Book Review

Asia

In today's world, the Japanese mother has an international reputation for devotion to children and home. Pick up any American journalistic account of women in contemporary Japan, and you will read about how Japanese women are still confined to their homes in their traditional roles as wives and mothers, lagging behind American women in both feminist consciousness and employment outside the home. Kathleen S. Uno's greatest achievement in this study of day care in early twentieth-century Japan is her demonstration that the "education mother" of postwar Japan is a modern construct, not a remnant of the feudal past. Drawing on a wealth of Japanese secondary sources, Uno convinces us of the sharp contrast between the intensely child-focused mother of today and the productive motherhood of early modern Japan. In the early modern period, when a woman's skills in spinning and weaving were often more valuable to her household than her attention to her children, families made frequent use of other caregivers, such as siblings, grandparents, and servants. The idea, newly introduced from the West, that children were primarily a mother's responsibility only gradually found acceptance, mainly among the middle and upper classes. The new ideal of motherhood resonated with changes in society. The modern institutions promoted by the new centralized state established in 1868 reduced the number of caregivers available as family members found employment outside the home, children began attending school regularly, and young couples left the extended family to establish new households in the city.

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