Recreating Japanese Men

The essays in this groundbreaking book explore the meanings of manhood in Japan from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. Recreating Japanese Men examines a broad range of attitudes regarding properly masculine pursuits and modes of behavior. It charts breakdowns in traditional and conventional societal roles and the resulting crises of masculinity. Contributors address key questions about Japanese manhood ranging from icons such as the samurai to marginal men including hermaphrodites, robots, techno-geeks, rock climbers, shop clerks, soldiers, shoguns, and more. In addition to bringing historical evidence to bear on definitions of masculinity, contributors provide fresh analyses on the ways contemporary modes and styles of masculinity have affected Japanese men’s sense of gender as authentic and stable.

Sabine Frühstück is Professor of Modern Japanese Culture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory, and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army and Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan, both from UC Press. Anne Walthall is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. She is the editor of Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History (UC Press) and author of The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Taseko and the Meiji Restoration, among others.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Interrogating Men and Masculinities
Sabine Fru¨hstu¨ck and Anne Walthall

Part I. Legacies of the Samurai
1. Do Guns Have Gender? Technology and Status in Early Modern Japan
Anne Walthall
2. Name and Honor: A Merchant’s Seventeenth-Century Memoir
Luke Roberts
3. Empowering the Would-be Warrior: Bushido¨ and the Gendered Bodies of the Japanese Nation
Michele M. Mason
4. After Heroism: Must Real Soldiers Die?
Sabine Fru¨hstu¨ck


Part II. Marginal Men
5. Perpetual Dependency: The Life Course of Male Workers in a Merchant House
Sakurai Yuki
6. Losing the Union Man: Class and Gender in the Postwar Labor Movement
Christopher Gerteis
7. Where Have All the Salarymen Gone? Masculinity, Masochism, and Technomobility in Densha Otoko
Susan Napier
8. Failed Manhood on the Streets of Urban Japan: The Meanings of Self-Reliance for Homeless Men
Tom Gill


Part III. Bodies and Boundaries
9. Collective Maturation: The Construction of Masculinity in Early Modern Villages
Nagano Hiroko
10. Climbing Walls: Dismantling Hegemonic Masculinity in a Japanese Sport Subculture
Wolfram Manzenreiter
11. Not Suitable as a Man? Conscription, Masculinity, and Hermaphroditism in Early Twentieth-Century Japan
Teresa A. Algoso
12. Love Revolution: Anime, Masculinity, and the Future
Ian Condry
13. Gendering Robots: Posthuman Traditionalism in Japan
Jennifer Robertson


Bibliography
Contributors
Index