3 Review(s)

Gambling with Virtue rings with the voices of women speaking openly about their struggle to be both modern and Japanese in the late twentieth century. It brings to the fore the complexity of women's everyday lives as they navigate through home, work, and community. Meanwhile, women fashion selves that acknowledge and challenge the social order. Nancy Rosenberger gives us their voices and experiences, interspersed with discussions of public ideas of the last three decades that have contributed significantly to the opportunities and risks women encountered in their journeys. Rosenberger uses the stage as a metaphor to demonstrate how everyday life requires Japanese women to be skilled performers. She shows how they function of stage in their accepted roles while effecting small but significant changes backstage. Over the last thirty years, Japanese women have expanded their influence and extended this cultural process of multiple arenas to find compromises between the old virtues of personhood and the new ideas for self. The women conform, maneuver, and make choices within these multiple stages as they juggle various concerns and desires. By the 1990s their personal choices had made a difference, calling into question the very nature of these multiple arenas. Highly accessible and enjoyable to read, Gambling with Virtue opens up the changing world of Japanese women to a wide range of readers. Its exploration of social change and women in Japan, non-Western versions of women's search for empowerment, cross-cultural notions of self, and the relation of public discourses with human agency in late capitalism will be of interest to students and specialists of Japanese studies, women studies, cross-cultural psychology, anthropology, and sociology.