The Modern Family in Japan: Its Rise and Fall

by Chizuko Ueno

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.

Genres: Japan, Feminism, Nonfiction

283 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2009

About the author

Chizuko Ueno is a Japanese sociologist and Japan's "best-known feminist".

Her research field includes feminist theory, family sociology, and women's history. She is best known for her contribution to gender studies in Japan. As a public intellectual, she played a central role in creating the field of gender studies in Japanese academia. At the same time, her radical tendency and strong character has invited criticism (she described herself as "critical, assertive, and disobedient").

Ueno is a trenchant critic of postwar revisionism and criticizes the whitewashing of Japanese history, which she claims attempts to justify its colonialism, wartime atrocities, and racism both before and after World War II. In particular, she has defended the compensation of Korean comfort women who were forced into prostitution by the Empire of Japan.