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of this new sect resulted from the steady process of
simplifying the "eifort" required to ensure rebirth in
Amida's Pure Land. Basically, faith in Amida was
manifested by recitation of the nenbutsu, a brief prayer
(Namu Amida Butsu, "Praise to Amida Buddha"). But
how many times did one need to recite the prayer, and
how "sincere" did one need to be in reciting it?
Shinran declared that the nenbutsu did not even have
to be recited aloud; a single, silent commitment to
Amida was enough. This certainly made the process of
ensuring salvation very simple indeed. But it was even
further simplified by Ippen, an itinerant evangelist
who, with a ragtag band of followers, traveled for years
by foot throughout Japan bestowing upon people
everywhere amulets (paper strips) inscribed with the
nenbutsu. A mystic, Ippen was assured by a god who
was a manifestation of Amida that it mattered not
whether the recipients of these amulets wanted them
or even knew what they stood for. The act of bestowal
of the amulets itself guaranteed salvation.
S. A. Thornton's book is a study of Ippen and his
beliefs and of the sect, known as Yugyó-ha (Sect of
Itinerant Preaching), that was established by his followers after his death and that flourished greatly for
many centuries. Like many charismatic religious leaders, Ippen did little to organize or promote a sect.
Indeed, he believed that his mission would simply end
with his death. But, as Thornton makel clear in great
detail, the sect founded in his name evolved in ways
that, I assume, would have appalled Ippen. For one
thing, it became a great institution whose members, for
the most part, were itinerants in self-proclaimed name
only. Moreover, the sect's heads were deified in a
manner that Ippen could not have approved of, and
the power or authority to guarantee rebirth in the Pure
Land, which Ippen believed derived solely from Amida's vow, was manipulated by the sect in various ways
to control followers and attract new converts. Perhaps
most astonishing of all for an organization claiming
Ippen as its spiritual forebear, the sect actively and
relentlessly sought worldly success through the patronage of the highest in the land, including emperors and
other members of the imperial family and shoguns and
their warrior followers.
Using an extensive variety of sources, Thornton has
produced a most impressive work of scholarship that
casts light onto a major area of Buddhist practice and
institutional development that has been relatively neglected by other researchers. She has clearly made a
major contribution to the field of Buddhist studies in
English. My only real criticism of her book is its
density. It is packed—I am inclined to say overloaded—with names, titles, and Japanese terms, and I
found it very difficult to read. My feeling is that if the
author of a monograph like this believes that he or she
absolutely must include a very great deal of sheer
research data in a book, he or she should consider
placing as much of the data as possible in appendixes
in order to make the text itself more readable. With
proper thought and organization, this kind of mono-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW graph can be shaped to appeal both to fellow scholars,
who may revel in the minutia of the author's research,
and to others, who may be defeated by such minutia.
This criticism aside, I wish to congratulate Thornton
for her achievement.
PAUL VARLEY
University of Hawai'i
Passages to Modernity: Motherhood,
Childhood, and Social Reform in Early Twentieth Centut) Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.
1999. Pp. x, 237. Cloth $47.00, paper $24.95.
KATHLEEN S. UNO.
,
In today's world, the Japanese mother has an international reputation for devotion to children and home.
Pick up any American journalistic account of women
in contemporary Japan, and you will read about how
Japanese women are still confined to their homes in
their traditional roles as wives and mothers, lagging
behind American women in both feminist consciousness and employment outside the home. Kathleen S.
Uno's greatest achievement in this study of day care in
early twentieth-century Japan is her demonstration
that the "education mother" of postwar Japan is a
modern construct, not a remnant of the feudal past.
Drawing on a wealth of Japanese secondary sources,
Uno convinces us of the sharp contrast between the
intensely child-focused mother of today and the productive motherhood of early modern Japan. In the
early modern period, when a woman's skills in spinning
and weaving were often more valuable to her household than her attention to her children, families made
frequent use of other caregivers, such as siblings,
grandparents, and servants. The idea, newly introduced from the West, that children were primarily a
mother's responsibility only gradually found acceptance, mainly among the middle and upper classes.
The new ideal of motherhood resonated with changes
in society. The modern institutions promoted by the
new centralized state established in 1868 reduced the
number of caregivers available as family members
found employment outside the home, children began
attending school regularly, and young couples left the
extended family to establish new households in the
city.
The substantive research from which Uno derives
her crucial insight into how motherhood and childhood have been constructed in modern Japan centers
on particular day-care institutions. Two professionally
trained female educators, Noguchi Yuka (1866-1950)
and Morishima Mine (1868-1936), founded the Futaba Whien in 1900 in Tokyo. The Kobe Wartime
Service Memorial Day-Care Association, which took
shape during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905,
was under the supervision of Namae Takayuki, a male
expert on philanthropy and relief work. Making use of
annual reports and the memoirs of staff members, Uno
shows that the staff of Futaba worked together with
Japanese parents, both fathers and mothers, to meet
their moral, educational, and spiritual needs. At Kobe,
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Reviews of Books
which in contrast provided day care in order to increase the earnings of working-class households, the
association offered fathers and mothers assistance in
finding employment and advice on savings. Uno devotes two additional chapters to how day-care facilities
evolved from these beginnings in the two decades that
followed. Our understanding of day-care centers is
enhanced by the numerous photographs Uno includes
in her work.
In the Taisho era (1912-1926), mothers in Japan
gained a higher profile than fathers as nurturing
parents. Echoing Western literature, leading child
welfare experts emphasized the importante of the
relationship between mother and child. By the 1920s,
as day-care centers proliferated in Japan, the special
responsibilities of mothers for infant care had found
sufficient acceptance that the assemblies that had once
been called parents' groups were now designated as
mothers' meetings. Nevertheless, no one associated
with childcare in Japan ever suggested that there was
an inherent conflict between motherhood and employment outside the home. Japanese child welfare experts
refrained from proposing the establishment of the
mothers' pensions that were favored in the United
States. Advocates of day care were constant in defending the usefulness of their institutions in terms of the
best interests of the nation, and the genera) acceptance
of day care may have been premised on the national
imperative to be productive. Uno allo points out that
the middle-class experts and philanthropists who advocated "wise motherhood" for those of their own
class seemingly presumed that productive work was
more important than devoted motherhood for households with lower incomes. Uno draws attention to the
continuities between Taisho practices and the Pact
that, in recent years, Japan has had the largest number
of day-care facilities of any industrialized nation.
This book is by no means perfect. There are mistakes in the indexing. Every scholar's nightmare, that
the reference numbers in the text should fail to match
the appropriate passage in the "Notes" section, has
actually occurred in notes 15 to 34 of chapter six. The
writing is sometimes repetitious. These minor technical flaws are, however, far outweighed by the acuity of
Uno's insights into the construction of modern motherhood in Japan.
SALLY A. HASTINGS
Purdue University
HONDA KATSUICHI. The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese
Journalist Confronts Japan's National Shame. Edited by
FRANK GIBNEY. Translated by KAREN SANDNESS. (A
Pacific Basin Institute Book; An East Cate Book.)
Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe. 1999. Pp. xxvii, 367.
Cloth $65.00, paper $24.95.
Honda Katsuichi is an experienced reporter for Japan'sAsahi shinbun. Thirty years ago, he was especially
well known for his frontline coverage, from both sides.
of the Vietnam War. In the preface to this book, he
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
writes that he was appalled at the horrors of warfare
visited upon the common people of Vietnam, and this
raised questions in his mind about how Japan's Imperial Army had behaved toward the common people of
China during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945. As
a consequence, in 1971, thirty-four years after the
events, Honda traveled to China to retrace the route
taken by the Imperial Army through cities and villages
from the time the fighting broke out in Shanghai in the
summer of 1937 until the defenseless Nationalist capital at Nanking (now rendered as Nanjing) was sacked
in the second week of December 1937. The title is
therefore somewhat misleading: about half of the book
is devoted to events that occurred before Nanjing.
The results of Honda's painstaking investigations
were printed in serial form by the Asahi papers in 1971
and then gathered together in book form as ChFtgoku
no tabi [Journey to China], which was published in
1972. This book is mainly a translation of the Japanese-language volume. Somewhat confusingly, however, there are appended chapters that are translations
of another book by Honda and that reflect journeys to
China and interviews conducted in the 1980s.
As a good journalist, Honda gets to the facts and
records them with careful detail. In a typical chapter of
this book, Honda examines what happened when the
Imperial Army entered Suzhou more than three weeks
prior to its arrival at Nanjing. Honda sets the scene
with available military records and newspaper accounts, kit the heart of the chapter is his interviews
with surviving victims. Nearly every page is illustrated
with a photograph of one of these victims, often
pointing to horrific wounds. Sometimes there are
before (1937) and after (1971) pictures. The chapter is
replete with maps, but not the battleground maps one
is accustomed to in reading military history. These are
maps of schools or hospitals or houses: here is the
room where Wang hid and here is the massacre room.
And here is the door where soldiers with bayonets
appeared (p. 48). And then follow three pages of
harrowing recollections provided by Wang Mugen,
seventy-eight years old when Honda interviewed him
in 1971. These firsthand, on-the-scene accounts provide Honda's book with an immediacy, an energy, and
an authenticity that is rarely found in the histories of
the Sino-Japanese War. It invites comparison with the
most compelling European Holocaust literature.
It is difficult to exaggerate the impact that Honda's
reportage had on Japan. Until Honda's articles appeared, Japanese tended to think back on the war
years with a strong sense of victimization. Everyone
knew of the food shortages, evacuations, the war
widows and orphans, the devastating firebomb raids, as
well as Hiroshima and Nagasaki. lenaga Saburo was
engaged in a decades-long struggle with the courts and
the Ministry of Education to compel bureaucrats,
publishers, and writers to take note of Japan's role as
aggressor. But Ienaga was a rare exception, and his
efforts were greeted with more apathy than support.
Honda's revelations did not suddenly produce a
FEBRUARY 2001