Peasants, Rebels and Outcastes

Using diaries, memoirs, fiction, trial testimony, personal recollections, and eyewitness accounts, Mikiso Hane weaves a fascinating tale of what it was like to be an ordinary Japanese during this last century of startling economic growth. Rescuing vivid, often wrenching accounts of peasants, miners, textile workers, rebels, and prostitutes, he forces us to see Japan’s “modern century” (from the beginnings of contact with the West to defeat in World War II) through fresh eyes. In doing so, he presents a formidable challenge to the success story of Japan’s “economic miracle.”

Starting with the Meiji restoration of 1868, Professor Hane shows how modernization actually widened the gulf, economically and socially, between the rich and the poor, between the mo-bo and the mo-ga (“modern boy” and “modern girl”) of the cities and their farm counterparts. He laces his scholarly narrative with sharply etched individual accounts that make us see what Japan looked like from the bottom up. We learn what the back-breaking labor of a typical farm family was like; what it was like for poverty-stricken parents to sell their daughters into Japan’s new mills, factories, and brothels; what it was to her in rural areas scourged by famine; to be on strike in a company town; in revolt in the countryside; or conscripted into the army.

Professor Hane presents us with a unique people’s history of a hitherto unknown Japan, a story as powerful and grim as any ever told by a Mayhew or a Dickens about England’s Industrial Revolution.
—from the back cover of the book

Includes Notes, and an Index