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"On 18 December 2019, a young woman by the name of Itō Shiori stepped outside the Tokyo District Court holding up a banner reading "victory" (shōso). The court had ruled that Itō had been assaulted by Yamaguchi Noriyuki, a prominent journalist, who would be punished for his crime. This was a significant result given that Japan's sex crime laws do not consider consent; instead, they require evidence of violence and intimidation-which can be difficult to successfully litigate. But with this case the fact that the court had found her "highly trustworthy" marked new ground, bringing Itō to express hope that her case would instigate a change in the law.1 A few months later, Time magazine listed her as one of the 100 most influential people in the world for her contribution to Japan's #MeToo movement. While Itō's courage was indeed in part inspired by the global reverberations of what had begun under that hashtag, the critique of sexual and gender relations in Japan has a much longer history"--

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: The Vulnerability Hypothesis -- Part I: Playing War -- Chapter 1. Field Games -- Chapter 2. Paper Battles -- Part II. Picturing War -- Chapter 3. The Moral Authority of Innocence -- Chapter 4. Queering War -- Epilogue: The Rule of Babies in Pink -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

"For over a century throughout Japan and beyond, children and concepts of childhood have been appropriated as tools for decidedly unchildlike purposes: to validate, moralize, humanize, and naturalize war, and to sentimentalize peace. Playing War argues that modern conceptions of war insist on and exploit a specific and static notion of the child: that the child, though the embodiment of vulnerability and innocence, nonetheless possesses an inherent will to war, and that this seemingly contradictory creature demonstrates what it means to be human. In examining the intersection of children/childhood with war/military, Sabine Frühstück identifies the insidious factors perpetuating this alliance, thus rethinking the very foundations of modern militarism. She also interrogates how essentialist notions of both childhood and war have been productively intertwined; how assumptions about childhood and war have converged; and how children and childhood have worked as symbolic constructions and powerful rhetorical tools, particularly in the decades between the nation and empire-building efforts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries up to the uneven manifestations of globalization at the beginning of the twenty-first."--Provided by publisher.

Following World War II, Japan's postwar constitution forbade the country to wage war or create an army. However, with the emergence of the cold war in the 1950s, Japan was urged to establish the Self-Defense Forces as a way to bolster Western defenses against the tide of Asian communism. Although the SDF's role is supposedly limited to self-defense, Japan's armed forces are equipped with advanced weapons technology and the world's third-largest military budget. Sabine Frühstück draws on interviews, historical research, and analysis to describe the unusual case of a non-war-making military. As the first scholar permitted to participate in basic SDF training, she offers a firsthand look at an army trained for combat that nevertheless serves nontraditional military needs

The American Anthropological Association's Code of Ethics does not sufficiently acknowledge the challenges posed for anthropologists who "study up" and "across" rather than "down" the partly imagined power hierarchy within which the researcher and her host members position themselves. The Code proves inadequate for the ethical dilemmas that emerged from the four projects presented in this volume on the worlds of urban feminists and right-wing conservatives, activists and policy-makers of a local community revitalization project, an indigenous minority in the process of reclaiming its present, and corporate soccer functionaries. Several features distinguish these articles from previous work on the subject of ethics in anthropology: It is no longer necessarily nor exclusively the ethnographer who does the writing. The contested claims to ethnographic authority, access, and representation are closely related to the importance of the production and circulation of texts. The will to be loyal to one's consultants does not in all projects appear as the most ethical manner to pursue fieldwork. The power relations that anthropologists engage mirror the fluidity and flexibility of power relations among their research subjects that appear exacerbated in study-up projects. As anthropology's focus has become increasingly urban, cosmopolitan, and Western, conventional understandings of ethnographic authority, access, and power relations are contested and problematized in new, more complex ways. (Crit Asian Stud/GIGA)

"Few things make Japanese adults feel quite as anxious today as the phenomenon called the "child crisis." Various media teem with intense debates about bullying in schools, child poverty, child suicides, violent crimes committed by children, the rise of socially withdrawn youngsters, and forceful moves by the government to introduce a more conservative educational curriculum. These issues have propelled Japan into the center of a set of global conversations about the nature of children and how to raise them. Engaging both the history of children and childhood and the history of emotions, contributors to this volume track Japanese childhood through a number of historical scenarios. Such explorations--some from Japan's early-modern past--are revealed through letters, diaries, memoirs, family and household records, and religious polemics about promising, rambunctious, sickly, happy, and dutiful youngsters."--Provided by publisher.