For as long as modernity has been ideologically (if not factually) monopolized by “the West,” conceptualizations and narratives of Japan's modernity, like those of other “non-Western” societies, have inevitably involved juxtapositions against an imagined Western standard. As the only non-Western society able to avoid colonization and pursue a modernization program that allowed it to rival the Western powers militarily, economically, and technologically, modern Japan has drawn perennial fascination for its exceptional achievements, with attention falling on its presumably exceptional cultural attributes. By the same token, classic analyses of Japan's cultural experience with the negative phenomena of modernity such as imperialism, fascism, and war—among them the early postwar essays of political scientist Maruyama Masao that in many ways defined the scholarly genre—framed Japan as somehow incomplete or “warped” in its modern development.Footnote ¹ In Maruyama's pathology, modern Japan retained essentially traditional cultural traits and a top-heavy social system that set it awkwardly apart from, and temporally behind, its Western counterparts. Understandings of how postwar Japan has dealt with, or rather failed to deal with, this checkered history—often framed in the form of a negative juxtaposition against a Germany seen as having confronted its past in a more mature and responsible way—have furthered the sense of Japanese society developmentally lagging, and culturally operating according to a unique, essentially unchanging logic.

While still retaining considerable influence among the general public, the ideological edifices of Orientalism and culturalism that once thus bracketed off Japan's modern experience from that of both “the West” and “the rest” have both come under heavy scholarly siege, and are by now, at a rhetorical level at least, in an advanced state of demolition. Groundbreaking reevaluations of Japanese imperialism and fascism such as Louise Young's Japan's Total Empire and Harry Harootunian's Overcome by Modernity presented Japan's experience of these modern phenomena not as top-down, unilateral impositions upon an underdeveloped, passive civil society awash in traditional ways of thinking, but as joint state-civil society projects mounted in response to the challenges, tensions, and promises of an advanced industrial capitalist modernity whose nature and dynamics were very much in step, and in interaction, with those in the contemporaneous “West.”Footnote ² Inspired by such works, and answering the call of scholars such as Andre Schmid to heed the transnational historiographical lessons of cultural and postcolonial studies of other places, a generation of Japan scholars have since been encouraged to go beyond culturalist, top-down, nation-centered paradigms to explore the place of Japan and the dynamic, diverse cultural experience of its civil society within an interconnected, transnational, global history of modernity.Footnote ³

A review of four works that seek to cast new light on the complex cultural histories of three perennial “hot spots” in the study of modern Japan—imperialism, fascism, and war remembrance—reveals the extent of the current quest to overcome such older culturalist paradigms, and the depth of penetration of notions of culture and identity as negotiated, multiple, and interconnected across borders. In The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915–1952, Reto Hoffman writes that “scholars have proposed an array of alternative terms … all of which characterize Japan as more or less sui generis. In this sense, this book aims to be an anticomparative history of fascism even though it is premised on how prewar Japanese compared the politics of Japan and Italy. The point, as contemporaries readily (if often just tacitly) recognized, is that comparisons were premised on an awareness of connections. … By moving away from Euro- and Japano-centric approaches, this study uncovers the making of fascist ideology as a complex interplay between ideas both local and global” (pp. 3, 4). In The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Japan, Akiko Hashimoto argues that just as in postwar Germany, “Japan's war memories are not only deeply encoded in everyday culture but are also much more varied than the single, caricatured image of ‘amnesia.’ … [T]here is no ‘collective’ memory in Japan; rather, multiple memories of war and defeat with different moral frames coexist and vie for legitimacy” (p. 4). Recognizing that “all colonial processes intrinsically demand a political, economic, and cultural exchange through negotiation, struggle, collaboration, and resistance,” the contributors to Reading Colonial Japan: Text, Context, and Critique, edited by Michelle M. Mason and Helen J. S. Lee, “take as a premise that colonialism is not simply a military-legal process or a government-led project.” Highlighting it rather as “a complex cultural system,” they seek to “deepen knowledge of Japanese colonialism(s)” by presenting a mix of primary sources and analytical essays that focus on “representation and rhetoric and how these intersect with operations of power” (pp. 1–2). And in In Transit: The Formation of the Colonial East Asian Cultural Sphere, Faye Yuan Kleeman “aims to transcend previous studies of the Japanese empire as a hegemonic macrosystem with unifying governing principles,” emphasizing “intercultural flows between the metropole and colonies of the Japanese empire” and providing “a fuller picture of Japanese colonial culture through the lenses of gender, personal narratives, and popular culture” (pp. 7, 16).

Transcending the Eurocentric and Japancentric frames that have defined these genres for so long is of course easier said than done, and in a time in which cultural history (and stingy publishers’ word limits) reign supreme, emphases on identity formation and the discursive workings of texts can also mean a sacrifice of the detailed attention to social and historical context more often emphasized in earlier scholarship. In their own ways, all four works reviewed here highlight such challenges. Where In Transit singularly demonstrates the perils of setting its own bar too high in these regards, however, The Fascist Effect, Reading Colonial Japan, and The Long Defeat each manage to make a serious and valuable contribution, respectively, to the study of Japan's experience of fascism, imperialism, and the postwar social reckoning with the disastrous war in which the two forces converged and culminated.

“Focusing on how contemporary Japanese understood fascism” through a survey of changing Japanese intellectual engagements with fascist Italy over the course of the latter's more than twenty-year trajectory, The Fascist Effect seeks to “recuperate a historical debate that has been largely disregarded by historians, even though its extent reveals that fascism occupied a central position in the politics of interwar Japan” (p. 2). Citing Robert O. Paxton's admonition that “a historian of fascism will need to determine which part of the elephant he chooses to study,” Hoffman characterizes The Fascist Effect as an “attempt is to cast a wide net over the beast of fascism, capturing the textual thickness of the pachyderm's skin” (p. 5). The double-analogy is ambivalent, for while the skin reference evokes the limitations of trying to grasp a social phenomenon like fascism through the (superstructural?) outer layer of texts and ideas alone, the analogy of a net seems to suggest, on the contrary, the possibility that such an approach might somehow seize the beast whole. Such ambivalence is also expressed in Hoffman's coy refusal to identify the nature of the animal: “This book sidesteps the ontological question ‘Was Japan fascist or not?’ preferring an enquiry into how fascism operated at different levels of analysis” (p. 7). Even so, his stimulating, innovative, well-written study would seem to provide new ammunition for answering this age-old, hotly contested question in the affirmative.

Hoffman begins by tracing the little-known transnational history of Shimoi Harukichi, perhaps fascist Italy's greatest exponent in prewar Japan, whose rise and fall in influence over the course of the 1920s into the early 1930s mirrored the trajectory of the broader Japanese intellectual posture towards fascism. The 1920s began with a rather naïve, open stance toward fascism, viewing the movement as “an innovative and radical form of nationalism” limited to Italy (p. 112). As profiled in chapter 2, standing out mostly positively against the backdrop of a Japan beset by ongoing socioeconomic instability, Mussolini and his achievements garnered increasing public interest toward the end of that decade. Yet as neatly explicated in Hoffman's third chapter, as Japanese and global socioeconomic problems grew to crisis proportions in the early 1930s—accompanied by the related sense of a rising domestic and global threat from the right—fascism became a target of increasingly serious and critical analyses. Innovative and sophisticated commentators such as the liberal Hasegawa Nyōzekan and the Marxist Tōsaka Jun readily drew parallels between developments in Italy and Japan while also recognizing and accounting for differences. Their nuanced, incisive theorizations remain fresh and unsettlingly relevant today.

For students of Japan's 1930s, the last point is not exactly new. Indeed, given the recent appearance of a series of important works on Japanese intellectual engagements with fascism in the 1930s—works that Hoffman himself cites but does not directly engage, such as Harootunian's Overcome by Modernity, Janis Mimura's Planning for Empire, and the essays in The Culture of Japanese Fascism edited by Alan Tansman—his claim that “the centrality of fascism in the Japanese cultural debates in this decade has largely gone unnoticed” (p. 64) seems, happily, a bit outdated.Footnote ⁴ In fact, Hoffman's own insistence upon fascism's ubiquity in 1930s discourse and his clear identification with the acuity of Tōsaka's analyses in particular would seem to position him alongside these recent scholars who would classify Japanese culture and society of this era as fascist, even as Hoffman himself refuses to commit. And Hoffman's assessment of the ambivalent language of the interwar Japanese right with regard to fascism—the main focus of much of the book—would seem to offer further confirmation of the applicability of the term, at least at the discursive level.

Under the ongoing spell of Orientalism, notes Hoffman, postwar analysts such as Maruyama Masao were all too quick to take interwar Japanese denials of the applicability of European paradigms to the Japanese situation at their word, identifying inconsistencies and ambiguities in the domestic political rhetoric of the 1930s and 1940s as signs of a specifically Japanese “irrationality” and “backwardness” that fundamentally distinguished Japanese fascism—if the word applied at all—as a species apart. Hoffman, in contrast, identifies in such contradictory positioning “a fascist critique of fascism” (p. 81). Precisely as Japan drew politically and ideologically closer to its fascist counterparts in Europe in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the identification of a shared agenda remained tempered by awareness that excessive emphasis on similarity would undermine the mystical claim to national uniqueness upon which the regime's legitimacy rested. “The functionaries of Japanese fascism—the motley crowd of ideologues, bureaucrats, politicians, and military,” Hoffman writes, “fought for a narrowing of its meaning by making fascism congruent with Fascist Italy—or, at least, by setting very clear limits to the extent to which fascism could be relevant in Japan” (p. 64). Such discourses involved “an admission of the commensurability with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany but qualified by the assertion that Japan's way to a new order was superior” (p. 81). Where Maruyama saw here a specifically Japanese illogic, Hoffman thus identifies a global fascist logic: “the ambiguities of Japan's fascism are a characteristic of fascism itself, reflecting its role as a mediator between revolution and restoration as well as its hybrid nature as a product of global and national history” (p. 7).

Hoffman's focus on such contradictions and continuities is productive, and his narrative of an evolving interwar Japan in the mirror of fascist Italy is enlightening and novel, bearing particular fruit in a fascinating discussion of responses to the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935–36. But like the pachyderm's skin, there are limits to the depth of a discourse-centered approach that spans some thirty years of history in less than 140 pages, leaving little room for more than a cursory attention to context. Hoffman is right in identifying and attempting to correct for Orientalist and parochial tendencies in much of the conventional literature on Japanese fascism, running the gamut from right to left. But he is also excessively dismissive of the work of many scholars of the early postwar decades who focused on social context and did classify wartime Japan as fascist, most of whom were Japanese and working in the Marxist tradition (along with those influenced by their work, such as Maruyama Masao and much more recently Harry Harootunian). One need only refer to Gavan McCormack's classic 1982 essay “Nineteen-Thirties Japan: Fascism?” to be reminded of the richness, variety, and nuances of this scholarship, whatever its weaknesses on the cultural front.Footnote ⁵ Relatedly, while rightly raising skepticism regarding assumptions of Japanese difference where fascism is concerned, Hoffman's Japan/Italy approach yields a blind spot for a constituent contextual element of Japan's interwar experience that genuinely did distinguish it—and its fascism—from that of the other Axis Powers, that is, the degree of anti-colonial resistance that Japan was compelled to confront, and negotiate with, in its expansion into neighboring Asia. As noted by scholars such as Furuya Tetsuo and Yoshimi Yoshiaki, the specific nature and dynamics of Japan's imperial crisis defined the shape of its fascism, inevitably producing a distinctive—and distinctly contradictory—ideological animal.Footnote ⁶ Understanding Japanese fascism, in other words, also requires recognizing the Asian elephant in the room.

While sharing Hoffman's emphasis on the discursive, the editors and contributors of Reading Colonial Japan: Text, Context, and Critique seek rather explicitly to take account of this very animal, attempting to reveal how empire and its tensions found their way into everyday Japanese consciousness, in different times and places, from the empire's beginning to its end. “The critical readings in this volume,” write editors Mason and Lee, “focus attention on how colonial logic in texts written by various members of the colonizing nation convert[ed] the obviously belligerent and violent facts of colonialism into a ‘palatable,’ even noble cause, grease[d] the wheels of empire, and fan[ned] the flames of imperial desire. They expose and challenge the rhetorical mechanisms used to erase the voices of the colonized and monopolize the authority to define their cultures and histories” (p. 4). Observing what has become a truism in studies of European colonialism—that “no colonial project succeeds without substantial support from its citizenry”—the authors seek to add to the growing body of work highlighting the dynamic and active contribution of Japanese civil society in the making of Japan's colonial modernity. Where Hoffman focuses on discourses produced mainly by elite intellectuals and politicians, the emphasis here is on the cultural sphere defined more broadly. “for instance, a housewife in Manchuria, settlers in Korea, [and] manga artists and fiction writers in mainland Japan” (p. 2).

One of the most distinctive aspects of Reading Colonial Japan is its format, in which a series of translated, short primary texts meant to “accentuate the wide array of representations of the empire” (p. 11) are each followed by a short, focused critical essay authored by a specialized scholar who analyzes the workings of the text in reflecting, refracting, and above all naturalizing Japan's colonial situation. For six of the eight essays the translator and the author of the critical essay are the same, but there are also two translations of primary texts paired with translations of earlier-published, landmark critical readings by Komura Yōichi (“Rule in the Name of ‘Protection,’” on the Hokkaido Former Natives Protection Law of 1899) and Kawamura Minato (“Popular Orientalism and Japanese Views of Asia,” on the 1930s bestseller children's comic book Adventures of Dankichi). Clearly intended to enrich the classroom, the format allows students (and teachers) without knowledge of Japanese access to a wide range of hitherto inaccessible primary documents and scholarly essays that identify and unpack the representational and ideological mechanisms through which the desires and tensions of empire were managed. (Davinder Bhowmik's essay, full of postcolonial idioms, is a single exception, likely accessible only to advanced graduate students.) Also distinctive, and reflective of the specific expertise of co-editor Mason, is the inclusion of two Hokkaidō-related texts in the mix, and the corresponding early dating of the beginning of Japan's modern empire to 1869, highlighting “the crucial role the colonization of Hokkaidō played in constructing the modern Japanese nation and empire” (p. 5).

Reading Colonial Japan’s translated texts present a colorful and memorable variety of vistas and experiences across a wide expanse of Japan's colonial empire both geographically and chronologically, from the “wild,” “primitive,” and menacing landscapes of Hokkaido yearning for “taming” in Kunikida Doppo's 1902 fictional memoir “The Shores of the Sorachi River,” analyzed by Mason, to two texts that vividly reveal wartime Japanese anxieties of an empire slipping from their grasp in the 1930s and 1940s: an ideologically laden cookbook for Japanese residents of Korea methodically dissected in a companion essay by Lee, and the short story “Manchu Girl” revealed by Kimberly T. Kono as a remarkably heavy-handed exercise in late colonial wishful thinking. Chronologically in-between and also reflective of the more critically ambivalent mood of the relatively liberal 1920s are the short story of the Okinawan “native” policeman “Officer Ukuma” considered by Bhowmik, Satō Haruo's remarkable fictional Taiwan ethnography “Demon Bird” analyzed by Robert Tierney, and Miyazawa Kenji's children's story “Wolf Forest, Basket Forest, and Thief Forest,” productively deconstructed by Kota Inoue.

As can be read from its subtitle, Reading Colonial Japan is explicitly concerned with texts as both constituent and reflective of contexts, but it is the texts themselves that are its primary focus. Representing a range of moments and locations across the empire's history, the results are consistently interesting and enlightening, but also fragmentary: a scattered set of snapshots that leaves much for the reader or instructor to fill in. A brief historical summary in the introduction is helpful, but more consistent contextualization would have been welcome, both in terms of the place of these texts within the conventional chronological and social histories of the Japanese empire, and a broader relational enframing in terms of interactions and interrelations with Japan's imperial competitors on the one hand and the subjective roles and resistances of the colonized on the other. Despite the introduction's recognition of negotiation and exchange as the central determinative dynamic of colonialism, the dynamics described here are mostly one-sided, limited to domestic Japanese perspectives. A welcome exception in terms of a primary source is “Officer Ukuma” by the Okinawan author Ikemiyagi Sekihō (translated by Bhowmik), and in terms of a secondary source, Komura's important attention to contemporaneous US attempts to justify claims to Hawaii in shaping the parameters of the “Hokkaido Former Natives Protection Law” both in terms of timing and contents.

Like Hoffman in The Fascist Effect, the contributors to Reading Colonial Japan are thus largely Japan-centered in their approach while also eschewing a conventional comparative Japan/West frame in favor of a common methodology whose deployment assumes, and indeed effectively confirms, a shared global experience. Hashimoto's The Long Defeat, by contrast, deploys a conventional nation-to-nation comparative approach, specifically that of Japan and Germany. In a work on the sociology of war memory this may be inevitable, at least to the degree that German experience remains central in informing the theoretical field as well as Germany's near-hegemonic functioning, like it or not, as a conceptual and moral yardstick with regard to Japanese experience. If not radically innovative, the result is a solid and thorough assessment of the state of war memory in contemporary Japan spanning both official and civil society perspectives. Hashimoto's study is above all impressive, indeed exhaustive, in the textual scope of its coverage, including sources such as memoirs and testimonials, letters to the editor, family interviews, popular media, opinion polls, and school textbooks, all neatly presented in a concise and highly accessible package. Hashimoto's identification of three major competing categories of memory narrative that coalesce around characterizations of the wartime Japanese as heroes, victims, and perpetrators—categories that then inform the basic organization of the book—is again highly logical and effective if not revolutionary. Equally so her observation that “the common Western criticism that Japan leaves so much of war history unexamined points the finger in the wrong direction: it is not about national amnesia but about a stalemate in a fierce, multivocal struggle over national legacy and the meaning of being Japanese” (p. 9).

Hashimoto's mobilization of German experience and her analyses rooted in German memory studies are serious and productive, producing an appropriately ambivalent comparative identification of Japan as relatively lacking in a “contrition culture.” As has been noted by many critical observers, the dominant Japanese postwar narrative is a generic one of “war is bad” and of “never again” through pacifism, rather than a focused project of unearthing and probing specific causalities and responsibilities. Yet while rightly acknowledging such troubling limitations, Hashimoto's systematic exploration of contemporary Japanese memory discourses convincingly and reassuringly reveals a Japan in which pacifism, negative emotional associations, and perpetrator accounts have been publicly diffused to such a wide degree that they leave remarkably little social room for the glorification of war or militarism. Even those accounts that do seem to aim to “restore” Japan to “normal” status rarely appeal to prewar values of selfless sacrifice or emperor worship, but rather to postwar ones of protecting one's family and community.

If its breadth of coverage is its strongest point, the greatest limitation of Hashimoto's study might well be its corresponding chronological narrowness. A work of sociology rather than history, The Long Defeat zeroes in on the decade and a half between the mid-1990s and the 2000s, raising question marks regarding its longer-term implications. It is encouraging that Hashimoto detects a widespread if quiet increase in openness and willingness to confront and acknowledge Japan's wartime wrongs over these years, even as this period is better known for the rise of an increasingly vocal revisionist right. Yet the period since, above all since the triple disaster of 2011, appears to be witnessing a reverse swing of the pendulum, at least so far as the voices of officialdom and the mass media are concerned. From a critical methodological perspective, the work's near-exclusive German comparative frame can also be seen as limiting its potential consideration of Japan's memory problematic in postcolonial terms. More generally, here as in the other works under consideration, there is room for more attention to domestic socioeconomic context as well as the interactive, transnational dynamics of Japan's regional and global positioning. Notwithstanding such broader limitations, in its thoroughness, balance, and accessibility, The Long Defeat has the makings of a standard work in the field.

Alas the same cannot be said of Kleeman's In Transit. Ponderously subtitled The Formation of the Colonial East Asian Cultural Sphere, it promises an exploration of “intercultural flows between the metropole and the colonies of the Japanese empire,” highlighting “patterns and trajectories of knowledge flow and cultural exchanges” (p. 7) that were “not unidirectional” (p. 8), revealing “the complicated and at times complicit relationship between colonialism and modernity” (p. 2). So far so good, despite concerns raised by Kleeman's naïve (at best) proposal to probe “the potential to reread the political concept of the ‘Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere’ (Daitōa Kyōeiken), not as an ideologically rooted term but as a space for cultural interaction and transformation in East Asia during the first half of the twentieth century” (p. 7). Concerns thus raised for the risk of colonial apologetics, intended or otherwise, are hardly allayed by a work that turns out to be, for all its peppering with contemporary cultural studies jargon and references, thoroughly conventional and conservatively Japan-centered, its six chapters presenting a series of extended, mostly descriptive biographical narratives of a handful of figures, one or two per chapter, their most notable shared traits, with only a couple of exceptions, being that they were all ethnically Japanese, elite, and female, and traversed the empire in one way or another. Signaling the book's rather touristic tone along with its often awkward writing style, Kleeman proclaims, “it is my intention to provide an assortment of lives, some still basking in the limelight, enjoying fame or notoriety, and some now obscure or forgotten” (p. 85). Two of the historical characters receiving a whole chapter of their own, the pan-Asianist Miyazaki Toten (the book's one male subject) and the singer and actress Kawashima Yoshiko/Ri Kōran, are indeed quite famous, and both have accordingly received a great deal of scholarly attention and interpretation, to which Kleeman's rather fawning account, based (like the rest of the book) almost entirely on memoirs, autobiographies, and secondary sources, adds little that is new. More generally, seeking to justify such an approach, Kleeman oddly maintains that “biographies and biographical study, although a legitimate and fertile ground for research in premodern Japanese literary studies, is [sic] nevertheless one of the weaker areas in modern Japanese studies” (p. 16).

While a focus on female historical figures is certainly welcome, it is problematic to suggest that “their engaged articulations … provide feminine (and thus alternative) readings to the male-dominated racial and cultural discourse of the empire” (p. 185)—that is, that possession of the feminine gender is itself enough to enable some sort of transcendence of imperial, national, ethnic, racial, class, and other intersectional identifications and interests. Chapter 3, which focuses on Nashimoto Masako (who was married to the last king of Chŏson/Korea) and Saga Hiroko (who was married to Pujie, younger brother to emperor Puyi), is exemplary of the problem. Usefully seeking to highlight “how marriages between Japanese princesses and aristocrats in colonized areas such as Korea and Manchuria substantiated the imperial theme of private bodies deployed for imperial, if not public, purposes” (p. 80), Kleeman proceeds to focus one-sidedly on the hidden suffering and sacrifices these elite Japanese women and their royal non-Japanese husbands endured for the empire as related in their own memoirs, only to proclaim that their stories amount to an examination of “the discrepancies between perception and reality relating to issues of culture, race, and the geopolitics between Japan and its colonies,” and even “an exemplar of human triumph over nations” (p. 106). Such naïve sentimentality is not helped by an excess of trendy, vague references to “the body,” “the sexualized gaze,” and the like.

Profiling two dancers in the sixth and final chapter, Kleeman writes, “more than any other artists, through their physical bodies these two remarkable women engaged the empire in the most direct way, traversing the empire and the world, performing culturally specific body languages and identities under the constant watchful gaze of the imperial authorities” (p. 206). Unlike all of the other figures profiled in the book, it should be noted that the two dancers referenced here were not ethnically Japanese—one was the Taiwanese Tsai Jui-yueh, the other the Korean Choi Seunghee. Of particular interest is the chapter's profiling of the latter's relationship with the innovative Japanese choreographer Ishii Baku (1886–1962), whose “deference to the indigenous body shape and simultaneous resistance to a direct transplantation of traditional Japanese elements into his dance … fashioned a kind of hybrid dance that expressed the essence of what Kuniyoshi Kazuko called ‘a modernity made in Japan’ (wasei moodan)” (p. 193). Kleeman intriguingly suggests here a relationship beyond the colonial, quoting Ishii as saying “‘the kind of buyō that we are aiming for is the true dance that transcends the boundaries of nation and race. … It is not a dance for one individual but the dance of a world citizen, a human being,’” and suggesting that “it is perhaps this universal, worldly outlook that attracted many students from the colonies to study under Ishii” (p. 197) in the 1920s and 1930s. Assuming he actually said it, Ishii's universalistic statement does seem remarkably postcolonial and postwar. But this may well be because it was—no specific date is provided, and Kleeman cites as its source only a 1994 biography by Ishii's son Ishii Kan. Much more typically colonial and nationalistic is Ishii's description of his thoughts upon first taking Choi under his wing in 1926: “‘I was thinking if only one superb dancer can emerge out of Korea, it would not only be beneficial to the harmony of the two ethnic groups but also would make Korean people known to the world’” (p. 196). Kleeman draws the latter quote from a source that is likely less partial, a 2007 essay by the scholar Kimura Rieko. But typically of this volume, no critical assessment is offered on either quote or its source—nor of the odd discrepancy between them.

More generally, Kleeman's characterization of “the larger sociohistorical context of the early twentieth-century formation of modern womanhood in Japan” within which her subjects (in this case the Meiji-era educator Kawahara Misako) “can only be fully understood” is representative of the disappointingly vague, unilateral, Japan-centered understanding of the nature and dynamics of the “cultural flows” meant to be the book's theme: “The Japanese conceptualization of a new modern womanhood then reverberated throughout Asia, eventually forming an East Asian discourse of womanhood that was analogous at its core, yet diverse in localized interpretations and implementations across different cultures and nation-states. Kawahara was among the first individuals to bring the concept of women's education—and to set up an infrastructure to promote and deliver that education—to the less-developed areas of Asia” (pp. 45–46). If this sounds surprisingly similar to how elite Japanese women of the time might themselves have characterized their role vis-à-vis Asia, Kleeman's reliance on Kawahara's memoirs provides an unsurprising explanation: “I ask: Based on her own account, what did she do and what did she see? … What were some of her concerns? Did gender play a role in how she viewed ‘the other’?” (p. 45). Kawamura's life, first as a colonial educator and then as a colonial spy for Japan during the Russo-Japanese War, was certainly colorful and noteworthy. But this only makes it all the more urgent that her views be put in their proper place, an exercise requiring the combination of careful and critical theoretical conceptualization with social and historical contextualization. In coming up short on both accounts, In Transit combines the weaker tendencies of contemporary scholarship with habits rightfully banished to the past. Among the four works reviewed here, it is thankfully most exceptional in this regard.