Sex in Japan's Globalization deals with poor Japanese peasant women who migrated overseas and worked as sex labourers. The core subject matter of the book is a historical study of the gendered and class impact of Japan's first encounter with globalization that began in the 1860s. The women who worked in overseas brothels, I argue, must be first understood as peasants unchained from the land by Meiji land and tax policies, who become ‘free labour’ searching for work in the colonial cities of Asia. The integration of Japanese women into the global work-force involved a series of activities not normally associated with work – the fixing of cultural standards of ideal womanhood and, strategically, public opinion.

At the heart of the monograph lies a structural contradiction inherent in the efforts of Meiji Japan to incorporate itself into a global economy. The book traces two moves of government. Japanese peasants were offered to the global market by government-sponsored migration to work the plantations of Hawaii and Australia as ‘free labourers’ from the mid-1880s. Simultaneously, the Japanese government attempted to implement laws to prevent Japanese women going abroad and ‘making do’ as itinerate vagrants and prostitutes. This double move was driven by two contradictory ends. One aim was the quest for ‘freedom’ crystallized around government efforts to promote Japanese trade and industry in a global economy and to secure the ‘free’ movement of Japanese labourers to places of work abroad in the face of race restrictions placed on coloured labourers in North America, colonial Australia and Dutch East Indies to name a few locations. The other governmental aim was ‘restrictions’, which coalesced around administrative endeavours to demarcate acceptable and unacceptable forms of work that the Japanese could pursue abroad: a peasant woman could accept work as a cook or domestic servant but not as a sex worker.

The originality of this research is its sceptical scrutiny of the widespread tendency in Japanese historiography to see modernization as the downward diffusion of patterns of domesticity and womanhood from the former samurai strata to the rest of Japanese society.