Takamure Itsue, Japanese Antiquity, and Matricultural Paradigms that Address the Crisis of Modernity: A Woman from the Land of Fire

by Yasuko Sato

Overview

This book explores Takamure Itsue’s (1894–1964) intellectual odyssey as Japan’s most notable pioneer in the study of women’s history. When she embarked on a series of scholarly projects that investigated marriage patterns and kinship systems in ancient Japan, it was a response to crisis-ridden modernity. Relentless in her quest to dismantle patriarchy, this “woman from the Land of Fire” (a nickname for her birthplace, Kumamoto Prefecture) locked herself away in 1931 and spent the rest of her life conducting research on female-friendly societies with matrilocal arrangements under kinship-based communal systems. While dissecting the patriarchal norms undergirding the capitalist nation-state, she embraced matricultural paradigms that embodied life-sustaining and life-enhancing values through communal childrearing and matrilineal inheritance. Takamure, a visionary thinker, asked big-picture questions and addressed multifarious issues of contemporary relevance, including beautystandards, human trafficking, gross disparities in wealth, war and imperialism, science and religion, and humanity’s relationship with nature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783031179082
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	06/30/2023
Edition description:	2023
Pages:	343
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Yasuko Sato is Associate Professor of History at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, where she teaches East Asian history, along with world/US survey courses. Her area of specialization is Japanese intellectual history in global contexts, with primary attention to the rediscovery and revival of classical antiquity in the modern world.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Man Who Transformed His Wife into a Matricultural Visionary.- Chapter 2: Traveling an Uncharted Path in Search of the Unifying Power of Love in a Dichotomously Divided and Godless World.- Chapter 3: Anarchist Views on Women in Modern Capitalist Societies.- Chapter 4: Women’s Beauty and Intelligence in the Ancient Classics of Japan.- Chapter 5: Pioneering Japanese Feminist History.- Chapter 6: From Oppression to the Dawn of Liberation: “Women Are Now Standing on Their Own Feet”.- Chapter 7: Revolting Against Western Capitalist Patriarchy: Questioning Modernity During the Asia-Pacific War.- Chapter 8: One Human Family and the Love of Life.- Chapter 9: Matricultures and Maternalist Paradigms Around the Globe.- Chapter 10: Takamure in the Twenty-First Century.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Yasuko Sato provides a sympathetic account of the life and work of the sometimes controversial figure of Takamure Itsue. By surveying Takamure’s poetry, diaries, autobiographical writings, polemical writings, and her studies of Japanese history and mythology, Sato introduces Takamure to a wide international audience.” (Vera Mackie, University of Wollongong, Australia)

“Takamure Itsue, an anarchist, poet, first women’s historian, fanatic nationalist and maternalist feminist, is a controversial figure. This is a challenging and considerate re-examination to allocate her work and life with a new light in the historical context of Japanese feminism.” (Chizuko Ueno, University of Tokyo, Japan)

“An analysis of the historian and thinker Takamure Itsue is long overdue. In this important work, Sato attends to Takamure’s complex body of scholarship which straddles the past, present, and future. Readers will benefit from Sato’s careful attention to Takamure’s alternative visions for society and significant reinterpretation of Takamure’s work and legacy.

Takamure is mostly known in English for her anarchist writings and pathbreaking research on matrilocal marriage patterns in early Japanese society. Instead, Sato focuses on Takamure’s entire intellectual trajectory, interweaving it with her fascinating biography. The book sheds critical light on Takamure’s distinctive feminism, elucidating her scholarship on female-friendly societies and visions for a woman-centered future beyond the nation-state.

Although scholars have criticized Takamure’s support for the wartime state, Sato pieces together the whole of Takamure’s monumental oeuvre and finds more consistency that rupture in her thought. We in the present, Sato contends, will benefit from grappling with Takamure’s legacy.” (Marnie S. Anderson, Smith College, USA)

“Sato’s book offers a sympathetic and comprehensive portrait of the pioneering feminist writer Takamure Itsue. Through an analysis of both her work and her tumultuous personal life, it illuminates how and why she came to a critique of the patriarchal, capitalist society in which she lived, and it introduces readers to her lively and provocative writing about varied topics including love, ethnography, poetry, anarchy, and ancient Japanese history. This book, which combines biography and intellectual history, will be essential reading for scholars interested in one of Japan’s most prominent feminist thinkers.” (Amy Beth Stanley, Northwestern University, USA)

“Sato’s exposition of Takamure Itsue’s lifework is an exhilarating plunge into the life and vision of a revolutionary Japanese thinker. Takamure’s personal experience of the failures of patriarchy inspired a remarkable oeuvre detailing, among other things, the power and longevity of historical Japanese matriculture and, most exciting, a map forward towards the intensification of matriculture in any society today. It is no accident that strengthening matricultures around the world would go a long way towards addressing the causes and consequences of climate change and ultra-militarized states – both the fruit of patriarchal lust for money and power. Compliments to Yasuko Sato for bringing forth Takamure’s ideas at a moment when old ways have reached their expiry date!” (Linnéa Rowlatt, International Network for Training, Education, and Research on Culture, Canada)