The attempt to remake or reconfigure national boundaries had implications for all aspects of Japanese society and culture, not the least of which was the reimagining of the female body. Based on over a decade of research, this wide-ranging, lively, up-to-date book will both spark discussion among specialists grappling with long-enduring subjects of intellectual debate and animate undergraduate and graduate classrooms on modern Japanese women’s history and gender studies.ĭuring the opening years of the Shōwa period (1925–1940), Japan embarked upon a mission to expand not only its sphere of influence but the bounds of its national territory, which eventually encompassed what came to be called the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere (Daitōa kyōeiken). By covering an entire century, Japanese Feminist Debates is able to trace the origins and development of feminist consciousness from the late nineteenth century to the present day. It also situates these debates in relation to modern Japanese social policy and comparative discussions about welfare regimes. Part of the answer lies in the contested definitions of gender equality and women’s liberation, and this book traces these contentions over the course of modern Japanese history.

Kano argues that these feminist debates explain an important paradox: why Japan is such a highly developed modern nation yet ranks dismally low in gender equality. Her focus on the 'rondan'-the Japanese intellectual public sphere-allows her to show how disputes taking place therein interacted with both popular culture and policy making. Focusing on essential questions that have yet to be resolved, Ayako Kano traces the emergence and development of these controversies in relation to social, cultural, intellectual, and political history. The book is organized around intellectually and politically charged debates, including important recent developments in state feminism and the conservative backlash against it, spearheaded by the current prime minister, Abe Shinzō. Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor contributes to this discussion in a number of unique ways. This new volume brings to light Japan’s feminist public sphere, a discursive space in which academic, journalistic, and political voices have long met and sparred over issues that remain controversial to the present day: prostitution, pornography, reproductive rights, the balance between motherhood and paid work, relationships between individual, family, and state. Recent years have seen a surge of interest in Japanese feminism and gender history. This thought-provoking work will appeal to scholars of feminist theory, cultural studies and Japanese studies. Using translation as a theoretical tool to decentre the West as the origin of (feminist) theorizations of the maternal, it enables a transnational dialogue for imagining mothers' potential for violence. Drawing on a wide range of original archival materials, it explores three discursive sites where the image of the murderous mother assumed a distinctive visibility: media coverage of cases of maternal filicide the rhetoric of a newly emerging women’s liberation movement known as ūman ribu and fictional works by the Japanese writer Takahashi Takako. It offers a snapshot of a historical and social moment when motherhood was being renegotiated, and maternal violence was disrupting norms of acceptable maternal behaviour. This book provides the first full-length, English-language investigation of the multiple and often contradictory ways in which mothers who kill their children were portrayed in 1970s Japan.

The goddess chronicles