Mizuta Noriko: Biocritical Essay of a Literary Feminist and Global Scholar

Introduction: Feminist Talk

Tokyo, Japan. September 9, 2018: Professors Wachi Yasuko, Kitada Sachie, and I sit around Professor Mizuta Noriko's dining room table, laden with homecooked foods, sandwiches, and snacks.¹ After carefully ladling chilled edamame soup and warm beef stew into ceramic bowls, Mizuta takes the seat closest to the kitchen. While enjoying the hospitality of a scholar skilled at entertaining, we talk for more than ten hours. Our conversation traverses time and space—from the 1940s to the future, from Japan to the United States and back again. We discuss the influence of social and political movements on education; life stories are narrated through the context of internationalization and changing notions of home. We debate the power of literature to articulate what is otherwise difficult to express. We gossip about authors, as the group excitedly plans an event to honor poet Yosano Akiko (1878-1942).² We talk of international exchange, literary depiction, feminist criticism, the formation of academic disciplines and universities, and women's roles in the workplace and family, all topics that demonstrate the intimate intersection of the professional and personal in the lives of female academics. This intersection is especially true for Mizuta—professor, university chancellor, literary critic, translator, essayist, poet, founder of journals, and convener of groups of scholars like the one around today's table, among her many other jobs. This "biocritical" essay—part biography, part academic analysis—explains how Mizuta's life choices, including those to study and teach in the United States and to establish feminist movements and universities in Japan, have indelibly impacted the fields of literature and gender studies. Her work has increased awareness of the diversity of women's lived experiences and the politics underlying women's cultural representation. By voicing her own beliefs, Mizuta has encouraged other women to speak out and be heard.

This "biocritical" essay is based on conversations with Mizuta held in 2017 and 2018 at her home and in cafes in Tokyo and on close reading of her publications in English and Japanese. It is not a comprehensive review of Mizuta's career, but instead an attempt to identity some of her major contributions and some themes common to her work. Her career epitomizes the belief in the power of education to influence worldviews and diplomatic relations. In addition to the remarkable number of publications (monographs, anthologies, edited volumes, poetry collections, articles, essays, and more) and awards (domestic and international) listed on her C.V. and in the bibliography included in this issue, Mizuta raised five children: three of whom became successful professors, one a lawyer, and another a musician³; her twelve grandchildren also have diverse interests and talents. As explained below, many interwoven strands of her work—finding modes of expression to convey the complex negotiation of being both an insider and outsider, amplifying silenced voices, changing expectations for women, providing forums for academic discussions, balancing family and employment outside the home, and forming communities—are part of larger feminist movements that Mizuta assembled. She was on the vanguard of second-wave feminism (dai ni nami feminizumu) and literary criticism that accounted for gender in evaluating an author's contributions. Mizuta's achievements and setbacks teach larger lessons about women's roles in the literary world, academy, household, and nation and demonstrate how individual decisions pay off in unexpected dividends for larger populations.

As Mizuta's observations below reveal, for the generation of Japanese female professors born in the 1930s, history and memory intertwined in often unanticipated ways. She came of age during a turning point in U.S.-Japan relations, when American education was particularly effective as a diplomatic tool and Japan was reemerging on the global scene as an American ally against communism and exporter of new ideas and technologies. She was educated in the 1960s and entered the workforce in the 1970s, when marginalized groups, as a means to get mainstream interests to acknowledge their existence and to encourage larger social and political transformations, demanded changes in academic structures; for example, these efforts resulted in the establishment of Women's Studies programs in the United States and Japan. Through her personal experiences and cultural production, Mizuta and other women who studied in the United States in the early Cold War Era facilitated a kind of "cultural cross-pollination," combining, even if somewhat haphazardly, diverse elements of both nations to extend international understanding, expand intellectual fields, and advance women's equality. Especially after becoming a university administrator in the 1980s and 1990s, Mizuta fostered Japanese intellectual exchange with Asia and Europe. As this biocritical essay argues, without Mizuta, feminist literary criticism and the field of Japanese gender studies would not have existed as we know them today.

Childhood and Education in Japan

August 19, 1937: Mizuta Noriko was born as the second daughter of a family that valued education and wrote poetry. Her mother, Mizuta Seiko (1912-2013), attended an elite girls' high school and later established a haiku poetry society in Tōgane City, Chiba Prefecture. She published five books of haiku and served in leadership positions in the National Haiku Society (Haijin Kyōkai). Her grandmother, Machida Sumiko (c. 1884-1974), was an elementary school teacher and one of the first women in Japan to earn a formal teaching license. In addition, she was one of only two hundred instructors of the Urasenke School of the Japanese "way of tea" and taught the practice of tea until a few years before her death. She, too, wrote haiku, and her husband, Mizuta's grandfather, Machida Hitoshi (c.1880-1954), was a haiku poet of some renown. Mizuta Noriko's famous father, Mikio Mizuta (1905-76), was active in Japanese government for more than thirty years; he was elected to the House of Representatives for thirteen consecutive terms and served as Minister of Finance six times (1960-72), in addition to holding several other important positions. During the Allied occupation, he helped develop the Fundamental Law of Education (Kyōiku kihonhō, 1947) and economic and taxation policies that fostered Japan's postwar growth.⁴ One of his primary objectives was to encourage the national government to cover fifty percent of the costs of compulsory education (Josai University, n.d.). As a culmination of his efforts in education, he founded Josai University in 1965 and served as chancellor until his death in 1976.

From 1943 to 1948, the family lived in Katsuyama and Tateyama, Chiba Prefecture, to avoid the aerial bombings of Tokyo during the war and to survive the difficult years after. Mizuta remembers hearing the Emperor's surrender speech on the radio on August 15, 1945. The horrors of war have never been far from her memory, as evident by recollections during our September 9, 2018 conversation and those written in personal essays and poems. Many of the authors, artists, and poets she chose to study suffered the trauma of war.

Mizuta entered Tokyo Woman's Christian University (Tokyo Joshi Daigaku) in 1956, at a time when only around 2.1 percent of women in Japan (12 percent of men) attended four-year universities (Mizuta 2004, 10). Tokyo Woman's Christian University, founded in 1918, is one of Japan's oldest private institutions and is known for English education. (Her parents had sent her to a Catholic junior high school and high school, which also taught English.) She graduated in March 1960 with a degree in American and British literature and began graduate school at Tokyo Metropolitan University (Tokyo Toritsu Daigaku) the following month. Through the guidance of her professors, Mizuta realized that the best way to study William Faulkner's (1897-1962) literature, then her thesis topic, was at an American graduate school. She applied to Princeton University but received the reply that the school did not accept women. Although not enrolling female undergraduates until 1969 (the same year Princeton became coed), Yale University allowed women in graduate programs. Mizuta was given the chance to study at Yale with Professor Cleanth Brooks (1906-94), a scholar of Faulkner, poetry specialist, and pioneer of New Criticism. Generally speaking, New Criticism was a formalist movement that developed in the mid-twentieth century in the United States to emphasize close reading of aesthetic worlds within texts rather than explication of such extratextual factors as reader responses and historical context. Brooks' close textual analysis differed from the academic examination of how literary works fit into authors' biographies and provide insight into their lives, an approach popular in Japan at the time. Mizuta's study at Yale led to academic and personal discoveries, altering both the course of her own life and that of the fields of literary and gender studies.

Yale Days and Literary Discoveries

September 1961: Mizuta entered Yale graduate school with nine other Japanese Fulbright recipients, including two women: Ishikawa Michiko (comparative politics) and Oyama Atsuko (linguistic theory).⁵ Fulbright Fellowships became available to Japanese graduate students starting in 1952, after the end of the Government Aid and Relief in Occupied Areas Program (GARIOA, 1949-52) that had been financed by Japan's war debt and administered by the United States Army. Fulbright differed from GARIOA, which was a more composite study-abroad program aimed at providing both firsthand engagement with American-style democracy and specialized academic learning to fill knowledge gaps in scholars' home countries; Fulbright focused more on the latter. GARIOA students were assigned to American universities by the Institute of International Education (IIE) and did not have any say in their placement. However, Fulbright applicants, like Mizuta, had to apply to their desired graduate programs.

Before travel was liberalized in 1964 and at a time when one dollar was equal to 360 yen and Japanese were not allowed to take more than two hundred dollars out of the country, fellowships from the American government, universities, and private organizations were among the only means for Japanese students to study in the United States; 651 Japanese women received GARIOA and Fulbright fellowships between 1949 and 1966 (Freedman 2016). Mizuta had a scholarship from Yale in addition to a Fulbright fellowship. Along with covering transportation costs and paying tuition, fellowships provided professional networks, social connections, orientations, and other essential parts of the study-abroad experience. For example, from 1949 until decommissioned in 1960, the Hikawa-maru ship took Japanese exchange students to the United States on a memorable two-week journey (Itō 2015, 153 and 268-69). Mizuta's 1961 Fulbright cohort was one of the first student groups to use commercial planes. She flew to San Francisco via Hawaii, seeing parts of the United States that most Japanese could only read about in books and magazines.

Both GARIOA and Fulbright offered six-week orientations to help foreign students to acclimate to American learning styles premised on debating ideas, to answer questions about American daily life, and to practice English. Mizuta attended the orientation at Yale; this was her first interaction with students from around the world, for Japanese universities lacked resources to support exchange students in the early 1960s. She resided at Helen Hadley Hall, the Yale dormitory for female graduate students, and her roommates were from Armenia, Turkey, and Pakistan, the latter two in their late twenties and thirties (Mizuta 2004, 13-15). The cutoff age for Fulbright fellowships was forty-one, providing the opportunity for career professionals, as well as students, to study abroad.

Mizuta was assigned to two different host families, one through the Fulbright program and the other by Yale (Mizuta 2004, 16-17). The husband of the family chosen by the Fulbright was a World War Two veteran who had fought in Japan and now owned the Sleeping Giant Motel (Hamden, Connecticut). The day she moved into her motel room, the family left a welcome bouquet of flowers for her. She worked at the motel kitchen and restaurant, helping prepare breakfast for guests, for two weeks until Yale classes began. The husband of the second family was a political scientist who had been an advisor on East Asian foreign policy affairs for the Eisenhower administration. The family lived in a grand house on a promontory overlooking Long Island Sound with a private beach. Mizuta therefore had the chance to experience a diversity of American lifestyles and social classes.

Fulbright orientation and residing at Helen Hadley Hall were two of many Yale experiences that encouraged Mizuta to reflect on what it meant to be a "foreigner" and a "woman," two themes of her later work. Coping with the legacy of World War Two and nuclear cataclysm were part of this process. In My Encounter with Women's Studies (Josei gaku to no deai, 2004), she writes of an uncomfortable dinner party at the home of her second host family, after she had moved into the Yale dormitory. Also invited was a family of a professor from China. The dinner conversation turned to World War Two, and the family stated that the United States was justified in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to end the war and bring about peace; everyone else at the table agreed. Shocked, Mizuta abruptly stood up and left the house without saying good-bye. If the college-aged son of the invited family had not caught up with her in his car, she would have walked the more than half-hour drive back to Helen Hadley Hall. Due to this dinner, her relationship with her host family deteriorated, and she did not see them again (Mizuta 2004, 17). To supplement her Fulbright fellowship, Mizuta held a part-time job in the New York City branch of the Bank of Tokyo during the summer holiday, where she worked alongside Japanese women who had come to the United States as war brides. Japanese war brides were one of the largest populations of foreigners who came to the United States in the 1940s and 1950s (Crawford et al., 2010). In the summer when dormitories were unavailable to current students, Mizuta lived in an apartment and shopped for food at an Asian grocery story. At Yale, she encountered students from different parts of Asia, including countries like China, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia that had complex histories and political relationships to Japan.

Studying at Yale was her first experience at a coed school and made her realize how male-dominated universities were. As she writes in My Encounter with Women's Studies, Yale had a small number of black students but no female undergraduates, and all professors, administrators, and teaching assistants were male (Mizuta 2004, 20). The few women employees held secretarial jobs. There were instances of Yale students having their girlfriends come to class and sit at their desks in their stead in order to shock professors and encourage the university to change, efforts that seemed impressive to Mizuta at the time (Mizuta 2004, 20). Mizuta recalls the "ladies first" etiquette on campus and during social events, where women entered rooms first and were served before men. Helen Hadley Hall had an 8:00 pm curfew, and men were not allowed to spend time there. Through lectures about American society at the Fulbright orientation and conversations with dormitory friends, Mizuta learned the "rules" for dating in the United States and how women were expected to behave socially in 1960s America (Mizuta 2004, 21-23; Ōba and Mizuta 1995, 123-24). While at Yale, Mizuta began to reflect on how the United States was fundamentally a society of couples, and marriage was seen as a means of social acceptance and stability. It was difficult for women to go to social events alone, and few places were accessible to single women. Divorce was seen as a failing, and having a child out of wedlock as a scandal.

Mizuta wanted to continue these cross-cultural observations and other personal growth experiences begun in her first year at Yale. In 1961, Fulbright fellowships could be renewed for a second year, and she was able to complete her Master's degree in American Studies in 1963. She then decided not to move back Japan, but to instead remain at Yale to earn a Ph.D. in American Studies.

In personal essays included in Reflections on a Place of Belonging: Whereabouts of the Family (Ibashokō: kazoku no yukue, 1998), Mizuta writes that one her most valuable experiences at Yale was the discovery of books and magazines (Mizuta 1998, 185-202). Extensive reading expanded her understanding of literature as both a means of individual expression and the articulation of feelings common to groups, such as women's emotional experiences as daughters, wives, mothers, students, and teachers. Mizuta took courses at Yale with eminent literary critics advocating close textual analysis, including Geoffrey Hartman (1929-2016), Harold Bloom (1930-2019), and Robert Penn Warren (1905-89), as well as with Brooks. She browsed the Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) papers housed at Yale University Library. Reading Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86) and Kate Millet (1934-2017) helped to provide the foundation for her work in second-wave feminism described below. Reading Julia Kristeva (b. 1941) and Jacques Lacan (1901-81), helped her consider the role of psychoanalysis and poststructuralist criticism in bringing new voices into literary studies. When she looked for Jean Paul Sartre's (1905-80) What Is Literature (Qu'est-ce que la littérature?, 1948) in the Yale library, she was unable to find the book in English translation. She was told that graduate students were expected to read French as well as English in 1960s America. She also realized many American intellectuals were not interested in this book at the time.

In part as a result of her voracious reading and her training by eminent literary critics, Mizuta sought to understand the lives of authors as they were shaped by their historical contexts, as well the form and content of their literary production. Her research accounted for the institutional structures and social processes that shaped identity, which she argued were large factors in literary expression. Mizuta eloquently summarized a key aspect of her approach during our September 9, 2018 conversation: "in front of literary works are authors" (sakuhin no mae ni sakka ga iru); knowing the author is essential to fully understanding their text. Her attention to the author has arguably led to her advocacy of the creative power of the individual as a response to repressive social forces. She explored literary expression to better understand the construction of the modern self. She later published long dialogues with authors, whom she met in the United States and Japan.⁶

Mizuta put her deep reading and analyses of author's inner worlds into practice in her doctoral dissertation Crime and Dream: A Study of Edgar Allan Poe; even in 2018, she recalled researching how Poe's (1809-49) madness, odd marriage, and economic poverty influenced his gothic literature and images of the grotesque (Mizuta 1970 and 2018). At the time, there was a dearth of global academic scholarship on Poe, a gap that Mizuta sought to fill. Brooks advised her not to study Faulkner, saying there was nothing left to write about him (Mizuta 2018). Instead, he suggested that she analyze Poe, for the last major study had been Patrick F. Quinn's The French Face of Poe (1957). Mizuta remembers excitedly delving into literary journals to which Poe had contributed and reading "magnificent" articles, poems, and prose (Mizuta 2018). She submitted her dissertation in 1970 and returned to Poe at several points in her academic career, for example writing a chapter comparing Poe to author Tanizaki Jun'ichirō (1886-1965) in Reality and Fiction in Japanese Literature (1980). She published her dissertation research in Japanese (Edogā Aran Pō no sekai: tsumi to yume, 1982).

Mizuta's research on Poe represented her growing attention to literary "outsiders": mainstream authors who created characters to manifest the estrangement they themselves felt in their personal lives; authors who had been marginalized due to their gender, race, class, psychological states, and other factors; and authors residing in the peripheries of their societies, like Ōba Minako (1930-2007) who lived for a time in the wilderness of the United States and Doris Lessing (1919-2013) whose experiences in Zimbabwe influenced her writings. Mizuta believed that positionality on society's outside (gaichi) provided valuable insights on society's inside (naichi). Arguably, Mizuta's discovery of Poe led her to later publish analyses of other poets and authors who had suffered from inner turmoil, often leaving home in search of places where they might belong (ibasho), such as Sylvia Plath (1932-63) and Osaki Midori (1896-1971). Notably, many of the writers Mizuta researched took long sojourns from their hometowns, as she herself did. Mizuta said that her study of Poe also helped her to consider broad concepts of the "grotesque," "arabesque," and "oriental" in American painting as well as literature (Mizuta 2018).

Mizuta's choice to remain at Yale was also motived by her personal connections and involvement in activist and artistic movements. At Yale, she met Victor Lippit, then a graduate student in economics, through his Japanese roommate. They introduced their friends Kyoko Iriye (1936-2013), a Tokyo University graduate who had come to Yale on a Fulbright in 1959 to study English literature and also resided in Helen Hadley Hall, and Mark Selden, who had lived in Brooklyn and gone to high school with Lippit. The four friends inspired each other's intellectualism, humanism, and political engagement. Mizuta married Lippit in the United States, and their children were born American citizens under the current laws, further encouraging her to reflect on the meaning of nation and home (Mizuta 2004, 100).

Travel was logistically easier in the mid-1960s than it was when Mizuta had first arrived in the United States. She and Lippit lived in London in 1966 and on a kibbutz in Israel for three weeks in 1967 as part of his research on economics. They resided for a time on a hippie commune in New Hampshire and had a cat named Marx. Mizuta returned to Japan from 1967 to 1969 and taught American literature and culture at Dokkyō University (Dokkyō Daigaku, in Saitama); by this time, their first son, Akira, had been born. When she returned Yale in 1969 to write her dissertation, she said that she felt more at home in the United States and less like an exchange student (Mizuta 2018).

Mizuta, who uses Japanese and American national events as reference points in her personal narrative, was inspired by Yale student movements calling for changes in racially-divided America and for support of alternative political models. She thanks friends, like fellow graduate student Marion Wright Edelman (b. 1939), who became the first woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar and founder of the Children's Defense Fund, for encouraging her to participate in the Civil Rights Movement. Mizuta joined the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963 and heard Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. Victor Lippit formed the Yale Socialist Union for Free Cuba, which, with only eleven members, was not a popular movement.⁷ Mizuta joined Yale poetry circles, including that around John Hollander (1929-2013), thus expanding her efforts in free verse. She had earlier participated in Japanese poetry circles like the Boomerang Group (Būmerangu no kai). (See Jordan Smith's introduction.)

Mizuta often visited New York City (approximately a two-hour train ride from Yale) to hear folk singers and meet writers, including Joan Baez (b. 1941, who gave a concert at Yale), Bob Dylan (b. 1941), Shiraishi Kazuko (b. 1931), and Tomioka Taeko (b. 1935). When she came to Yale for a literary reading on Mizuta's invitation in 1964, Tomioka brought her translator, Kate Millet, then a professor at Barnard College and romantically involved with Japanese sculptor Yoshimura Fumio (1926-2002). Mizuta remarks that, because the United States was the "world's center of internationalization," she experienced aspects of cultural diversity she could not while growing up in Japan (Mizuta 2018). For example, her poetry collection, A Wedding in Amsterdam (Amusuterudamu no kekkonshiki, 2013), which offers reflections on Anne Frank (1929-45), was inspired by seeing Holocaust survivors in New York City in 1961. The complicated context of 1960s America, with its contradictory coexistence of intellectualism and anti-intellectualism and of liberalization and conservatism, with its traces of war and overt violence, encouraged her academic exploration of critical theories, her readings of literature, and her writing of poetry.

Mizuta's time at Yale influenced her reflection on Japan's condition; her concerns for Japan's past and future continue to influence her present activities. Like other exchange students, she came to the United States bearing the burden of her own past and open to new experiences. She arrived at Yale one year after Yamamoto Sukeyoshi's (b. 1939) Hi, Mom: A Teenaged Look at America (Māchan konnichiwa: haitin no mita Amerika) and the same year as Oda Makoto's (1932-2007) I'll See It All (Nandemo mite yarō), two influential books detailing men's experiences living, studying, and working in the United States. As evident in the narratives of these books, men could hold more jobs, belong to more social groups, and travel with more mobility than women could. These texts and others written by Japanese exchange students were part of a postwar sub-genre of travel literature set against a background of Japanese war memories, American racial tensions, and rising youth attention to global issues, including genocide, environmental pollution, and discrimination. Although Mizuta published essays about her American years after 1970, this sub-genre of travel literature seemed to have influenced her thinking, for she mentioned Oda's book in our September 9, 2018 conversation.

To elaborate, as Mizuta astutely observed, Japanese students who came to the United States in the early 1960s differed from those who came before and after (Mizuta 2018). In the 1950s, Japan was poor and underdeveloped, recovering from war destruction, and in need of advanced knowledge. Gaps between the United States and Japanese behaviors and lifestyles loomed large and were apparent in the America media that circulated in Japan. For example, these disparities were visualized in Hollywood films and later television dramas that portrayed the material comforts of American daily life and discussed in popular magazines like Time, which, in March 23, 1959, ran a feature article on women's status in Japanese society and the royal wedding of Crown Prince Akihito and Michiko Shōda. In the 1950s, study abroad was promoted as a means to infuse Japan with new ideas and to foster a labor force skilled in cutting-edge techniques being developed at American universities. This was apparent in the aforementioned GARIOA program, the recruitment documents of which stipulated that experience of American life would be prioritized over studying. Besides, it was impossible to earn an American graduate degree in one year, the length of a GARIOA grant. American interest in Japan in the 1950s was for political and cultural rather than economic reasons, as evident by fads for sukiyaki restaurants, judo, and Zen Buddhism. Mizuta and other female exchange students brought kimono with them from Japan to wear at international nights and other campus events, believing that they were supposed to dress in a way that represented Japanese traditions; this practice was not common among male exchange students. However, in Mizuta's words, by the early 1960s, Japan "had regained its selfconfidence" and "created its individuality," while the United States had become tainted with images of racial violence, McCarthyism, and the execution of the Rosenbergs (1953) (Mizuta 2018). Japanese students who came to the United States in the 1960s did so for their own benefit, rather than for that of the nation, and were more worldly in their perspectives. Many engaged in global social justice and antiwar movements, like those opposing American involvement in Vietnam. When travel became more available to ordinary people, for example in the 1980s, Japanese students who failed university examinations went to the United States to study without scholarships. Having learned English in Japanese schools, they found American universities to be more accessible than those in other countries. Yet violence in 1980s America, due to gangs, drugs, and other problems, was a reason why Mizuta wanted to return permanently to Japan. In the 1990s, Yale's New Haven was one of America's most dangerous cities.

Notably, Mizuta became one of the only Japanese exchange students in history to become a professor of American literature in the United States. Former study-abroad students, such as women who had married Americans and wanted to stay in the United States, were hired by their host universities to teach Japanese language and literature, for there were few American-trained professionals in these fields at the time. This was true of Kyoko Iriye Selden, who became a professor of Japanese at a few schools, eventually building her career at Cornell University. After graduating from Yale in 1970, Mizuta was hired as an Assistant Professor at Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York (part of Fordham University since 2002). When Victor Lippit was offered a job at University of California, Riverside, the couple moved to the West Coast. Mizuta taught at Scripps College (1971-74) and then became an Associate Professor at the University of Southern California (1974-86). Her five years studying at Yale, her two years teaching in Japan, and her international travels inspired Mizuta to consider the social and political influence of literature, the role of women in the academy, and cross-cultural pollination between Japan and the United States. Living in Riverside (1971-83), a town situated by the desert, seemed to her, at times, like being on the "end of the earth" (chi no hate), but this location positioned her in proximity with Japanese communities in Los Angeles, in which she became involved (Mizuta 2018). The experience provided further intellectual growth and new collaborations that enabled her to play a leading role in establishing Women's Studies and literary criticism premised on gender.

Women's Studies and Cultural Criticism

1970-86: Mizuta established her professorial career at a time of rising global demands for women's equal rights and opportunities. It was an era of collective activism and widespread protest against social constrictions and political inequities. Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, diplomatically represented by the United Nations Decade for Women (1975-85), and concurrent with the sexual revolution, what became known as "second-wave feminism" disclosed how notions of biological determinism created a binary between men and women, resulting in different norms for the two genders. Second-wave feminism encompassed various groups, including those seeking an end to physical and metaphorical violence against women and those fighting for inclusion of women in politics and for equal pay for equal work, acknowledgement of gendered division of labor at home, improvement of women's roles in universities, awareness of how women have been represented in media, reproductive freedoms, and sexual health. Awakening individual women to their own discrimination was a step toward changing patriarchal society. Many second-wave feminists viewed women as a category of people unified by their biological sex, while taking into account how experiences of gender have been shaped by race, class, ethnicity, and nation, especially with the influence of poststructuralist theories and the individualism and diversity of "third-wave feminism" in the early 1990s. The United States exerted a strong influence on Japanese feminism, as a social and political example (both good and bad) and as a source of texts and programs. Mizuta's work demonstrates a strong comparative approach, first with the United States and later with other parts of Asia.

In general, Mizuta's feminist intervention sought to amplify women's voices that had been suppressed by institutional structures and norms, to show how women had been depicted in contrast to men, to reveal women's consciousness of their experiences, to profile the diversity of women's self-expression, to reintegrate women into larger metanarratives of history and culture, and to provide new outlets for international discussion and debate. Inspired by texts like Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1970) that revealed the hegemonic gender relationships underlying the production of texts, Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex (1949) about the "othering" of women in patriarchal society to elevate men's status as the mainstream norm, and E. Ann Kaplan's theories of women in film, which she translated into Japanese in 1985 and 1988, Mizuta viewed the canonization of literature by men as a process that required the demarcation of literature by women as a separate and inferior category. Japanese women writers had been doubly excluded—from both the literary canon in their own country and the canons established in other languages through translation processes that prioritized literature by men who presented certain images of Japan and raised the status of authors whose works reflected these views, such as Kawabata Yasunari (1899-1972), Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, and Mishima Yukio (1925-70) (for example, Fowler 1992). Mizuta tried to solve these problems in three major ways: 1) by establishing Women's Studies in the United States and Japan, 2) by founding magazines for cultural exchange, and 3) by promoting literature by twentieth-century Japanese women. Concurrently, she worked in other areas to improve women's status, such as writing poetry and essays about her own experiences and convening research groups. She inspired scholars to re-read major works of world literature through the lens of gender and to take seriously writers who were widely published yet marginalized in academia.

Mizuta Noriko with her parents (Mizuta Mikio and Mizuta Seiko) and sister (Mizuta Yoshiko), 1959.

Left: Mizuta Noriko with her mother, Mizuta Seiko, at future site of Josai University, 1990.

Right: Mizuta Noriko in Chiba, in front of a statue of her father, Mizuta Mikio.

Mizuta Noriko with Kyoko Selden in Monterey, California, circa 1975.

Mizuta Noriko at Yale, circa 1990.

Mizuta Noriko and her children (Akira, Seiji, Yukio, Tamiko, Takuro), 1981.

Mizuta Noriko on her 70th birthday at Suigestu Hotel Ohgaisou, "Maihime no ma" with her children's families, 2007.

Mizuta Noriko at a family wedding in Amsterdam, 2010.

Mizuta Noriko, birthday photo with her grandchildren, 2014.

Mizuta Noriko, assorted poetry anthology book covers: Sound Waves (Onpa, 2020)

Summer in Santa Barbara (Santa Bābara no natsuyasumi, 2010). The first two covers feature Eva Vargö's art.

Poetry's Charm/Poetry's Field (Shi no miryoku/shi no ryōiki, 2020)

Rabbit Garden (Usagi no iru niwa, 2020)

Mizuta Noriko at her desk, 1994.

Mizuta Noriko as Chancellor, 2010.

First, in the 1960s, few female authors were included in literature curricula in the United States and Japan. When Mizuta asked to incorporate more works by women into her Marymount classes on American, British, and comparative literature, the Dean said no (Mizuta 2004, 32-33). She remarked that, the Dean's refusal, along with being married to an American and teaching American and British literature to American students, encouraged her to reflect on her own choice to study men (Mizuta 2004, 34).

Mizuta first encountered the term "Women's Studies" when she was invited to help design a strategy course for the field at the University of Southern California (Mizuta 1977a, 48-49 and Mizuta 2004, 35). The establishment of Women's Studies was motivated by the rise of the New Left, student protests, and other activism and by recent inclusion of other marginalized groups, including African American and Jewish writers, in university curricula. Also, universities were feeling the need to provide students with more practical forms of education to cultivate their "independent social existences" after graduation (Mizuta 2018) and to enable them to become more engaged world citizens. In the 1970s, the University of Southern California held Women's Studies symposia, bringing faculty from across the disciplines together to discuss gender issues; one symposium focused on changing gender roles in Asia. The Japanese term josei gaku, a literal translation of "Women's Studies," shows origins in American efforts. The 1979 manifesto of the Women's Studies Association of Japan (Nihon Josei Gakkai), of which Mizuta was a founding member, defined the field as the "interdisciplinary study of women and of problems related to women, predicated on a respect for women as human beings and dedicated to a thorough reconsideration of all preexisting academic disciplines from women's points of view" (Nihon Josei Gakkai 1979). Women's Studies proponents also sought to rectify discrepancies in the tenure system and disparities in the academic salaries of men and women (Mizuta 2004, 40). Acknowledging the perceived gender binary between men and women and how institutions have adhered to it were instrumental in this process.

Second, as Mizuta observed, "What women thought of themselves was new territory"; she helped establish magazines as venues for this newfound expression (Mizuta 2018). For example, she was part of the inaugural committee and editorial staff of Feminist (Feminisuto), a monthly magazine that roughly lasted from 1977 to 1980. Mizuta's work with Feminist began in 1976, the year when she was tenured at the University of Southern California and her father died. While visiting Tokyo, she met poet Atsumi Ikuko (b. 1940), Feminist's primary founder and editor, who had returned to Japan after studying at the Iowa International Writers' Workshop in 1975 (Mizuta 2004, 86). (Poet Shiraishi Kazuko had also attended this Iowa program in 1973 and was a founding member of the Women's Studies Association of Japan.) Feminist aspired to be the "New Bluestocking" (Atarashi Seitō), referring to Japan's first literary magazine established by women, Seitō (1911-16). In addition to diverse forms of poetry and prose, Bluestocking included literary reviews, philosophical discussions, debates about gender issues, and calls for women's rights (Bardsley 2007). Like their predecessor, Feminist combined literature and politics, raising readers' awareness of longstanding inequities, new ideas, and available resources. Photographer Matsumoto Michiko (b. 1950) created the covers, all headshots of influential women; the first issue featured Yoko Ono (b. 1933). A goal of Feminist was to expose how cultural media around the world construct negative images of women and to propose alternatives. As editorial committee member Kobayashi Fukuko wrote, "Only when these crippling images of women are shattered will woman be able to claim her dignity and express her generativity in full. Women of the East and West, by bringing to public recognition feminine concerns and values, will bring a balance to our cultures that will allow both men and women to respond to life in ways that transcend definitions of gender" (Kobayashi 1977, 1). From her home in California, Mizuta submitted articles about literary representations of women, crosscultural comparisons between Japan and the United States, and updates on Women's Studies at the University of Southern California (e.g., Mizuta 1977a and 1977b). An English language issue (Volume 1, No. 4, February 1978), edited by Kobayashi, extended internationally the "dialogue among women" about their "concerns and aspirations" (Kobayashi 1977, 1). The journal's editorial committee included American scholars.

Feminist was short lived due to trouble finding sponsors (issues included commercial advertisements, like those for women's bookstores and Josai University Dental School), Atsumi's disappearance (perhaps to the United States), and internal conflicts about content and editing. The journal comprised a loose coalition of culturalists and activists with different agendas and approaches, and the distinctions among them became more pronounced (Mizuta 2018). Later, Mizuta was an active member of the New Feminist Review (Nyū feminisuto rebyū: shin feminizumu no hihyō), a six-volume series lasting from 1991 to 1993, covering topics in culture, representation, art, and criticism. She edited Volume 2: Women and Representation—Current State of Feminist Criticism (Nyū feminisuto rebyū: onna to hyōgen. Feminizumu hihyō no gendai, May 1991) to which she contributed articles and a discussion (taidan) with author Tomioka Taeko.

Third, Mizuta was determined to add twentieth-century Japanese women to the canon of world literature on equal footing to men. A handful of female professors were researching women from Japan's past, like Murasaki Shikibu (c. 973-c. 1015) and Higuchi Ichiyō (1872-96). Because Scripps College's curriculum included a course on world literature, Mizuta was able to teach stories by Japanese male authors Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916), Kawabata Yasunari, and Tanizaki along with those by British female authors like Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), the Brontë sisters, and Jane Austen (1775-1817) (Mizuta 2004, 35). However, before the 1980s, very little, if anything at all, was being published in Japanese or any world language about twentieth-century women writers. This lack was one reason for Mizuta's turn toward Japanese and comparative literature.

Believing that "we needed our own texts" to represent "modern female selves," Mizuta and Kyoko Selden edited and translated Stories by Contemporary Japanese Women Writers (1982). As they wrote in the introduction to this first collection of fiction by twentieth-century Japanese female authors available in English:

The authors included…deal with the experience of modern women with penetrating sincerity and honesty, but their philosophic profundity in understanding modern life, their intellectual capacity to view their experiences in a historical and social context, and their mastery of the art of fiction render the traditional category of "female-school literature" [joryū bungaku] totally inadequate to characterize their works. Indeed, they stand at the core of modern Japanese literature as a whole (Lippit and Selden 1982, xxiii).

In this quote, they are reacting against beliefs that female authors provide insights into women, while male authors comment on the general human condition and that all women can be unified under one totalizing category. They chose twelve authors whose works epitomize the diversity of women's experiences; explore the "psychology of love, female sexuality, and the emotional intricacies of complex human social relations"; negotiate ideals and norms of patriarchal society; and represent the "political, philosophic, and aesthetic" ideas of their times (Lippit and Selden 1982, xvi). Included are writers who explored the "female psyche" (Lippit and Selden 1982, xvi) like Enchi Fumiko (1905-86) and Ōba Minako; those spoke out against exploitation based on gender and class like Miyamoto Yuriko (1899-1951), Hirabayashi Taiko (1905-72), and Sata Ineko (1904-98); those who represented nonconformist lifestyles like Hayashi Fumiko (1903-51), Uno Chiyo (1897-1996), and Tomioka Taeko; those who "ventured into the world of abnormal psychology" (Lippit and Selden 1982, xvii) like Kōno Taeko (1926-2015) and Takahashi Takako (1932-2013); and Hayashi Kyōko (1930-2017) whose writing sought to convince readers that nuclear cataclysm should never happen again. In addition to pinpointing key themes in literature by women, Mizuta and Selden showcased aesthetic developments initiated by female writers (Lippit and Selden 1982, xviii). Perhaps reflecting their own strong work ethics, they chose women who were "highly prolific and productive, who meet the publishing demands of journals" (Lippit and Selden 1982, xviii). The book, dedicated to their mothers, went through several reprintings (including an enlarged 1991 edition under the title Japanese Women Writers: Twentieth Century Short Fiction) and was the first of their collections of literary translations by Japanese women that included Funeral for a Giraffe: Seven Stories by Tomioka Taeko (2000), More Stories by Japanese Women Writers: An Anthology (2011), and a yet unpublished volume of works by Osaki Midori. Selden contributed literary translations to the Review of Japanese Culture and Society and other journals that Mizuta founded. (See, for example, Special Journal Issue in Honor of Kyoko Selden, 2015.)

Throughout her career, Mizuta published analytical studies about, conversations with, and translations of literature by Osaki, Tomioka, Ōba, and Shiraishi. She met the latter three writers in the United States and established close working relationships with them. These writers all expressed female consciousness, imagination, and the culture of gender difference (Mizuta 2004, 86). They depicted the emotional ramifications in conforming, or not, to roles in the family, the backbone of patriarchal society, and contradictions in notions of female sexuality, among other issues pertaining to women. Much of Mizuta's critical analysis centers around the theme of "representation" (hyōgen): how authors craft fictional characters and poets narrate the experience of archetypes that categorize, restrain, repress, or liberate women. These characters lay bare the larger myths about gender in their societies.

Mizuta's critical themes coalesce in her decades-long study of Ōba Minako, whom she first met in Los Angeles around 1978 or 1979. Ōba, who had aspirations of becoming a painter, had lived in Alaska, Oregon, and Wisconsin, experiences that helped her to process feelings of being an outsider and inspired her literary settings. As represented by the article translated in this issue, "The Dream of the Yamanba: An Overview," Mizuta explored how Ōba's interpretation of classical Japanese figure of the "mountain witch" (yamanba) represented an existence outside patriarchal social norms. Mizuta theorized, "Ōba sees this witch spirit as both the structure of female sexuality and a weapon for survival necessitated by male domination. As such, the witch occupies a central place in Ōba's thought" (Mizuta 1993, 61). She translated Ōba's "The Smile of a Mountain Witch" (Yamanba no bisho, 1976) for Stories by Contemporary Japanese Women Writers.

Ōba exemplified Mizuta's interest in literary "outsiders," which had been fueled by her dissertation research on Poe and her cultural activities in California. For example, she contributed to Rafu shinpō (Los Angeles Japanese Daily News, founded in 1903), the organ of first-generation Japanese immigrants, and Nanka bungei (So-Cal Literary Arts, 1965-85), run by second and third-generation immigrants. She invited Japanese writers, including Ōba, to the local literary groups composed of Japanese, Taiwanese, and Korean Americans who wrote in Japanese. She supported immigrant rights movements, including those fighting against evictions of Japanese immigrants when property values rose in Little Tokyo and upscale hotels were constructed in the 1980s. Mizuta theorized that outsiders view their own existences differently than insiders do, for they need to shed their own identities in order to fit in or have political rights. In her literary criticism, she extended this position metaphorically to women as a group, who have been denied accesses and rights given to men. She assesses how writers like Ōba created new characters, in this case from literary traditions, to express women's consciousness of being outsiders.

In our September 9, 2018 conversation, Mizuta compared Ōba's mountain witch living on the outside of her society to the protagonist of Murata Sayaka's (b. 1979) 2016 Akutagawa-Prizewinning novella Convenience Store Woman (Konbini ningen), who finds a way to quietly exist within Tokyo by disengaging from mainstream middle-class norms. Murata's female protagonist feels she is a "convenience store human," a person who functions as part of the machinery of the convenience store, an essential place in Japanese daily life staffed by a fungible labor force that often goes overlooked. By becoming one with the store, she is able to extricate herself from pressures to conform to prescribed life courses for women of marriage and motherhood and/or stable employment. As a contrast, in From Heroine to Hero: The Female Self and Expression (Hiroin kara hīrō e: josei no jiga to hyōgen, 1982), Mizuta explores the emotional strain women felt trying to free themselves from comfortable yet constraining roles.

Notions of outsiderness and the painful liberation experienced while leaving one identity behind to assume another are essential to understanding From Heroine to Hero, a collection of essays written between 1970 and 1981. During our September 9, 2018 conversation, Mizuta summarized the crux of the book: "The process of becoming a woman is always a failure. Women always need to give up something essential about themselves in order to become a woman" (Mizuta 2018). Simply put, this statement, influenced by reading Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault (1926-1984), and the psychoanalytic feminist theories they inspired, means that gender is a social construct determined by patriarchal institutions that have marginalized women based on the belief that the female sex lacks certain biological traits. Mizuta analyzes how twentieth-century women have become more aware of the historical binary division of men's agency in the "public sphere" (political participation and work outside the home) and women's relegation to the "private sphere" (the home and the family). Women have written literature to cope with, negotiate, and even escape the domestic roles in which they have been placed. In From Heroine to Hero, Mizuta closely reads and compares works by such Japanese, European, and North American writers as Ōba, Tomioka, Takahashi, Tsushima Yūko (1947-2016), Kōno, Lessing, and Plath. The book title refers to the move from comfortable and noble yet subservient social positions (heroines) to more enlightened and engaged yet painful ones (heroes), a process resulting in madness, frustration, and adverse psychological effects (Kitada and Miya E. M. Lippit 1994, 82-82). As Kitada Sachie aptly summarizes:

In her earlier work, Mizuta divides women's representation into two categories, "an attachment to women's territory" and "liberation from systems," and identifies the logic of "liberation" as the chain of reasoning that moves from the former to the latter. In her later work, however, offering Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook as an example, she says that by discarding gender roles as one searches for an identity, one is more likely, at the end of the search, to be confronted with madness/silence than with freedom (Kitada 1994, 83).

From Heroine to Hero epitomizes Mizuta's aphorism that "in front of literary works are authors" and her belief that the writing process is part of women's liberation. As Kitada further states, "The critical reading proposed by Mizuta—her attempt to locate in texts the 'deviations' and 'hidden' feelings, thoughts, and consciousness of women in their own peculiar, inflected existences—provides a basic viewpoint and methodology for later feminist criticism" (Kitada 1994, 84). The book operates from the notion that the expression of the modern self (private sphere) was a turning point in the evolution of modern Japanese literature.

Mizuta delves into the discovery of the "modern self" in Reality and Fiction in Modern Japanese Literature, a book written in English in 1979 while she was living in Riverside and dedicated to the memory of her father. In her quintessential personal tone and characteristic close reading that accounts for the machinations of history on the individual, Reality and Fiction in Modern Japanese Literature explores the turn toward interiority of male and female Japanese writers in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mizuta and other scholars argue that a catalyst was their encounters with Western literature that emphasized the individual. She uncovers traces of European and American literary movements that were adapted in Japan, such as romanticism, cosmopolitanism, and traditionalism, and encouraged reevaluation of Japanese traditions (Mizuta 1982b, 1). More than offering surveys of authors and their works, Mizuta investigates a major theme in modern Japanese literature: the authors' "concern about the relationship of their art to the self, [historical] reality, and Japan's cultural tradition," along with the "archetypal creative imagination underlying it" (Mizuta 1982b, 2 and 12). She shows how writing about the modern ego was part of larger ideological and aesthetic explorations and a questioning of what it meant to be human (Mizuta 1982b, 4 and 12). Through self-expression, authors negotiated their roles in the literary world (bundan) and the "alienation of intellectuals and artists from the life of common people, which is particularly pronounced in modern Japan" (Mizuta 1982b, 12). Mizuta analyzes authors in tandem and traces their sources of inspiration to better understand the fictional forms they developed. For example, she explicates the Chinese origins of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's (1892-1927) "Toshishun" (1920), the debate between Akutagawa and Tanizaki about the significance of plot, Western dark romanticism and Japan's aesthetic literature by Poe and Tanizaki, depictions of disease and madness by Yokomitsu Riichi (1898-1947) and Kajii Motojirō (1901-32), Miyamoto Yuriko's and Mishima Yukio's use of autobiography, and notions of "self-revelation" and "self-concealment" in Tomioka Taeko's novels.

Reality and Fiction in Japanese Literature thus exemplifies Mizuta's comparative approach, her admiration for authors as creative producers, and her own "return" to Japanese literature. As Mizuta writes in the introduction:

[This study] emerged during the years when, my sojourn in the United States having become longer than I had initially anticipated, my consciousness turned increasingly toward questioning and evaluating my own relation to Japan's literary heritage. For Japanese who have witnessed (at least intellectually) the violent attraction to and rejection of foreign cultures of many of their predecessors in the Meiji, Taishō, and Shōwa eras, and their final, often sentimental and abstract, glorification of the Japanese cultural heritage, Nihon kaiki (return to Japan) still presents enormously complex intellectual as well as emotional problems (Mizuta 1982b, x).

Mizuta had returned to Japan for extended visits in the 1970s and 1980s, but California had remained her home. In 1986, she moved back to Japan to build Josai University into an international educational institution and to expand her intellectual and personal pursuits. She had not intended to stay in the United States for more than two decades, and she was ready to begin the next phase of her life in Japan.

Establishing Josai International University

1986: The 1970s and 1980s were an exciting time for feminism in the United States and Japan, with the formation of activist movements, journals, research groups, and academic theories and curricula. Mizuta was an active member of inaugural committees in both countries, including those for Women's Studies at the University of Southern California, the Women's Studies Association of Japan, and the journal Feminist discussed above. She was on the vanguard of comparative feminist literary criticism, and her publications were cited by scholars and attracted graduate students. While many of her early writings were grounded in her engagement with the United States, many of her later writings centered on women in other parts of Asia, including Korea and China, and Europe (e.g. Mizuta 2010).

Mizuta undertook numerous leadership positions that enabled her to expand and internationalize Josai University. For example, in 1982, she served on the planning committee for the establishment of the Josai Base College (opened in 1983). In 1992, she led the establishment of Josai International University and taught in the Faculty of Humanities. She was Vice Chancellor of Josai University Educational Corporation (1986-2004) and President of Josai International University (1996-2009), along with holding other teaching and administrative positions, before becoming Chancellor of the Josai University Educational Corporation (2004-17). She extended the university's academic presence through new campuses in Chiba, Tokyo, and Saitama and new faculties, including those in Pharmaceutical Sciences (2004), Social Work Studies (2004), Social and Environmental Studies (2010), Nursing (2012), and Tourism (2006). (Japanese universities typically have a main and branch campuses.) To foster global intellectual exchange, she established the Josai University International Cultural and Education Center (1986), and, over the decades, she formed collaborations with schools in China, Hungary, Korea, Malaysia, and elsewhere. She invited international professors to teach courses, an experience E. Ann Kaplan fondly describes in her introduction to this issue. Mizuta worked closely with graduate students from Japan and abroad, promoting their research through scholarships, journals, conferences, and outreach programs. Mizuta believes that private universities should coexist alongside public ones and play a large role in Japan's globalization, teaching students to think and learn for themselves in the tradition of John Dewey's notion of education (Mizuta 2018).

To Mizuta, two of the most exciting administrative jobs were constructing the main campus for Josai International University in Tōgane City, Chiba Prefecture, and establishing graduate programs in Women's Studies. Under gentan policies beginning in 1971, the Japanese government paid farmers to reduce their rice crops in order to keep prices high. As a result, Tōgane City was able to purchase fields once used for rice from farmers. Mizuta worked with her mother to design a new campus on this land. They selected the architecture, landscaping, and other features and presented their plans to the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology for approval. They offered professors, including Kitada Sachie and Wachi Yasuko, incentives to leave their jobs at other universities and join the burgeoning Josai faculty. After four years of planning, the Tōgane campus opened in 1992 and included courses in Women's Studies, first at the undergraduate level and then a Master's degree program in the Josai International University Graduate School of Humanities (1996) and doctoral program in Comparative Cultures (1998).

Mizuta founded two English-language journals with international distribution: U.S.–Japan Women's Journal (1985), one of the most established scholarly journals on gender and the world's only journal devoted to the study of women and Japan, and Review of Japanese Culture and Society (1988), advancing the study of art, literature, and culture. Until 2000, U.S.–Japan Women's Journal was published in both Japanese (Nichibei josei jānaru from 1988) and English (English Supplement from 1991). It is now published solely in English in order to promote international communication, reach a larger readership, and build an international community of scholars. The mission of these journals is to foster the work of young researchers and to ensure that the achievements of established scholars are not forgotten. She also established periodicals to promote research by Josai International University students and faculty, such as JIU Women's Studies (JIU josei gaku, lasting from 1998 to 2007) that includes prefaces by professors and parts of graduate theses. For example, Wachi Yasuko's preface (Volume 6, 2003) questions, "Will the Twenty-First Century Become the Century of Peace?" (21-seki wa heiwa no seiki to naru ka). Japanese literature scholar Furomoto Atsuko also discusses the relationship between peace and Women's Studies in her preface to Volume 9 (2006).

Through her leadership and teaching at Josai International University, Mizuta cultivated future female leaders, enhanced women's careers, and advanced creative expression. For example, in 2006 she founded the Josai University and Josai International University Female Leader Development Scholarship Program. She established L-WIN (Leaders-Women International Network), an organization of women in leadership positions in universities and research institutions worldwide and was the organization's Japan representative. She also served as the delegate for the Asian region in the International Conference of University Women Presidents and as Chair of the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry Committee to Consider Ways to Empower Women. She has established programs in English and Japanese, including the Center for International Culture, Art and Education and the Global College Programs (with sister university relations with more than 170 universities worldwide), and has updated curricula to meet the needs of the times. She helped establish numerous scholarships, including the Noriko Mizuta Hungary, Poland, Czech, Slovak Scholarship Program (begun in 2009 to fund graduate students).

Mizuta also made Josai International University an international center for poetry. She brought poets together for conferences and edited collections; her efforts to promote international poetry collaborations included establishing the Japan-China Association for Short Poetry (part of the Josai University Educational Corporation) in 2008 and founded Carillon Avenue, a coterie magazine for poetry and reviews, in 2009. She hosted readings and discussions among poets and published books for wider audiences to enjoy, such as Poetry and Outer Territories: Dialogues among East Asian Poets (Bei 2016), which includes her interviews with six poets. (See Jordan Smith's introduction for additional poetry activities.)

Current Work

Present Moment: During her final decade at Josai International University, Mizuta worked primarily with graduate students, adult education, and foreign units, while serving as the chief administrator. She convened symposia on such diverse topics as women's life courses, Korean popular culture, and gender in Asia, many of which have been edited by Kitada Sachie and published as books (Mizuta 2014a, 2014b, 2016). As part of her "very global life as a chancellor and professor" (Mizuta 2018), Mizuta has held leadership positions in cross-cultural societies, including President of the Japan-Sweden Society (2014), Vice-President of the Japan-Hungary Friendship Association (2014), Overseas Director for the Dalian Foreign Friendly Association (2015), and member of the Friends of Ireland Group. She has been awarded more than fifteen honorary titles from universities in Asia, Europe, and North America. Her international prizes and honors include the Pro Cultura Hungarica Prize (2011), Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of Hungary (Civil List, 2013), and Silver Grade Pro Universitate Award (Semmelweis University, Hungary, 2016). In 2016, the University of California, Riverside gave her a UCR Medallion for her more than thirty-year collaboration with the university and her achievements in international education. In 2017, she founded the International Institute for Media and Gender Studies (Kokusai Mejia Josei Bunka Kenkyūjo), which holds scholarly events and publishes The Journal of Comparative Media and Women's Studies (Hikaku mejia josei bungaku kenkyū).

Mizuta has continued to use free-verse as a means to process and express her emotions. She was awarded the 2013 Cikada Prize by the Swedish Institute. The prize, created to commemorate the 1974 Swedish Nobel Poet Laureate Harry Martinson (1904-78), is awarded yearly to one poet writing in an Asian language whose works "defend the inviolability of life" (Swedish Institute 2018). She wrote a children's picture book in verse (e.g., Mizuta and Obara 2017). In 2020 alone, she published two books of poems, Rabbit Garden (Usagi no iru niwa) and Sound Waves (Onpa), and a collection of critical essays on poetry, Poetry's Charm/Poetry's Field (Shi no miryoku/shi no ryōiki). Still a voracious reader, she is up-to-date with current feminist theories and literary texts. She is writing new books about the female authors and poets she admires, including studies of Tomioka Taeko and Shiraishi Kazuko slated for publication in 2021. A literary workshop in her honor at Oxford University was organized by Linda Flores in 2019. It is with admiration that we compile this special issue of Review of Japanese Culture and Society in her honor.

During our September 9, 2018 conversation, Mizuta stated that she is "filled with a sense of purpose and satisfaction" about what she has accomplished and about the international life she has led. Yet she is bewildered that "young people do not want to be global" (Mizuta 2018) and is concerned that Japanese society has not become culturally diverse enough. For example, she worries about the insularity of Japanese youth, as demonstrated by the decreasing number of students studying abroad and by their shorter durations of time at international universities (for example, McCrostie 2017). Students came to the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, with many staying more than a year, to gain knowledge of fields that were not yet fully developed in Japan, but, in 2019, students believe that they can learn enough by staying at their home universities. Mizuta advocates for more discussions about the kind of country Japan should become in the twenty-first century and the type of education needed to achieve this goal (Mizuta 2018). She is also concerned about the Japanese government's control of private universities and favors the American system in which public and private universities coexist, something she painfully learned through her experiences with Josai International University (Mizuta 2017). Our talk around the dining room table also turned to the topic of age discrimination, which has yet to be acknowledged as a legal issue in Japan. While Japanese universities are increasingly allowing professors to continue working after sixty, the customary retirement age in Japan and rights to teach and advise students are not often extended beyond age seventy. This can be devastating for aging academics whose careers are tightly tied to their lifestyles and senses of purpose. Yet Mizuta remarks that she is happy, despite these and other worries. She has a wide circle of family, friends, and colleagues. She regularly organizes and participates in events and collaborations (Mizuta 2018), welcoming both new colleagues and established scholars.

As this biocritical essay outlines, Mizuta has brought together many kinds of writers and activists and has changed views of women in culture and society. Bridging Japan and the world, she has taught English, American, Japanese, and comparative literature to diverse groups of students and helped found Women's Studies programs in the United States and Japan. She has created venues for researchers at all stages of their careers to present and publish their findings and for artists, authors, and poets to showcase their works. Her own experiences at Yale University led to academic and personal discoveries and inspired her to establish international scholarships for graduate students. Mizuta has given voice to women's modes of expression shaped both by biology and social structures, by the denial of rights held by men in the family system, employment, politics, and other institutions, and has sought to rectify injustices wrought by their earlier suppression. Her work has encompassed several connected themes, including consciousness, representation, marginalization, history, memory, the modern self, collective action, and the complex feelings of being an outsider even while being an active participant in social and literary groups. As Kitada Sachie summarizes, "In sum, Mizuta places the experience of woman as the 'other,' the 'enigma,' at the center of her criticism, analyzing woman's identity in her relations and conflicts with men. Mizuta takes into account changes in technology and culture and explores the boundaries of feminism" (Kitada 1994, 84). Mizuta's work exemplifies the power of literature to encourage self-realization, change worldviews, and inspire activism. Authors and poets stand before their works, showing the power of individual expression. Her career demonstrates how living between Japan and the United States, with Japanese and English languages, provides new insights. As evident by her perceptive observations, she has carefully reflected on personal and political change and the role of Japan in the world. Her career illuminates larger issues in gender and international exchange and provides insight into the formation of the global fields of literature and gender studies.

In our conversations and in her publications, Mizuta has referred to Virginia Woolf's definition of "novelists" as keen onlookers who "plac[e] themselves at a distance away from full participation in life [and] write down their observations of people and life" (Lippit and Selden 1982, xvii-xviii). She has used this definition as a foil to her own view of authors and poets as active participants doing more than recording the happenings around them. Instead, they initiate social, cultural, and political reform, learning more about themselves in the process. As she wrote with Kyoko Selden, "Above all, in their indefatigable pursuit of the ego, [female writers] are legitimate and committed participants in the world of modern literature; they emerge from their pursuit sometimes as confident new women, sometimes wounded and battered. Some envision a new social system and an ideal future, while others present a fundamental skepticism toward the fulfillment of the ego in their attempts to transcend the self through religion, madness, or suicide. Their works reveal fully the depth and limitations of modern literature, which has centered on the search for the modern self as its major theme" (Lippit and Selden 1982, xvii-xviii). Indeed, Mizuta Noriko demonstrates the impact one woman can have on the world.