Gender and Human Rights Politics in Japan: Global Norms and Domestic Networks (review)

Jennifer Chan-Tiberghien's Gender and Human Rights Politics in Japan traces the reframing and diffusion of women's and children's rights as human rights norms in Japan since the early 1990s. It both reveals the relationship between global and domestic activism over women's and children's issues and illuminates the methods Japanese activists have employed to promote change at all levels of government and society. The book's forte is its attention to the many-faceted activities of nongovernmental activists, particularly "the elaborate educational process that . . . global campaigns entail," a process that supplies a crucial link between transnational activism and domestic political change (p. 142; italics in the original). Whether one is interested in international politics, gender issues, human rights pedagogy, the dynamics of societal change in Japan, or Japanese governmental processes, this is a provocative commentary worth reading.

Chan-Tiberghien identifies clear shifts in discursive practices over women's and children's issues in the 1990s and offers a parsimonious explanation for what produced these shifts. The study considers the achievement of policy change in five issues of sexuality historically resistant to change in Japan: legalization of birth control pills, sexual harassment prevention, military sexual slavery, domestic violence, and child prostitution. For each issue, the author attributes concrete policy changes to efforts by Japanese activists with links to broader transnational human rights movements. In this account, the critical factor that has enabled policy changes in Japan is the reframing of these issues as human rights issues at international conferences. Subsequently, local educational and awareness-raising efforts, combined with leverage politics, have then promoted the diffusion of these reframed norms in Japan.

Chan-Tiberghien demonstrates persuasively that a shift toward interpreting women's and children's rights as human rights has occurred in government institutions, policy guidelines, and legislated changes. The author explains this shift by arguing that several international conferences in the 1990s contributed to a reframing of issues in human rights terms, in particular, the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, and the First World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in Stockholm in 1996. From these meetings, issues of sexuality emerged as human rights issues, and this transformation helped in raising societal awareness and ultimately government adoption of new policies. Attention to educational efforts enables the author to identify the mechanisms through which international and domestic movements have influenced both the central government and local communities.

The book's organization builds toward an integrated analysis of this process of change in norms and policies. Early chapters present overviews of key elements of the process of development and dissemination of human rights norms, by providing background on the global human rights movement at the United Nations level (chapter three) and an introduction to relevant recent policy changes in Japan (chapter four). Central chapters look at activities of movement organizations that have promoted the spread of a human rights interpretation of women's and children's issues. Chapter six on human rights education is unquestionably among the strongest chapters of the book in the way it introduces "educational activities" that "have drastically redefined the purpose, subject, categories of trainers and learners, pedagogy, curriculum, and space of education in Japan" (p. 76). Besides identifying concrete processes through which activists and researchers have raised public awareness of women's and children's issues as human rights issues, the portrayal of Japanese bureaucrats' initiatives constitutes a strong case that nongovernmental activism has had an impact on state institutions. Chapter seven presents an instance of active international participation of Japanese nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) at the World Conference against Racism in 2001 and brings to the fore the position of minority women in the broader women's movement. Having examined processes at the global and local levels...