Songs as Weapons: The Culture and History ofKomori(Nursemaids) in Modern Japan

Abstract

Komori is a generic term that consists of a noun,ko(a child), and a verb,moru(to protect or to take care of); Japanese use it to refer to any person, male or female, old or young, who takes care of children. This article will focus on the young girls, hired by families in need of child care in the so-called modern Imperial period (1868–1945), who were calledkomori. Like their European counterparts, nursemaids and nannies,komoribegan to appear in what Michel Foucault has called the “discourse of power” in the late nineteenth century, i.e., in the formative period of the Japanese modern nation state. Thekomori'sappearance in Japan's discourse of power corresponded to the emergence of a subculture among thekomorithat is the focus of my analysis in this article.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.