Authors: Gail Lee Bernstein
ISBN-13: 9780520239746, ISBN-10: 0520239741
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: University of California Press
Date Published: October 2005
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Gail Lee Bernstein is Professor of History at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Haruko's World: A Japanese Farm Woman and Her Community (1996), editor of Recreating Japanese Women (California, 1991), and coeditor of Public Spheres, Private Lives (2005) and Japan and the World: Essays on Japanese History and Politics (1988).
"There simply is no other book like this. No other family history presents such a range of insights into the ways in which individuals, women as well as men, have had to cope with changes wrought by the social modernization of Japanese family culture."James L. McClain, author of Japan: A Modern History
"Isami's House is the chronicle of a remarkable family, neither aristocratic nor famous, whose rise and decline seem to parallel Japan's. It makes absorbing reading, affording a panoramic view of a rural family's rise to local prominence at the dawn of the modern Japanese nation state, the expansion of its presence to Tokyo and then the empire, its experience in war and defeat, and finally its postwar reconfiguration as a dispersed urban family."Norma Field, author of
In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: A Portrait of Japan at Century's End
Prologue : history revealed | ||
Matsuura genealogy | ||
Introduction : an agrarian childhood | 1 | |
1 | The house Isami built | 21 |
2 | Kissing cousins | 36 |
3 | Father of the village | 48 |
4 | Strong wives | 66 |
5 | Urban studies | 83 |
6 | The marriage pipeline | 97 |
7 | Frugality and fancy schemes | 109 |
8 | Outposts of modernity | 123 |
9 | Isami's children in harm's way | 137 |
10 | Hard times on the home front | 146 |
11 | Surviving Hiroshima | 159 |
12 | Missed fortunes | 169 |
13 | Making history | 181 |
14 | Absent husband | 195 |
15 | Couples and uncouplings | 205 |
16 | Mothering | 217 |
Epilogue : kin work | 233 |