Modern Girls on the Go: Gender, Mobility, and Labor in Japan

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.

This collection brings together diverse analyses of women in Japan—including department store elevator girls, tour bus guides, airline stewardesses, soldiers, soccer players, beauty queens, and educators—who have been intimately involved in the practices and professions of modernity.

Alisa Freedman is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature and Film at the University of Oregon. Laura Miller is the Ei'ichi Shibusawa-Seigo Arai Professor of Japanese Studies and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Christine R. Yano is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.