Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 206
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9½
978-1-4422-6509-7 • Hardback • April 2016 • $115.00 • (£88.00)
978-1-4422-6510-3 • Paperback • April 2016 • $44.00 • (£35.00)
Tatsuichi Horikiri is an independent scholar at the Kitakyushu Museum of Natural History and Human History. Rieko Wagoner is principal lecturer in Japanese at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut.
Introduction
Notes to the Reader
Era Designation and Timeline
Map
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1 Kasuri Mattress Cover from Home
Chapter 2 Koshimaki Petticoat of 83 Patches
Chapter 3 Echigo-jishi Costume for Boy Dancer
Chapter 4 How Many Diapers?
Chapter 5 Two Hanten Field Jackets
Chapter 6 Okiboda, the Pride of Women
Chapter 7 My Teacher’s Sunday Best
Chapter 8 A Weighty Quilt
Chapter 9 Life with a Mosquito Net
Chapter 10 A Bed of Wood Shavings
Chapter 11 The Meisen the Girl Could Not Wear
Chapter 12 Dead Horse
Chapter 13 Female Coal Miners
Chapter 14 Aunties and Uncles
Chapter 15 Rich and Poor
Chapter 16 A Begging Girl
Chapter 17 Noble-minded Ladies
Chapter 18 A Gown of Leaves for the Dead
Chapter 19 Katatsuke-gasuri
Chapter 20 A Lady in a Dilapidated Mansion
Chapter 21 Female Workers in Textile Mills
Chapter 22 Forbidden Tears
Chapter 23 The Thousand-stitch Waistband
Chapter 24 The Rising Sun Kimono That She Wore
Chapter 25 Gifts from My Mother
Chapter 26 Akemi’s Song
Chapter 27 Military Uniforms and Shoes
Chapter 28 What Mompe Trousers Symbolized
Chapter 29 A White Chima Jeogori
Chapter 30 Sarasa Print Bed Quilt
Chapter 31 Hanten Story
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Term Glossary
Selected Bibliography
Supplemental Bibliography
Index
This work touched my heart as much as my head. It brilliantly captures the human spirit of working-class Japanese in the first half of the twentieth century: farmers, schoolgirls, laborers, miners, housewives, soldiers. Drawing on his massive collection of the threadbare clothes that people wore, Horikiri gives us thirty-one stories full of haunting sadness and dignified resilience along with his own trenchant observations about Japanese life and values. His reflections on war should be read by everyone.
— James L. Huffman, Wittenberg University
This is a fascinating exploration in social and cultural history. Through well-chosen, vividly described vignettes, it examines the meaning of fabric and clothing for those who fabricate these items, those who wear or use them, and those who observe the dress of others. A compassionate and compelling work.
— Andrew Gordon, Harvard University
This is a remarkably coherent translation of a fascinating book. Horikiri’s narrative of clothing serves well as a new vision of peoples’ history that conveys a tale of material culture at odds with the middle-class mythologies of modern Japan. Indeed, Horikiri’s work is a recasting of the very notion of kokoro, which in this work serves as a highly valued trope for everyday humanity.
— Christopher Gerteis, SOAS, University of London
In The Stories Clothes Tell, Tatsuichi Horikiri puts readers in touch, almost literally, with the past experience of Japan’s everyday people, or shomin. In a kaleidoscope of more than thirty short essays, each set around a different piece (or sometimes just a scrap) of clothing, Horikiri gathers together the ‘whispers,’ as he puts it, of lives lived largely out of sight of Japan’s upper classes. Thanks to Rieko Wagoner’s fine and empathetic translation, readers outside Japan can now enter Horikiri’s world—not of Japan’s ‘good old days’ that never were, but the ‘real old days’ that might otherwise be lost to memory forever.
— Andrew Barshay, University of California, Berkeley
Readable and engaging memoirs of everyday life in early twentieth-century Japan
Depicts the lives of ordinary people from the lower strata of society, as told in their own words
Uses clothing and textiles as a window into life experiences
Includes timeline, glossary, maps, and photographs of clothing
A rich primary source for courses on modern Japanese history, modern East Asian history, the history of colonialism, labor history, material culture, memory studies, and family studies
FOR PROFESSORS
Lecture Notes. The Lecture Notes provide the tables and figures from the text.