In Close Association is the first English-language study of the local
networks of women and men who built modern Japan in the Meiji period
(1868-1912). Marnie Anderson uncovers in vivid detail how a colorful
group of Okayama-based activists founded institutions, engaged in the
Freedom and People's Rights Movement, promoted social reform, and
advocated "civilization and enlightenment" while forging pathbreaking
conceptions of self and society. Alongside them were Western Protestant
missionaries, making this story at once a local history and a
transnational one.
Placing gender analysis at its core, the book offers fresh perspectives
on what women did beyond domestic boundaries, while showing men's lives,
too, were embedded in home and kin. Writing "history on the diagonal,"
Anderson documents the gradual differentiation of public activity by
gender in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Meiji-era
associations became increasingly sex-specific, though networks remained
heterosocial until the twentieth century.
Anderson attends to how the archival record shapes what historians can
know about individual lives. She argues for the interdependence of women
and men and the importance of highlighting connections between people to
explain historical change. Above all, the study sheds new light on how
local personalities together transformed Japan.