This collection brings together diverse analyses of women in Japan-including department store elevator girls, tour bus guides, airline stewardesses, soldiers, soccer players, beauty queens, and educators-who have been intimately involved in the practices and professions of modernity.

This spirited and engaging multidisciplinary volume pins its focus on the lived experiences and cultural depictions of women's mobility and labor in Japan. The theme of "modern girls" continues to offer a captivating window into the changes that women's roles have undergone during the course of the last century.

Here we encounter Japanese women inhabiting the most modern of spaces, in newly created professions, moving upward and outward, claiming the public life as their own: shop girls, elevator girls, dance hall dancers, tour bus guides, airline stewardesses, international beauty queens, overseas teachers, corporate soccer players, and even female members of the Self-Defense Forces. Directly linking gender, mobility, and labor in 20th and 21st century Japan, this collection brings to life the ways in which these modern girls-historically and contemporaneously-have influenced social roles, patterns of daily life, and Japan's global image. It is an ideal guidebook for students, scholars, and general readers alike.

"In Modern Girls on the Go: Gender, Mobility, and Labor in Japan, editors Alisa Freedman, Laura Miller, and Christine R. Yano have compiled an important collection on women and work in the 20th and 21st centuries Japan . . . As a result of the interdisciplinary structure of this collection, the assembled essays offer useful contributions to a variety of fields and are accessible to academic and general readers alike. The editors organized the volume into four sections . . . this organization of chapters serves to guide the reader through distinct sociohistorical periods while masterfully weaving together the connections between 'gender', 'mobility', and 'labor' throughout Japan's period of modernization . . . It is difficult to pinpoint any shortcomings in the volume; rather, it only left this reader wanting more . . . In reading Freedman, Miller, and Yano's outstanding collection, one hopes that these two debates will cease to be seen as oppositional pathways for Japanese women, and that-following in their 'modern girl' predecessors' footsteps-they will take the lead in moving Japan into a more prosperous and egalitarian era."