Women and Networks in Nineteenth-Century Japan by Bettina Gramlich-Oka, Anne Walthall, Miyazaki Fumiko et al

Reviewed by: Women and Networks in Nineteenth-Century Japan by Bettina Gramlich-Oka, Anne Walthall, Miyazaki Fumiko et al. Garrett L. Washington (bio) Women and Networks in Nineteenth-Century Japan. Edited by Bettina Gramlich-Oka, Anne Walthall, Miyazaki Fumiko, and Sugano Noriko. University of Michigan Press, 2020. vi, 289 pages. $85.00, cloth; $30.95, paper. Since the late 1990s, scholars of women and gender in Japan have been relying less and less on two fundamentally significant analytical frameworks. The misogynistic Neoconfucian construct of ryōsai kenbo (good [End Page 175] wife, wise mother) and the "birth of feminism" narrative have understandably dominated these fields. While enhancing our knowledge tremendously, these frameworks have often also simplified and reduced the visibility of Japanese women's agency. Furthermore, scholarship steeped in these two structures has tended to elide the histories of women who do not align with these frames of reference. These past few decades of scholarship, however, have succeeded in highlighting much more of the diversity of early modern and modern Japanese women's lives and decentering ryōsai kenbo and feminism. They have also begged the difficult question of where the field should go next. Women and Networks in Nineteenth-Century Japan, whose ten contributors have been at the forefront of this decades-long rethinking process in the United States and Japan, offers a response. This edited volume aims to examine how women from several classes created networks and participated in networks built by men in Japan's long nineteenth century. The authors analyze the benefits and burdens that accrued to Japanese women as they took part in local, regional, and national networks in a quickly changing Japan. More than simply studying networks, the work intends to find and investigate women's complex relationships to family, mobility, work, and various private and public institutions. In addition, it attempts to provide fresh perspectives on major political, social, religious, and literary events that greatly enhance scholars' understanding of those developments. It succeeds at all these goals. With four coeditors and ten chapters based on two symposia held at Sophia University in Tokyo in 2013 and 2014, the book predictably shows some unavoidable asymmetry in terms of theme and chronology. Ultimately, however, Women and Networks in Nineteenth-Century Japan impressively manages to pull together very different scholars with distinct approaches and theses into a coherent and fascinating whole. Rather than a collection of disparate essays that appeal only to scholars working on their respective topics, the discrete chapters work together to make many common, insightful points about women and about nineteenth-century Japan more broadly. Part 1, the book's largest, most homogeneous section, begins with five chapters that introduce readers to many of the historical approaches and overlapping themes that run throughout the work. They focus on women's participation in kin-based networks, from the local and regional to the national level, while highlighting other important lines connecting these case studies. Through close readings of diaries, letters, family lineages, and other sources, the authors describe and analyze the various types of "kin work" and other responsibilities carried out by their elite women subjects. They also describe the consequences of men's decisions, failures, absences, and deaths as well as relationships and behaviors that clearly defied rigid social and political rules. The five chapters, respectively, examine the households [End Page 176] of a mid-ranking samurai family in Tosa, of Confucian scholar-official Rai Shunsui (1746–1816), of influential kokugaku (national studies) scholar Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843) during his exile in Akita, of popular late Edo novelist Takizawa Bakin (1767–1848), and of daimyō returning from Edo to distant, unfamiliar home domains in the tumultuous 1860s. In each case, it was invariably women who performed the kin work that maintained families, along with many other crucial duties (p. 71). Typically in the absence of adult men, women carried the vast majority of responsibility. They raised their children and grandchildren, including male household heads still in their minority. They also arranged marriages and divorces, managed relations in the home, and maintained critical social networks with neighbors and with relatives. The authors consistently provide intimate details that clearly illustrate these duties in each family

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