| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Simon Partner. Toshié: A Story of Village Life in Twentieth-Century Japan. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2004. Pp. xv, 195. $19.95.
Simon Partner uses the life of Sakaue Toshié, her family, and her village to explore the intersection of the individual and the Japanese nation during the reign of the Showa Emperor (1926–1989). Toshié was born in the first year of the Showa era, and she was still alive and well when Emperor Hirohito died in 1989. Kosugi, the village where she lived all her life, is located in Niigata Prefecture, near the Japan Sea. In telling the story of how Kosugi changed from an oppressed site of poverty to an integral part of Japan's mass consumer society, Partner has produced a book that will be a pleasure for the general reader as well as a welcome tool in the classroom.	1
By turning our attention to rural Japan (and by implication away from Tokyo), Partner enables us to understand Japanese experience in new ways. We see how, in the prewar era, newspapers and radio mediated the relationship of villagers to national and international events. (Partner offers no explanation for his omission of sound recordings, films, and newsreels.) Decades after Western merchants and missionaries took up residence in Japan, Toshié saw such folk for the first time when prisoners of war were among her fellow workers on the Niigata docks. Whereas histories of transportation have generally featured trains, streetcars, and automobiles, Partner tells the fascinating story of how farm machinery, including various modes of transportation, transformed rural social relationships in the postwar era.	. . .

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