The essays in this groundbreaking book explore the meanings of manhood in Japan from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. Recreating Japanese Men examines a broad range of attitudes regarding properly masculine pursuits and modes of behavior. It charts breakdowns in traditional and conventional societal roles and the resulting crises of masculinity. Contributors address key questions about Japanese manhood ranging from icons such as the samurai to marginal men including hermaphrodites, robots, techno-geeks, rock climbers, shop clerks, soldiers, shoguns, and more. In addition to bringing historical evidence to bear on definitions of masculinity, contributors provide fresh analyses on the ways contemporary modes and styles of masculinity have affected Japanese men’s sense of gender as authentic and stable.
Recreating Japanese Men
About the Book
Reviews
"A complex, engaging, and nuanced discussion of expressions of Japanese masculinity."—Mark McLelland Journal of Japanese Studies (JAS)
"A well-realized collection of essays on early-modern and contemporary masculinities in Japan . . . A very satisfying voyage."—Jack David Eller Anthropology Review Database“Recreating Japanese Men is a wonderful and invaluable book. Its interdisciplinary mix of essays opens the door to a new world of scholarship on masculinity in Japan." —David L. Howell, Harvard University
“By considering a wide variety of alternative masculinities throughout Japanese history, these essays reveal the tensions, conflicts and overlapping between competing masculine and feminine ideals and practices in surprising ways.” —Robert A. Nye, Oregon State University
“This gallery of striking but also subtle images of Japanese masculinity both reinforces old and reveals new historical understandings of Japanese political and military institutions, social divisions, and cultural anxieties. Essential reading in both Japan and masculinity studies.“ --Gary Cross, author of Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Interrogating Men and Masculinities
Sabine Fru¨hstu¨ck and Anne Walthall
Part I. Legacies of the Samurai
1. Do Guns Have Gender? Technology and Status in Early Modern Japan
Anne Walthall
2. Name and Honor: A Merchant’s Seventeenth-Century Memoir
Luke Roberts
3. Empowering the Would-be Warrior: Bushido¨ and the Gendered Bodies of the Japanese Nation
Michele M. Mason
4. After Heroism: Must Real Soldiers Die?
Sabine Fru¨hstu¨ck
Part II. Marginal Men
5. Perpetual Dependency: The Life Course of Male Workers in a Merchant House
Sakurai Yuki
6. Losing the Union Man: Class and Gender in the Postwar Labor Movement
Christopher Gerteis
7. Where Have All the Salarymen Gone? Masculinity, Masochism, and Technomobility in Densha Otoko
Susan Napier
8. Failed Manhood on the Streets of Urban Japan: The Meanings of Self-Reliance for Homeless Men
Tom Gill
Part III. Bodies and Boundaries
9. Collective Maturation: The Construction of Masculinity in Early Modern Villages
Nagano Hiroko
10. Climbing Walls: Dismantling Hegemonic Masculinity in a Japanese Sport Subculture
Wolfram Manzenreiter
11. Not Suitable as a Man? Conscription, Masculinity, and Hermaphroditism in Early Twentieth-Century Japan
Teresa A. Algoso
12. Love Revolution: Anime, Masculinity, and the Future
Ian Condry
13. Gendering Robots: Posthuman Traditionalism in Japan
Jennifer Robertson
Bibliography
Contributors
Index