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

I N T R O D U C T I O N Ūman Ribu as Solidarity and Difference In 1970, a new women’s liberation movement, known as ūman ribu (woman lib), erupted across Japan. This grassroots feminist movement was catalyzed by the 1960s uprisings in the wake of the anti–Vietnam War movement, student movements, and New Left radicalism. This book forwards an analysis of the historical significance of ūman ribu and its politics, philosophy, legacy, and lessons for the future. As part of the crest of social movements that arose internationally during the 1960s and 1970s, ūman ribu can be understood as a particular incarnation of radical feminism, born from the cross-fertilizations of genealogies of resistance both domestic and international. A study of ūman ribu offers a vital contribution to understanding the gendered formations of Japanese modernity, imperialism, and the limits of postwar liberal democracy and its complex leftist history. Ūman ribu activists forwarded an incisive critique of Japanese national imperialism and how its dynamics of discrimination shaped Japanese leftist culture. Beyond assessing ūman ribu within the framework of the nation-state, a close examination of its historical and political formation illuminates the international and transpaci fic dimensions of the feminist and liberation movements of this era. The study of any non-Euro-American, or non-Western, feminist formation must, at the outset, take into account the implications of the constructed global divisions of West and East, first and third worlds, north and south, and their racialized and gendered significance. This framework is further complicated by Japan’s complex rivalry with Western “civilization,” its history as an imperialist power, and its colonial legacy that articulates through the ūman ribu movement in multiple ways. This project is therefore necessarily positioned within and against the centuries-long orientalizing gaze that sees the non-West as subordinate, inferior, feminized, and colored, yet xvi I N T R O D U CT I O N it remains mindful of the racialized and first-world geopolitical status of the nation-state designated Japan.1 My project, as an interpretive analysis of this feminist movement, seeks to unsettle Euro-American epistemic hegemonies and imperializing powerknowledge formations, constituting a critical counterdiscourse that exposes the domesticating implications of certain master narratives that would seek to render resistant subjects marginal. While some may argue that the numerical size of ūman ribu, approximating a few thousand participants during the early 1970s, was marginal compared to the massive memberships of existing Japanese women’s movements, the importance of its historic interventions and its critique of modern society and the Japanese left cannot be adequately measured by a sociological enumeration of its participants.2 Ūman ribu not only was a past social movement but also constituted a political identity and a living philosophy. Its political interventions and contradictions remain as relevant lessons for our present political condition. Many ūman ribu activists were variously involved in the New Left and the anti–Vietnam War and student movements of the late 1960s, and they learned many difficult, painful, and productive lessons from those formative experiences . Most ribu participants were college-educated young intellectuals, largely women in their twenties and thirties. They had come of age in the education system that had undergone democratic reforms during the U.S. occupation, and thus they witnessed the limits of Japan’s democracy and experienced the contradictions of inequalities within a capitalist state. As women who were predominantly ethnic-majority Japanese and largely from the postwar Japanese middle and lower-middle classes, they occupied a positionality that was relatively privileged yet discontent. In sync with the student rebellions and middle-class dissent erupting across cities around the world, the women of ribu identified with this larger wave of revolt. As a network of urban-based autonomous groups, ribu groups did not seek to establish a hierarchical organization or appoint a formal representative or leader, which characterized the new organizing style of the late-1960s movements.3 Its break from the existing constellation of progressive and leftist movements was based on its emphasis on the “liberation of sex” and the “liberation of onna.” Ribu adopted and politicized the term onna, a term for women that was imbued with sexualized connotations. Linguist Orie Endo states that onna “contains a strong and negative sexual connotation” and can be considered disrespectful, taboo, and “dirty.”4 Ribu activist Sayama Sachi writes that precisely because onna emphasized a “sexual being, with many desires” and had a negative...

Share