Toshie
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€38.99
1930s
A01=Simon Partner
agency
agricultural mechanization
agriculture
asia
Author_Simon Partner
capitalism
Category=NHF
consumer culture
day laborers
economic depression
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
farming
femininity
gender
japan
japanese culture
japanese history
kosugi
labor
land reform
modernity
nonfiction
occupation
peasant
poverty
rural community
rural japan
rural life
sakaue toshie
social history
spiritual mobilization
state power
technology
tenant farmers
village woman
war
wartime
women
womens history
womens studies
Product details
- ISBN 9780520240971
- Weight: 318g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 25 Mar 2004
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Sakaue Toshie was born on August 14, 1925, into a family of tenant farmers and day laborers in the hamlet of Kosugi. The world she entered was one of hard labor, poverty, dirt, disease, and frequent early death. By the 1970s, that rural world had changed almost beyond recognition. "Toshie" is the story of that extraordinary transformation as witnessed and experienced by Toshie herself. A sweeping social history of the Japanese countryside in its twentieth-century transition from 'peasant' to 'consumer' society, the book is also a richly textured account of the life of one village woman and her community caught up in the inexorable march of historical events. Through the lens of Toshie's life, Simon Partner shows us the realities of rural Japanese life during the 1930s depression; daily existence under the wartime regime of 'spiritual mobilization'; the land reform and its consequences during occupation; and the rapid emergence of a consumer culture against the background of agricultural mechanization during the 1950s and 1960s.
In some ways representative and in other ways unique, Toshie's narrative raises questions about conventional frameworks of twentieth-century Japanese history, and about the place of individual agency and choice in an era often seen as dominated by the impersonal forces of modernity: technology, state power, and capitalism.
Simon Partner is Associate Professor of Japanese History at Duke University. He is the author of Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer (California, 1999).
