Ayako Kano
Biographic Data
| ID | 2280853 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ayako Kano |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ayako |
| FAMILY NAME | Kano |
| SIGNATURE | KANO A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pennsylvania |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3316-7424 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 16 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Voices from the Contemporary Japanese Feminist Movement , by Emma Dalton and Caroline Norma
Chance, Choice, and Cheerful Chaos: A Journey to Leadership
The Future of Gender in Japan: Work/Life Balance and Relations between the Sexes
This chapter begins with a snapshot of gendered images in the days and weeks after March 11, 2011. It continues by analyzing changes in how gender has operated as a category of scholarly discussion, showing a shift in attention from gender inequality to class disparity. It suggests that the social and academic concern over weak men has obscured the problem of female poverty. It then reviews recent government policy on Gender-Equal Society and the…
Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan by Amanda C. Seaman
Reviewed by: Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan by Amanda C. Seaman Ayako Kano (bio) Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan. By Amanda C. Seaman. University of Hawai'i Press, 2017. x, 230 pages. $62.00. Amanda Seaman's Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan is an informative and thought-provoking book that offers many fascinating insights into pregnancy—in both its mundane and its outlandish modes—in the last few decades in Japan. As a …
Rethinking Japanese Feminisms
Rethinking Japanese Feminisms
Rethinking Japanese Feminisms offers a broad overview of the great diversity of feminist thought and practice in Japan from the early twentieth century to the present. Drawing on methodologies and approaches from anthropology, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, literature, media studies, and sociology, each chapter presents the results of research based on some combination of original archival research, careful textual analy…
Contemporary Japanese Women's Theatre and Visual Arts: Performing Girls' Aesthetics by Nobuko Anan
Reviewed by: Contemporary Japanese Women’s Theatre and Visual Arts: Performing Girls’ Aesthetics by Nobuko Anan Ayako Kano Contemporary Japanese Women’s Theatre and Visual Arts: Performing Girls’ Aesthetics. By Nobuko Anan. Contemporary Performance InterActions series. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; pp. 230. Nobuko Anan’s Contemporary Japanese Women’s Theatre and Visual Arts joins a fleet of scholarly books published in the last several deca…
Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor
Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor charts the varied terrain of controversies on questions of gender and sexuality that have animated women and men in modern Japan. It describes the rondan, a public sphere in which academic, journalistic, and political voices have sparred over issues that remain disputed to the present day: prostitution, pornography, decisions about reproduction including birth control, abo…
Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor
Recent years have seen a surge of interest in Japanese feminism and gender history. This new volume brings to light Japan's feminist public sphere, a discursive space in which academic, journalistic, and political voices have long met and sparred over issues that remain controversial to the present day: prostitution, pornography, reproductive rights, the balance between motherhood and paid work, relationships between individual, family, and state…
Japan: The Precarious Future
On March 11, 2011, a 9.0 earthquake off Japan’s northeast coast triggered a tsunami that killed more than 20,000 people, displaced 600,000, and caused billions of dollars in damage as well as a nuclear meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Japan, the world’s third largest economy, was already grappling with recovery from both its own economic recession of the 1990s and the global recession following the US-driven fina…
Backlash, Fight Back, and Back-Pedaling: Responses to State Feminism in Contemporary Japan
From the mid-1990s, the Japanese government has promoted the creation of a “gender-equal society,” but since about 2000 this example of “state feminism” has faced a severe backlash. This article addresses the following questions about the phenomenon of Japanese state feminism, its history and its consequence: (1) How did the government policy for a “gender equal society” come into existence, and what explains its remarkably progressive nature? (2…
Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600-1950
Acting Like a Woman
Acting like a woman does not come naturally. It has to be taught, learned, rehearsed, and repeated. It does not arise from a moment of inspiration, but from many years of persistent inculcation. In an acting woman, the cultural and social desires of an age are concentrated, molding her every gesture, every glance. In turn, her movements and words, watched and heard, applauded and critiqued, enforce and revise those desires. Of all acting women, i…
Epilogue
In 1914, two competing productions of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé appeared on the stage in Japan. One featured Kawakami Sadayakko, recently widowed, who was trying to revitalize her career by performing a role that was quite different from both the Orientalized geisha she had performed in the West and the modern traveler she had performed in Japan.1 The other production starred Matsui Sumako, the actress who had premiered the role in Tokyo one year earl…
Reproducing the Empire
It was in 1899 that a troupe of about 20 actors embarked on a world tour, led by Kawakami Sadayakko and her husband Otojirō. It seems that Sadayakko’s role in this troupe was an ambiguous one at the outset: She did participate in rehearsal performances in Japan, yet there were no concrete plans for her to perform abroad. Upon arriving in San Francisco in May 1899, however, she found out that the theater conventions of the United States expected h…
Modern Formations of Gender and Performance
In the final years of the reign of Meiji emperor (1868–1912), a new kind of woman appeared in the pages of Engei gahō (Theater graphic), a theater magazine featuring many photographs and sketches as well as performance reviews and essays. First published in 1907, the magazine had been including in almost every issue a page or two of photographs of the most popular geisha of the day. Dressed in Japanese kimono or Western dress, these women had sha…
Wifeing the Woman
Kawakami Sadayakko is conventionally portrayed as a woman who stole the stage by accident.1 She is pictured as a woman who became an actress under duress, who had neither much training nor talent in acting, and whose success can be attributed mostly to her relationships with powerful men. In the standard texts of Japanese theater history, she is dispatched in a few lines. She is usually mentioned, briefly and nonchalantly, as arguably having been…
A New Theater
Just as actress Kawakami Sadayakko’s presence enabled the project of straightening theater, actress Matsui Sumako’s presence animated the project of bringing theater into a new era. This was the era of New Theater, a bundle of practices and ideas that correspond to a well-established movement in Japanese theater history: the shingeki. At first, shingeki was merely a descriptive phrase employed to distinguish new theatrical experiments from kabuki…
A New Woman
In the chapters on Kawakami Sadayakko, the terms “wifeing” and “straightening” were coined to summarize the contentious and paradoxical process of the modern formation of woman and theater, respectively. In the case of Matsui Sumako, there is no need for neologisms, since two terms that were used in her time are ready at hand and as useful today as they were back then: “New Woman” (atarashii onna) and “New Theater” (shingeki). These terms will be…
Feminists and Femmes Fatales
The preceding chapters showed Matsui Sumako as a New Woman, a sexual subject par excellence. When performed on stage, however, the New Woman takes on various hues: The primary colors that make up the full palette are that of the outspoken and rational feminist on one end and the seductive and irrational femme fatale on the other end, with many gradations in between. During her short but brilliant career, Matsui Sumako performed a number of roles …
Straightening the Theater
While wifeing shapes the image of Kawakami Sadayakko as woman, as a performer she is usually defined in relation to the genre of “shimpa.” The word translates as “new school drama,” and the standard encyclopedia definition explains that it was a kind of hybrid genre, a step between kabuki and truly modern theater. For this reason it is a genre that illuminates the contours and contradictions in the transition to modern theater.1 Kawakami Sadayakk…
Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender and Nationalism
Weaving together careful readings of plays and reviews, memoirs and interviews, biographies and critical essays, Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan traces the emergence of the first generation of mod
Visuality and gender in modern Japanese theater: Looking at Salome
As part of a collective project to map the changes in the sense of vision and visuality in modern Japan, this paper focuses on theater and the environment around it, and asks what gender, sexuality and performance had to do with vision and visuality, as physical operation and as social fact. Examining the circulating images of women as performers and performers as women, this paper argues that a significant change occurred in Meiji Japan which al…
Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan
The all-female Takarazuka Revue is world-famous today for its rococo musical productions, including gender-bending love stories, torridly romantic liaisons in foreign settings, and fanatically devoted fans. But that is only a small part of its complicated and complicit performance history. In this sophisticated and historically grounded analysis, anthropologist Jennifer Robertson draws from over a decade of fieldwork and archival research to expl…
Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender and Nationalism
Weaving together careful readings of plays and reviews, memoirs and interviews, biographies and critical essays, Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan traces the emergence of the first generation of mod
Visuality and gender in modern Japanese theater: Looking at Salome
As part of a collective project to map the changes in the sense of vision and visuality in modern Japan, this paper focuses on theater and the environment around it, and asks what gender, sexuality and performance had to do with vision and visuality, as physical operation and as social fact. Examining the circulating images of women as performers and performers as women, this paper argues that a significant change occurred in Meiji Japan which al…
Visuality and gender in modern Japanese theater: Looking at Salome
As part of a collective project to map the changes in the sense of vision and visuality in modern Japan, this paper focuses on theater and the environment around it, and asks what gender, sexuality and performance had to do with vision and visuality, as physical operation and as social fact. Examining the circulating images of women as performers and performers as women, this paper argues that a significant change occurred in Meiji Japan which al…
Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan
The all-female Takarazuka Revue is world-famous today for its rococo musical productions, including gender-bending love stories, torridly romantic liaisons in foreign settings, and fanatically devoted fans. But that is only a small part of its complicated and complicit performance history. In this sophisticated and historically grounded analysis, anthropologist Jennifer Robertson draws from over a decade of fieldwork and archival research to expl…
Acting Like a Woman
Acting like a woman does not come naturally. It has to be taught, learned, rehearsed, and repeated. It does not arise from a moment of inspiration, but from many years of persistent inculcation. In an acting woman, the cultural and social desires of an age are concentrated, molding her every gesture, every glance. In turn, her movements and words, watched and heard, applauded and critiqued, enforce and revise those desires. Of all acting women, i…
Epilogue
In 1914, two competing productions of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé appeared on the stage in Japan. One featured Kawakami Sadayakko, recently widowed, who was trying to revitalize her career by performing a role that was quite different from both the Orientalized geisha she had performed in the West and the modern traveler she had performed in Japan.1 The other production starred Matsui Sumako, the actress who had premiered the role in Tokyo one year earl…
Reproducing the Empire
It was in 1899 that a troupe of about 20 actors embarked on a world tour, led by Kawakami Sadayakko and her husband Otojirō. It seems that Sadayakko’s role in this troupe was an ambiguous one at the outset: She did participate in rehearsal performances in Japan, yet there were no concrete plans for her to perform abroad. Upon arriving in San Francisco in May 1899, however, she found out that the theater conventions of the United States expected h…
Modern Formations of Gender and Performance
In the final years of the reign of Meiji emperor (1868–1912), a new kind of woman appeared in the pages of Engei gahō (Theater graphic), a theater magazine featuring many photographs and sketches as well as performance reviews and essays. First published in 1907, the magazine had been including in almost every issue a page or two of photographs of the most popular geisha of the day. Dressed in Japanese kimono or Western dress, these women had sha…
Wifeing the Woman
Kawakami Sadayakko is conventionally portrayed as a woman who stole the stage by accident.1 She is pictured as a woman who became an actress under duress, who had neither much training nor talent in acting, and whose success can be attributed mostly to her relationships with powerful men. In the standard texts of Japanese theater history, she is dispatched in a few lines. She is usually mentioned, briefly and nonchalantly, as arguably having been…
A New Theater
Just as actress Kawakami Sadayakko’s presence enabled the project of straightening theater, actress Matsui Sumako’s presence animated the project of bringing theater into a new era. This was the era of New Theater, a bundle of practices and ideas that correspond to a well-established movement in Japanese theater history: the shingeki. At first, shingeki was merely a descriptive phrase employed to distinguish new theatrical experiments from kabuki…
A New Woman
In the chapters on Kawakami Sadayakko, the terms “wifeing” and “straightening” were coined to summarize the contentious and paradoxical process of the modern formation of woman and theater, respectively. In the case of Matsui Sumako, there is no need for neologisms, since two terms that were used in her time are ready at hand and as useful today as they were back then: “New Woman” (atarashii onna) and “New Theater” (shingeki). These terms will be…
Feminists and Femmes Fatales
The preceding chapters showed Matsui Sumako as a New Woman, a sexual subject par excellence. When performed on stage, however, the New Woman takes on various hues: The primary colors that make up the full palette are that of the outspoken and rational feminist on one end and the seductive and irrational femme fatale on the other end, with many gradations in between. During her short but brilliant career, Matsui Sumako performed a number of roles …
Straightening the Theater
While wifeing shapes the image of Kawakami Sadayakko as woman, as a performer she is usually defined in relation to the genre of “shimpa.” The word translates as “new school drama,” and the standard encyclopedia definition explains that it was a kind of hybrid genre, a step between kabuki and truly modern theater. For this reason it is a genre that illuminates the contours and contradictions in the transition to modern theater.1 Kawakami Sadayakk…
Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender and Nationalism
Weaving together careful readings of plays and reviews, memoirs and interviews, biographies and critical essays, Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan traces the emergence of the first generation of mod
Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600-1950
Backlash, Fight Back, and Back-Pedaling: Responses to State Feminism in Contemporary Japan
From the mid-1990s, the Japanese government has promoted the creation of a “gender-equal society,” but since about 2000 this example of “state feminism” has faced a severe backlash. This article addresses the following questions about the phenomenon of Japanese state feminism, its history and its consequence: (1) How did the government policy for a “gender equal society” come into existence, and what explains its remarkably progressive nature? (2…
Japan: The Precarious Future
On March 11, 2011, a 9.0 earthquake off Japan’s northeast coast triggered a tsunami that killed more than 20,000 people, displaced 600,000, and caused billions of dollars in damage as well as a nuclear meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Japan, the world’s third largest economy, was already grappling with recovery from both its own economic recession of the 1990s and the global recession following the US-driven fina…
Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor
Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor charts the varied terrain of controversies on questions of gender and sexuality that have animated women and men in modern Japan. It describes the rondan, a public sphere in which academic, journalistic, and political voices have sparred over issues that remain disputed to the present day: prostitution, pornography, decisions about reproduction including birth control, abo…
Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor
Recent years have seen a surge of interest in Japanese feminism and gender history. This new volume brings to light Japan's feminist public sphere, a discursive space in which academic, journalistic, and political voices have long met and sparred over issues that remain controversial to the present day: prostitution, pornography, reproductive rights, the balance between motherhood and paid work, relationships between individual, family, and state…
Rethinking Japanese Feminisms
Rethinking Japanese Feminisms
Rethinking Japanese Feminisms offers a broad overview of the great diversity of feminist thought and practice in Japan from the early twentieth century to the present. Drawing on methodologies and approaches from anthropology, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, literature, media studies, and sociology, each chapter presents the results of research based on some combination of original archival research, careful textual analy…
Contemporary Japanese Women's Theatre and Visual Arts: Performing Girls' Aesthetics by Nobuko Anan
Reviewed by: Contemporary Japanese Women’s Theatre and Visual Arts: Performing Girls’ Aesthetics by Nobuko Anan Ayako Kano Contemporary Japanese Women’s Theatre and Visual Arts: Performing Girls’ Aesthetics. By Nobuko Anan. Contemporary Performance InterActions series. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; pp. 230. Nobuko Anan’s Contemporary Japanese Women’s Theatre and Visual Arts joins a fleet of scholarly books published in the last several deca…
Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan by Amanda C. Seaman
Reviewed by: Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan by Amanda C. Seaman Ayako Kano (bio) Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan. By Amanda C. Seaman. University of Hawai'i Press, 2017. x, 230 pages. $62.00. Amanda Seaman's Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan is an informative and thought-provoking book that offers many fascinating insights into pregnancy—in both its mundane and its outlandish modes—in the last few decades in Japan. As a …
The Future of Gender in Japan: Work/Life Balance and Relations between the Sexes
This chapter begins with a snapshot of gendered images in the days and weeks after March 11, 2011. It continues by analyzing changes in how gender has operated as a category of scholarly discussion, showing a shift in attention from gender inequality to class disparity. It suggests that the social and academic concern over weak men has obscured the problem of female poverty. It then reviews recent government policy on Gender-Equal Society and the…
Chance, Choice, and Cheerful Chaos: A Journey to Leadership
Voices from the Contemporary Japanese Feminist Movement , by Emma Dalton and Caroline Norma
Japanese History and Culture (20 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Gender Studies (12 works) · Asian Culture and Media Studies (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Art (10 works) · History (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Visual arts (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works)