Genders, Sexualities and Bodies in Modern Japanese History

The importance of gender to the writing of the history of modern Japan is now wellestablished. We can trace a shift from ‘women’s history’, which was largely focused on making women visible in the historical narrative, to ‘gender history’. The field of gender history deploys ‘gender’ as a major conceptual tool of analysis; considers both men’s and women’s experiences; and interrogates both masculinity and femininity (Scott 1988: 42; Molony and Uno 2005: 1–35). There is a long tradition of the writing of women’s history in the Japanese language and we now have a significant body of scholarship in the English language, too, starting in the 1970s, and increasing in recent years.1 The concept of ‘gender’ (jendā) has gradually become mainstreamed, in both popular and academic discourse in Japan, and in English-language writings on modern Japanese history.