Scream from the Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan

1. Origins of the Other/Onna: The Violence of Motherhood and the Birth of Ribu

C H A P T E R O N E Origins of the Other/Onna The Violence of Motherhood and the Birth of Ribu Declarations like the “scream from the womb” and the “truth spoken by the vagina” were emblematic of the discourse that distinguished ūman ribu (woman lib) from its political predecessors. Ūman ribu was conceived from the cross-fertilization of multiple political and intellectual genealogies that catalyzed a new social movement. This chapter traces the political genealogy of ūman ribu by mapping the points of divergence, (dis)continuities, and fault lines that distinguished it from other women’s movements in Japan. Ribu’s relationship to mainstream Japanese women’s movements was highly critical, involving a deliberate distance and break from the existing constellation of political organizations such as housewife associations, women’s democratic leagues, and mothers’ peace movements.1 Ribu activists were thoroughly critical of the modern family system and political movements that were premised on the identities of wives and mothers. The extent of ūman ribu’s critique and rejection of the legitimacy of the family system marked a decisive break from both existing women’s movements and the left. In the course of tracing these fissures, I outline why ūman ribu can be defined as a specific form of radical feminism in contradistinction to other women’s movements. Ribu’s discourse exposed how the overwhelming majority of postwar women’s organizations failed to offer a critique of the interconnections between Japanese imperialism, discrimination , and the family system. Ribu activists thus distinguished themselves as a radical feminist movement through their critical denunciation of the modern family system as a foundational reproductive mechanism of a discriminatory society. “Origins of the Other/Onna” thus examines ribu’s critical relation to other 4 O R I G I N S O F T H E OT H ER / ONNA Japanese women’s movements as well as how ribu’s discourse about the liberation of onna was an extension of this critique. In contrast to other Japanese words for woman, such as fujin (lady) or josei (the generic term for woman), ribu’s deliberate use of onna signaled the politicization of what was widely considered a pejorative term, with sexual or lower-class connotations. Ribu’s reclamation of onna was linked with its rejection of the legitimacy of the gender-conforming roles of shufu (housewife) and haha (mother) that were rooted in the family system. Ribu activists critiqued the family system as a microcosm of Japan’s male-centered (dansei-chūshin) discriminatory capitalist order. Ribu’s politics around giving birth and abortion expressed the movement’s aims to liberate sex from the confines of this order. Many ribu women rejected the marriage system and instead created communes where they lived together with their children to express their rejection of the family system. In stark contrast to the feminine identities of fujin (lady) and shufu (housewife ), ribu allied itself with criminalized women. In the early 1970s, ribu activists declared their solidarity with mothers who killed their children— known as kogoroshi no onna (child-killing onna)—symbolizing a bold repudiation of the prescribed roles for women. Ribu’s collective response to these “violent mothers” demonstrates how the movement articulated a distinct conception of the relationship between women and violence that recognizes the potential power of onna to engage in a mutiny against an oppressive system .2 By critically engaging with kogoroshi no onna who symbolized, at once, the violence and violation of motherhood (bosei) and the potential violence within mothers, ribu activists forwarded an alternative feminist conception of violence. The final part of this chapter focuses on how one of the movement’s leading activists and theorists, Tanaka Mitsu, elaborated a distinct theory about women, abortion, and violence that remains a compelling contribution to feminist thought. The Contradictions of Postwar Equality, Peace, and Democracy After the catastrophic culmination of a series of Japan’s wars and interimperialist conflict across Asia, World War II ended in August 1945. During the U.S. Occupation (1945–52), Japan’s political system was dismantled and reformed under the command of General Douglas MacArthur. As scholars have noted, “The transformation of the Japanese national polity from a wartime belligerent nation to a demilitarized and peaceful one was a highly gendered process.”3 The governmental regulation of the Japanese family began in the twentieth O R I G I N S O...