Transforming Japan: How Feminism and Diversity are Making a Difference

Notes on Contributors

397 notes on Contributors Keiko Aiba, who received a PhD in sociology from Washington State University, is currently associate professor in the Faculty of International Studies at Meiji Gakuin University. She has researched various aspects of gender relations in Japan and her writings include “Refreshing Beers and Caring Skin: The Construction of Gender in Japanese Television Commercials” (with Raymond A. Jussaume), in Journal of National Women’s Education Center (1998), and “JobLevel Sex Composition and the Sex Pay Gap in a Large Japanese Firm” (with Amy Wharton) in Sociological Perspectives (2001). She is currently looking at how gender and body are intertwined through an ethnographic study of Japanese women professional wrestlers. Besides her essay in this volume, she has published several other articles on Japanese women professional wrestlers such as “Tatakaku gino to jiko boei: joshi puroresuraa no shintai to jendaa” (Combat skills and self-defense: gender and the bodies of wrestlers), in Jendaa & sekushuariti (Gender & Sexuality) (2008), and Joshi puroresuraa no kega to itami (Injuries and pains of Japanese women professional wrestlers), in Supootsu to jendaa kenkyu (Journal of sport and gender studies) (2010). Chieko Akaishi, who received a BA from the Department of Sociology at Tokyo University, is an activist and writer. Herself a single mother, she is involved in single mothers’ self-support efforts, the movement to bring about change in inheritance laws in the civil code pertaining to children of unmarried couples or mothers, and also movements to fight poverty. She is a director of the nonprofit organization Shinguru mazaazu fooramu (Single Mothers’ Forum), an editor for Femin fujin minshu shimbun (Femin Women’s Democratic Newspaper ), and a representative of Han-hinkon netto (Antipoverty network) and Josei to hinkon netto (Women and poverty network). Her writings include Shinguru mazaa ni kanpai (Cheers to single mothers) (2001), Shinguru mazaa no anata ni kurashi o norikiru 53 no hoho (53 ways for single mothers to overcome hardships of living) (2008), and Jendaa no kiki o koeru (Overcoming the crisis of gender) (2006). Kaoru Aoyama obtained her PhD in sociology from the University of Essex, UK, in 2005. She has specialized in issues of gender/sexuality, social inclusion/exclusion , transborder migration, and sex work/trafficking. Striving to create theo- 398 retically and methodologically sound social research that will be useful for those being researched, she has been involved in team research projects including one on women returnee migrants in northern Thailand and another on migrant sex workers in Japan, both led by migrants and/or sex workers themselves. In addition , her activism with a Tokyo-based independent organization called People’s Plan Study Group, revolves around networking of socially committed academics and activists toward participatory democracy beyond national and other hierarchical borders. She is currently an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Inter-cultural Studies, Kobe University. Her monograph in English, Thai Migrant Sex Workers: From Modernisation to Globalisation, was published by Palgrave/Macmillan in 2009. Chieko M. Ariga is a research faculty at the Department of Languages & Literature, University of Utah. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago. Her special research areas are Edo literature, women’s literature, feminist criticism, and cultural studies. Her essays and translations have appeared in such journals as the International Journal of Social Education, IRIS, Journal of Asian Studies, Manoa, Monumenta Nipponica, and U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal (for which she served as the journal’s associate editor, 1990-2002). She is the author of Jendaa kaitai no kiseki: bungaku, seido, bunka (Strategy of degendering: literature, institutions, and culture) (1996). Aya Ezawa received her PhD in sociology from the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign and is currently university lecturer in the Sociology of Modern Japan in the Japanese Studies Program at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on the gender and class dimensions of social policy, as well as their implications for the living conditions of single mothers in contemporary Japan. Her most recent research has been funded by an Abe Fellowship from the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership, and has been published, among others, in Japanstudien, Kikan shakai hosho kenkyu (Japanese Quarterly for Social Security Research), and Social Class in Contemporary Japan: Structures , Sorting and Strategies, edited by David Slater and Hiroshi Ishida. Mioko Fujieda, professor emerita of women’s studies and dean of the faculty of humanities at Kyoto Seika University, has written widely on Japanese feminism. She is the supervising translator in Japanese of the books Sexual Politics, by Kate Millet, and The...