Dignity: A Journal on Sexual Exploitation and Violence Volume 4 Issue 4 Article 4 1-2020 Feminist Action Against Pornography in Japan: Unexpected Success in an Unlikely Place Caroline Norma Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, [email protected] Seiya Morita Kokugakuin University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dignity Part of the Asian Studies Commons, Civic and Community Engagement Commons, Community-Based Research Commons, Courts Commons, Criminal Law Commons, Criminology Commons, Domestic and Intimate Partner Violence Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, Human Rights Law Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Law and Gender Commons, Law and Society Commons, Legal Remedies Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, Sexuality and the Law Commons, Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance Commons, and the Social Work Commons Recommended Citation Norma, Caroline and Morita, Seiya (2020) "Feminist Action Against Pornography in Japan: Unexpected Success in an Unlikely Place," Dignity: A Journal on Sexual Exploitation and Violence: Vol. 4: Iss. 4, Article 4. DOI: 10.23860/dignity.2019.04.04.04 Available at: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dignity/vol4/iss4/4https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dignity/ vol4/iss4/4 This Research and Scholarly Article is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@URI. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dignity: A Journal on Sexual Exploitation and Violence by an authorized editor of DigitalCommons@URI. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Feminist Action Against Pornography in Japan: Unexpected Success in an Unlikely Place Abstract In late 2016 a feminist movement against problems of commercial sexual exploitation, and especially issues of coerced pornography filming, arose in Japan. This article describes the history of this movement as it mobilized to combat human rights violations perpetrated by the country’s pornographers. The movement’s success came not spontaneously or haphazardly; in fact, it was orchestrated earlier over a full decade-and-a-half by activists who persevered in researching and highlighting pornography’s harms in a civil environment of hostility, isolation and social derision, even among progressive groups and individuals. The Anti-Pornography and Prostitution Research Group (APP) was particularly prominent in this history. Its members were inspired and instructed early on by the work of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin in bringing to public attention victims’ accounts of pornography’s harms in the US from the 1980s, and they attempted to follow this example. The example of feminist anti-pornography activism we described here, therefore, is a case of unlikely political success achieved in an unexpected place (e.g., Japan currently ranks 110th-place in global gender equality league tables), and it is offered in real-world example of MacKinnon’s "butterfly" model of radical social change. Keywords Japan, feminist, pornography, commercial sexual exploitation, pornographers, harm, movement, social change, Anti-Pornography and Prostitution Research Group, Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, court, legal, “butterfly model” Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Acknowledgements The authors acknowledge and thank members of the Anti-Pornography and Prostitution Research Group (APP) and the Organization for Pornography and Sexual Exploitation Survivors (PAPS). Dignity thanks the following people for the time and expertise to review this article: Heather Brunskell-Evans, Visiting Research Fellow, Kings College, London; Rebecca Whisnant, Associate Professor and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies Program, University of Dayton, Ohio; and Mary Anne Layden, Director of Education, Center for Cognitive Therapy, Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania This research and scholarly article is available in Dignity: A Journal on Sexual Exploitation and Violence: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dignity/vol4/iss4/4 Norma and Morita: Feminist Action Against Pornography in Japan Volume 4, Issue 4, Article 4, 2019 https://doi.org/10.23860/dignity.2019.04.04.04 FEMINIST ACTION AGAINST PORNOGRAPHY IN JAPAN: UNEXPECTED SUCCESS IN AN UNLIKELY PLACE Caroline Norma Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Australia Seiya Morita Kokugakuin University, Japan ABSTRACT In late 2016 a feminist movement against problems of commercial sexual exploitation, especially issues of coerced pornography filming, arose in Japan. This article describes the history of this movement as it mobilized to combat human rights violations perpetrated by the country’s pornographers. The movement’s success came not spontaneously or haphazardly; in fact, it was orchestrated earlier over a full decade-and-a-half by activists who persevered in researching and highlighting pornography’s harms in a civil environment of hostility, isolation and social derision, even among progressive groups and individuals. The Anti-Pornography and Prostitution Research Group (APP) was particularly prominent in this history. Its members were inspired and instructed early on by the work of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin in bringing to public attention victim accounts of pornography’s harms in the US from the 1980s, and they attempted to follow this example. The example of feminist anti-pornography activism described here is a case of unlikely political success achieved in an unexpected place, given that Japan ranks 110th-place in global gender equality league tables out of 150 countries, and it is offered as a real-world example of MacKinnon’s “butterfly” model of radical social change. KEYWORDS Japan, feminist, pornography, commercial sexual exploitation, pornographers, harm, movement, social change, Anti-Pornography and Prostitution Research Group, Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, court, legal, “butterfly model” [S]mall actions in a collective context can produce systemic changes. But- terfly politics encourages multidimensional political thinking, precise en- gagement, principled creativity, imagination, instinct, and adaptability. It inspires interventions, even tiny ones…Equality seekers, spread your wings. You’re stronger than you think. You never know what can happen (MacKinnon, 2017, p. 8). HE #METOO MOVEMENT that emerged in the United States in 2017 to rally against male sexual harassment and assault of women in work, and which T continues today in different guises in a number of countries, does not yet encompass those women for whom male sexual harassment and assault is work. Melissa Farley raised the question, “Will we include prostituted women under the #MeToo umbrella as sisters who are both victims of male violence and survivors of Published by DigitalCommons@URI, 2019 1 Dignity: A Journal on Sexual Exploitation and Violence, Vol. 4, Iss. 4 [2019], Art. 4 it?” (2018), and Catharine MacKinnon also wrote that the test of the #MeToo movement’s truly transformative nature will be whether or not it leads to men “who outright buy others for sexual use” being “unmasked and penalized as the predators they are” (2019, pp. xxii-xxiii). This failure of #MeToo advocates to un- derstand prostitution and pornography as fundamental blueprints for, and pure forms of, the workplace sexual harassment they campaign against is a critique of the movement by its loyalist friends. From an international viewpoint, however, these friends possibly judge too harshly. The #MeToo movement in South Korea, for example, campaigns against male celebrities prostituting and pimping women, and this focus has only strength- ened since the outbreak of the Burning Sun club scandal in January 2019, which involved male celebrities mediating the prostitution of women through high-end clubs under their ownership (“Police step up probe of Burning Sun club,” 2019). Before this, moreover, from late 2017, South Korea’s feminist movement was ani- mated by the issue of illicitly captured “spy-cam” footage uploaded to a domesti- cally hosted pornography website called Sora.net (Cho, 2014). In other words, the Korean #MeToo movement, which in fact arose earlier than its counterpart in the US when a feminist rally was held to protest a Gangnam railway station femicide in May 2016 (Boroweic, 2016), has, over the course of its development, come to center practices of commercial sexual exploitation in its campaigning. In Korea there exists, therefore, a #MeToo movement that passes some of the test that Far- ley and MacKinnon wish to see met by movement advocates in the United States. This Korean precedent for the global #MeToo movement is, of course, well known in the English-speaking feminist world (Kuk, Park & Norma, 2018), and has attracted celebration and journalistic attention in both feminist and mainstream media outlets. Furthermore, it attracts even greater attention among Japanese feminists, for different reasons. In Japan, Korea’s #MeToo movement is of interest as a counterpoint lesson for introspective questioning of what went wrong in the local movement, and why it failed when its Korean counterpart flourished. Widely lamented is journalist survivor Shiori Ito ̄ being forced to flee to England from Japan one year after she emerged to lead the #MeToo movement in late 2017 with the publication of her book-length testimonial of a work-related rape, and subsequent media conferences describing her violent victimization by