Managing Women: Disciplining Labor in Modern Japan is a valuable contribution to labor and gender studies. The book focuses on Japanese female textile workers in the interwar period. Elyssa Faison's unassuming style and lucid organization will appeal both to higher-level undergraduates and to graduates who are interested in the way gender hierarchies and political economy developed and became intertwined in Japan during the prewar period.

Rural women provided the labor for Japan's earliest drive for industrialization. In the late 1880s, young women recruited from the countryside to work in the textile factories accounted for 85 percent of the workforce in silk-reeling factories, and 75 percent of all workers in cotton-spinning factories (p. 8). Faison makes a case that at the precise moment of Japan's first efforts to industrialize, the governing of the family and politics (strictly speaking, the command of the body politic) became imbricated with one another. The alignment of family with nation-building and state-endorsed capitalist institutions grafted the authority and responsibility of the father to manage individuals, goods, and wealth within the family onto the administrative procedures of the state. This is an important point. It allows Faison to claim—correctly, in this reader's opinion—that at the historical moment when Japanese women were subjected to the timetable of the factory, a “corporate paternalistic” mode of production specific to Japan emerged. The characteristic of this mode of production was that it integrated women into a relation of command and obedience by encoding upon their bodies the “ideal woman” through a variety of disciplinary techniques (such as calisthenics, cleaning [pp. 73–74], and “womanly arts” [p. 63]). The aim of the disciplinary programs initiated by factory managers was to make the female factory worker's personality and subjectivity obedient to the organization and command of the factory by actively manipulating the women to see and speak about themselves as “good (read docile) wife, wise (read socially useful) mother.” These techniques embedded in daily routines constituted a broader “holistic approach to the management of workers” (p. 33) targeting the minute details of daily life such as food, rest, and sexual relations.

The originality of Faison's research is twofold. First, she shows that the imposition of conduct and the subjection of bodies cannot be explained by economic relations alone. The integration of women into the workforce and the composition of factory women into a “working class” involved a series of activities not normally recognized as work—the fixing of cultural standards of ideal womanhood, fashions, tastes, and, strategically, public opinion. The modalities of power that captured and integrated individuals into capitalist institutions differed depending on the position within the factory hierarchy and ethnicity. Faison's writing on how Okinawan and Korean women were incorporated into the factory floor, and the techniques of discipline deployed through “welfare institutions” such as the Sōaikai, are fascinating and rich. Although not clearly articulated, Faison seems to hint that the disciplining—transforming the useless or dangerous multitudes into an ordered class—of Okinawan and Korean women depended on modalities of power based on colonial forms of policing and scientific knowledge based in an unchanging ethnic personality rather the immanent contradiction in capital–labor relations. That is to say, Faison work shows how other forces and dynamics outside economic relations of production can be invoked to explain the expansion of capitalism.

Managing Women: Disciplining Labor in Modern Japan is also a reexamination of the fundamental problematic of ideology, power, and subjectivity. She cleverly brings Foucault and Marx together to show how the forces of capitalism changed the material existence and subjective reality of modern Japan. However, the merger of Foucaudian and Marxist notions of exploitation and domination comes with some methodological tension. Faison shows that capital exploits not just the physical powers of the body, but also the general social knowledge spread throughout society and embodied in each individual, such as language, protocols, and familial relations. Capital shapes the capacity to communicate and to feel the content of what we think.

The great achievement of Faison's book is to illustrate that the different modalities of power that captured and integrated the women into the factory floor were an intimate part of how their lives and subjectivity were structured. Yet, in her quest to give the women she is studying agency, which is pivotal to her narrative on the Toyo Muslin strikes by factory women (chapter 4), Faison uses the general doctrine “good wife and wise mother” (ryōsai kenbo) as an ideology in the pejorative sense of the term. That is to say, ryōsai kenbo denotes a misrepresentation of the truth that works to wipe out the fundamental division between worker and capitalist, and between wages and capital. In her use of ryōsai kenbo as a form of false consciousness, Faison posits a fixed distinction between the domain of power and subjectivity. Female union activists had a clearly articulated position on the limits and legitimate use of political authority, and heroically pit their bodies against the superior forces of management and the state. Faison posits female workers as directly and openly resistant to state notions of womanhood and the authority of the factory managers. Here, Faison evokes a notion of subjectivity based on fully formed and autonomous individual taking responsibility for her freedom that stands apart from the notion of discipline as a mode of power that produces a subjectivity through practices that integrated individuals into a designated collective whole.

Faison's work shows the challenges faced in doing work driven by critical theory. The methodological tension referred to here is a challenge that applies to all social historians. Her willingness to consciously face some of the perplexingly difficult questions inherent in this body of theory should not only be commended, but encouraged. For students of Japanese gender relations or labor history, the socially engaged, and those who like thinking outside the box, read Managing Women: Disciplining Labor in Modern Japan.