Toshié : a story of village life in twentieth-century Japan
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Toshié : a story of village life in twentieth-century Japan
(A Philip E. Lilienthal book)
University of California Press, c2004
- : cloth
Available at 8 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Bibliography: p. 183-187
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Sakaue Toshie was born on August 14, 1925, into a family of tenant farmers and day laborers in the hamlet of Kosugi. The world she entered was one of hard labor, poverty, dirt, disease, and frequent early death. By the 1970s, that rural world had changed almost beyond recognition. "Toshie" is the story of that extraordinary transformation as witnessed and experienced by Toshie herself. A sweeping social history of the Japanese countryside in its twentieth-century transition from 'peasant' to 'consumer' society, the book is also a richly textured account of the life of one village woman and her community caught up in the inexorable march of historical events. Through the lens of Toshie's life, Simon Partner shows us the realities of rural Japanese life during the 1930s depression; daily existence under the wartime regime of 'spiritual mobilization'; the land reform and its consequences during occupation; and, the rapid emergence of a consumer culture against the background of agricultural mechanization during the 1950s and 1960s.
In some ways representative and in other ways unique, Toshie's narrative raises questions about conventional frameworks of twentieth-century Japanese history, and about the place of individual agency and choice in an era often seen as dominated by the impersonal forces of modernity: technology, state power, and capitalism.
Table of Contents
Preface List of Illustrations 1. On the Banks of the Agano 2. The Making of a Japanese Citizen 3. The Village Goes to War 4. Rural Life Under the Occupation 5. Red Carpets and Whisky Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
by "Nielsen BookData"