Temporalities and the Transnational: Yoshi Kasuya’s Consideration of Secondary Education for Girls in Japan (1933)

Abstract

Goodman explores the historical and comparative temporalities underpinning the 1933 comparative account of girls’ education in England, Germany, France, America, and Japan that Yoshi Kasuya, a teacher from Tsuda College, Japan, produced for her doctorate at Teachers College Columbia. Yoshi’s study configured a complex cultural model of modern Japanese womanhood and associated educational program, that entangled Japanese elements with facets of Western womanhood that she encountered during her periods of research. Goodman explores the temporalities that thread through Yoshi’s study, by examining times of diachronic comparison and temporalities of adaptation, times of the nation and temporalities of awakening, and times of vernacular cosmopolitanism and temporalities of becoming. Attention to multiple temporalities points to the entanglement of the transnational with the international and the national.