean comfort women who were forced into prostitution by the Empire of Japan.

Reviews

[Evelyn R]

I appreciated this book's criticism of the complicity of the Japanese and Western women's movements with imperialism and military adventures. At the same time, it takes a truly bizarre and contradictory pacifist line that I don't think is supported even by the book's own evidence. Its prohibition of violence of any kind has only the advantage of moral "consistency," though that very consistency makes it, in my view, counterproductive and even dangerous.

My strongest criticisms of the book are around this pacifist political line, which only occupies the last sixth of the book or so. Much of the book is keen analysis of the history of feminism's entanglement in Japanese nationalism and the fascist state project, and makes some valuable insights regardless of the conclusions one draws from them.

[Kuu]

ehhhhh

[Thea Tong]

The Bible, but correct version

[Graham Oliver]

The beginning of the book, which focused on a handful of key female figures pre-war, was hard for me to find meaningful due to lack of context about why these figures deserved so much attention, vs. the middle of the book which focused more broadly on society and government.

I found the middle of the book really engaging and easy to understand/follow, despite not having a ton of background in the subject. I really appreciated the thorough analysis of the implications of different ways of viewing so-called "comfort women" and war writ large.

As another reviewer noted, the call for absolute pacifism at the end of the book seemed very facile and odd. One part literally says that the writer believes feminism requires being against all forms of violence, and should even include the criminalization of war, but how would anyone enforce such a criminalization without violence? If the writer just means theoretically, then it seems an unnecessary thing to say.

[Trauermaerchen]

This book is a really interesting exploration of the relationship between Nationalism and Gender. I especially appreciated the section on "comfort women" which is a topic I haven't read much about before and found to be the strongest section overall.

Seemingly the most controversial aspect of this book is the author's perspective on the criminalization of war. I can see why some people may see it as almost naive but personally, I really appreciated her perspective on the criminalization of war and its inseparability to war crimes.

I will say that this book is a bit chaotic at times and I was missing maybe an overarching perspective, something to contextualize the rest of the book. Still, I found this to be a really valuable read that I got a lot out of.

[Benemint]

Very thought provoking. This is a must-read to those who study modern Japanese history.

[Thomas Kyhn]

Should have been proofread before publishing.

[David]

Probably rings truer in Japanese.