Modernization as creative problem making: Political action, personal conduct and Japanese overseas prostitutes= La modernisation en tant que source de problème …

New Left Review, 1988

Journal of Women's History, 2017

In the early 1920s, the League of Nations embarked on regulating human trafficking as a social problem and questioned colonial empires about how to regulate it within and outside of their territories. As this question affected the Japanese empire and colonial Taiwan (1895–1945), the met- ropolitan government utilized the international discourse about human trafficking to construct regulations for the border-crossing prostitution of under-age women. This translation of the international discourse about human trafficking enabled Japan to preserve adult prostitution and freed colonial Taiwan from the related effects of Japan’s international agree- ment. These maneuvers also encouraged officials and the press based in Japan and Taiwan to associate prostitution with daughter adoption and further child abuse and parental authority, redefining the ideal of free will and movement. This article examines how Japanese criticisms of human trafficking evolved and intertwined in the Japanese colonial courts that adjudicated the adoption of Taiwanese daughters into households.

The Journal of Asian Studies, 2018

The diversity of models for understanding power, and how power relates to rights and repression, has been one of the strengths of feminist research. The books under review build on this strength by coupling accounts of women's struggle for civil and social rights with the history of modernity. Both enterprises hold out the promise of new freedoms, unconventional ways of living, and liberation from the fetters of tradition. Despite diversity in topic and approach, the three publications share a common vision of what constitutes the modern. First, "modern" is understood in epochal terms: a distinct rupture in time when rigid kinship obligations, feudal duties and inflexible hierarchical structures dissipate and are replaced by a modern state rooted in legalism that gives free play to individual interests and spontaneous horizontal associations. Second, the primacy of individual interest, rights guaranteed by the rule of law, and the emergence of civil society register simultaneously as a gauge of progress and as an index marker of how far Japan has followed or deviated from the trajectory of Western liberal democracies. Third, there is a shared anti-state attitude. Following the current dominant trend in academia, each of these publications emphasize how heavy-handed forms of government stifle the real forces of innovation and social and political change; namely agents, movements and cultures found outside the state.

Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review E-Journal No. 23 (June 2017) , 2017

The Problem of Women in Early Modern Japan and Finding Women in the State are in many ways quite different: they cover different geographic areas and different time periods; they use different sources and ask different questions. But it is productive to think about them in tandem, to see what kind of questions they do raise and to think about the ways "the woman question" is posed in these two contexts-early modern Japan and early Maoist China, respectively. Both books are interested in the question of what looking at history through a feminist lens does to our view of that history; both are interested in dismantling a hegemonic narrative that provides a diminished vision of women as historical subjects. And both of them point out ways in which neither the "problem of women" (Yonemoto) nor the problem of finding women in the state (Wang) has been resolved. I will begin by talking about each book separately and then offer some general conclusions.

A paper presented ISA Asia-Pacific Confrence, 25-28 June 2016, City University of Hong Kong The paper proposes to apply the theory of multiple modernities to the study of national identity examining various discourses of modernity that were in circulation in the Japanese empire. As proposed by Shmuel N Eisenstadt, the theory of moderenities is an expression of attitudes to social scientific understanding of the world: conventional theories of modernity and modernisation need to be challenged for their often implicit western-centricity in that all societies in the world are expected to converge on the European model. Apart from a focused critique of the conventional theories’ western-centricity and the suggestion that the analytical focus should be place on human agency, the theory of multiple modernities is rather undefined. However with these two points, it still helps develop new research on identities, and the case of East Asia serves as an ideal context in which identity is investigated from a fresh angle. Set in this broad framework, the paper investigates discourses of modernity that were in circulation in the Japanese empire. As it is well known, intellectuals of wartime Japan were deeply engaged with the question of modernity, and the idea such as the East Asian Community and the event such as the ‘Overcoming Modernity’ symposium of 1942 were expression of their endeavour. These were, needless to say, the ruler’s hegemonic idea but there is some evidence some intellectuals in colonised Korea and Taiwan took them up as the tool of subversion of Japanese imperial rule as well as of consolidating national unity. Drawing mainly from secondary literature on colonial intellectuals in the Japanese Empire, the paper sheds light on the complex interaction among different ideas framed in the modernity discourse which reflect conscious exercise of agency.