The Modern Family in Japan: Its Rise and Fall

Front Cover
Trans Pacific Press, 2009 - 283 pages
This award-winning book brings together Chizuko Ueno's groundbreaking essays on the rise and fall of the modern family in Japan. Combining historical, sociological, anthropological, and journalistic methodologies, Ueno - who is arguably the foremost feminist theoretician in Japan - delineates in vivid detail how the family has been changing in form and function in the last hundred years. In each chapter, Ueno introduces the reader to a different facet of modern Japanese family life, ranging from children who fantasize about being orphans to the elderly who confront 'pre-senescence.' The central focus is on the housewife - her history, her ever-changing responsibilities, her ways of surviving mid-life crisis. This is an indispensable book for students and scholars seeking to understand modern Japan.
 

Selected pages

Contents

Figures
7
Exploring Family Identity
25
Womens Transformation and the Family
41
3
63
Modernity for the Family
89
The Evolution of Umesaos Home Science
125
Technological Innovation and Domestic Labor
138
A Postwar History of the Mother
161
Wives at Midlife Crisis Stage
182
The Trap of Separate Surnames for Married Couples
199
Old Age as Lived Experience
206
The Possibility of Female Bonds
223
Crosscultural Adaptation
236
Notes
252
Bibliography
264
Copyright

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The Modern Family in Japan: Its Rise and Fall
Chizuko Ueno
Limited preview - 2009

Common terms and phrases

associational bonds become blood bond society child Chizuko civil code concept conventional cross-cultural adaptation culture daughter divorce domestic labor economic employees employment Etō extent of co-residence family members family system father female feminism feminists filicidal full-time housewives gender differences household housewife housework husband and wife identity ideology ie system increase individual interpersonal relationships issue Itō Japan Japanese Americans Japanese society Japanese women Katei zasshi kazoku live male marriage married couples Marxist feminism Meiji Meiji era Meiji government modern family mother motherhood Nihon nuclear family old age overseas parents patriarchal patrilineal pattern person postwar reality regarded residence result role romantic love Saitō Satō selective bond senility separate surnames shared social sphere stem family territorial bonds Tokiko traditional Ueno Ueno Chizuko Ueno's Umesao unconventional urban wives woman women's history women's liberation women's studies workers workplace

About the author (2009)

UENO Chizuko is a leading Japanese feminist scholar and Professor Emeritus at the University of Tokyo. Her areas of specialization include gender theory, women's studies and family sociology. After graduating from the Graduate School of Kyoto University, she served as Associate Professor at Heian Jogakuin Junior College, Visiting Researcher at the University of Chicago and Associate Professor at Kyoto Seika University. Her overseas appointments include Visiting Professor at the University of Bonn and at the University of Mexico. She became Associate Professor at the Faculty of Letters, University of Tokyo, in 1993, and then Professor in the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Tokyo, in 1995. In recent years, she has been involved in research on aged care.

Bibliographic information

TitleThe Modern Family in Japan: Its Rise and Fall
Japanese society series, ISSN 1443-9670
AuthorChizuko Ueno
PublisherTrans Pacific Press, 2009
ISBN1876843624, 9781876843625
Length283 pages
  
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