Books

Mobilizing Japanese Youth: The Cold War and the Making of the Sixties Generation

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

Cornell University Press 2021

In Mobilizing Japanese Youth, Christopher Gerteis examines how non-state institutions in Japan—left-wing radicals and right-wing activists—attempted to mold the political consciousness of the nation's first postwar generation, which by the late 1960s were the demographic majority of voting-age adults. Gerteis argues that socially constructed aspects of class and gender preconfigured the forms of political rhetoric and social organization that both the far-right and far-left deployed to mobilize postwar, further exacerbating the levels of social and political alienation expressed by young blue- and pink- collar working men and women well into the 1970s, illustrated by high-profile acts of political violence committed by young Japanese in this era.

Winner of the 2022 Best Book Award, Research and Knowledge Exchange Prizes, SOAS University of London.

Gender Struggles: Wage-earning Women and Male Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan

Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard East Asian Monographs

Harvard University Press 2010

In the formative years of the Japanese labor movement after World War II, the socialist unions affiliated with the General Council of Trade Unions (the labor federation known colloquially as Sohyo) formally endorsed the principles of women’s equality in the workforce and put in place measures to promote women’s active participation in union activities. By the late 1950s, however, even Japan’s radical socialist unions had reestablished the primacy of conservative gender norms, channeling women’s labor activism to support political campaigns that advantaged a male-headed household and that relegated women’s wage-earning value to the periphery of the household economy.

Second Prize Winner of the 2011 Triannual Book Award, European Association for Japanese Studies.

Japan Since 1945: From Postwar to Post-Bubble

Bloomsbury Academic 2013

Japan Since 1945 moves beyond the 'lost decade' and 'terrible devastation' frameworks that have thus far defined too much of the discussion, offering a more nuanced picture of the nation's postwar development. The multidisciplinary essays that comprise Japan Since 1945 demonstrate its ongoing importance and relevance. Examining the historical context to the social, cultural, and political underpinnings of Japan's postwar development, the contributors re-engage earlier discourses and introduce new veins of research.

Reviewed in: Japan Forum and The Historian.

Critical Readings on the History of Industrialization in Modern Japan

Brill 2013

The three volumes of this edited collection feature essays examining the economic and social transformations that redefined Japan from the proto-industrial economy of the early modern era to Japan’s twentieth-century emergence as one of the world’s great industrialized nations. The first volume, Tokugawa Economy and Society, examines how the political economy of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, despite political constraints designed specifically to hinder social and economic change, established the proto-industrial roots for Japan’s rapid industrialization during the Meiji Era. The second volume, Meiji Industrialization, explores how the men who established the modern government of the Meiji Era (1868-1912) found fertile ground for the rapid industrialization they envisioned necessary for the defense of the nation. Their successes, and failures, laid the groundwork for a modern empire. The final volume, Twentieth Century Japan, examines the century of industrialization that underpinned the rise of Imperial Japan, its disastrous invasion of Pacific Asia, and its unexpected emergence from the ashes of World War II to become one of the world’s great industrialized powers, a feat which has since fascinated politicians and industrialists across the developing and developed world.