in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity, by Karen Nakamura (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 2006, 226 pp., softcover, ISBN 978-0-8014-7356-2, $19.95). Soya Mori THIS BOOK IS BASED ON Karen Nakamura s doctoral dissertation, titled Deaf Identities, Sign Languages, and Minority Social Movement Politics in Modern Japan {1868-2000), which written for her PhD in cultural anthropology at Yale University. To conduct this research, Nakamura lived in Japan in the latter half of the 19905 and based her book on the fieldwork she carried out there. Nakamura is now assistant professor of anthropology and East Asian studies in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. She was born in Indonesia to Japanese parents, grew up in Australia and Japan, and has spent most of her adult life in the United States (186). Her background suggests that she may have experienced an identity crisis in her early adolescence; if so, it may have affected her cultural and linguistic identity such that it later became one of her main research topics. It may also have had a positive effect on her view of people as a cultural and linguistic minority and influenced her to regard them from a viewpoint of neutrality rather than pathology. This book has three parts. The first presents general information about Japanese people and Japan; the second consists of life histories of women from three generations; and the last part discusses politics in the Japanese community. Nakamura introduces her book by saying, 'This book is the story of three generations of deaf people in Japan and how the shifting political, social, and educational environment of the last century shaped their lives (2). She also states that her central thesis is that the social and institutional history of postwar deaf communities in Japan enabled an unusual form of personal and mass organizational identity politics to emerge in the 1970s and 19805 (2). Introduction to the Japanese Community Chapters 1, 2, 3, 5, and 7 compose the first part of the book, which is an introduction for readers who are unfamiliar with the community and modern Japanese history. In chapter 1 Nakamura introduces the policy of the Japanese Federation of the (JFD) as fundamental Japaneseness and writes that its members believe they are similar to kikokushijo (returnee Japanese, the group to which I belong); some nikkeijin (Brazilian-Japanese): and the more assimilationist front of the Burakumin former outcast movement (2). This view is one of the book's key points. First she presents the JFD's policy background and explains why the organization had no choice but to adopt this particular stance. The leaders of the current JFD are middle-aged people who grew up in the aftermath of World War II, which explains the roots of the group's social movement. According to Nakamura, there are two important cohorts in postwar Japan. The first consists of people of the baby-boomer generation, many of whom were made postlingually deaf by the antibiotic streptomycin. The second cohort consists of people from the postmainstreaming era. The demographic interpretation of these two big postwar issues in the Japanese Community can also be applied to situations in other countries. Life History The second part of the book consists of chapters 4, 6, and 9, which present the life histories of five deaf women from three different generations. Using the oral life history studies method with Japanese Sign Language (JSL) Nakamura videotaped interviews in JSL with the women and noted variations in their sign usage. The first woman, who from the prewar generation, JSL with spatial grammar exclusively. The second three women, who were from the postwar generation, signed differently as a result of their educational background difference. The oldest of these three used a grammar system that primarily visual-spatial and with very little fmgerspelling (72-73), while the two younger women used a grammar much closer to spoken language (73). …