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History of Women in East Asia
REQUIRED READINGS (Affordable paperback)
Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Anne Walthall, and James Palais, East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History (Wadsworth Publishing;
2 edition, 2008)
Summary
Designed for the East Asian history course, this text features the latest scholarship on the region's cultural, political, economic, and
intellectual history. Coverage is balanced among East Asian countries, with approximately 20 percent of the text focused on Korea, an
area that has become increasingly important in world politics. Special attention is devoted to gender and material culture, and themes
are reinforced through the text's pedagogical features. Full color inserts on topics such as food, clothing, and art objects illustrate the
rich artistic heritage of East Asia and bolster the coverage of material culture. Features include a range of primary source documents
on topics such as women's independence and students-turned-soldiers, and biographical sketches throughout the text highlight the
lives of popular figures and ordinary people. "Connections" features provide an international context for the history of East Asia,
including topics such the origin and spread of Buddhism and a global perspective of World War II. Available in the following split
options: EAST ASIA: A CULTURAL, SOCIAL, AND POLITICAL HISTORY (Chapters 1-30), ISBN: 0547005342; PREMODERN EAST ASIA: To 1800 (Chapters 1-17), ISBN: 0547005393; MODERN EAST ASIA: From 1600 (Chapters 16-30), ISBN:
0547005369.
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Dorothy Ko, JaHyun Kim Haboush, Joan R. Piggott, ed. Women and Confucian Cultures (Univ. of CA Press (2003)
2 Summary
Representing an unprecedented collaboration among international scholars from Asia, Europe, and the United States, this volume
rewrites the history of East Asia by rethinking the contentious relationship between Confucianism and women. The authors discuss the
absence of women in the Confucian canonical tradition and examine the presence of women in politics, family, education, and art in
premodern China, Korea, and Japan.
What emerges is a concept of Confucianism that is dynamic instead of monolithic in shaping the cultures of East Asian societies. As
teachers, mothers, writers, and rulers, women were active agents in this process. Neither rebels nor victims, these women embraced
aspects of official norms while resisting others. The essays present a powerful image of what it meant to be female and to live a
woman's life in a variety of social settings and historical circumstances. Challenging the conventional notion of Confucianism as an
oppressive tradition that victimized women, this provocative book reveals it as a modern construct that does not reflect the social and
cultural histories of East Asia before the nineteenth century.
SELECTED READINGS: EAST ASIA
Sources of East Asian Tradition, Sources of Chinese Tradition, Sources of Japanese Tradition, Sources of Korean Tradition
CHINA: READINGS SELECTED FROM…
Susan Mann and Yu-Yin Cheng ed., Under Confucian Eyes: Writings on Gender in Chinese History (Univ. of CA press, 2001)
2 Summary
These translations of eighteen classical Chinese texts from the mid-ninth century (Tang dynasty) through the late nineteenth century
(Qing dynasty) offer a comprehensive collection of primary sources focusing on gender issues in medieval and late imperial China.
The book's title reflects the sometimes ironic relationship between Confucian viewpoints and women's visibility in Chinese historical
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documents. The texts, written by both men and women, show that Confucian values and scholarly practices produced a rich
documentary record of women's lives. This compilation includes a brief guide for use by students and teachers.
Robin Wang, Images of Women in Chinese Thought and Culture (Hackett Pub Co Inc, 2003)
2 Summary
This rich collection of writings -- many translated especially for this volume and some available in English for the first time -provides a journey through the history of Chinese culture, tracing the Chinese understanding of women as elucidated in writings
spanning more than two thousand years. From the earliest oracle bone inscriptions of the Pre-Qin period through the poems and stories
of the Song Dynasty, these works shed light on Chinese images of women and their roles in society in terms of such topics as human
nature, cosmology, gender, and virtue.
JAPAN: READINGS SELECTED FROM…
Gail Lee Bernstein ed., Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945 (Univ. of CA press, 1991)
2 Summary
In thirteen wide-ranging essays, scholars and students of Asian and women's studies will find a vivid exploration of how female roles
and feminine identity have evolved over 350 years, from the Tokugawa era to the end of World War II. Starting from the premise that
gender is not a biological given, but is socially constructed and culturally transmitted, the authors describe the forces of change in the
construction of female gender and explore the gap between the ideal of womanhood and the reality of Japanese women's lives. Most of
all, the contributors speak to the diversity that has characterized women's experience in Japan. This is an imaginative, pioneering work,
offering an interdisciplinary approach that will encourage a reconsideration of the paradigms of women's history, hitherto rooted in the
Western experience.
Anne E. Imamura, ed. Re-Imaging Japanese Women (Univ. of CA press, 1996)
2 Summary
This compilation of essays takes a revealing look at women whose voices have only recently begun to be heard in Japanese society:
politicians, practitioners of traditional arts, writers, radicals, wives, mothers, bar hostesses, department store and blue-collar workers.
This unique collection of essays gives a broad, interdisciplinary view of contemporary Japanese women while challenging readers to
see the development of Japanese women's lives against the backdrop of domestic and global change.
These essays provide a "second generation" analysis of roles, issues and social change. The collection brings up to date the work
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begun in Gail Lee Bernstein's Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945 (California, 1991), exploring disparities between the current
range of images of Japanese women and the reality behind the choices women make.
Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno ed., Gendering Modern Japanese History (Harvard Univ. Press, 2008)
Summary
In the past quarter-century, gender has emerged as a lively area of inquiry for historians and other scholars, and gender analysis has
suggested important revisions of the “master narratives” of national histories—the dominant, often celebratory tales of the successes
of a nation and its leaders. Although modern Japanese history has not yet been restructured by a foregrounding of gender, historians of
Japan have begun to embrace gender as an analytic category.
The sixteen chapters in this volume treat men as well as women, theories of sexuality as well as gender prescriptions, and same-sex as
well as heterosexual relations in the period from 1868 to the present. All of them take the position that history is gendered; that is,
historians invariably, perhaps unconsciously, construct a gendered notion of past events, people, and ideas. Together, these essays
construct a history informed by the idea that gender matters because it was part of the experience of people and because it often has
been a central feature in the construction of modern ideologies, discourses, and institutions. Separately, each chapter examines how
Japanese have (en)gendered their ideas, institutions, and society.
KOREA: READINGS SELECTED FROM…
Yung-Hee Kim, Questioning Minds: Short Stories by Modern Korean Women Writers (Univ. of Hawaii press, 2010)
Young-Key Kim-Renaud, ed., Creative Women of Korea: The Fifteenth Through the Twentieth Centuries (M E Sharpe Inc, 2003)
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TENTATIVE THEME
False dichotomies useful for pedagogical purposes (the lower the course number, more useful; for graduate students, more focus on
breaking down the dichotomies)
West/East (some cases drawn from, say, Latin America), Modern/Tradition, Men/Women, In/Out (e.g. household/domesticity v.s.
careers outside home), Foreign/Domestic, for/against War (revolution)/Peace
1= Primary source/ 2=Secondary Source/ =Film/ Visual images cut and paste from webpages/ppt presentations
KOREA
JAPAN
CHINA
Antiquity Myth/History
Myth/History
1 and Tangun
Shinto
0
Theocracy
1 Pimiko
800
Tang Court Culture
Women Polo horse riders
900
Heian Court Culture
1Sei shonagon, The Pillow Book
1 Murasaki Shikibu, Diary of Lady
Murasaki
1100
Marriage
1200
2 Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Inner
Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of
Chinese Women in the Sung Period
Buddhism
Buddhism
Buddhism (Zen)
2Eun-Su Cho, ed. Korean
Buddhist Nuns and Laywomen:
Hidden Histories, Enduring
Vitality
2Paula Kane Robinson Arai, Women
Living Zen: Japanese Soto Buddhist
Nuns
1 Du Guangting (855-933), Divine
Traces of the Daoist Sisterhood:
Records of the Assembled
Transcendents of the Fortified Walled
City
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KOREA
1400
1500
1700
1800
“Entertainers”: Keisong
Stanley Murashige ppt + 1Shin Jae-hyo, The Tale of Chun
Hyang
Theme?
1The Memoirs of Lady
Hyegyong: The Autobiographical
Writings of a Crown Princess of
Eighteenth-Century Korea
1850
JAPAN
Medieval Women
Merchants
Warrior Culture
Tomoe = female warrior
“Entertainers”: Geisha
“Geisha and in the Floating World”
Theme?
2Christina Guilmartin, Engendering
China: Women, Culture, and State
Homo-sexuality
2 Gary Leupp, Male Colors: The
Construction of Homosexuality in
Tokugawa Japan
Confucianism
Confucianism
1 Kikue Yamakawa, Women of the Mito
Domain: Recollections of Samurai
Family Life
2Susan Mann, The Talented Women of
the Zhang Family
Last Emperor
2 Kaibara Ekken
1900s-
“New Women”
1 Na Hye-sok, “Kyonghui”
CHINA
“New Women”
1 Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, Naomi
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KOREA
1900s-
Comfort Women
2 C. Sarah Soh, The Comfort
Women: Sexual Violence and
Postcolonial Memory in Korea
and Japan
1950s
JAPAN
Women for War
2 “Good wife, wise mother”
2 Sumiko Otsubo, “Eugenics”
12 “Red Cross” and “Cosmetics” in
Visualizing Cultures@ MIT
Comfort Women
2 Michiko Takeuchi, “Japanese pan-pan
girls,” (Duke Univ. Press, 2010)
CHINA
Women for War/Revolution
12 Visualizing Cultures@ MIT
1 Xie Bingying, A Woman Soldier's
Own Story
2 Christina Guilmartin, Engendering
the Chinese Revolution: Radical
Women, Communist Politics, and Mass
Movements in the 1920s
Comfort Women
2???
Women after 1945
Women after 1945
2Iwao Sumiko, Japanese Women
2 Kenji Ito, “Yuasa Toshiko”
1 Rae Yang, Spider Eaters: A
Memoir(cultural revolution)
READINGS: CHINA
Xie Bingying, A Woman Soldier's Own Story (Columbia Univ. Press, 2001)
1 Summary
In lyrical, flowing prose, this absorbing autobiography interweaves politics, family relations and romance as it chronicles an
extraordinary woman's struggle to free herself from traditional Chinese society. Born into a conventional family, Xie Bingying (19062000) was expected to be an obedient daughter and, later, daughter-in-law. A girl's education was largely restricted to learning how to
spin cotton and embroider. Xie's reading was limited to such books as Teach Your Daughter Traditional Rules. Her fate was to be
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determined by her parents and a matchmaker. From an early age, Xie rebelled against these circumstances. Despite her mother's
scolding, she dared to venture outside to play with the boys, and she fought fiercely against having her feet bound. In this chronicle of
the first 32 years of her life, gracefully translated by her daughter and son-in-law, Xie recounts her efforts to secure an education,
escape from an arranged marriage, raise an infant while a single mother and, chiefly, forge political change in China as a soldier in the
National Revolutionary Army fighting the warlords who dominated much of China in the 1920s, and against the Japanese in the 1930s.
Drawn to the bohemian life, Xie scoffed at financial and physical security, and gloried in her image as a "warrior who opposes all
feudal rule," even when her choices summoned hunger, loneliness and imprisonment. The happiest day of her early life, she recalls,
was the day in 1928 when her War Diary was published. She went on to become a noted author of novels, other autobiographical
works and essays. This story of a Chinese feminist makes social and political issues of 20th-century China dramatically accessible to
the lay reader. 12 photos, 3 maps. The efforts of women to emancipate themselves from restrictive social and family bonds is one of
the central themes of modern Chinese history. A high degree of grit, intelligence, perseverance, and luck was required to succeed,
particularly in the early decades of the 20th century. Xie Bingying had all those qualities in spades. Like a rocket escaping the pull of
gravity, she hurtled from the remote village in central China where she was born in 1906 to a bohemian existence in urban China and
eventually to a successful career as a teacher, essayist, novelist, and social activist. In 1927, she became a soldier in the Nationalist
Army during its famous Northern Expedition. Her vivid and emotionally charged memoir, covering the first third of her life, was first
published in China 60 years ago and is translated here by her daughter and son-in-law. An exemplar of the "new woman," Xie was an
idealist and a romantic given to florid writing that matches the impressive melodrama of her life. For larger public and academic
libraries. [Although sympathizing with the ideals of the Communist party, Xie Bingying was not a Communist and moved to Taiwan
in 1948, becoming an ardent opponent of Mao.
Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Univ of CA, 1993)
2 Summary
The Sung Dynasty (960-1279) was a paradoxical era for Chinese women. This was a time when footbinding spread, and Confucian
scholars began to insist that it was better for a widow to starve than to remarry. Yet there were also improvements in women's status in
marriage and property rights. In this thoroughly original work, one of the most respected scholars of premodern China brings to life
what it was like to be a woman in Sung times, from having a marriage arranged, serving parents-in-law, rearing children, and coping
with concubines, to deciding what to do if widowed.
Focusing on marriage, Patricia Buckley Ebrey views family life from the perspective of women. She argues that the ideas, attitudes,
and practices that constituted marriage shaped women's lives, providing the context in which they could interpret the opportunities
open to them, negotiate their relationships with others, and accommodate or resist those around them.
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Ebrey questions whether women's situations actually deteriorated in the Sung, linking their experiences to widespread social, political,
economic, and cultural changes of this period. She draws from advice books, biographies, government documents, and medical
treatises to show that although the family continued to be patrilineal and patriarchal, women found ways to exert their power and
authority. No other book explores the history of women in pre-twentieth-century China with such energy and depth.
Christina Guilmartin, Engendering the Chinese Revolution: Radical Women, Communist Politics, and Mass Movements in the 1920s
(Univ. of CA press, 1995)
2 Summary
The author writes the history of gender politics in the 1920s with this compelling assessment of the impact of feminist ideals on the
Chinese Communist Party during its formative years. For the first time, Gilmartin reveals the extent to which revolutionaries in the
1920s were committed to women's emancipation and the radical political efforts that were made to overcome women's subordination
and to transform gender relations. Women activists whose experiences and achievements have been previously ignored are brought to
life in this study, which illustrates how the Party functioned not only as a political organization but as a subculture for women as well.
We learn about the intersection of the personal and political lives of male communists and how this affected their beliefs about
women's emancipation. Gilmartin depicts with thorough and incisive scholarship how the Party formulated an ideological challenge to
traditional gender relations while it also preserved aspects of those relationships in its organization.
Christina Guilmartin, Engendering China: Women, Culture, and State (Harvard Univ. Press, 1994)
2 Summary
This collection of essays looks at educated women in China during the 18th century captures a pivotal moment in a cross-cultural and
interdisciplinary dialogue. For the first time, the voice of China-based scholars are heard alongside scholars positioned in the United
States. The distinguished contributors to this volume are of different generations, hold citizenship in different countries, and were
trained in different disciplines, but all embrace the shared project of mapping gender in China and making power-laden relationships
visible. The essays take up gender issues from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The book focus on the changing status of
contemporary village women, sexuality and reproduction, prostitution, women's consciousness, women's writing, the gendering of
work, and images of women in contemporary Chinese fiction. Some of the liveliest disagreements over the usefulness of western
feminist theory and scholarship on China take place between Chinese working in China and Chinese in temporary or longtime
diaspora. "Engendering China" should appeal to a broad academic spectrum, including scholars of Asian studies, critical theory,
feminist studies, cultural studies, and policy studies.
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Du Guangting (855-933), Divine Traces of the Daoist Sisterhood: Records of the Assembled Transcendents of the Fortified Walled
City (Three Pines Press, 2006)
1 Summary
This book presents unique materials on the lives and religious quests of Daoist women in medieval China. Translating and discussing
religious women’s biographies, the book explores the social context, ideals, and specific techniques of their practice, relating the
stories to overall Daoist themes and contemporaneous political events. It elucidates the underlying threads of women’s divine careers
and brings out both the deep human interest and humor of the stories. Through Suzanne Cahill’s efforts, the women of medieval
Daoism receive a new and clear voice, to be heard across cultures and millennia.
Susan Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (Univ. of CA press, 2007)
2 Summary
The history of China in the 19th century usually features men as the dominant figures in a chronicle of warfare, rebellion, and dynastic
decline. This book challenges that model and provides a different account of the era, history as seen through the eyes of women.
Basing her remarkable study on the poetry and memoirs of three generations of literary women of the Zhang family--Tang Yaoqing,
her eldest daughter, and her eldest granddaughter--Susan Mann illuminates a China that has been largely invisible. Drawing on a
stunning array of primary materials--published poetry, gazetteer articles, memorabilia--as well as a variety of other historical
documents, Mann reconstructs these women's intimate relationships, personal aspirations, values, ideas, and political consciousness.
She transforms our understanding of gender relations and what it meant to be an educated woman during China's transition from
empire to nation and offers a new view of the history of late imperial women.
Lu Hsun, Selected Stories (W. W. Norton, 2003)
1 Summary
Living during a time of dramatic change in China, Lu Hsun had a career that was as varied as his writing. As a young man he studied
medicine in Japan but left it for the life of an activist intellectual, eventually returning to China to teach. Though he supported the aims
of the Communist revolution, he did not become a member of the party nor did he live to see the Communists take control of China.
Ambitious to reach a large Chinese audience, Lu Hsun wrote his first published story, "A Madman's Diary," in the vernacular, a
pioneering move in Chinese literature at the time. "The True Story of Ah Q," a biting portrait of feudal China, gained him popularity
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in the West. This collection of eighteen stories shows the variety of his style and subjects throughout his career. [Read: The New
Year’s Sacrifice]
Rae Yang, Spider Eaters: A Memoir (Univ. of CA press, 1998)
1 Summary
Born in 1950, Rae Yang came of age in a time of tremendous social upheaval in her native China. Her parents, Communist
intellectuals who had been in favor with the leadership, were denounced during the so-called anti-Rightist campaigns of the 1950s.
During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Yang, a Red Guard, traveled throughout the country spreading revolutionary fever--an
exciting period, she recalls, that she had much time to reflect on while later working at a collectivized pig farm. (She named the pigs
under her charge, she writes: Capitalist, Prince, Natasha, and so on.) Disillusioned by the violence, repression, and hardship all around
her, Yang eventually managed to leave China on a student visa for the United States. "Lies, big and small, cannot easily hypnotize
me," she writes, and her memoir paints an honest portrait of a China in suffering.
FILMS: China
Eat Drink Man Woman (1994, 124 mins)
Summary
The film is about 3 unmarried sisters and their father (= a master chef) in urban Taipei in the 1980s. From celebrated director Ang Lee
(The Ice Storm, Sense and Sensibility) comes a movie so visually stunning that it spans the "beautiful balance of elementsmellow,
harmonious and poignantly funny" (The Washington Post). This "charming study of love, family and tradition" (Leonard Maltin)
"tickles both mind and body" (Movie Reviews UK). Trouble is cooking forwidower and master chef Chu (Sihung Lung) who's about
to discover that no matter how dazzling and delicious his culinary creations might be, they're no match for the libidinous whims of his
three beautiful but rebellious daughters. A master in the kitchen, Chu is at a loss when it comes to the ingredients of being a father.
Every Sunday, he whips up a delicacy of dishes for his ungrateful daughters, who are so self-consumed that they don't see his attempt
at showing them lovegastronomically.So, as relationships sour and communications break down, Chu concocts a sure-fire recipe that
will bring his family back together: He creates his own love affair to rival his daughters' affections
Raise the Red Lantern (1991, 125 mins)
Summary
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Zhang Yimou (Ju Dou) directed this fascinating, visually formal 1991 film about an educated woman (Gong Li) who is sent off to
become the newest wife of a feudal nobleman in 1920s China. Nearly isolated in his spooky, palatial home, she develops relationships
with several of the other wives and slowly becomes aware of a hideous legacy of punishment toward more willful women. The film
has a brittle and dry quality that is deliberate, but also suggestive of Zhang working through various explorations of his own style
(which he resolved in his next film, The Story of Qiu Ju).
READINGS: JAPAN
Paula Kane Robinson Arai, Women Living Zen: Japanese Soto Buddhist Nuns (Oxford Univ. Press, 1999)
2 Summary
In this study, based on both historical evidence and ethnographic data, Paula Arai shows that nuns were central agents in the
foundation of Buddhism in Japan in the sixth century. They were active participants in the Soto Zen sect, and have continued to
contribute to the advancement of the sect to the present day. Drawing on her fieldwork among the Soto nuns, Arai demonstrates that
the lives of many of these women embody classical Buddhist ideals. They have chosen to lead a strictly disciplined monastic life over
against successful careers and the unconstrained contemporary secular lifestyle. In this, and other respects, they can be shown to stand
in stark contrast to their male counterparts.
Elyssa Faison, Managing Women: Disciplining Labor in Modern Japan (Univ. of CA press, 2007)
2 Summary
At the turn of the twentieth century, Japan embarked on a mission to modernize its society and industry. For the first time, young
Japanese women were persuaded to leave their families and enter the factory. Managing Women focuses on Japan's interwar textile
industry, examining how factory managers, social reformers, and the state created visions of a specifically Japanese femininity. Faison
finds that female factory workers were constructed as "women" rather than as "workers" and that this womanly ideal was used to
develop labor-management practices, inculcate moral and civic values, and develop a strategy for containing union activities and
strikes. In an integrated analysis of gender ideology and ideologies of nationalism and ethnicity, Faison shows how this discourse on
women's wage work both produced and reflected anxieties about women's social roles in modern Japan.
Sumiko Iwao, Japanese Women (Free Press, 1998)
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2 Summary
Japanese women, according to Iwao, a professor of psychology in Tokyo, "often feel that living according to principle forces human
beings into unnatural behavior" and is "confining as far as the attainment of happiness for the individual is concerned." She compares
this attitude favorably with that of American women's "persistent" demands for an ideal of equality. Iwao argues that "contrary to the
image of subjugation outsiders seem to associate with Japanese women," they have more freedom than Japanese men, who are mere
worker bees; they have more time for friends, family and personal interests, and control the purse strings. While there is widespread
dissatisfaction with exhausted and uncompanionable husbands, one in six women compensates, guiltlessly, with a lover. Sixty-five
percent of Japanese women with school-age children have jobs, and although they "believe in equal pay for equal work, equal
opportunity and so on," they are generally not expected to contribute to household expenses. The study is densely packed with
invaluable data about generational changes in Japanese women's lives, and is intriguing for its insights into the differences between
Japanese and American value systems, but it is sometimes unduly provocative in tone and ambiguous in its assessments of Japanese
women's recent progress.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Written by a female psychology professor in Tokyo, this work aims to describe the modern Japanese woman. She is a mixture of
tradition and "new attitude." She is often viewed as passive, demure, and self-sacrificing--but at the same time she can be formidable,
ruling her family with unspoken power. Iwao recalls her own grandmother, who could "make two fine grown men cringe before her."
The book explores many topics about womanhood--myths, motherhood, marriage, financial power, divorce, sex, politics, the
workplace. American and Japanese women have very different expectations about marriage: in one survey, more Japanese than U.S.
women rated having children as very important. While Japanese women are still expected to serve the tea in the workplace, more of
them are having extramarital affairs. This is a revealing look at the changing roles of women in today's Japan. Recommended for all
women's studies and international studies collections.
Gary Leupp, Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan (Univ. of CA press, 1997)
2 Summary
Tokugawa Japan ranks with ancient Athens as a society that not only tolerated, but celebrated, male homosexual behavior. Few
scholars have seriously studied the subject, and until now none have satisfactorily explained the origins of the tradition or elucidated
how its conventions reflected class structure and gender roles. Gary P. Leupp fills the gap with a dynamic examination of the origins
and nature of the tradition. Based on a wealth of literary and historical documentation, this study places Tokugawa homosexuality in a
global context, exploring its implications for contemporary debates on the historical construction of sexual desire.
Combing through popular fiction, law codes, religious works, medical treatises, biographical material, and artistic treatments, Leupp
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traces the origins of pre-Tokugawa homosexual traditions among monks and samurai, then describes the emergence of homosexual
practices among commoners in Tokugawa cities. He argues that it was "nurture" rather than "nature" that accounted for such
conspicuous male/male sexuality and that bisexuality was more prevalent than homosexuality. Detailed, thorough, and very readable,
this study is the first in English or Japanese to address so comprehensively one of the most complex and intriguing aspects of Japanese
history.
Seishonagon, The Pillow Book (Penguin Classics, 2007)
1 Summary
The classic portrayal of court life in tenth-century Japan: Written by the court gentlewoman Sei Shonagon, ostensibly for her own
amusement, The Pillow Book offers a fascinating exploration of life among the nobility at the height of the Heian period, describing
the exquisite pleasures of a confined world in which poetry, love, fashion, and whim dominated, while harsh reality was kept firmly at
a distance. Moving elegantly across a wide range of themes including nature, society, and her own flirtations, Sei Shonagon provides a
witty and intimate window on a woman's life at court in classical Japan.
Murasaki Shikibu, Diary of Lady Murasaki (Penguin Classics, 1999)
1 Summary
The Diary recorded by Lady Murasaki (c. 973 c. 1020), author of The Tale of Genji, is an intimate picture of her life as tutor and
companion to the young Empress Shoshi. Told in a series of vignettes, it offers revealing glimpses of the Japanese imperial palace the
auspicious birth of a prince, rivalries between the Emperor's consorts, with sharp criticism of Murasaki's fellow ladies-in-waiting and
drunken courtiers, and telling remarks about the timid Empress and her powerful father, Michinaga. The Diary is also a work of great
subtlety and intense personal reflection, as Murasaki makes penetrating insights into human psychology her pragmatic observations
always balanced by an exquisite and pensive melancholy.
Barbara Soto, The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan (Duke Univ. Press, 2003)
2 Summary
Presenting a vivid social history of “the new woman” who emerged in Japanese culture between the world wars, The New Japanese
Woman shows how images of modern women burst into Japanese life in the midst of the urbanization, growth of the middle class, and
explosion of consumerism resulting from the postwar economic boom, particularly in the 1920s. Barbara Sato analyzes the icons that
came to represent the new urban femininity—the “modern girl,” the housewife, and the professional working woman. She describes
how these images portrayed in the media shaped and were shaped by women’s desires. Although the figures of the modern woman by
15
no means represented all Japanese women, they did challenge the myth of a fixed definition of femininity—particularly the stereotype
emphasizing gentleness and meekness—and generate a new set of possibilities for middle-class women within the context of
consumer culture.
The book is rich in descriptive detail and full of fascinating vignettes from Japan’s interwar media and consumer industries—
department stores, film, radio, popular music and the publishing industry. Sato pays particular attention to the enormously influential
role of the women’s magazines, which proliferated during this period. She describes the different kinds of magazines, their stories and
readerships, and the new genres the emerged at the time, including confessional pieces, articles about family and popular trends, and
advice columns. Examining reactions to the images of the modern girl, the housewife, and the professional woman, Sato shows that
while these were not revolutionary figures, they caused anxiety among male intellectuals, government officials, and much of the
public at large, and they contributed to the significant changes in gender relations in Japan following the Second World War.
Michiko Suzuki, Becoming Modern Women: Love and Female Identity in Prewar Japanese Literature and Culture (Stanford Univ.
Press, 2009)
2 Summary
Presenting a fresh examination of women writers and prewar ideology, this book breaks new ground in its investigation of love as a
critical aspect of Japanese culture during the early to mid-twentieth century. As a literary and cultural history of love and female
identity, Becoming Modern Women focuses on same-sex love, love marriage, and maternal love—new terms at that time; in doing so,
it shows how the idea of "woman," within the context of a vibrant print culture, was constructed through the modern experience of
love. Author Michiko Suzuki's work complements current scholarship on female identities such as "Modern Girl" and "New Woman,"
and interprets women's fiction in conjunction with nonfiction from a range of media—early feminist writing, sexology books,
newspapers, bestselling love treatises, native ethnology, and historiography. While illuminating the ways in which women used and
challenged ideas about love, Suzuki explores the historical and ideological shifts of the period, underscoring the broader connections
between gender, modernity, and nationhood.
Kikue Yamakawa, Women of the Mito Domain: Recollections of Samurai Family Life (Stanford Unv. Pres, 2002)
1 Summary
Based on the recollection of the author’s mother, other relatives, and family records, this is a vivid picture of the everyday life of a
samurai household in the last years of the Tokugawa period.
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FILMS: Japan
Two DVDS: each consists of short pieces (each running 10-15 mins) on historical recreation of Japan from the medieval to 19C Japan.
Twenty-Four Eyes: The Criterion Collection (1954, 156 min) RE: Women during and for war
Summary
Keisuke Kinoshita's Twenty-Four Eyes (Nijushi no hitomi) is an elegant, emotional chronicle of a teacher s unwavering commitment
to her students, her profession, and her sense of morality. Set in a remote, rural island community and spanning decades of Japanese
history, from 1928 through World War II and beyond, Kinoshita's film takes a simultaneously sober and sentimental look at the epic
themes of aging, war, and death, all from the lovingly intimate perspective of Hisako Oshi (Hideko Takamine), as she watches her
pupils grow and deal with life's harsh realities. Though little known in the United States, Twenty-Four Eyes is one of Japan's most
popular and enduring classics.
Himeyuri no To (1953, 1982, about 120 min) RE: Women during and for war
Summary
The time setting of this classic is World War II on Okinawa, and a group of young teenage women who have been trained in nursing,
especially as it relates to the emergencies and trauma sustained in combat, are working on the island to help the wounded. NonJapanese audiences may get insights into their perky good cheer, their tendency to start singing at the drop of a hairpin, and their
dedication to nurturing their dreams. Cold-blooded Americans have their own agenda for the island, and the young women's optimistic
lives may not last long in the face of an imminent invasion.
Shall We Dance? (1997, 119 mins) RE: Modern, career women in urban Japan
Summary
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On his evening commute, bored accountant Sugiyama (Koji Yakusho) always looks for the beautiful woman who gazes wistfully out
the window of the Kishikawa School of Dancing. One night he gets off the train, walks into the studio, and signs up for a class. Soon
Sugiyama is so engrossed in his dancing he practices his steps on the train platform and under his desk, and becomes good enough for
competition, compelling his wife to hire a private investigator to find out why he stays out late and returns home smelling of perfume.
Among the colorful characters Sugiyama meets is his coworker Aoki (Naoto Takenaka), who transforms himself from geeky systems
analyst to hilariously flamboyant (and bad-wigged) lounge lizard. Aoki explains to Sugiyama, "When I finish work, put on the clothes,
the wig and become Donny Burns, Latin world champion, and I start to move to the rhythm, I'm so happy, so completely free." Here
lies the chief charm of Shall We Dance, the contrast between the ultracompetitive women of the studio--including the one who caught
Sugiyama's eye, Mai (Tamiyo Kusakari)--and the men who dance simply because they enjoy it. This 1996 film is somewhat
comparable to the flamboyant Aussie favorite Strictly Ballroom, but Shall We Dance is especially noteworthy for contrasting the
boldness of social dance with the buttoned-up societal mores of Japan, where people avoid public displays of emotion. Even in Japan,
the joy of dance is irresistible.
KOREA: READINGS FROM…
Eun-Su Cho, ed. Korean Buddhist Nuns and Laywomen: Hidden Histories, Enduring Vitality (SUNY press, 2011)
2 Summary
This compilation of essays explores the roles of Korean Buddhist nuns and laywomen from the14th century to the present. Uncovering
hidden histories, this book focuses on Korean Buddhist nuns and laywomen from the fourth century to the present. Today, South
Korea's Buddhist nuns have a thriving monastic community under their own control, and they are well known as meditation teachers
and social service providers. However, little is known of the women who preceded them. Using primary sources to reveal that which
has been lost, forgotten, or willfully ignored, this work reveals various figures, milieux, and activities of female adherents, clerical and
lay. Contributors consider examples from the early days of Buddhism in Korea during the Three Kingdoms and Unified Silla periods
(first millennium CE); the Koryŏ period (982-1392), when Buddhism flourished as the state religion; the Chosŏn period (1392-1910),
when Buddhism was actively suppressed by the Neo-Confucian Court; and the contemporary resurgence of female monasticism that
began in the latter part of the 20th century.
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The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong: The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea (Univ. of CA
1996)
1 Summary
Lady Hyegyong's memoirs, which recount the chilling murder of her husband by his father, is one of the best known and most popular
classics of Korean literature. From 1795 until 1805 Lady Hyegyong composed this masterpiece, which depicts a court life whose
drama and pathos is of Shakespearean proportions. Presented in its social, cultural, and historical contexts, this first complete English
translation opens a door into a world teeming with conflicting passions, political intrigue, and the daily preoccupations of a deeply
intelligent and articulate woman.
JaHyun Kim Haboush's accurate, fluid translation captures the intimate and expressive voice of this consummate storyteller. The
Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong is a unique exploration of Korean selfhood and of how the genre of autobiography fared in premodern
times.
Shin Jae-hyo, The Tale of Chun Hyang (Silk Pagoda, 2010)
1 Summary
The legendary story of the daughter of a kisaeng, Korean singer/entertainer, and Li Mong Ryong, the son of a local lord. Chun Hyang
is the most beloved tale of love in Korea, the subject of that nation's first-ever talking film (remade more than a dozen times to date.)
The pair's separation, her subsequent torture by a corrupt minister, and their eventual reuniting, were first remembered in pansori, a
Korean version of Peking Opera, before the tale was written down by Shin Jae-hyo centuries later.
C. Sarah Soh, The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan (Univ. of Chicago, 2009)
2 Summary
In an era marked by atrocities perpetrated on a grand scale, the tragedy of the so-called comfort women—mostly Korean women
forced into prostitution by the Japanese army—endures as one of the darkest events of World War II. These women have usually been
labeled victims of a war crime, a simplistic view that makes it easy to pin blame on the policies of imperial Japan and therefore easier
to consign the episode to a war-torn past. In this revelatory study, C. Sarah Soh provocatively disputes this master narrative. The
author reveals that the forces of Japanese colonialism and Korean patriarchy together shaped the fate of Korean comfort women—a
double bind made strikingly apparent in the cases of women cast into sexual slavery after fleeing abuse at home. Other victims were
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press-ganged into prostitution, sometimes with the help of Korean procurers. Drawing on historical research and interviews with
survivors, Soh tells the stories of these women from girlhood through their subjugation and beyond to their efforts to overcome the
traumas of their past. Finally, Soh examines the array of factors— from South Korean nationalist politics to the aims of the
international women’s human rights movement—that have contributed to the incomplete view of the tragedy that still dominates today.