Knowledge, Power, and Women's Reproductive Health in Japan, 1690–1945

Knowledge, Power, and Women's Reproductive Health in Japan, 1690–1945
Author: Yuki Terazawa
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2018-04-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 3319730843

This book analyzes how women’s bodies became a subject and object of modern bio-power by examining the history of women’s reproductive health in Japan between the seventeenth century and the mid-twentieth century. Yuki Terazawa combines Foucauldian theory andfeminist ideas with in-depth historical research. She argues that central to the rise of bio-power and the colonization of people by this power was modern scientific taxonomies that classify people into categories of gender, race, nationality, class, age, disability, and disease. Whilediscussions of the roles played by the modern state are of critical importance to this project, significant attention is also paid to the increasing influences of male obstetricians and the parts that trained midwives and public health nurses played in the dissemination of modern powerafter the 1868 Meiji Restoration.

Science for Governing Japan's Population

Science for Governing Japan's Population
Author: Aya Homei
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2022-11-17
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1009195751

Twenty-first-century Japan is known for the world's most aged population. Faced with this challenge, Japan has been a pioneer in using science to find ways of managing a declining birth rate. Science for Governing Japan's Population considers the question of why these population phenomena have been seen as problematic. What roles have population experts played in turning this demographic trend into a government concern? Aya Homei examines the medico-scientific fields around the notion of population that developed in Japan from the 1860s to the 1960s, analyzing the role of the population experts in the government's effort to manage its population. She argues that the formation of population sciences in modern Japan had a symbiotic relationship with the development of the neologism, 'population' (jinkō), and with the transformation of Japan into a modern sovereign power. Through this history, Homei unpacks assumptions about links between population, sovereignty, and science. This title is also available as Open Access.

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture
Author: Jennifer Coates
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 537
Release: 2019-12-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351716786

This Companion is a comprehensive examination of the varied ways in which gender issues manifest throughout culture in Japan, using a range of international perspectives to examine private and public constructions of identity, as well as gender- and sexuality-inflected cultural production. The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture features both new work and updated accounts of classic scholarship, providing a go-to reference work for contemporary scholarship on gender in Japanese culture. The volume is interdisciplinary in scope, with chapters drawing from a range of perspectives, fields, and disciplines, including anthropology, art history, history, law, linguistics, literature, media and cultural studies, politics, and sociology. This reflects the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of the dual focal points of this volume—gender and culture—and the ways in which these themes infuse a range of disciplines and subfields. In this volume, Jennifer Coates, Lucy Fraser, and Mark Pendleton have brought together an essential guide to experiences of gender in Japanese culture today—perfect for students, scholars, and anyone else interested in Japan, culture, gender studies, and beyond.

The Japanese

The Japanese
Author: Christopher Harding
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2020-11-05
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0141992298

A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 'Mightily impressive ... a marvellous read' Sunday Times From the acclaimed author of Japan Story, this is the history of Japan, distilled into the stories of twenty remarkable individuals. The vivid and entertaining portraits in Chris Harding's enormously enjoyable new book take the reader from the earliest written accounts of Japan right through to the life of the current empress, Masako. We encounter shamans and warlords, poets and revolutionaries, scientists, artists and adventurers - each offering insights of their own into this extraordinary place. For anyone new to Japan, this book is the ideal introduction. For anyone already deeply involved with it, this is a book filled with surprises and pleasures.

A Companion to Global Gender History

A Companion to Global Gender History
Author: Teresa A. Meade
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 672
Release: 2020-12-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1119535808

Provides a completely updated survey of the major issues in gender history from geographical, chronological, and topical perspectives This new edition examines the history of women over thousands of years, studies their interaction with men in a gendered world, and looks at the role of gender in shaping human behavior. It includes thematic essays that offer a broad foundation for key issues such as family, labor, sexuality, race, and material culture, followed by chronological and regional essays stretching from the earliest human societies to the contemporary period. The book offers readers a diverse selection of viewpoints from an authoritative team of international authors and reflects questions that have been explored in different cultural and historiographic traditions. Filled with contributions from both scholars and teachers, A Companion to Global Gender History, Second Edition makes difficult concepts understandable to all levels of students. It presents evidence for complex assertions regarding gender identity, and grapples with evolving notions of gender construction. In addition, each chapter includes suggestions for further reading in order to provide readers with the necessary tools to explore the topic further. Features newly updated and brand-new chapters filled with both thematic and chronological-geographic essays Discusses recent trends in gender history, including material culture, sexuality, transnational developments, science, and intersectionality Presents a diversity of viewpoints, with chapters by scholars from across the world A Companion to Global Gender History is an excellent book for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students involved in gender studies and history programs. It will also appeal to more advanced scholars seeking an introduction to the field.

Inward Conquest

Inward Conquest
Author: Ben W. Ansell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2020-11-26
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1107197392

Examining schools, libraries, prisons, asylums, and vaccines, this study is the first comprehensive look at the origins of public services.

Waiting for the Cool Moon

Waiting for the Cool Moon
Author: Wendy Matsumura
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2023-12-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1478027827

In Waiting for the Cool Moon Wendy Matsumura interrogates the erasure of colonial violence at the heart of Japanese nation-state formation. She critiques Japan studies’ role in this effacement and contends that the field must engage with anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity as the grounds on which to understand imperialism, colonialism, fascism, and other forces that shape national consciousness. Drawing on Black radical thinkers’ critique of the erasure of the Middle Passage in universalizing theories of modernity’s imbrication with fascism, Matsumura traces the consequences of the Japanese empire’s categorization of people as human and less-than-human as manifested in the 1920s and 1930s, and the struggles of racialized and colonized people against imperialist violence. She treats the archives safeguarded by racialized, colonized women throughout the empire as traces of these struggles, including the work they performed to keep certain stories out of view. Matsumura demonstrates that tracing colonial sensibility and struggle is central to grappling with their enduring consequences for the present.

Building a Modern Japan

Building a Modern Japan
Author: M. Low
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2005-05-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1403981116

In the late Nineteenth-century, the Japanese embarked on a program of westernization in the hope of building a strong and modern nation. Science, technology and medicine played an important part, showing European nations that Japan was a world power worthy of respect. It has been acknowledged that state policy was important in the development of industries but how well-organized was the state and how close were government-business relations? The book seeks to answer these questions and others. The first part deals with the role of science and medicine in creating a healthy nation. The second part of the book is devoted to examining the role of technology, and business-state relations in building a modern nation.

Toxic Archipelago

Toxic Archipelago
Author: Brett L. Walker
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2011-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0295803010

Every person on the planet is entangled in a web of ecological relationships that link farms and factories with human consumers. Our lives depend on these relationships -- and are imperiled by them as well. Nowhere is this truer than on the Japanese archipelago. During the nineteenth century, Japan saw the rise of Homo sapiens industrialis, a new breed of human transformed by an engineered, industrialized, and poisonous environment. Toxins moved freely from mines, factory sites, and rice paddies into human bodies. Toxic Archipelago explores how toxic pollution works its way into porous human bodies and brings unimaginable pain to some of them. Brett Walker examines startling case studies of industrial toxins that know no boundaries: deaths from insecticide contaminations; poisonings from copper, zinc, and lead mining; congenital deformities from methylmercury factory effluents; and lung diseases from sulfur dioxide and asbestos. This powerful, probing book demonstrates how the Japanese archipelago has become industrialized over the last two hundred years -- and how people and the environment have suffered as a consequence.

Childbirth in Republican China

Childbirth in Republican China
Author: Tina Phillips Johnson
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2011-09-16
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 0739164406

"Childbirth is a window into the shifting cultural and political landscape of a particular place and time. Much can be learned about a culture by examining its treatment of women and children. More importantly, reproduction encompasses both a moral and a social imperative; the continuation of a society rests on childbirth. In imperial China, securing the continuation of the family line was the utmost filial act, with the family as the basic organizing unit of society and the state. Yi-li Wu noted that "childbirth was the warp on which the fabric of society was woven" in imperial China. I argue that childbirth remains so, and alterations in how childbirth is viewed and conducted merely point to larger ideological visions of social and political structures. Li Xiaojiang asserted in the preface to her anthropological study of modernization and traditional childbirth customs in rural China in the 1990s that "because of its close relationship with levels of health and disease, birth is one of the keys to understanding and constructing women's lives, but our field of vision has been blind to it." Opening one's eyes to the rich material surrounding childbirth, the researcher is made aware that legislation regarding reproduction and birth, maternal and child health, and the general treatment of women and children illuminate the relative value or disregard a people carry for those women and children."--Publisher's description.