Blood Ties: Intimate violence in Shinzô Abe’s Japan

staff sgt. warren peace

I first met Keiko Kondo in Tokyo in spring 2012. Like all of us, she was struggling to comprehend, a year on, what Japan’s triple disaster—earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor meltdown—meant. The crisis stirred social activism as citizens began to question government and industry’s handling of the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, but it also galvanized a conservative push for national unity. At that moment, it was clear that March 11, 2011—“3/11”—marked a turning point for Japanese society and politics. But it was unclear which direction that turn would take.

Kondo stands on the front lines of intimate violence in Japan as director of the All Japan Women’s Shelter Network (ShelterNet), a nonprofit organization that coordinates 67 privately run women’s shelters in the country, and in 2011, she and her colleagues found themselves overwhelmed with calls from the worst-hit areas. It was from that vantage point that she made a critique of the post-disaster rally-around-the-flag rhetoric that stuck with me.

Kizuna, the bonds between people, emerged as a buzzword after 3/11. Entertainers promoted events to raise money for the affected areas in the name of kizuna; government officials organized programs to bolster kizuna; a new center-left political party formed as the Kizuna Party. Kondo noted that calls to strengthen kizuna put victims of domestic violence in a precarious position. In regions affected by the tsunami and nuclear meltdown, legal definitions of families often threw women back into cramped temporary housing developments with their abusive husbands. Those, like Kondo, working to support women extricating themselves from violent households understood that there are cases when kizuna kills—when the bonds that link families become bondage.

Five years later, the situation regarding intimate violence has worsened. The events known as 3/11 represented a critical moment, Kondo told me in June. In a time of insecurity, the nation looked to the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which had been in power almost continuously from 1955 to 2009. Shinzô Abe, after an unsuccessful first term from 2006 to 2007, returned as prime minister in 2012 and renewed his assault on citizens’ rights.

This time around, Abe has softened his reactionary tone, and relies instead on the rhetoric of economic growth to maintain political popularity. Abe played a key role in attacks on gender-equality policies in 2005, portraying feminist scholars and bureaucrats who sought to create a “gender-free” curriculum in schools as radical, destructive, and even “reminiscent of Pol Pot’s faction.” In his second term, Abe has co-opted the language of female empowerment to push for economic reform. He seeks deregulation of labor markets, in part to tap into the potential of Japan’s highly educated women to stimulate the lagging national economy. But for Abe, neoliberal policies work together with a conservative, sexist vision of society. In his attempts to revise the postwar Constitution to bolster supposedly traditional notions of family, Abe is reinforcing the understanding that women belong to their spouses—an idea that leads to abuse and can trap women in unsafe relationships. Citing government programs such as matchmaking events and a women’s health bill that critics attack as focused on the fitness of wombs rather than that of women, Kondo questions the substance of Abe’s calls for women to be more active in Japanese society: “Behind slogans about empowerment are policies that actually say [to women], ‘give birth, increase [the population], work, throw away your individual identity, and devote yourself to your families and your nation.’”

THE SCOPE OF VIOLENCE

Kondo speaks with the authority of decades of experience. An assertive but welcoming person, she began her activism in the far north of Japan, in Hokkaido, working in grass-roots advocacy for women’s rights in the 1980s. Kondo co-founded ShelterNet in 1998 after participating in the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing, organizing the first international symposium on women’s shelters in Japan in 1996, and...