Abstract
Castellini introduces the women’s liberation movement (ūman ribu) that emerged in Japan in the early 1970s. Drawing on the work of Setsu Shigematsu (Scream from the Shadow: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan, 2012), he offers a brief historical and social account of Japanese society in the late postwar period, outlines the movement’s genealogies of political contestation and briefly reflects on issues of translation and transnational dialogue between ribu and US-based Western feminism. He considers the movement’s main philosophical tenets: the notions of consciousness transformation and liberation of female sexuality, the elaboration of new forms of relationality, the formulation of onna (literally “woman”) as a new political subject and a critique of motherhood and the family system that expose an unprecedented gendered critique of Japanese postwar society.
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Notes
- 1.
The Japan-US Security Treaty or ANPO (abbreviation for the Japanese Nichibei anzen hoshō jōyaku) was signed at the end of the Allied Occupation in 1951, to become effective in 1952, and placed the United States as the effective arbiter of Japan’s defence interests. It established that US military facilities be hosted in and about Japan throughout the postwar period with the double aim of (1) protecting Japan against armed attack from without, since the treaty—and the new Japanese constitution imposed during the Occupation—severely restricted the size and purposes of the Japanese Self-Defence Forces; (2) contributing to the maintenance of international peace and security in the Far East. The treaty came up for revision and renewal in the 1960 and this became the focus of the greatest mass movement in Japanese political history. For an in-depth investigation of the implications of the treaty and the social and political contestations triggered by its renewal, see Hara (1987), Kan (1987), Kersten (1996), Sakurada (1997) and Sasaki-Uemura (2001).
- 2.
According to Shigematsu (2012: 67) the pamphlet distributed at the rally was “The Declaration of the Liberation of Eros” (Erosu kaihō sengen), which was to become “one of the first widely distributed ribu manifestos.”
- 3.
“Ūman ribu—dansei tengoku jōriku.” Asahi shinbun [Tokyo ed.], 4 October, 1970, p. 24. Morning ed.
- 4.
The Japanese writing system comprises three scripts: Chinese characters (kanji) and two phonetic scripts made up of modified Chinese characters (hiragana and katakana). Hiragana is used to write words without character representation, words that are no longer written in characters and following kanji to show conjugation endings. Katakana is the simplest and more geometric of the two phonetic scripts and is primarily used to transcribe foreign words and as a mark of emphasis. A correct transliteration of “Women’s Lib” would have been uimenzu ribu, ūman ribu (woman lib) being a somewhat incorrect version that, by omitting the mark of the genitive, simplified English grammar to a minimum. Two other examples of transliterated words that we have already encountered are feminizumu ( フェミニズム, feminist) and feminisuto ( フェミニスト, feminist).
- 5.
Akiyama reproduces at least two more articles from the Asahi shinbun that make use of the same linguistic strategy (Akiyama 1993: 42, 49).
- 6.
This constituted a major criticism that Japanese commentators frequently directed at ribu and which is variously acknowledged by Ehara (2012: 106), Akiyama (1993: 52), Fujieda and Fujimura-Fanselow (1995: 159), Ueno (2011: 10) and Shigematsu (2012: xxii). Feminist sociologist Ueno Chizuko (2011:10) dismisses this accusation as rooted in xenophobic stereotypes by means of which conservative forces cast everything that is perceived negatively as foreign and, thus, out of place in Japan.
- 7.
- 8.
As Welker (2012: 29, note 6) rightly observes, this usage of the term “ribu women” is somewhat anachronistic at such an early stage when women activists had yet to consciously identify themselves with the movement.
- 9.
The first appearance of the American Women’s Lib on the Japanese scene can be traced back to the spring of 1970 when articles began to appear in wide-circulation newspapers. Japanese media coverage was fragmentary and biased in the information it provided, focusing almost exclusively on sensational actions of American activists such as disrupting beauty contests, throwing away and burning bras and holding demonstrations against clubs that barred access to women. On March 28, 1970, an article appeared in the Asahi shinbun under the headline “Smash ‘man’s society!’ Reject femininity: with ‘no bra’ and red stockings.” The title of the article made use of a linguistic pun that transformed the name of the feminist radical group founded by Ellen Willis and Shulamith Firestone (Redstockings) into an item of clothing, and turned women activists into curiously dressed creatures, while simultaneously arousing the curiosity of the reader (Akiyama 1993: 36–7).
- 10.
One such example is provided by the name of the above-mentioned “Preparatory Committee for a Women’s Liberation Movement” (josei kaihō undō junbi kai).
- 11.
Shigematsu’s path-breaking monograph Scream from the Shadow: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan (2012) constitutes, to my knowledge, the most extensive and thorough analysis of ribu in English language to date and offers a compelling account of its multiple genealogies. Counter to the accusation of ribu being a mere Western import, Shigematsu locates the movement’s emergence squarely in a domestic history of feminist, social and political struggles. My account in this chapter of ribu, its organizational strategies, forms of struggle and philosophical principles owes a profound debt to her landmark text.
- 12.
- 13.
Shigematsu (2012: 6, 78, 130, 221 note 29); see also Satō (2010: 31).
- 14.
An understanding of womanhood and motherhood as coextensive found in those years confirmation in the idealization of maternal love and the elaboration of a maternalistic discourse that became central to the promotion of women’s participation in peace movements in the postwar (Mackie 2016; Swerdlow 1993).
- 15.
- 16.
I owe this insight to the perceptive comments an anonymous reviewer offered to an article I submitted for publication at the time I was working on this chapter. On that occasion I was reminded that Akiyama’s absence from Japan during the early years of the movement and her never having lived in a commune might have made her unaware of the extent to which there were contentious debates around who were the “authentic” or “true” ribu activists. And yet, it was only in 1974 that Akiyama left Japan to live in the Soviet Union (where she remained until 1981).
- 17.
While recognizing the pivotal role Tanaka played in shaping the movement in its early years, Shigematsu has also acknowledged that her charisma and vigorous ability to make herself heard at public meetings and within the life at the commune made her a contradictory figure within ribu, in that she came to be recognized as the leader of a movement that purported to have no leader. For an extensive investigation of this complex dynamics, see Shigematsu’s chapter “Ribu and Tanaka Mitsu: The Icon, the Center, and its Contradictions” (Shigematsu 2012: 103–135).
- 18.
We should, nonetheless, acknowledge the fact that, by the time ribu emerged, Akiyama was already in her thirties, married and with a child and this might have placed her at a relative distance from ribu’s younger constituency and from its fervent critique of marriage and the family system. In this respect, Akiyama herself has described the WOLF group she co-founded (about which more to follow) as a “middle-aged ribu” (chūnen no ribu) (Akiyama et al. 1996: 47) in contrast to her perception of ribu as a “movement of young women/daughters” (musume no undō) in their twenties (Akiyama 1993: 188).
- 19.
Welker’s recent work has been at the forefront of a study of the history of ribu that privileges the movement’s production of “engaged translations” of pamphlets, leaflets and reports produced by the American Women’s Lib. For earlier works that provide useful information on the importance of translation in the emergence of ribu, see Matsui (1990: 438), Buckley (1997: 185–98) and Mackie (2003: 152).
- 20.
The name of the group was a Japanese transliteration of the English “Woolf” from Virginia Woolf: since the Japanese rendering of the name does not distinguish between “Woolf” and “wolf,” the members of the group were pleased for the name of the group to be a pun on the name of the writer and the animal. Additionally, even though it was not one of the original intentions behind the naming of the group, urufu (WOLF) was later said to also stand for “Women’s Liberation Front” (Akiyama 1993: 60–1; Welker 2012: 30).
- 21.
Among the translated essays were Jo Freeman’s “The Bitch Manifesto,” Shulamith Firestone’s “Love,” Pat Mainardi’s “The Politics of Housework,” Ti Grace Atkinson’s “Radical Feminism” and “The Institution of Sexual Intercourse,” Anne Koedt’s “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” Carol Hanisch’s “The Personal is Political,” Jennifer Gardner’s “False Consciousness,” Kate Millett’s “Sexual Politics” and the “Redstockings Manifesto.”
- 22.
See note 4.
- 23.
My considerations of the activities of the WOLF Group is deeply indebted to the insights Welker offers in his “Translating Women’s Liberation, Translating Women’s Bodies in 1970s–1980s Japan” (2012). I refer the reader to this article for an in-depth study of the first Japanese translation of Our Bodies, Ourselves. In her book The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Border, Kathy Davis acknowledges the existence of this first Japanese translation of Our Bodies, Ourselves (revised in 1988) as well as of an unauthorized version that appeared in 1976 in Taiwan (2007: 53). However, Welker acutely observes how she seems to downplay these two early translations “in her narrative about the global spread of the book, perhaps because it runs against the standard narrative of second-wave feminist discourse spreading from the US to Europe to the rest of the world” (Welker 2012: 31–32, note nr. 23). See also Welker (2015).
- 24.
Despite the imposed democratization of education in the postwar years (with schools becoming co-ed in the 1960s) and the expanded educational opportunities for women which increased the number of girls graduating from four-year universities, the reality of postwar Japan was that schools remained a two-stream, gender-segregated system where women were still perceived to have the obligation to undertake what was called “women’s education” (joshi kyōiku). This is exemplified by the fact that in 1969 the Ministry of Education made four courses in the home economics curriculum compulsory for women and that, despite the opposition to this change during the 1970s and Japan’s signing of the 1980 Convention to End All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the Ministry retained the home economics requirement for girls until 1989 (Buckley and Mackie 1986: 180; Buckley 1993: 359–65; Mackie 2003: 171 note 48; Loftus 2013: 155).
- 25.
Feminist writer and activist Yoshitake Teruko (1931–2012) recalls how it was thanks to ribu’s emphasis on women’s mutual sharing of experiences of oppression that she was finally able to come to terms with her own experience of rape at the hands of the American occupation forces shortly after Japan’s defeat in 1945. She stresses how the transformation of her inner feminine consciousness constituted a pivotal moment in her healing process:
That I became able, in these circumstances, to begin to talk about my rape experience, and to write about it, was due entirely to my encounter with (the activists of) women’s lib [sic] because they helped me to be aware of the existence of a feminine consciousness located inside each of us. Why had I lived for a quarter of a century trying to conceal the fact that I was a rape victim? Why had I been constantly plagued by a sense of inferiority? As I continued to probe these questions, it suddenly became quite obvious. It was because I was, in the end, still bound up in a stereotypical image of women that defined women’s happiness in terms of getting married, being a good wife, and being a good mother. (Yoshitake 2006; quoted and translated in Loftus 2013: 101)
- 26.
On August 21–24, 1971, the first ribu camp (gasshuku) was held in the Nagoya prefecture with the participation of 257 women from all over the country, while a second one was held on August 17–21, 1972, in Hokkaidō. Between these two retreats, the first official ribu conference (ribu taikai) was organized on May 5, 1972, attracting around 2000 participants.
- 27.
Muto (1997: 155) argues that there were 500 participants at the symposium, while Tanaka (1995: 343) offers an even higher figure of 700. Shigematsu (2012: 72), on the other hand, reports a much more contained 200. In light of her in-depth analysis of the movement, the wide range of sources she uses and her direct contact with many of ribu’s founding members, I have decided here to privilege Shigematsu as the most reliable source.
- 28.
“‘Onna no tsūkaku’ wo shuppatsuten ni.”Asahi shinbun, 17 November, 1970, p. 17. Morning ed.
For a detailed consideration of the term onna and its political underpinnings in the rhetoric of the movement, see the following section “Onna and the liberation of woman’s sexuality.”
- 29.
An edited transcript of the debate was published four months later in the first book-length publication of ribu: Protesting Sexual Discrimination: The Contentions of Ūman Ribu (Seisabetsu e no kokuhatsu—ūman ribu wa shuchō suru). Emblematic of the emphasis ribu placed upon the individual as the subject of the movement, the volume opened with a section that was aptly entitled “What woman’s liberation (josei kaihō) means to me.” Following the record of the symposium was a collection of ribu pamphlets and a long section that provided detailed information about the American Women’s Liberation Movement. This included an abridged translation of Marlene Dickson’s article “The Rise of Women’s Liberation” published in the December 1969 issue of Ramparts Magazine and of Gloria Steinem’s essay “What Would It Be Like if Women Win” which appeared in Time Magazine in August 1970.
- 30.
Although Shigematsu’s detailed analysis of the movement does not include an investigation of the role that engaged translations might have played in the early history of ribu, she, nonetheless, strongly emphasizes the importance of “the (racialized) labor of translation as a political practice of intercultural mediation” (2012: xxiv). Not only that, she also calls attention to how an attentive engagement with “troubled translations and the nontranslatable” is crucial in “attend[ing] to the imbrications and interpenetration of local, linguistic, transcultural and transnational forces” (2012: xxiv).
- 31.
There exist two versions of Tanaka’s pamphlet “Liberation from the Toilet”: the original was circulated in August 1970, and it was followed only a few months later by a longer, revised version in October 1970. I cite here the original version reproduced in Mizoguchi et al. (1992): 201–7). The revised pamphlet has been reprinted in Tanaka (2010: 333–47). For detailed information about the publishing history of these two pamphlets, see Shigematsu (2012: 205–6, note 81).
- 32.
- 33.
- 34.
In this regard, Ueno (1988: 171) has bleakly stated that “[i]ndustralization organized male members of the society as wage labourers but it left women in the private sphere with children, the elderly, the diseased and the handicapped.”
- 35.
Until 1985 neither Japanese women nor men could establish a new family registry in case they married a non-Japanese. However, due to the fact that Japanese men were not removed from their parents’ family registry upon their marriage, they were in a position to sidestep such a dilemma of illegitimacy/citizenship for their children. This was a legal issue that was specific to Japanese women and that was partially resolved only in 1985 when a revision of the National Law made it possible for either parent to confer Japanese nationality to his or her child (Bryant 1991: 132).
- 36.
Nishimura (2006: 52–3) differentiates ribu collectives into three groups, according to the rationale and aims behind their original formation: those focused on elaborating and practising new modes of childrearing, those that emerged as centres for the organization of ribu’s activities and were devoted to the circulation of information and, lastly, those that were simply born out of a desire to experiment with alternative forms of female communal living. Among the numerous women-only collectives that emerged in the 1970s, the Ribu Shinjuku Centre occupied a distinctive place in that it played a pivotal role in shaping the contours and priorities of the movement in its formative years (Shigematsu 2012; Nishimura 2006: 57–96; Endō et al. 1996).
- 37.
For a recent investigation of the emergence of the notion of Japan as a “maternal society” in the 1960s and its consolidation in the 1970s, see Yoda’s (2000) insightful article “The Rise and Fall of Maternal Society: Gender, Labor, and Capital in Contemporary Japan.”
- 38.
- 39.
Uno (1993: 295) maintains that attempts to prescribe a feminine identity as bound to a woman’s role of wife and mother and confined within the boundaries of the domestic sphere continued in various form well into the 1980s.
- 40.
Wakakuwa (2004) offers a fascinating account of media representations of women’s roles during wartime.
- 41.
We cannot fail to notice the reality gap that distinguished the late postwar period in Japan and which emerged from the simultaneous intensification of women’s participation in the labour force and the tendency in popular discourse to valorize women in their primary role as mothers. Despite women’s increasing access to higher education, scholars have highlighted the consolidation of the (in)famous M-curve in women’s employment statistics. According to this typical pattern women worked while single, left their jobs on marrying or on occasion of their first pregnancy and returned to work after the birth of their last child, although this time with a shift from full-time to part-time employment. This pattern combined with the constant wage differential according to gender and with women’s limited opportunities for career advancement. Furthermore, women’s employment conditions were regulated by the Labour Standards Act whose “protective” provisions secured maternity and menstruation leave and prohibited women from dangerous occupations and excessive overtime or night work, thus suggesting that women were valued mainly in their role as (potential) mothers and not as individuals (Ueno 1988; Buckley 1993; Ochiai 1997; Mackie 2003; Tipton 2008).
- 42.
Two detailed studies on this topic are Tiana Norgren’s Abortion Before Birth Control: The Politics of Reproduction in Postwar Japan (2001) and Kato Masae’s Women’s Rights? The Politics of Eugenic Abortion in Modern Japan (2009). See also Tama Yasuko’s article “The Logic of Abortion: Japanese Debates on the Legitimacy of Abortion as Seen in Post-World War II Newspapers” (1994).
- 43.
Whereas in the 1970s Japan’s fertility rate had reached 2.0, in 1990 it fell to its lowest value of 1.57. Such sensational drop in the birth rate prompted the news media to coin the phrase “1.57 shock” (Ogino 1994: 89).
- 44.
Shigematsu has also highlighted how the presence at the Ribu Shinjuku Centre of Yonezu Tomoko—a woman with a disability who developed a close relationship with Tanaka Mitsu—was also fundamental in shifting ribu’s politics from a focus on abortion as woman’s right to a critique of the state control of reproduction and ableism (2012: 79–81, 90).
- 45.
I am grateful to Sharalyn Orbaugh for this point and careful reminder.
- 46.
We might also speculate that the gendered division of labour within the modern nuclear family might have made the paternal figure virtually non-existent, thus potentially voiding the chances for ribu’s active engagement with it.
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Castellini, A. (2017). The Women’s Liberation Movement in 1970s Japan. In: Translating Maternal Violence. Thinking Gender in Transnational Times. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53882-6_3
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