Abstract: The role of music and dance in the creation of the modern Japanese nation-state has yet to be fully appreciated. Dance was among the many areas of social activity in which the Japanese encountered different attitudes and practices after the forced opening of the country to Western powers. Concern about Western contempt for the allegedly immoral ways of the Japanese people, as well as the elite’s contempt for the practices of the common people, led to regulation and prohibition of customs deemed offensive—including, in the 1870s, the dances associated with the Bon festival. Meanwhile, Western-style ballroom dancing was introduced as part of a “Western civilization” ( seiyō bunmei ) package, but it, too, acquired a dubious reputation. Borrowing heavily from bon odori , the reform-oriented musicologists Tanaka Shōhei and Tanabe Hisao devised sō odori (communal dancing), which they intended as a more appropriate social and leisure activity for middle- and upper-class families. The form, later renamed katei odori (home dance), attracted significant media attention in the 1920s, although its actual dissemination is hard to gauge. The current article examines these attempts to regulate bon odori and its reinvention as katei odori , arguing that both of these efforts were part of a broader agenda for reforming social life and, moreover, exemplified the process of creating a democratic national culture that could be shared by all members of the nation. The article also discusses the dances as examples of how elements of common culture, despised and condemned by the social elite in the early Meiji period, were rehabilitated and transformed into cultural assets.

Abstract: Scholars have long noted the essential role of nyōbō , or ladies-in-waiting, in The Tale of Genji . Although rarely taking center stage, these seemingly peripheral characters have been understood to constitute networks through which information could flow, often “offstage,” thus setting in motion much of the tale’s drama and propelling the narrative forward. This article examines the prominence of ladies-in-waiting in the tale’s earliest extant adaptation, the mid-twelfth-century Genji Scrolls . My study, employing both art historical and literary textual analyses, demonstrates that the nyōbō ’s function informs their treatment and placement in the scrolls’ images as well as several aspects of the work’s visual structure. It also adds to scholarship on voyeurism in Genji by noting the ways in which information gathering is shown to be multisensory rather than limited to the use of vision and to be the purview of female as well as male characters. Finally, paralleling the role of nyōbō as points of connection in the tale’s narrative structure, I show how images of the ladies-in-waiting in the Genji Scrolls tie together disparate elements of the tale and also reveal hidden meanings to astute readers and viewers.

Reviewed by: Science for Governing Japan's Population by Aya Homei Osamu Saito Science for Governing Japan's Population. By Aya Homei. Cambridge University Press, 2022. 300 pages. ISBN: 9781009186834 (hardcover; also available as e-book). Bureaucrat-scientists have rarely been the subject of inquiry in historical studies. Historians have tended to focus on the big names who made decisions within the nexus of political elites, on high-ranking civil servants and business executives, or on those working in science and technology who were able to devise the right tools [End Page 267] and systems to meet particular policy objectives. In Science for Governing Japan's Population, Aya Homei sheds light on the technical and research bureaucrats (gijutsu kanryō, also known as gikan) in the field of population science who played a role in the Japanese state's efforts to manage the country's population from the late 1860s to the 1960s. The government collected data on the size, births, deaths, and geographical movements of the population in its attempts to tackle emerging policy issues, including various social and economic problems of the 1920s and 1930s, population redistribution within the wartime empire, and demographic questions such as birth control and family planning in the postwar years. The book's introduction reproduces a 2020 government leaflet that describes Japan's population in figures with the message that the country is getting old and shrinking (p. 2). Homei notes that "historically speaking, this way of presenting, interpreting, and responding to population facts is relatively new" (p. 5), going back to the period immediately after the Meiji Restoration. Chapter 1 looks at the institutionalization of population statistics, focusing on Sugi Kōji, who pioneered the development of modern Japanese statistics, and his disciples. In the Meiji period, statisticians of the Sugi group tried hard to persuade the government's higher-ranking officials to accept the need for a census as a means of collecting information about the nation's population, but it took a considerably long time—in sharp contrast to their campaign's success in Taiwan. The government of the newly colonized island welcomed any assistance in gathering systematic information about the people to be governed. It was this Taiwanese experience, Homei argues, that helped to implement the census back in "Japan Proper" and eventually raised the statisticians' status as population experts. Chapter 2 turns to the administrative management of vital statistics by taking a look at the establishment of medical midwifery and the changing profile of midwives since the 1870s. The government assigned midwives an indispensable role in collecting birth and death statistics for the health of the Japanese population. From chapter 3 onward, the focus shifts to the population experts themselves. This chapter examines the collaboration in the late 1920s between government departments and population specialists who were appointed as members of an investigative commission that was established to deliberate on official inquiries about the perceived population problem and associated issues such as food shortages. Some of those specialists were bureaucrats themselves, but others were academics. Given that the population problem was rooted in the possibility of the country heading toward "overpopulation," controlling population growth was the key issue in the commission's deliberations and discussions, of which the most heated were on birth control and eugenics. One civil servant member, Nagai Tōru, "recommended birth control as an interim measure … until society developed fully" (p. 112), whereas another, Nagai Hisomu, a professor at Tokyo Imperial University, prioritized issues of quality over quantity and thus "put eugenic birth control at the fore" (p. 114). The commission failed to propose specific policies, but Homei concludes that through those discussions population problems "became shorthand for a myriad of issues associated [End Page 268] with the population trend that were subject to government intervention" (p. 120), and this "paved the way for institutionalizing eugenic and social policy measures with a specific aim to 'improve' the quality of the Japanese race and population" (p. 121). National land planning, a population-related wartime policy initiative, is the topic of chapter 4. This initiative, conceived in 1939 but abandoned by 1943, has so far been little studied, but this chapter reveals some important aspects of the...

Reviewed by: Seeds of Control: Japan's Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea by David Fedman Chia-Li Chu and Kuang-Chi Hung Seeds of Control: Japan's Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea. By David Fedman. University of Washington Press, 2020. 320 pages. ISBN: 9780295747453 (hardcover). Seeds of Control, by David Fedman, is an excellent addition to the history of forestry and environmental governance in Korea, the Japanese empire, and wider East Asia. Its contribution to the historiography is twofold. First, the book challenges the colonial narrative, crafted by Japanese officials and Western observers, that presented Korea as a denuded peninsula requiring "saving" through reforestation. Second, it revises the post-independence narrative characterizing Japanese rule as a homogeneous project of resource plundering. The study illustrates, rather, that neither forestry nor colonialism was a monolithic entity; the seeds of control were sown in the [End Page 258] interest of buttressing heterogeneous legal, scientific, industrial, and political orders, even as those seeds, with their uneven germination and growth patterns, further complicated the messy and asymmetrical imperial structures in which people and the environment were entangled. Part 1, "Roots," investigates the emergence of modern forestry in Japan and Korea, beginning in chapter 1 with the impact of the 1868 Meiji Restoration on Japanese forestry. As the Meiji state struggled to discipline forest users with a new set of laws, intellectuals like Shiga Shigetaka and Yanagita Kunio tried to invent an age-old "tradition" of "forest-love thought" (airin shisō) to serve as the foundation of Japanese modernity (p. 33). Meanwhile, the government dispatched students to renowned forestry schools in Germany, France, and the United States, where they not only learned the latest theories and practices of scientific forestry but also "rediscovered" forest management practices of Tokugawa Japan through the lens of modern science. By the 1890s, graduates from foreign as well as Japanese forestry schools had been installed as top-ranking officials, middle-ranking bureaucrats, and rank-and-file technicians in the rapidly expanding empire. This growing network of forest professionals subsequently served as the backbone of colonial forestry from Hokkaido to Taiwan to Korea. Chapter 2 details how Japan understood Korean forests in the decades leading up to the annexation of the peninsula in 1910. Nineteenth-century Chosŏn forestry was plagued by a timber shortage that stemmed from an overreliance on red pine (Pinus densiflora) monoculture exacerbated by rapid population growth and unequal access to forest products. Japanese observers simplistically attributed the devastation of forests in the southern part of the peninsula to poor management, ignoring geographical and historical factors such as the accessibility of southern shores and the recent rise in foreign demand. The "pristine" forests of the northern interior were meanwhile uncritically held up as what Korean mountains would look like if properly managed. These discourses helped justify a centralized management system designed to "save" Korean forests. The Chosŏn government's last-ditch efforts to offset Japanese influence by bringing Russia into its forest industry, moreover, made forest management in Korea crucial in terms not only of timber supply but of geopolitical security as well. Part 2, "Reform," consists of four chapters each examining one aspect of colonial forestry in Korea—tenure regulation, scientific research, industrial policy, and local associations. Chapter 3 focuses on attempts by the Bureau of Forestry under the Bureau of Agriculture and Commerce of the Governor-General of Korea to centralize forestry through "an unambiguous legal system of land tenure" that would enable the government to lease well-demarcated woodlots to Japanese and Korean agriculturalists (p. 73). The first round of forest registry (1909–1911) nevertheless resulted in most farmers being denied access to forest resources due to a lack of documents such as survey maps and land titles. Unable to recruit collaborators and faced with widespread dissatisfaction, the bureau tried in the 1920s to accommodate local forest [End Page 259] customs by accepting a wider set of proof such as forestry skills and historical connections to forested land. While that significantly increased the number of Korean woodlot owners, Japanese owners retained a far larger share. The government-controlled tenure system ultimately excluded many Korean farmers and disrupted traditional forms of forest ownership...

Reviewed by: In Close Association: Local Activist Networks in the Making of Japanese Modernity, 1868–1920 by Marnie S. Anderson Haiying Hou In Close Association: Local Activist Networks in the Making of Japanese Modernity, 1868–1920. By Marnie S. Anderson. Harvard University Asia Center, 2022. 208 pages. ISBN: 9780674278257 (hardcover). The front cover of Marnie S. Anderson's new book, In Close Association: Local Activist Networks in the Making of Japanese Modernity, 1868–1920, features a photo of a group of Western and Japanese women in front of the Okayama Church in the early twentieth century. The photo represents one important topic of the study: networks between foreign Protestant missionaries and Japanese women. The book, however, is not only about women. Anderson writes extensively about gender history from a political and social standpoint, taking as her focus the networks of a diverse group of people, men and women, based in Okayama. Hers is the first English-language book to investigate the domestic and international networks that brought men and women together at the local level to forge Japanese modernity. By carefully examining these people's political, educational, and social activism from 1868 to 1920, she offers new perspectives on different patterns of local activist networks, which sometimes enabled women to play independent and leadership roles and which were not always gender-specific. Scholars have discussed the shaping of Japanese modernity following the 1868 Meiji Restoration from various angles. Many studies, for instance those by Fred G. Notehelfer and Albert Craig, have focused on male intellectuals such as Kido Takayoshi, Kume Kunitake, Fukuzawa Yukichi, Itō Hirobumi, and Mori Arinori, [End Page 112] many of whom were bureaucrats who took a top-down approach to the project of building a modern nation-state.1 Research shows that women also pushed Japanese modernity forward through the pursuit of political, economic, and ideological advancement. A wealth of excellent works by Sheldon Garon, Barbara Molony, Vera Mackie, and Tomida Hiroko—to name but a few—has examined progressive women's activism on suffrage, motherhood, and sexuality in the first half of the twentieth century.2 In Close Association enriches the current scholarship on the progression of Japanese modernity. It continues the discussion of gender that was begun in Anderson's first book, A Place in Public, which focused on women's roles and rights, and opportunities and limitations, during the early Meiji period.3 In Close Association adds a fresh perspective to that earlier examination by bringing to light the ties between non-elite men and women who sought from the 1880s onward to promote and embrace "civilization and enlightenment" (bunmei kaika) from the bottom up at the local level in Okayama. As Anderson suggests, Okayama was distinctive partly because of its favorable educational policies and the relatively early arrival of Western missionaries; nonetheless, studying its case "illustrates historical dynamics that apply to other parts of the country" (p. 8). The book is as much about networks as it is about modernity. Anderson emphasizes that women sometimes took on leadership roles in networks, as opposed to being viewed merely as men's helpers or assistants. This argument is similar to that in a recent and important edited volume on networks, Women and Networks in Nineteenth-Century Japan.4 Whereas that book places women at the center, though, Anderson provides insight into how men and women intertwined and worked together to effect historical change. In Close Association is divided into four chapters. The first two chapters explore the lives and work of a man and a woman, Nakagawa Yokotarō (1836–1903) and Sumiya Koume (1850–1920), respectively. The third chapter focuses on a women's political organization, the Okayama Joshi Konshinkai (Okayama Women's Friendship Society [OWFS]); the final chapter examines the activism of a couple, Ishiguro Kan'ichirō (1854–1917) and Ishiguro Orio (1864–1917), and two single women, Ōnishi Kinu (1857–1933) and Kajiro Yoshi (1871–1959). Most of these individuals were former samurai or women from former samurai families who were connected through family, kinship, or public ties. For example, Sumiya was Nakagawa's concubine, and Ōnishi was the younger sister of Nakagawa's wife. They also overlapped through their involvement in local...

Reviewed by: Discovering Women's Voices: The Lives of Modern Japanese Silk Mill Workers in Their Own Words by Sandra Schaal Christina Ghanbarpour Discovering Women's Voices: The Lives of Modern Japanese Silk Mill Workers in Their Own Words. By Sandra Schaal. Trans. Jim Smith and Sandra Schaal. Leiden: Brill, 2022. 457 pages. ISBN: 9789004464421 (hardcover; also available as e-book). How does a researcher reconcile evidence of severe health risks, widespread sexual harassment, and other abusive work conditions with firsthand accounts of tennis lessons, boat trips on Lake Suwa, and some degree of financial independence? Sandra Schaal aims to do just that in her new book on female factory workers from the Meiji period to the early postwar years. Using company records, surveys, songs, photos, and interviews with former factory workers, Schaal critiques both Marxist interpretations of textile factory work and the so-called jokō aishi narrative of exploitation [End Page 262] by demonstrating how, for at least some workers, such work offered opportunities for education, leisure, social status, and a far higher standard of living than they could have enjoyed had they remained in their impoverished villages. In Discovering Women's Voices, Schaal lays out the case for factory work as an opportunity for poor women, largely by comparing work songs and studies from the Meiji and early Taishō periods to later studies and her own interviews with women who worked in the mills in the late 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s (one interviewee worked in the mills off and on until as late as the 1980s). This English translation is to be commended for its well-written prose and clean writing style.1 While women's work songs from the earlier (1880s–early 1920s) generation decried poor working conditions—lamenting, among other things, the difficulty of the work, the strict quality standards, the low wages, and even nonpayment for work—Schaal's interviews with women from the later (late 1920s–1940s) generation show that they were almost entirely unfamiliar with these songs and did not always agree with them. Nor did they agree with depictions such as Aa! Nomugi tōge (Ah! The Nomugi Pass), Yamamoto Shigemi's celebrated 1968 account of Meiji-era workers, whose tone is derived from Hosoi Wakizō's foundational 1925 work, Jokō aishi (The Tragic History of Female Factory Workers), which portrayed these workers as victims of a cruelly exploitative system that treated them as resources to be used up and thrown away. On the contrary, Schaal argues, while later factory workers agreed that the work was constant, difficult, and poorly remunerated, they did not see it in as negative a light as has been portrayed. Many women emphasized how well factory managers treated them ("almost like a daughter"), how spacious the living areas were (one woman mentions two tatami mats' space per person in the dormitories), and how they still had a small amount of cash left for personal use after sending most of their wages home to support their families (pp. 272–73, 283–91). They commented on the opportunities that the factories had given them, such as being able to see a movie, go sightseeing with their factory group, and participate in organized field days. Some factories provided continuing education, hiring middle school teachers and others to give lectures and teach essential skills such as using an abacus or prestigious activities such as flower arrangement (pp. 317–21). Factories also gave long-term workers elegant gifts, such as paulownia-wood chests and fine silk fabric (pp. 292–95). These opportunities, the women noted, were things they would never have experienced had they not gone to work in the factories. Moreover, being able to support their families and to be publicly recognized for that support—in some cases, being treated like minor celebrities in their home villages—made female factory workers feel like heroes and improved their chances of marrying well (pp. 280–81). These women often defined their work in terms of traditional values, such as performing filial piety by sending money home and helping their brothers complete their education. From this, Schaal concludes that while the jokō aishi narrative—a term derived from the abovementioned work by Hosoi—may...

Reviewed by: Healing Labor: Japanese Sex Work in the Gendered Economy by Gabriele Koch Fabio Gygi Healing Labor: Japanese Sex Work in the Gendered Economy. By Gabriele Koch. Stanford University Press, 2020. 248 pages. ISBN: 9781503610576 (hardcover; also available as softcover and e-book). Gabriele Koch's excellent ethnography Healing Labor provides a tightly interwoven argument on the place of the sex industry in the Japanese economy. Her broader aim is to elucidate through the lens of sex work the ways in which the economy itself is [End Page 187] gendered; that is, which kinds of work are considered real and which ancillary, what counts as respectable employment and what does not, and how the often invisible feminized care work supports the visible male-dominated economy. A diverse range of materials is brought in to foster an understanding of the "processes by which the gendering of the economy is continually reconstituted" (p. 4): analyses of policy documents that circumscribe the legal position of the sex industry (chapter 1), descriptions of promotional material produced by the sex industry to recruit new workers (chapter 2), interviews with women who work in different parts of the sex industry (chapter 3), the observation of a training session for newly recruited workers (chapter 4), participant observation at a nongovernmental organization engaged in antitrafficking advocacy (chapter 5), and narratives of how women in the sex industry navigate risk at work (chapter 6). At the core of Koch's argument is the notion that the sexual release provided by the women working in the sex industry is understood as a form of care that heals and restores the labor power of the men and thus constitutes an indirect contribution to the Japanese economy. Building on recent anthropological work on emotional, affective, and intimate labor, Koch describes the discourse of iyashi (healing) as a meaning-making device that works on several levels. It allows the women who engage in sex work to indirectly participate in the formal economy and gives them a means to valorize their work relative to the socially recognized work of the men who are their customers. On a larger societal level, it provides a justification of the sex industry in terms of care for the workforce by shifting the focus from leisure to health maintenance (p. 104). This discourse is undergirded by pervasive gender stereotypes: it is widely taken for granted, for example, that if the sex industry did not exist men would run rampant in the streets and sexual crimes would dramatically increase. Women, conversely, are considered to have an innate affinity for maternal care that makes them ideal affective laborers: taking "a maternal stance allowed sex workers to create the circumstances in which a customer could momentarily suspend his responsibilities and obligations, replacing them with a desire to be indulged and to act selfishly" (p. 106). Iyashi, a term originally coined in the 1990s by the anthropologist Ueda Noriyuki when working on healing rituals in Sri Lanka, has become an idiom of distress, a way of articulating what is needed in a muen shakai, a society ailing from a lack of human connection and meaning1 Like many things that are described as experiencing a boom in Japan, iyashi is a felicitous marriage between social critique and marketing lingo, drawing attention to a phenomenon and at the same time providing the means to commodify it. Koch does not delve into the murky origins of the term, but uses it in a general way to refer to anything that relieves loneliness, alienation, and stress caused by inhumane work conditions. The sex industry would not function without the complicity of wider Japanese society. Koch suggests that the legal grey zone in which it operates is deliberately [End Page 188] created to both perpetuate the opportunities for men to be "healed" and leave open the possibility for the police to crack down on it. This uncertainty has caused many businesses to take their storefronts online, meaning that women are increasingly going to meet strangers in hotel rooms without any backup from their employers. Koch's book can be fruitfully read together and contrasted with Kumada Yōko's ethnography of women at a "delivery health...

Reviewed by: Turbulent Streams: An Environmental History of Japan's Rivers, 1600–1930 by Roderick I. Wilson Philip C. Brown Turbulent Streams: An Environmental History of Japan's Rivers, 1600–1930. By Roderick I. Wilson. Leiden: Brill, 2021. 294 pages. ISBN 9789004433014 (hardcover; also available as e-book). In recent years, historians both in and outside of Japan have begun to turn sustained attention to historical transformations in Japan's environment and its interactions with human populations. This has largely been thanks to the work of Conrad Totman from the 1980s onward in journals such as Agricultural History and Journal of Forest History and in his monograph The Green Archipelago. Although it took some time to develop, the field has now blossomed and exhibits diverse and sometimes innovative methodological approaches. Brett Walker's The Lost Wolves of Japan is unusual in adopting the perspective of the animals that are his subject. Victoria Lee's The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth Century Japan and Yulia Frumer's Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan have been of particular interest to those formally trained in the history of science and technology. Scholars drawn to intellectual history have had the benefit of Federico Marcon's The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan. Now, recent PhDs much more self-consciously trained in environmental history have begun to populate the field. Notable is the work of David Fedman in Seeds of Control: Japan's Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea and that of Jakobina Arch in Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan.1 [End Page 140] Roderick Wilson's Turbulent Streams makes another fine contribution to this growing body of literature on Japanese environmental history, exploring the early modern Tokugawa era to well into the twentieth century. The book draws on a considerable volume of Japanese-language secondary sources that focus exclusively on Japan and also takes inspiration from well-known theoreticians and practitioners who make up the core of English-language environmental historical studies. Scholars who inform Wilson's work from an environmental historical perspective include Richard Wright, whose study of the Columbia River formed part of the inspiration for Turbulent Stream's subject and approach, as well as William Cronon and Sarah Pritchard. To provide an understanding of more theoretical/conceptual issues, Wilson references Bruno Latour and James Scott. The result is a sophisticated, wide-ranging monograph that should have broad interdisciplinary appeal for advanced undergraduates as well as senior scholars, whether or not they are Japan specialists. Turbulent Streamsencourages readers to think of rivers as one component in the fabric of multiple interdependent systems that constitute what Wilson calls "environmental relations" (p. 36). Building on a brief excerpt from Kamo no Chōmei's thirteenth-century classic Hōjōki, he launches into reflections on the tensions introduced by different time scales as perceived by humans and on geological and biological factors. More importantly, however, he evaluates the European Enlightenment conception of nature as part of a dyad that contrasts nature with human society. Wilson analyzes the character of human involvement with, and perceptions of, nature by way of a brief environmental history of Lake Ogura (in suburban Kyoto on the Yodo Riveras it flows southwest from Lake Biwa). He details the relationships of lakeside residents and the efforts of communities to ameliorate flood risk and promote production. This overview provides a basis for his evaluations of prior contributions of twentieth-century authors to our understanding of the relationship between nature and society. Here Wilson references Japanese authors such as Watsuji Tetsurō as well as those from the Englishspeaking academic world such as Julia Thomas. Wilson argues that all of these previous contributions, positive though they may be, are limited and narrowly focused in comparison to what he aims to accomplish. To improve our understanding of nature and society, Wilson takes what he calls a relational approach to understanding the environment rather than simply focusing on specific elements of the environment individually. Following Richard White, he seeks to develop a holistic understanding of society's interactions with the world that it inhabits: that is to...

Reviewed by: Uncertain Powers: Sen'yōmon-in and Landownership by Royal Women in Early Medieval Japan by Sachiko Kawai Paula R. Curtis Uncertain Powers: Sen'yōmon-in and Landownership by Royal Women in Early Medieval Japan. By Sachiko Kawai. Harvard University Asia Center, 2021. 372 pages. ISBN: 9780674260160 (hardcover). Elite women of the Heian period—whether obscured behind bamboo blinds in luxurious residences, composing masterful poetry, or setting narratives of their worlds to paper—have long held an allure for readers. Literary scholars have highlighted these women as proactive figures working tirelessly to navigate the complexities of the imperial court that shaped their lives and to carve out their own spaces within it, rather than simply as objects of desire or (sometimes nameless) beauties subject to the whims of powerful men. Sachiko Kawai's Uncertain Powers: Sen'yōmon-in and Landownership by Royal Women in Early Medieval Japan adds to this scholarship from a historical perspective, bringing a wealth of economic and material evidence to bear on questions of gendered participation in the highest levels of court society. Kawai foregrounds elite women of the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, underscoring that they were not passive participants in their day-to-day experiences but instead worked strategically to secure their (often precarious) livelihoods. Departing from previous historical studies on early medieval court women that emphasized political intrigue or intimate liaisons, Kawai calls attention to consumption and management practices to present fresh views on elite women as significant actors in premodern Japanese society. By evaluating, coordinating, and distributing the material and human resources from the estates (shōen) at their disposal, Kawai argues, royal women leveraged the privileges of their courtly titles and inheritance to elevate their sociopolitical status, maintain crucial interpersonal networks, and make a living. In doing so, these women compensated for the "power-authority gap" that disadvantaged them (p. 3). The study focuses on nyoin, a term that originally denoted a regent's daughter having the status of a queen-consort (kōgō) but later came to refer more broadly to royal women whose status approximated that of a retired emperor. Kawai maintains that prior scholarship has failed to adequately address the complexities faced by royal women who enjoyed this perquisite, underestimating "the gender disparity between male and female royals by overemphasizing the nyoin's political and economic [End Page 109] independence" (p. 15). The result has been a monolithic interpretation of women's lives based on the presumption that having authority directly correlates with the ability to wield power. In contrast, Uncertain Powers emphasizes the challenges royal women faced in obtaining, retaining, managing, and eventually transferring their material and human assets, thus revealing the "limitations and possibilities" (p. 23) that constituted their experiences in an environment where the social, political, economic, cultural, and religious were deeply intertwined. Kawai draws on the example of Sen'yōmon-in (1181–1252), daughter of the retired emperor Goshirakawa (1127–1192; r. 1155–1158), to explore this tension between ideal and reality. Sen'yōmon-in was named nyoin at age nine, and upon her father's death two years later she inherited sizeable landholdings, including his main residence, Rokujō Palace; the temple Chōkōdō (located on the palace grounds); and some eighty estates. Kawai uses Sen'yōmon-in's documentary records on this inheritance to counterbalance past studies that focused solely on political interpretations of royal women and relied on assumptions about the influence and wealth they readily enjoyed as a result of their official appointments. The author calls these assumptions into question through a material and economic approach that seeks to integrate "multidirectional power dynamics" (p. 19); she takes into account not only intersections of sociopolitical and spiritual life, but also the negotiations of power, authority, and interregional economic and social relationships that extended far beyond the capital and required female proprietors to invest at least as much careful attention, if not more, than their male counterparts. The book's arguments unfold over ten chapters divided into three parts: the history of royal women and nyoin at court, Sen'yōmon-in herself, and comparative perspectives. Part 1 introduces the historical development of the nyoin title...