Christopher Gerteis
Biographic Data
| ID | 383416 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christopher Gerteis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christopher |
| FAMILY NAME | Gerteis |
| SIGNATURE | GERTEIS C |
| AFFILIATIONS | SOAS University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4977-6152 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 18 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Engines of deviance
This article examines how during the 1970s, state, media, and research institutions transformed bōsōzoku – the contemporaneous label for cohorts of motorcycle-riding youth – into an object of governance. Between 1972 and 1979, national news media, police bureaucracies, and legislative authority aligned to transform scattered riding practices into a unified phenomenon. Drawing on police white papers, newspaper databases, and research archives, the…
Writing Against the Machine
Historians generate knowledge through the labour of composition – through the friction between interpretation and evidence that makes claims open to scrutiny and challenge. This essay argues that when composition is bypassed, that structure disappears. Generative AI raises this issue in urgent fashion. Current large language models produce what the essay terms ‘stochastic history’: prose that replicates the surface forms of historical explanation…
Coed Revolution
Reviewed by: Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left by Chelsea Szendi Schieder Christopher Gerteis (bio) Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left. By Chelsea Szendi Schieder. Duke University Press, 2021. xii, 212 pages. $99.95, cloth; $25.95, paper; $25.95, E-book. Chelsea Szendi Schieder's Coed Revolution is a fascinating deep dive into the gendered structures of student activism in 1960s Japan. Hers is …
Mobilizing Japanese Youth
In Mobilizing Japanese Youth, Christopher Gerteis examines how non-state institutions in Japan—left-wing radicals and right-wing activists—attempted to mold the political consciousness of the nation's first postwar generation, which by the late 1960s were the demographic majority of voting-age adults. Gerteis argues that socially constructed aspects of class and gender preconfigured the forms of political rhetoric and social organization that bot…
Automobility and the City in Twentieth-Century Britain and Japan
Automobility and the City in Twentieth-Century Britain and Japan is the first book to consider how mass motorization reshaped cities in Japan and Britain during the 20th century. Taking two leading ‘motor cities’, Nagoya and Birmingham, as their principal subjects, Simon Gunn and Susan C. Townsend show how cars changed the spatial form and individual experience of the modern city and reveal the similarities and differences between Japan and Brita…
Origins of the Modern Japanese Bureaucracy
What is a bureaucracy, from where does it come, and how does it develop? Japanese have long described their nation as a 'kingdom of bureaucrats', but until now, no historian has fully explained the historical origins of the mammoth Japanese executive state. In this ground-breaking study, translated into English for the first time, Yuichiro Shimizu traces the rise of the modern Japanese bureaucracy from the Meiji Restoration through the early 20th…
Japan’s Occupation of Java in the Second World War
Japan’s Occupation of Java in the Second World War draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex Asian societies, placing this narrative in a larger wartime context of domestic, regional, and global crisis. Japan’s occupation of Java is here revealed in a radically new and nuanced light, as an ambiguous encounter r…
Wendy Matsumura. The Limits of Okinawa
Wendy Matsumura has crafted a well-documented, theory-heavy account of labor and identity along the colonial periphery of imperial Japan. The Limits of Okinawa: Japanese Capitalism, Living Labor, and Theorizations of Community examines the simultaneous processes of co-option, exploitation, and subversion experienced by Okinawans living and working within the sugar production system that emerged alongside Japanese modernity. Matsumura refocuses th…
Political Protest in Internar Japan Part I
The following article is a reformatted reprint of a unit developed by MIT Visualizing Cultures, a project focused on image-driven scholarship. Click here to view the essay in its original, visually-rich layout. This is part two of the second in a series of Visualizing Cultures reprints. In the coming months the Asia-Pacific Journal will reprint a number of articles on the theme of social protest in Japan originally posted at MIT VC, together with…
Beyond the Bubble, Beyond Fukushima
Christopher Gerteis and Timothy S. George make a case for revisiting Japan's postwar history in the second decade of the twenty-first century. They argue that Japan's problematic responses to the triple disasters of March 2011 warrant re-evaluating the persistent myths of failure and success associated with Japan's "postwar" and "post-bubble" eras
Japan since 1945
The fifteen multidisciplinary essays that comprise this book examine the social, cultural, and political underpinnings of Japan’s postwar and post-industrial trajectories. Unique for their integration of gender, class and ethnicity within four thematic narrative frames, the essays of this volume explore topics that range from the last twenty years of the Japanese state’s efforts to formulate industrial policy and foster financial reform to the un…
Patricia L. Maclachlan. The People's Post Office
This is not the book I expected, and it was nice to be surprised. Patricia Maclachlan's monograph is a well-written, argument-driven analysis of the interest group politics that drive Japan's modern state bureaucracy. Maclachlan has crafted an exquisite study of institutional politics as a means to further demonstrate the distinctive role played by commissioned postmasters in Japan's postwar electoral system; her book also underscores the ubiquit…
Women's History and Local Community in Postwar Japan
Journal Article Women's History and Local Community in Postwar Japan Get access Women's History and Local Community in Postwar Japan, by Curtis Anderson Gayle. London: Routledge, 2010, 192 pp., $130.00 (ISBN 978-0-415-55939-3) Christopher GERTEIS Christopher GERTEIS School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Science Japan Journal, Volume 14, Issue 1,…
Gender Struggles
In the formative years of the Japanese labor movement after World War II, the socialist unions affiliated with the General Council of Trade Unions (the labor federation known colloquially as Sohyo) formally endorsed the principles of women’s equality in the workforce and put in place measures to promote women’s active participation in union activities. However, union leaders did not embrace the legal framework for gender equality mandated by thei…
Gender Struggles
Selected bibliography on labor in Japan
A senior American historian once told me that there were hardly any books on Japanese labor.His perception was understandable; indeed, there have been far too few English language books on labor and the working-class in Japan.Yet, I was chagrined to discover that he, along with many other labor historians, have based their understanding of Japan on a very small number of books published in the 1980s.This selected bibliography, organized in revers…
THe Erotic and the Vulgar
This essay engages the colonial legacy of postwar Japan by arguing that the political cartoons produced as part of the postwar Japanese labor movement's critique of U.S. cultural hegemony illustrate how gendered discourses underpinned, and sometimes undermined, the ideologies formally represented by visual artists and the organizations that funded them. A significant component of organized labor's propaganda rested on a corpus of visual media tha…
Labor’s Cold Warriors
During the 1950s, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) led a global covert attempt to suppress left-led labor movements in Western Europe, the Mediterranean, West Africa, Central and South America, and East Asia. American union leaders argued that to survive the Cold War, they had to demonstrate to the United States government that organized labor was not part-and-parcel with Soviet communism. The AFL’s global mission was placed in care of Jay …
THe Erotic and the Vulgar
This essay engages the colonial legacy of postwar Japan by arguing that the political cartoons produced as part of the postwar Japanese labor movement's critique of U.S. cultural hegemony illustrate how gendered discourses underpinned, and sometimes undermined, the ideologies formally represented by visual artists and the organizations that funded them. A significant component of organized labor's propaganda rested on a corpus of visual media tha…
Labor’s Cold Warriors
During the 1950s, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) led a global covert attempt to suppress left-led labor movements in Western Europe, the Mediterranean, West Africa, Central and South America, and East Asia. American union leaders argued that to survive the Cold War, they had to demonstrate to the United States government that organized labor was not part-and-parcel with Soviet communism. The AFL’s global mission was placed in care of Jay …
THe Erotic and the Vulgar
This essay engages the colonial legacy of postwar Japan by arguing that the political cartoons produced as part of the postwar Japanese labor movement's critique of U.S. cultural hegemony illustrate how gendered discourses underpinned, and sometimes undermined, the ideologies formally represented by visual artists and the organizations that funded them. A significant component of organized labor's propaganda rested on a corpus of visual media tha…
Selected bibliography on labor in Japan
A senior American historian once told me that there were hardly any books on Japanese labor.His perception was understandable; indeed, there have been far too few English language books on labor and the working-class in Japan.Yet, I was chagrined to discover that he, along with many other labor historians, have based their understanding of Japan on a very small number of books published in the 1980s.This selected bibliography, organized in revers…
Gender Struggles
In the formative years of the Japanese labor movement after World War II, the socialist unions affiliated with the General Council of Trade Unions (the labor federation known colloquially as Sohyo) formally endorsed the principles of women’s equality in the workforce and put in place measures to promote women’s active participation in union activities. However, union leaders did not embrace the legal framework for gender equality mandated by thei…
Gender Struggles
Women's History and Local Community in Postwar Japan
Journal Article Women's History and Local Community in Postwar Japan Get access Women's History and Local Community in Postwar Japan, by Curtis Anderson Gayle. London: Routledge, 2010, 192 pp., $130.00 (ISBN 978-0-415-55939-3) Christopher GERTEIS Christopher GERTEIS School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Science Japan Journal, Volume 14, Issue 1,…
Japan since 1945
The fifteen multidisciplinary essays that comprise this book examine the social, cultural, and political underpinnings of Japan’s postwar and post-industrial trajectories. Unique for their integration of gender, class and ethnicity within four thematic narrative frames, the essays of this volume explore topics that range from the last twenty years of the Japanese state’s efforts to formulate industrial policy and foster financial reform to the un…
Patricia L. Maclachlan. The People's Post Office
This is not the book I expected, and it was nice to be surprised. Patricia Maclachlan's monograph is a well-written, argument-driven analysis of the interest group politics that drive Japan's modern state bureaucracy. Maclachlan has crafted an exquisite study of institutional politics as a means to further demonstrate the distinctive role played by commissioned postmasters in Japan's postwar electoral system; her book also underscores the ubiquit…
Political Protest in Internar Japan Part I
The following article is a reformatted reprint of a unit developed by MIT Visualizing Cultures, a project focused on image-driven scholarship. Click here to view the essay in its original, visually-rich layout. This is part two of the second in a series of Visualizing Cultures reprints. In the coming months the Asia-Pacific Journal will reprint a number of articles on the theme of social protest in Japan originally posted at MIT VC, together with…
Beyond the Bubble, Beyond Fukushima
Christopher Gerteis and Timothy S. George make a case for revisiting Japan's postwar history in the second decade of the twenty-first century. They argue that Japan's problematic responses to the triple disasters of March 2011 warrant re-evaluating the persistent myths of failure and success associated with Japan's "postwar" and "post-bubble" eras
Wendy Matsumura. The Limits of Okinawa
Wendy Matsumura has crafted a well-documented, theory-heavy account of labor and identity along the colonial periphery of imperial Japan. The Limits of Okinawa: Japanese Capitalism, Living Labor, and Theorizations of Community examines the simultaneous processes of co-option, exploitation, and subversion experienced by Okinawans living and working within the sugar production system that emerged alongside Japanese modernity. Matsumura refocuses th…
Japan’s Occupation of Java in the Second World War
Japan’s Occupation of Java in the Second World War draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex Asian societies, placing this narrative in a larger wartime context of domestic, regional, and global crisis. Japan’s occupation of Java is here revealed in a radically new and nuanced light, as an ambiguous encounter r…
Automobility and the City in Twentieth-Century Britain and Japan
Automobility and the City in Twentieth-Century Britain and Japan is the first book to consider how mass motorization reshaped cities in Japan and Britain during the 20th century. Taking two leading ‘motor cities’, Nagoya and Birmingham, as their principal subjects, Simon Gunn and Susan C. Townsend show how cars changed the spatial form and individual experience of the modern city and reveal the similarities and differences between Japan and Brita…
Origins of the Modern Japanese Bureaucracy
What is a bureaucracy, from where does it come, and how does it develop? Japanese have long described their nation as a 'kingdom of bureaucrats', but until now, no historian has fully explained the historical origins of the mammoth Japanese executive state. In this ground-breaking study, translated into English for the first time, Yuichiro Shimizu traces the rise of the modern Japanese bureaucracy from the Meiji Restoration through the early 20th…
Mobilizing Japanese Youth
In Mobilizing Japanese Youth, Christopher Gerteis examines how non-state institutions in Japan—left-wing radicals and right-wing activists—attempted to mold the political consciousness of the nation's first postwar generation, which by the late 1960s were the demographic majority of voting-age adults. Gerteis argues that socially constructed aspects of class and gender preconfigured the forms of political rhetoric and social organization that bot…
Coed Revolution
Reviewed by: Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left by Chelsea Szendi Schieder Christopher Gerteis (bio) Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left. By Chelsea Szendi Schieder. Duke University Press, 2021. xii, 212 pages. $99.95, cloth; $25.95, paper; $25.95, E-book. Chelsea Szendi Schieder's Coed Revolution is a fascinating deep dive into the gendered structures of student activism in 1960s Japan. Hers is …
Engines of deviance
This article examines how during the 1970s, state, media, and research institutions transformed bōsōzoku – the contemporaneous label for cohorts of motorcycle-riding youth – into an object of governance. Between 1972 and 1979, national news media, police bureaucracies, and legislative authority aligned to transform scattered riding practices into a unified phenomenon. Drawing on police white papers, newspaper databases, and research archives, the…
Writing Against the Machine
Historians generate knowledge through the labour of composition – through the friction between interpretation and evidence that makes claims open to scrutiny and challenge. This essay argues that when composition is bypassed, that structure disappears. Generative AI raises this issue in urgent fashion. Current large language models produce what the essay terms ‘stochastic history’: prose that replicates the surface forms of historical explanation…
History (12 works) · Political science (12 works) · Japanese History and Culture (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Politics (9 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Economic history (5 works) · History (5 works) · Economics (4 works)