New Books on Japan: "In Close Association: Local Activist Networks in the Making of Japanese Modernity, 1868–1920"

October 11, 2023 | 7:00-8:30 PM EST | REGISTER FOR ZOOM

In Close Association: Local Activist Networks in the Making of Japanese Modernity, 1868–1920 (Harvard University Asia Center Press, 2022)

Author: Marnie Anderson, Professor of History, Smith College

Discussant: Anne Walthall, Professor of History Emerita, University of California, Irvine

The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Marnie Anderson (Professor of History, Smith College). Professor Anderson will be speaking about her new book, In Close Association: Local Activist Networks in the Making of Japanese Modernity, 1868–1920 (Harvard University Asia Center Press, 2022). In Close Association is the first English-language study of the local networks of women and men who built modern Japan in the Meiji period (1868–1912). Professor Anderson uncovers in vivid detail how a colorful group of Okayama-based activists founded institutions, engaged in the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, promoted social reform, and advocated “civilization and enlightenment” while forging pathbreaking conceptions of self and society. Placing gender analysis at its core, In Close Association offers fresh perspectives on what women did beyond domestic boundaries, while showing men’s lives, too, were embedded in home and kin. Writing “history on the diagonal,” Anderson documents the gradual differentiation of public activity by gender in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Meiji-era associations became increasingly sex-specific, though networks remained heterosocial until the twentieth century. Anne Walthall (Professor of History Emerita, University of California, Irvine) will serve as discussant.