Gender and the Koseki In Contemporary Japan
Gender and the Koseki In Contemporary Japan

Author: Linda White

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-04-17

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 131720106X

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The Japanese koseki system is the legal and social structure keeping record of all Japanese citizens. Determined by the Civil Code and the Koseki Law, for activists challenging it, the koseki is also an ideological structure, which has produced patriarchal control through single-surname households. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Tokyo, this book engages with issues of gender hierarchy and structural inequality in Japanese society. Studying several decades of feminist activism and critique of the koseki system, it analyses the strategies of activists who have creatively circumvented koseki rules in order to maintain their natal names in marriage. It examines the case studies of members of the fūfubessei (separate surname movement) and the movement to end discrimination against children born out of wedlock, and in so doing this book illuminates the contradictions in current family law and koseki practice that have animated a generation of feminists in Japan. Demonstrating the effect of the koeski on family, gender, and national identity, this book will be useful for students and scholars of Cultural Anthropology, Gender Studies, and Japanese Studies in general.

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture
The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture

Author: Jennifer Coates

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-12-06

Total Pages: 537

ISBN-13: 1351716786

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This Companion is a comprehensive examination of the varied ways in which gender issues manifest throughout culture in Japan, using a range of international perspectives to examine private and public constructions of identity, as well as gender- and sexuality-inflected cultural production. The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture features both new work and updated accounts of classic scholarship, providing a go-to reference work for contemporary scholarship on gender in Japanese culture. The volume is interdisciplinary in scope, with chapters drawing from a range of perspectives, fields, and disciplines, including anthropology, art history, history, law, linguistics, literature, media and cultural studies, politics, and sociology. This reflects the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of the dual focal points of this volume—gender and culture—and the ways in which these themes infuse a range of disciplines and subfields. In this volume, Jennifer Coates, Lucy Fraser, and Mark Pendleton have brought together an essential guide to experiences of gender in Japanese culture today—perfect for students, scholars, and anyone else interested in Japan, culture, gender studies, and beyond.

Japan's Household Registration System and Citizenship
Japan's Household Registration System and Citizenship

Author: David Chapman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-03-05

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1134512910

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Japan’s Household Registration System (koseki seido) is an extremely powerful state instrument, and is socially entrenched with a long history of population governance, social control and the maintenance of social order. It provides identity whilst at the same time imposing identity upon everyone registered, and in turn, the state receives validity and legitimacy from the registration of its inhabitants. The study of the procedures and mechanisms for identifying and documenting people provides an important window into understanding statecraft, and by examining the koseki system, this book provides a keen insight into social and political change in Japan. By looking through the lens of the koseki system, the book takes both an historical as well as a contemporary approach to understanding Japanese society. In doing so, it develops our understanding of contemporary Japan within the historical context of population management and social control; reveals the social effects and influence of the koseki system throughout its history; and presents new insights into citizenship, nationality and identity. Furthermore, this book develops our knowledge of state functions and indeed the nation state itself, through engaging critically with important issues relating to the koseki while at the same time providing a platform for further investigation. The contributors to this volume utilise a variety of disciplinary areas including history, gender studies, sociology, law and anthropology, and each chapter provides insights that bring us closer to a comprehensive grasp of the role, effects and historical background of what is a crucial and influential instrument of the Japanese state. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Japanese history, Japanese culture and society, Japanese studies, Asian social policy and demography more generally.

An Introduction to Japanese Society
An Introduction to Japanese Society

Author: Yoshio Sugimoto

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-06-22

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 113948947X

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Essential reading for students of Japanese society, An Introduction to Japanese Society now enters its third edition. Here, internationally renowned scholar, Yoshio Sugimoto, writes a sophisticated, yet highly readable and lucid text, using both English and Japanese sources to update and expand upon his original narrative. The book challenges the traditional notion that Japan comprises a uniform culture, and draws attention to its subcultural diversity and class competition. Covering all aspects of Japanese society, it includes chapters on class, geographical and generational variation, work, education, gender, minorities, popular culture and the establishment. This new edition features sections on: Japan's cultural capitalism; the decline of the conventional Japanese management model; the rise of the 'socially divided society' thesis; changes of government; the spread of manga, animation and Japan's popular culture overseas; and the expansion of civil society in Japan.

Manga Girl Seeks Herbivore Boy
Manga Girl Seeks Herbivore Boy

Author: Brigitte Steger

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 3643903197

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Japan's gender roles are in turmoil. Traditional life courses for men and women are still presented as role models, but there is an increasing range of gender choices for those uncomfortable with convention. This collection of studies from the University of Cambridge provides fascinating insights into the diversity of gendered images, identities, and life-styles in contemporary Japan - from manga girls to herbivore boys, from absent fathers to transgender people. (Series: Japanese Studies / Japanologie - Vol. 3)

Japan's Ultra-right
Japan's Ultra-right

Author: Naoto Higuchi

Publisher: Apollo Books

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 9781920901936

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"First published in Japanese in 2014 by the University of Nagoya Press as Nihon-Gata Haigai-Shugi by Naoto Higuchi."

The State Construction Of 'Japaneseness'
The State Construction Of 'Japaneseness'

Author: Masataka Endo

Publisher:

Published: 2020-09-15

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781920901622

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For more than 140 years, Japan's koseki registration system has functioned as the official means by which an individual qualifies as 'Japanese'. Information concerning each family is entered into one koseki register record in a system that documents the status relationship information of Japan's population based on the notion of 'bloodline'. Tracing the history of the koseki registration system from its inception in the Meiji era through its use in Japan's colonial holdings in the pre-war era and to the present day, The State Construction of 'Japaneseness' challenges the very foundations of the system, arguing that it promotes prejudice and discrimination and fosters a divisive understanding of the 'Japanese' as a people. This significant work presents conclusive evidence on how the koseki registration system has used deeply problematic understandings of ethnicity, citizenship and the family to define 'the Japanese', excluding and discriminating against those unable to fit into the framework of this highly politicised bureaucratic system.

Beyond Common Sense: Sexuality And Gender In Contemporary Japan
Beyond Common Sense: Sexuality And Gender In Contemporary Japan

Author: Wim Lunsing

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-12-22

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 131779303X

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First published in 2001. This volume is based on the author's visit to Japan in Summer 1986 on his findings about some of the questions he was asked whilst there. He was 25 and these questions centred around asking if he was married or had a girlfriend, when in his homeland of the Netherlands he openly identified as gay. This research is an investigation of how gay and lesbian people, women's and men's liberationaists, singles and other people, such as transsexuals, transvestites and hermaphrodites, whose ideas, feelings or lifestyles are at variance with Japanese constructions of marriage and inherently the construction of life, live in Japan.

The Modern Family in Japan
The Modern Family in Japan

Author: Chizuko Ueno

Publisher: Trans Pacific Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9781876843564

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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.

Sacred Heritage in Japan
Sacred Heritage in Japan

Author: Aike P. Rots

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-04-02

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1000045633

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Sacred Heritage in Japan is the first volume to explicitly address the topics of Japanese religion and heritage preservation in connection with each other. The book examines what happens when places of worship and ritual practices are rebranded as national culture. It also considers the impact of being designated tangible or intangible cultural properties and, more recently, as UNESCO World or Intangible Heritage. Drawing on primary ethnographic and historical research, the contributions to this volume show the variety of ways in which different actors have contributed to, negotiated, and at times resisted the transformation of religious traditions into heritage. They analyse the conflicts that emerge about questions of signification and authority during these processes of transformation. The book provides important new perspectives on the local implications of UNESCO listings in the Japanese context and showcases the diversity of "sacred heritage" in present-day Japan. Combining perspectives from heritage studies, Japanese studies, religious studies, history, and social anthropology, the volume will be of interest to scholars and students who want to learn more about the diversity of local responses to heritage conservation in non-Western societies. It will also be of interest to scholars and students engaged in the study of Japanese religion, society, or cultural policies.