Rethinking Japanese Feminisms 6715_Book.indd 1 8/3/17 3:42 PM 6715_Book.indd 2 8/3/17 3:42 PM Rethinking Japanese Feminisms Edited by Julia C. Bullock, Ayako Kano, and James Welker University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu 6715_Book.indd 3 8/3/17 3:42 PM © 2018 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bullock, Julia C., editor. | Kano, Ayako, editor. | Welker, James, editor. Title: Rethinking Japanese feminisms / edited by Julia C. Bullock, Ayako Kano, and James Welker. Description: Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017014299 | ISBN 9780824866693 (cloth; alk. paper) Amazon Kindle 9780824866723 EPUB 9780824866716 PDF 9780824866730 Subjects: LCSH: Feminism—Japan. Classification: LCC HQ1762 .R48 2017 | DDC 305.420952—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014299 An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open-access ISBNs for this book are 9780824878382 (PDF) and 9780824878375 (EPUB). More information about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. The open access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Cover art: Miki Suizan, Japanese, 1887–1957 Fair Wind (Junpū) Japanese, Shōwa era, 1933 Panel; ink, color, and mica on silk 241.6 x 191.5 cm (95 1/8 x 75 3/8 in.) Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Charles H. Bayley Picture and Painting Fund and Museum purchase with funds donated anonymously 2007.813 Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 —Julia C. Bullock, Ayako Kano, and James Welker Part I Rethinking Activism and Activists 1 Women’s Rights as Proletarian Rights: Yamakawa Kikue, Suffrage, and the “Dawn of Liberation” 15 —Elyssa Faison 2 From “Motherhood in the Interest of the State” to Motherhood in the Interest of Mothers: Rethinking the First Mothers’ Congress 34 —Hillary Maxson 3 From Women’s Liberation to Lesbian Feminism in Japan: Rezubian Feminizumu within and beyond the Ūman Ribu Movement in the 1970s and 1980s 50 —James Welker 4 The Mainstreaming of Feminism and the Politics of Backlash in Twenty-First-Century Japan 68 —Tomomi Yamaguchi Part II Rethinking Education and Employment 5 Coeducation in the Age of “Good Wife, Wise Mother”: Koizumi Ikuko’s Quest for “Equality of Opportunity” 89 —Julia C. Bullock 6 Flower Empowerment: Rethinking Japan’s Traditional Arts as Women’s Labor 103 —Nancy Stalker v 6715_Book.indd 5 8/3/17 3:42 PM vi Contents 7 Liberating Work in the Tourist Industry 119 —Chris McMorran Part III Rethinking Literature and the Arts 8 Seeing Double: The Feminism of Ambiguity in the Art of Takabatake Kashō 133 —Leslie Winston 9 Feminist Acts of Reading: Ariyoshi Sawako, Sono Ayako, and the Lived Experience of Women in Japan 154 —Barbara Hartley 10 Dangerous Women and Dangerous Stories: Gendered Narration in Kirino Natsuo’s Grotesque and Real World 170 —Kathryn Hemmann Part IV Rethinking Boundaries 11 Yamakawa Kikue and Edward Carpenter: Translation, Affiliation, and Queer Internationalism 187 —Sarah Frederick 12 Rethinking Japanese Feminism and the Lessons of Ūman Ribu: Toward a Praxis of Critical Transnational Feminism 205 —Setsu Shigematsu 13 Toward Postcolonial Feminist Subjectivity: Korean Women’s Redress Movement for “Comfort Women” 230 —Akwi Seo 14 Takemura Kazuko: On Friendship and the Queering of American and Japanese Studies 251 —J. Keith Vincent Conclusion On Rethinking Japanese Feminisms 267 —Ayako Kano Contributors 283 Index 289 6715_Book.indd 6 8/3/17 3:42 PM Acknowledgments his volume grew out of a 2013 conference on Japanese feminisms T that was supported by Emory University and the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies. The conference offered an unprecedented opportunity to “rethink modern Japanese feminisms” from a broad array of disciplinary, temporal, geographical, and theoreti- cal perspectives, and it generated an overwhelmingly positive response from attendees. This book is the result of that gathering and the enthu- siasm of participants. In addition to the volume’s contributors, the editors would like to acknowledge the efforts of the many individuals who contributed time, effort, and intellectual horsepower to the honing of the essays that are included here. They include Jan Bardsley, Laura Dales, Hikari Hori, Ronald Loftus, Dina Lowy, Elizabeth Miles, and especially Vera Mackie, Barbara Molony, and Ueno Chizuko, whose inspiring keynote speeches at the conference are taken up in this volume’s conclusion. We would also like to thank Sarah Jiajia Wang, Kirsten Seuffert, and Sumiko Hatakeyama for assistance with the bibliographical sources and for proofreading. The University of Pennsylvania provided financial assis- tance for image reproduction and producing the index. In addition, at the University of Hawai‘i Press, we would like to thank our editor, Pamela Kelley, for smoothly steering this project through to completion, and Wendy Bolton, for her meticulous copyediting. We are also extremely grateful to two anonymous reviewers who provided vii 6715_Book.indd 7 8/3/17 3:42 PM viii Acknowledgments excellent feedback that helped us to improve the introduction and helped individual authors to improve their chapters. Finally, the editors would like to acknowledge all the scholars of Japanese women’s studies and feminist studies who have contributed to the creation of these fields, making this volume possible. 6715_Book.indd 8 8/3/17 3:42 PM Introduction Julia C. Bullock, Ayako Kano, and James Welker he great diversity of feminist issues and practices represented T in this volume should make it clear why we have opted to write about “feminisms” in the plural. When the editors of this volume first con- ceived the idea for a book on modern Japanese feminisms, already more than a decade into the twenty-first century, it seemed an opportune time to reassess the many ways that feminist thought and activism have shaped modern Japanese society, as well as take stock of what work remained for future generations of scholars and activists. The chapters in this book work toward the rethinking of Japanese feminisms in several ways. Some authors throw light on ideas and prac- tices that resonate with feminist thought but find expression through the work of writers, artists, activists, and laborers who have not typi- cally been considered feminist. These scholars call on us to reconsider, and perhaps expand, the types of thought and praxis that we generally include within a feminist rubric. The authors of other chapters revisit specific moments in the history of Japanese feminisms in order to com- plicate or challenge the dominant scholarly and popular understandings of specific activists, practices, and beliefs. Rethinking Japanese Feminisms draws from and builds on the work of scholars, activists, and thinkers researching and publishing about “femi- nisms” since the 1970s, when the field of women’s studies emerged world- wide, becoming known in Japan as joseigaku. The intervening decades have seen the repositioning of women’s studies as gender studies, fol- lowed by gender and sexuality studies, which itself has often incorpo- rated or overlapped with a field now called LGBT/LGBTQ studies or 1 6715_Book.indd 1 8/3/17 3:42 PM 2 Julia C. Bullock, Ayako Kano, and James Welker simply queer studies. These new perspectives have reshaped how we con- ceive of modern female subjects, and, much as feminist scholarship was instrumental in the development of queer studies, so too has queer stud- ies influenced feminist scholarship—in Japan and elsewhere. Written by scholars who employ methodologies and theoretical perspectives from anthropology, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, lit- erature, media studies, queer studies, and sociology, the chapters in this volume reflect the influence of these theoretical and methodological shifts. Building on previous scholarship over the past several decades that has explored Japanese culture through the lens of gender and sexuality studies, the essays in this volume apply these insights toward an assess- ment of the past, present, and future of feminisms in Japan.1 The chapters that follow have been organized into sections focused on Activism and Activists, Education and Employment, Literature and the Arts, and Boundaries—specifically, ways feminist activism and thought in Japan have transcended national and cultural borders. Each section is preceded by a brief introduction underlining key points made in each of the chapters and highlighting common themes across the chapters. The conclusion, by Ayako Kano, considers questions of the canonization, nationality, and future of Japanese feminisms, drawing on keynote talks given by leading scholars of feminism, Vera Mackie, Barbara Molony, and Ueno Chizuko, at the 2013 conference. By way of providing context for these chapters, the remainder of this Introduction provides a historical overview of feminisms in Japan. An Introduction