Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018. viii, 301 pp. (Illustrations.) US$65.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-6669-3.
Rethinking Japanese Feminisms makes Japan and feminisms accessible and legible to a wide range of global readers, from academic researchers to activists and policymakers. The authors, an interdisciplinary group of Japanese and Western scholars of Japan and gender and sexuality studies, successfully bring cohesion to chapters that span a broad range of feminist inquiry through a trained focus on power and hierarchies among feminists and feminisms, and how the inherent violence of these encounters can be critically interrogated, transformed, and repurposed in a different time and space by the same or new generations in the struggle for liberation. The editors introduce the volume’s central task as the examination of how feminist thought and activism—transnational and indigenous—shape and respond to modern Japanese society, from the early twentieth century onward. J. Keith Vincent also captures the essence of this work with a question that is feminism’s core contradiction and a source of ongoing internal struggle, “What does it mean to do queer or feminist work with a focus on a culture other than one’s own?” (253).
While Vincent’s primary concern is what it means to be an American researching feminisms in Japan or vice versa, all these authors demonstrate how intersectionality demands that we acknowledge all the different ways we are both insiders and outsiders across our multiple identities—each with their own culture (such as race, class, gender, religion, nationality, etc.)—and how shifting identities can change the direction, nature, and intent of our focus or gaze. These authors frame the Japanese feminist struggle for liberation within the broad context of Japan’s encounter with the West—and specifically with the United States—and examine how Japan as a colonial power, a defeated and occupied nation, and a postmodern democracy have cast Japanese women in the roles of both oppressor and oppressed at home and abroad. Each chapter in Rethinking Japanese Feminisms forces us to take another look at our existing canon and shows us how to: question what we think we see, widen our scope of analysis and, in so doing, uncover and problematize existing power relations.
Leslie Winston contends that Taisho and early Showa era painter and magazine illustrator Takabatake Kasho’s work disrupts and transcends the boundaries between female and male, Japanese and Western, human and animal, and Japanese-style and Western-style painting (141), and contemporary manga artists reflect this influence. Elyssa Faison details how activist Yamakawa Kikue’s articulation of the relationship between gender and political, economic, and social rights shifted between pre- and post-World War II. According to Julia Bollock, the Coeducation Research Society, founded by Koizumi Ikoku in 1932, outlined a system of coeducation in Japan well in advance of the Supreme Command of Allied Powers, even though conventional wisdom holds that this education reform was imposed by outside forces.
Nancy Stalker’s chapter views ikebana as a site of women’s empowerment, simultaneously educating us about a traditional industry evolving in response to a new market—Western consumers—while re-inscribing Japanese cultural identity in a rapidly modernizing postwar economy. Chris McMorran asks how women ryokan workers’ performance of imagined “traditional” caregiving roles for domestic and international tourists transgresses the very norms they enact. James Welker traces how Japanese lesbians, marginalized in the uman ribu movement in 1970s and 1980s, built networks in the United States that help them to build community at home in Japan.
Barbara Hartley, Kathryn Hemman, and Sarah Frederick each focus on the work of specific Japanese writers to think about the larger question of Western norms of knowledge production about Japan—how we determine who is important to read and translate, and how we represent and interpret female narrators on the written page. Their chapters underscore how activism can be expressed through writing and reading and, given the constraints that spatially confine many women, how the written language is literally transportive.
Nearly all chapters examine the state’s role in constructing and maintaining gender-based systems of inequality, and feminism as a political project to dismantle them across public and private life. For example, Tomomi Yamaguchi chronicles how in the 2000s, grassroots conservatives successfully mobilized in some Japanese localities to contest local ordinances for a gender-equal society. Similarly, Hillary Maxon’s rethinking the First Mothers’ Conference in 1955 is fundamental to understanding the genealogy of Japan’s contemporary anti-nuclear movement and opposition to revision of Article 9 of the nation’s postwar constitution. Further, Setsu Shigematsu’s essay on critical transnational feminism as practice and Akwi Seo’s chapter on Korean women in 1990s Japan mobilizing against Japan’s wartime system of military sexual slavery contribute to our understanding of the multitude of complicated gendered subjectivities that colonialism produces, and that lie at the heart of contemporary global issues. My only critique of this volume is that the authors did not engage more directly with the disciplines of political science and public policy to fully demonstrate how their interdisciplinary thinking can offer practical approaches to complex socio-political challenges.
Sherry L. Martin
US Department of State, Washington, DC, USA
[The views expressed in this review are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of the US Department of State or the US Government.]