Although both Tatsuichi Horikiri's The Stories Clothes Tell: Voices of Working-Class Japan and James Huffman's Down and Out in Late Meiji Japan seek to illuminate the lives of Japan's poor in the early decades of the twentieth century, the approaches they take could not be more different. Read “against” each other, the two volumes raise compelling questions about the method, aims, and audience for works of history, especially those that explore the lives of marginalized people whose “voices” are often absent from conventional historical sources.
Horikiri's work, originally published in Japanese in 1990, has been edited and translated by Rieko Wagoner, who is to be commended for making this evocative work available to non-Japanese readers. Born in 1925 in Kagoshima, Horikiri left Japan for a job in northern China in 1943 but was soon conscripted into the Japanese army. After its defeat and his repatriation, he began to pursue an...
