Following trade agreements between Japan and the US in the 1850s, Tokyo began importing an American commodity: Western social activism. Yasutake illuminates the motivations and experiences of American missionaries, U.S. WCTU workers, and their Japanese proteges.

Following landmark trade agreements between Japan and the United States in the 1850s, Tokyo begin importing a unique American commodity: Western social activism. As Japan sought to secure its future as a commercial power and American women pursued avenus of political expression, Protestant church-women and, later, members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) traveled to the Asian coast to promote Christian teachings and women's social activism. Rumi Yasutake reveals in Transnational Women's Activism that the resulting American, Japanese, and first generation Japanese-American women's movement came to affect more than alcohol or even religion. While the WCTU employed the language of evangelism and Victorian family values, its memebers were tactfully expedient in accommodating their traditional causes to suffrage and other feminist goals, in addition to the various political currents flowing through Japan and the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century. Exploring such issues as gender stuggles in the American Protestant church and bourgeois Japanese women's attitudes towards the "plesure class" of geishas and prostitutes, Yasutake illuminates the motivations and experiences of American missionaries, U.S. WCTU workers, and their Japanese proteges. The diverse machinations of WCTU activism offer a compelling lesson in the complexities of cultural imperialism.