Now playing: Simon Partner's “Koume's World” on the ”History of Japan” podcast

Simon Partner is professor of history at Duke University who is renowned as a scholar of 19th– and 20th–century Japan. His diligently researched 2023 biography of Kawai Koume offers a fresh look at a tumultuous period in Japan's history through the diary of a Wakayama artist, accessible by professional academics as well as everyday scholars with an interest in this time and place. Isaac Meyer is a historian, high school teacher, and podcaster who launched The History of Japan Podcast in 2013. Thanks to Simon Partner, he was drawn into Koume's World.

Through Koume’s eyes and words, Simon Partner opens a window on social, economic, and cultural life amid some of the most dramatic periods of Japan’s transformative nineteenth century. Koume’s World vividly portrays the everyday activities, social interactions, information networks, cultural production, and household economy of a samurai family across the Tokugawa-Meiji divide. 

Partner’s narrative offers a remarkably detailed portrait of the dynamic working life of a female artist and household manager while also giving a regional perspective on the upheavals surrounding the Meiji Restoration. As a microhistorical study of gender, economy, and society in nineteenth-century Japan, Koume’s World is a compelling account of how one woman experienced both mundane routines and drastic social transformations.

Listen to the first episode of the “History of Japan” podcast discussion of Koume's World >>