Women of the Mito Domain

Women of the Mito Domain PDF Author: Kikue Yamakawa
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804731492
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
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.

Women of the Mito Domain

Women of the Mito Domain PDF Author: Kikue Yamakawa
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804731492
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
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.

Women of the Mito Domain

Women of the Mito Domain PDF Author: Kikue Yamakawa
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description


Bakumatsu No Mito-han

Bakumatsu No Mito-han PDF Author: Kikue Yamakawa
Publisher:
ISBN: 9784130270281
Category : Japan
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description


Sakamoto Ry?ma and the Meiji Restoration

Sakamoto Ry?ma and the Meiji Restoration PDF Author: Marius B. Jansen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231101738
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
Jansen tells the story of the Restoration in the career and thought of Sakamoto Ryoma and, to a lesser extent, Nakaoka Shintaro, each an example of the new type of political leader: idealistic, individualistic, and patriotic.

Women and Class in Japanese History

Women and Class in Japanese History PDF Author: Hitomi Tonomura
Publisher: U of M Center for Japanese Studies
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
"...marks an important moment not only in the study of gender and women in Japanese society but also in the development of collabortive efforts between Japanese and Western scholars on the subject..."--back cover.

The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko

The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko PDF Author: Laura Nenzi
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082485389X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko is the story of a self-described "base-born nobody" who tried to change the course of Japanese history. Kurosawa Tokiko (1806–1890), a commoner from rural Mito domain, was a poet, teacher, oracle, and political activist. In 1859 she embraced the xenophobic loyalist faction (known for the motto "revere the emperor, expel the barbarians") and traveled to Kyoto to denounce the shogun's policies before the emperor. She was arrested, taken to Edo's infamous Tenmachō prison, and sentenced to banishment. In her later years, having crossed the Tokugawa-Meiji divide, Tokiko became an elementary school teacher and experienced firsthand the modernizing policies of the new government. After her death she was honored with court rank for her devotion to the loyalist cause. Tokiko's story reflects not only some of the key moments in Japan's transition to the modern era, but also some of its lesser-known aspects, thereby providing us with a fresh narrative of the late-Tokugawa crisis, the collapse of the shogunate, and the rise of the Meiji state. The peculiar combination of no-nonsense single-mindedness and visionary flights of imagination evinced in her numerous diaries and poetry collections nuances our understanding of activism and political consciousness among rural nonelites by blurring the lines between the rational and the irrational, focus and folly. Tokiko's use of prognostication and her appeals to cosmic forces point to the creative paths some women constructed to take part in political debates and epitomize the resourcefulness required to preserve one's identity in the face of changing times. In the early twentieth century, Tokiko was reimagined in the popular press and her story was rewritten to offset fears about female autonomy and to boost local and national agendas. These distorted and romanticized renditions offer compelling examples of the politicization of the past and of the extent to which present anxieties shape historical memory. That Tokiko was unimportant and her loyalist mission a failure is irrelevant. What is significant is that through her life story we are able to discern the ordinary individual in the midst of history. By putting an extra in the spotlight, The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko offers a new script for the drama that unfolded on the stage of late-Tokugawa and early Meiji history.

Mistresses

Mistresses PDF Author: Elizabeth Abbott
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1590208765
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 526

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Book Description
“A lively and nuanced look at gender roles as they have been revealed by the lives of concubines and mistresses over the centuries” (Kirkus). She exists as both a fictional character and as a flesh-and-blood human being. But who is she, really? Why do women become mistresses, and what is it like to have a private life that is usually also a secret life? Is a mistress merely a wife-in-waiting, or is she the very definition of the emancipated, independent female? Elizabeth Abbott intelligently examines the motives and morals of some of history's most infamous and fascinating women, from antiquity to today. Drawing intimate portraits of those who have—by chance, coercion, or choice—assumed this complex role, Mistresses offers a rich blend of personal biography and cultural insight. “Ms. Abbott is delightfully indiscreet, with an eye for a good story and a colloquial style . . . She has done the ladies a service by bringing them out of the shadows.” —The Economist

Women in Japanese Religions

Women in Japanese Religions PDF Author: Barbara Ambros
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479827622
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
A comprehensive history of women in Japanese religious traditions Scholars have widely acknowledged the persistent ambivalence with which the Japanese religious traditions treat women. Much existing scholarship depicts Japan’s religious traditions as mere means of oppression. But this view raises a question: How have ambivalent and even misogynistic religious discourses on gender still come to inspire devotion and emulation among women? In Women in Japanese Religions, Barbara R. Ambros examines the roles that women have played in the religions of Japan. An important corrective to more common male-centered narratives of Japanese religious history, this text presents a synthetic long view of Japanese religions from a distinct angle that has typically been discounted in standard survey accounts of Japanese religions. Drawing on a diverse collection of writings by and about women, Ambros argues that ambivalent religious discourses in Japan have not simply subordinated women but also given them religious resources to pursue their own interests and agendas. Comprising nine chapters organized chronologically, the book begins with the archeological evidence of fertility cults and the early shamanic ruler Himiko in prehistoric Japan and ends with an examination of the influence of feminism and demographic changes on religious practices during the “lost decades” of the post-1990 era. By viewing Japanese religious history through the eyes of women, Women in Japanese Religions presents a new narrative that offers strikingly different vistas of Japan’s pluralistic traditions than the received accounts that foreground male religious figures and male-dominated institutions.

Divorce in Japan

Divorce in Japan PDF Author:
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804779173
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
A social, legal, and intellectual history of divorce in Japan over the last four centuries, during much of which Japan had one of the highest divorce rates in the world.

Koume’s World

Koume’s World PDF Author: Simon Partner
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231559100
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Kawai Koume (1804–1889) was an accomplished poet and painter and a wife, mother, and grandmother in a lower-ranking samurai family in the provincial castle town of Wakayama. She was an eyewitness to many of the key events leading up to the Meiji Restoration and the radical changes that followed, including the famine of 1837, the great earthquake of 1854, the cholera epidemic of 1859, and the departure of samurai to fight in the civil wars of the 1860s. For more than fifty years, she kept a diary recording her family’s daily life—meals and expenses, visitors and the weather, small-town gossip and news of momentous events. Through Koume’s eyes and words, Simon Partner opens a window on social, economic, and cultural life amid some of the most dramatic periods of Japan’s transformative nineteenth century. Koume’s World vividly portrays the everyday activities, social interactions, information networks, cultural production, and household economy of a samurai family across the Tokugawa-Meiji divide. Partner’s narrative offers a remarkably detailed portrait of the dynamic working life of a female artist and household manager while also giving a regional perspective on the upheavals surrounding the Meiji Restoration. A compelling microhistorical study of gender, economy, and society in nineteenth-century Japan, Koume’s World is a compelling account of how one woman experienced both mundane routines and drastic social transformations.