Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016. ix, 320 pp. US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-5580-2.
Ayako Kano begins Japanese Feminist Debates with a simple question: “Can a girl be happy in Japan?” (1). The question came to her when she was asked to testify as an expert witness in a custody battle between an American father and a Japanese mother. The attorney wanted her to argue that the child would have a better life as a female in the United States. Kano wisely declined to testify, but this unanswerable question captures many of the contradictions of contemporary Japan, which has a high standard of living but ranks low in many measures of gender equality. True to the topic of the book, Kano does not ever attempt to answer this question definitively. Rather, she points to the multiple voices which have described, critiqued, protested, or projected hopeful future visions of the lives of women in modern Japan.
The scope of the book covers feminist intellectual debate (ronsō) or discussion (rondan) from the Meiji period to the present day. The decision to focus the book on debate rather than on a history of feminism in Japan is ingenious, and distinguishes it from previous writing in English (for example, Vera Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality, Cambridge University Press, 2003; Sharon L. Sievers, Flowers in Salt: The Beginning of Feminist Consciousness in Japan, Stanford University Press, 1983). Japan’s rapid modernization and high literacy rate made public intellectual debate an important part of establishing national identity and public policy, particularly in the Meiji period and in the early postwar years when the role of women was being renegotiated. As with feminism in the West, there has never been a single feminist discourse, but constant contestation or multiple, sometimes competing feminisms. By presenting these issues as debates, Kano does not attempt to reconcile or rank them, but shows where opinion falls on major issues, and why.
The book is organized thematically, with chapters on sex, reproduction, work, and public policy. Debates within each chapter are presented more or less chronologically, with some focus on the Seitō (Bluestocking) writers of the Meiji period and the women’s lib movement of the 1960s. This approach allows for a nuanced and detailed picture not only of the debates themselves, but of the various positions taken by major names in Japanese feminism.
The chapter on sexuality focuses largely on debates surrounding prostitution and pornography. Although sexual mores have changed dramatically since the Meiji period, Kano finds issues of control of sexuality versus self-determination are still current. She writes, “The feminist conundrum identified earlier [in the Meiji period] thus turns out to be alive even today: the argument against commodification risks supporting a call for greater state control of sexuality, whereas the argument for individual control of sexuality risks condoning the expansion of the sex industry. Thus, when feminists want to criticize the sex industry, they find it difficult to avoid the logic of state control, and when they want to stress individual control of sexuality, they find it difficult to avoid the logic of commodification” (62).
The next chapter concerns debate around abortion and birth control, with concomitant issues of eugenics and disability rights activism. Japan is unusual among industrialized nations in that it was one of the first to decriminalize abortion (in 1948) but late to legalize hormonal birth control. Kano argues that the debate in Japan has not been “a woman’s choice” versus “fetal life” as in the United States, but rather about issues relating to economic viability, eugenics, the complexity of women’s lives, and “nature” (101). While Kano finds that the appeal to what is “natural” is similar to the religious opposition to abortion in other countries, other aspects of the debate in Japan are more nuanced than the rather calcified positions in the US. Since responsibility for a child’s well-being as well as a woman’s own extends for a lifetime (as Kano points out, a lifetime that is unprecedentedly long), the economic and social burden is indeed substantial and in many cases overwhelming, and goes beyond issues of individual choice.
The chapter on work looks at the motherhood protection debate (bosei hogo ronsō) of the 1910s, the housewife debates of the 1950s, and the passage of the Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEOL) of 1985, all moments in which the debate centred around the valourization of motherhood and other unpaid domestic labour versus advocates of economic independence via paid work. The following chapter delves into more detail on the EEOL and other contentious sites of what Kano calls state feminism, or efforts to institute public policy to eliminate gender discrimination. This chapter also documents the conservative backlash against gains in gender equality, and various feminist responses to that backlash, including debates around so-called “gender-free” policies. An important point Kano makes is that the term usually translated in government documents as “gender equal” is in fact “male-female joint planning” (danjo kyōdō sankaku, 142) which belies the ultimately conservative ideology of politicians such as Abe Shinzō, who loudly proclaim the economic potential of women’s labour while at best promoting restrictive roles for women as wives and mothers and at worst actively undermining the work of feminist politicians.
Kano writes in a lucid and engaging style, meticulously researched and leavened with sharp-eyed reflections on her own experiences in Japan as a working mother while researching the book. Her vivid description of the elaborate daily preparation she was expected to perform for her elementary-school child rivals Anne Allison’s screed against the bentō box and Japanese preschool expectations (Anne Allison, Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics and Censorship in Japan, Westview Press, 1996). Japanese Feminist Debates is a cogent and illuminating overview of women’s issues in modern Japan, and should be of interest to any scholar of modern Japan, and of gender studies more generally. The clear prose style and inclusion of many sources not available in English also make it accessible for undergraduate teaching and appealing to non-specialist academics.
Deborah Shamoon
National University of Singapore, Singapore