Takamure Itsue, Japanese Antiquity, and Matricultural Paradigms that Address the Crisis of Modernity

Download or read book Takamure Itsue, Japanese Antiquity, and Matricultural Paradigms that Address the Crisis of Modernity written by Yasuko Sato and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-06-30 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores Takamure Itsue’s (1894–1964) intellectual odyssey as Japan’s most notable pioneer in the study of women’s history. When she embarked on a series of scholarly projects that investigated marriage patterns and kinship systems in ancient Japan, it was a response to crisis-ridden modernity. Relentless in her quest to dismantle patriarchy, this “woman from the Land of Fire” (a nickname for her birthplace, Kumamoto Prefecture) locked herself away in 1931 and spent the rest of her life conducting research on female-friendly societies with matrilocal arrangements under kinship-based communal systems. While dissecting the patriarchal norms undergirding the capitalist nation-state, she embraced matricultural paradigms that embodied life-sustaining and life-enhancing values through communal childrearing and matrilineal inheritance. Takamure, a visionary thinker, asked big-picture questions and addressed multifarious issues of contemporary relevance, including beauty standards, human trafficking, gross disparities in wealth, war and imperialism, science and religion, and humanity’s relationship with nature.