Geographies of Gender

Family and Law in Imperial Japan and Colonial Taiwan

Tadashi Ishikawa

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009534208
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

Tadashi Ishikawa traces perceptions and practices of gender in the Japanese empire on the occasion of Japan's colonisation of Taiwan from 1895 . In the 1910s, metropolitan and colonial authorities attempted social reform in ways which particularly impacted on family traditions and, therefore, gender relations, paving the way for the politics of comparison within and beyond the empire. In Geographies of Gender, Tadashi Ishikawa delves into a variety of diplomatic issues, colonial and anticolonial discourses, and judicial cases, finding marriage gifts, daughter adoption, and premarital sexual relationships to be sites of tension between norms and ideals among both elite and ordinary men and women. He explores how the Japanese empire became a gendered space from the 1910s through the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, arguing that gender norms were both unsettled and reinforced in ways which highlight the instability of metropole-colony relations.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Imprints page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Note on the Text
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Woman Question and Interwar Japan’s International Engagements
• 2 Empire Apart, Empire Together
• 3 Becoming a Taiwanese Man
• 4 When the Hearth Was at Once Warm and Cold
• 5 Freedom in a State of Flux
• 6 Stories Marginal Women Wove
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index