Anne Giblin Gedacht, "Tōhoku Unbounded: Regional Identity and the Mobile Subject in Prewar Japan" (Brill, 2022)

New Books in Japanese Studies · Jul 11, 2023 · 1h 4m

Anne Giblin Gedacht’s Tōhoku Unbounded: Regional Identity and the Mobile Subject in Prewar Japan (Brill, 2022) centers cross-border mobility in its narrative of the history of Japan’s Tōhoku region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book is a challenge to the stereotypical image of the Northeast as static and isolated. Focusing on Pacific migration―to Asia, North America, and the Philippines―Gedacht pieces together an account of how mobility and movement were instrumental in creating modern Tōhoku regional identities, and how this process was integral to Japan’s modern…