Book Review
BICYCLE CITIZENS: The Political World Of the Japanese Housewife.
By Robin M. LeBlanc With a Foreword by Saskia Sassen. Berkeley: University of California Press (Asia: Local Studies/Global Themes 1. Studies of the East Asian Institute. Columbia Univesity). 1999. xvii. 243pp. US$40.00. cloth. ISBN. 0-520-21290-8: US$14.95. paper. ISBN 0-520-21291-6.

Ms. LeBlanc's topic is a welcome reprieve from the dominant books on Japanese women which either portray them as "Sacred Mothers," Geishas, radical feminists, or underdeveloped females. These popular studies have reinforced the view that Japanese women, as a group, are not worthy of study in terms of their political and public roles.

The title Bicycle Citizens refers to the way that housewives move through their neighborhoods. They take the smaller road, they take more complicated routes, they travel short distances, and they carry everything with them. They know the intricate parts of their neighborhoods: the new buds on the trees, the nesting birds, the unswept streets, the children returning from school, the handicapped walking slowly, and the cries of new born children. In direct opposition to this mode of transportation is the Taxi Politician who rides on the highways, who cannot focus on the minute objects or on their daily transformations. The politician is concerned with raising money, with serving the state, and with his own professional career. The "Bicycle Citizen" is concerned with the values of the community, with maintaining a balance between public and private life, and is invariably a housewife or a shufu.

The political engagements of the "Bicycle Citizens" are described in rich detail. They are seen as volunteering in community service, in establishing a woman's grassroots political network-namely, the Seikatsu Club Co-op and its political wing, the Nettowaku (Netto), and in orchestrating the 1992 political campaign of Ono Kiyoko for a seat in the House of Councilors. Throughout these narratives, Professor LeBlanc provides insightful comments on the personalities, and their, often, contradictory motivations for entering the public realm. Added to her ethnographic study is a critical appreciation of the contribution of gender studies and the limitations of the traditional approaches to women's roles in politics.

Professor LeBlanc employs the neo-historicist methodology that relishes autobiographical accounts to help narrate and explain the text and the author's frame of reference. She arrives in her new neighborhood young, unmarried, and attractive. She becomes part of the venue by becoming an active friend with many housewives. She goes on picnics, attends committee meetings, even models in an art class to become more involved in the life of the neighborhood. It is in her methodology of becoming one with the neighborhood that she has both her greatest strength and her greatest weakness. She creates a new vision of the housewife in Japan who has a distinctive political and public role.

Ms. LeBlanc, an Assistant Professor of Politics at Washington and Lee University, has written an impressive and convincing study that captures "the nature of the relationship between politics and the daily lives of non-elite and Japanese homemakers in the postwar era." (p.8) Living with and observing the lives of housewives for over two years in the Tokyo ward of Nerima, Oizumi section, she "lets us . . . begin an investigation from a person's consciousness." (p.15) This allows the reader to see "beyond the boundaries of modern ideologies" and, thus, construct a reality that is closer to the experiences and understandings of the people involved than to the researcher's pre-formed expectations.

Professor LeBlanc enchants us with her personal narrative, her love for ironies and contradictions, and her talent for lively description. This book is a must read for anyone interested in how the non-elite woman engages in Japanese politics. The Professor has added a new concept and metaphor to Japanese studies. We will never look at a housewife again without the image of her on a bicycle weaving through the local politics.