Based on archival research undertaken in Japan and Britain, Mihalopoulos offers a new perspective on the relations between gender hierarchies and the political economy in a newly modernized Japan. The industrialization of Japan in the late nineteenth century coincided with attempts to establish new trade links abroad. The peasant class were sent overseas as ‘free labourers’ in a state-sponsored programme that also sought to maintain traditional codes of behaviour and morally acceptable forms of work. This study examines the particular impact of these restrictions on Japanese prostitutes abroad and reveals how the freedom offered to the poor by the state was limited and highly selective.

"'Mihalopoulos neatly integrates the issues of Japan's nation-building, labor migration in the context of a global workforce shaped by imperialism as well as industrial modernization, and the reification of standards of ideal womanhood in Japan. This is a book with which all students of Japanese modernity, of the construction of sexuality and gender, and of the creation of the nation in a globalizing world should engage.'"