Introduction : Gender and culture in Japan today

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book analyses the contours of the field. The collection features both new work and updated accounts of classic scholarship, providing a go-to reference work for contemporary scholarship on gender in Japanese culture. The book focuses on various disciplinary and subdisciplinary approaches to gender in Japanese culture, including approaches from premodern and modern history, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, queer theory, and linguistics. It aims to assess the work-life balance that determines much of family life in contemporary Japan, and demonstrates the uneasy pull between the demands of the public and private spheres experienced by many working people. The book presents a series of close readings of text and genre from the perspective of gender and its related issues. It also demonstrates how textual analysis sensitive to gender and its operations can reveal nuance and complexity in a variety of areas of study.