This spirited and engaging multidisciplinary volume pins its focus on the lived experiences and cultural depictions of women's mobility and labor in Japan. The theme of "modern girls" continues to offer a captivating window into the changes that women's roles have undergone during the course of the last century. Here we encounter Japanese women inhabiting the most modern of spaces, in newly created professions, moving upward and outward, claiming the public life as their own: shop girls, elevator girls, dance hall dancers, tour bus guides, airline stewardesses, international beauty queens, overseas teachers, corporate soccer players, and even female members of the Self-Defense Forces. Directly linking gender, mobility, and labor in 20th and 21st century Japan, this collection brings to life the ways in which these modern girls-historically and contemporaneously-have influenced social roles, patterns of daily life, and Japan's global image. It is an ideal guidebook for students, scholars, and general readers alike.
"Modern Girls on the Go takes us around Japan and around the world to discover how Japanese women have represented and shaped the technologies of modernity-among them capitalism, print culture, consumerism, and transportation systems-throughout the twentieth century and beyond . . . This is a book not only important to scholars engaged in the study of Japanese women's and gender history, but also
Journal of Japanese Studies
"Broad in scope, Modern Girls on the Go will be of use to students of gender, mobility, labor, and visual media within the field of Japanese studies, as well as to anthropologists and scholars interested in hybrid or interdisciplinary research methods. Spanning Japan's modernization era to the present day, the scholarship presented here is a valuable reminder of the light a historical approach can
The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology
"[A] serious contribution to intercultural studies and gender sensitivities-scholarly, well written, and often moving. . . . Highly recommended."
