Sandra Wilson

Susan Burns' subject is late Tokugawa discourse about ancient Japan. Through her analysis of the intellectual movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that was known as 'kokugaku'—'the study of our country' or 'national learning'—she makes a fascinating contribution to debates about how and when ideas about Japan as a community or a 'nation' emerged, and how they developed. Kokugaku has long been considered a precursor of modern nationalism in that its practitioners developed ideas about the singularity of Japanese culture, amongst other things; it has been condemned by some as a pillar of ultranationalism in the period before the Second World War. Burns' most significant contribution is to reveal the complexity and plurality of Tokugawa interpretations of Japan's ancient past. In doing so she shows the connections between diverse Tokugawa studies of the past and the contemporary Tokugawa political and social order. In addition, however, she also demonstrates what happened to kokugaku in the Meiji period and beyond, thus contributing to an ongoing discussion about how the forms of nationalism of the late nineteenth century onwards should be linked with earlier manifestations of national consciousness...

The 'modern girl' [moga] has long been associated with the period of 'Taishô democracy' and the emergence of mass culture in Japan. With her short hair, Western clothes, love of pleasure and apparent disregard for convention, she has seemed to epitomise the 1920s and the new atmosphere that permeated large Japanese cities, especially Tokyo. Yet, as Barabara Sato convincingly shows, the 'modern girl' was not the only new prototype of Japanese women in the interwar period. The growth of the middle class and of opportunities for suitable employment, together with the great expansion of the mass media, produced or highlighted two less spectacular but numerically much more significant figures—the middle-class housewife, interested in personal fulfilment rather than solely in her role as 'good wife and wise mother', and the professional working woman. None of Sato's three representative figures conformed with older stereotypes of the meek and docile Japanese woman, and hence all of them challenged ideas about gender in interwar Japan.

Researching the Fragments ranges across a broad spectrum of countries, disciplinary approaches and historical periods, from the history of Chinese Australians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and Vietnamese Australians in the present, to French women in colonial Vietnam, religious leaders in the Philippines in the 1500s, Japanese and Chinese prostitutes in Singapore, Malaysia and Australia, matriarchal communities on the Sino-Tibetan border, women writing verse for each other in secret scripts in late imperial China, contemporary political leaders in the Philippines, female heroes of classical Malay literature, and more. The editors are to be congratulated for producing such a coherent and interesting book out of such a wide range of material.