In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S This book was made possible through the support of multiple communities of activists, teachers, mentors, colleagues, friends, comrades, and loved ones. I have lived with this project for a long time, and its deepest roots exceed my own life and genealogy. My journey through the archives and fieldwork to the completion of this book took many detours and processes of protracted renegotiation and resolution. As a 1.5-generation privileged Japanese immigrant, born in Denenchōfu, Tokyo, but raised in a white working-class Canadian neighborhood in Surrey, British Columbia, my experience of the uneven assemblages of racism, sexism, and classism informed my motives for pursuing a graduate degree in the humanities. I went to graduate school at Cornell University, thanks to Tom Lamarre’s mentorship when I was an undergraduate at McGill University. Cornell proved to be a stimulating and fertile terrain. After a full-time immersion in those texts and theorists across the overlapping fields of continental philosophy, feminist theory, and Japanese philosophy, my relative dissonance with how feminist high theory meant almost exclusively Eurocentric feminist criticism impelled me down new paths of inquiry. I wondered about those lesser or unknown feminist revolutionaries and radicals who could challenge the boundaries of feminist theory and explode orientalist myths of the other. I first heard of Tanaka Mitsu from former members of the Japanese New Left who were visiting scholars at Cornell. After I located some of Tanaka’s writings as a graduate student in the late 1990s, her Japanese words of poetic rage became my entry point into the history of the movement. I am fortunate to have been the beneficiary of a constellation of scholars at Cornell who all taught me important lessons. The patience and support of my committee members as I made plenty of detours, including martial arts as 182 AC K N OW L ED G M EN TS a feminist praxis, was deeply appreciated. Naoki Sakai, my advisor, modeled the importance of taking a stance based on the political stakes of knowledge production; his imprint has been formative, and I am indebted to his support and principled generosity. I am grateful for Brett de Bary’s sensitive and meticulous approach to handling people and texts, for Victor Koschmann’s breadth of knowledge and consistency, and to Shelley Wong for introducing me to Asian American and ethnic studies. Gary Okihiro’s commitment to mentoring graduate students and his reflections on the greater purpose of the struggle from within the academy remain with me. My friendship with Susie Lee (Pak) and Jean Kim, as well as my other compadres during my graduate school years, sustained me in the early phases of this work; Jolisa Gracewood, Tamara Loos, Sara Friedman, Katsu Endo, Ilse Ackerman, Paula and Joshua Young, and Rich Calichman were notable in this regard. The first fourteen months of my fieldwork, from October 1999 to December 2000, was generously supported by a Japan Foundation Dissertation Research Grant. My original plans to study at Ochanomizu Women’s University were not feasible due to Tachi Kaoru’s leave of absence, so I ended up at the University of Tokyo, where Ueno Chizuko was generous enough to serve as my official advisor. It was an eye-opening experience to be a participant–observer in her famous seminars. Seeing how feminism can be transfigured and coarticulated in the most unexpected and innovative ways is one of Ueno’s trademarks and has enabled her unparalleled contribution to postwar Japanese feminist history and publishing. I was able to extend my field research for two more years, from March 2001 to March 2003, as a recipient of a Monbusho Research Scholarship. I appreciated the opportunity to conduct such extensive research over this three-year period from 1999 to 2003, when I was able to interact with and get to know many ribu activists and Japanese feminist scholars. Because of my affiliation with Ueno Chizuko and the University of Tokyo, it was sometimes difficult to negotiate the preexisting tensions and conflicts between some ribu activists and Ueno and the signifying power of the imperial university. During my fieldwork, I spent a significant amount of time with Tanaka Mitsu. I studied Eastern medicine (tōyōigaku) with her for six months as a student in her classes at the Asahi Cultural Center in Shibuya, and I worked as a volunteer for the Okinawan music...

Share