About the Book

Bringing together international scholars from various disciplines, this study takes an interdisciplinary perspective on the formation of the modern Japanese nation-state.

References to gender relations are deeply embedded in the historical concepts of nation and nationalism, and in the related symbols, metaphors and arguments. Moreover, the development of the binary opposition between masculinity and femininity, and the development of the modern nation-state are processes which occurred simultaneously, the product of a shift from a stratified, hereditary class society to a functionally differentiated social body. This book considers these processes by paying attention specifically to the Japanese case. Women and men in Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were told that the fate of the nation depended on their fulfilment of the gender role assigned to them. The predominant female gender ideal was that of the ‘Good Wife and Wise Mother’, an invented tradition which was presented as traditional, uniquely Japanese, and natural.

Tracing the idea of women’s and men’s gendered contributions to the nation and the state through contemporary concepts of citizenship, ethnicity, sexuality, work and everyday life, Gender, Nation and State in Modern Japan makes an important contribution to the literature on the formation of modern nation-states.