In the winter of 1913, a small crowd gathered on the streets of a famous red-light district on the outskirts of Tokyo. Curious patrons, journalists, and onlookers formed a steady procession to see the prostitute, Wada Yoshiko, and celebrate the release of her new book. A Prostitute’s Tale divulged inner secrets about her co-workers, patrons, and difficult confinement in a government-run syphilis hospital. According to the press, the author was a literary prostitute, a new expert, and a compelling version of Japan’s new woman. Soon widely acclaimed, her literary work heralded a growing public desire for inside knowledge about the lived experiences of pleasure workers. Wada’s success was the product of more than half-a-century of high-stakes conversations about the future of Japan. Her fame as an author simultaneously challenged and complemented previous discussions about the role of the female prostitute in the modern nation-state. However, while her perspective was new, the information she shared invoked key themes that had proliferated about her in prior decades. Since the 1850s, when Japan was forced to sign the “unequal” commercial treaties with the Western imperial powers, wide-ranging debates had taken place that linked the prostitute to national security and international prestige in imperative new ways. Imagining Prostitution in Modern Japan traces the symbol of the prostitute as a project of nation- and empire-building from the 1850s to 1913, ending one year after the death of the Meiji emperor, and coincidentally, the year of Wada’s publication. It untangles how ideas about pleasure work intersected with Japan’s transformation into a modern nation according to Western models. It asserts that the figure of the prostitute was a powerful symbolic resource that wide-ranging interest groups deployed, variously, to negotiate and define shifting distinctions of status, identity, and power. Each of the debates about the prostitute was in turn central to and mutually constitutive of the emergent social order in Meiji Japan.

This cultural history examines representations of pleasure work during Japan's transformation into a modern nation-state. It traces the figure of the prostitute in the context of Japanese nation- and empire-building immediately before and during the Meiji era.

Based on over two years of participant-observation in labor brokerage firms, factories, schools, churches, and people’s homes in Japan and Brazil, Sarah LeBaron von Baeyer presents an ethnographic portrait of what it means in practice to “live transnationally,” that is, to contend with the social, institutional, and aspirational landscapes bridging different national settings. Rather than view Japanese-Brazilian labor migrants and their families as somehow lost or caught between cultures, she demonstrates how they in fact find creative and flexible ways of belonging to multiple places at once. At the same time, the author pays close attention to the various constraints and possibilities that people face as they navigate other dimensions of their lives besides ethnic or national identity, namely, family, gender, class, age, work, education, and religion

In this book, Yuko Kawai departs from the common conception of Japan as an ethnically homogenous nation. A Transnational Critique of Japaneseness: Cultural Nationalism, Racism, and Multiculturalism in Japan investigates the construction of Japaneseness from a transnational perspective, examining ways to make Japanese nationhood more inclusive. Kawai analyzes a variety of communicational practices during the first two decades of the twenty-first century while situating Japaneseness in its longer historical transformation from the late nineteenth century. Kawai focuses on governmental and popular ideas of Japaneseness in light of local, global, historical, and contemporary contexts as well as in relation to a diverse array of Others in both Asia and the West.

This collection draws from scholars across different languages to address and assess the scholarly achievements of Tawada Yōko. Yōko, born in Japan (1960) and based in Germany, writes and presents in both German and Japanese. The contributors of this volume recognize her as one of the most important contemporary international writers. Her published books alone number more than fifty volumes, with roughly the same number in German and Japanese. Tawada’s writing unfolds at the intersections of borders, whether of language, identity, nationality, or gender. Her characters are all travelers of some sort, often foreigners and outsiders, caught in surreal in-between spaces, such as between language and culture, or between species, subjectivities, and identities. Sometimes they exist in the spaces between gendered and national identities; sometimes they are found caught between reality and the surreal, perhaps madness. Tawada has been one of the most prescient and provocative thinkers on the complexities of travelling and living in the contemporary world, and thus has always been obsessed with passports and trouble at borders. This current volume was conceived to augment the first edited volume of Tawada’s work, Yōko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, which appeared from Lexington Books in 2007. That volume represented the first extensive English language coverage of Tawada’s writing. In the meantime, there is increased scholarly interest in Tawada’s artistic activity, and it is time for more sustained critical examinations of her output. This collection gathers and analyzes essays that approach the complex international themes found in many of Tawada’s works.

Volume 1 of Inside Major East Asian Library Collections in North America presents an extensive collection of interviews that give key insights into Japanese and Korean librarianship.

Sex and sexuality are an integral part of human life and vital for the survival of the human race, but sexual freedoms in many countries have yet to be enshrined as constitutional rights. Focusing primarily on Japan, Shigenori Matsui explores the extent to which governments should be allowed to restrict or influence sexual autonomy. Should a constitution encompass rights including: to decide or change sexual or gender identity; to have children, through natural birth or through medically assisted reproduction; or to not have children, through access to abortion? This rigorously detailed legal analysis has implications for government policy in all countries facing similar issues.