East Asian societies have a patri-lineal tradition in which a family successor must be a son and parents live with the heir and his family. In Japan, the patri-lineal family system was prevalent among the samurai warrior class in the early modern period. In the modern period, it was stipulated in the civil code until the end of World War II. This tradition, however, is changing with a background of gender equalization and fewer number of sons resulting from low birth rates. Intergenerational Relationships between Married Children and Their Parents in 21st Century Japan is the first book that...

Japan’s Private Spheres: Autonomy in Japanese History, 1600-1930 traces the shifting nature of autonomy in early modern and modern Japan. In this far-reaching, interdisciplinary study, W. Puck Brecher explores the historical development of the private and its evolving relationship with public authority, a dynamic that evokes stereotypes about an alleged dearth of individual agency in Japanese society. It does so through a montage of case studies. For the early modern era, case studies examine peripheral living spaces, boyhood, and self-interrogation in the arts. For the modern period, they...

What is ninkatsu? Who promotes and governs this “active pursuit of pregnancy?” Trying to answer these questions, this unprecedented publication exhibits how mass media, policymakers, and biomedical science-corporate capitalism govern the individual’s reproductive choices in contemporary Japan through gendered discourses of self-improvement, life planning, and biomedical technology. Analyzing a broad range of media, popular science, and government material, it links historical and social processes with an original theoretical framework on self-governance, neoliberalism, and postfeminism....