H 131 30 Years of Sisterhood: Some Notes

30 Years of Sisterhood

Setting is 2003, Shizuoka prefecture, Nakaichi.

Miki Soko: After I met the women in the WLM, I didn’t feel alone any more. I knew that somewhere there was someone like me.

I had been a part of the fujin-kaihô undô, the left wing WLM, I wanted to liberate not only myself but all women.  To realize my ideals. I wanted to put an end to the dominant system of gender roles which talk about otoko-rashisa (masculinity) and onna-rashisa (femininity), and hold that women must be in the home and men must be at work.

So, when I got married, I shared the housework with my husband; but there was even a gender based division of labor within housework.  I did the cooking and cleaned the bathroom, for example.  He made the beds and cleaned the rooms. I did the cooking.  I came to see that when we were sharing the housework, we were still following along gender lines. I asked some married friends about it who were members of the josei mondai kenkyûkai but they did not have much of a reaction.  They did not question gender roles and were not angry about it.  That made me feel I was all alone.

Kuno Ayako was working for a newspaper in Nagoya and learned there was sex discrimination in wages.  Formed her own journal, Onna Hangyaku (おんな反逆) or “Women’s Rebellion.” They made a point of spelling out the word for "women," Onna, phonetically in hiragana (おんな) instead of using the comonly used Chinese character for woman, 女.

Wakabayshi Naeko was active in the Zenkyôtô or Joint Struggle Movement but found it rampant with sexism.  Women were just supposed to play a support role for the men: make them rice balls to take to the barricades and do the dishes and housekeeping.

Doi Yumi recalls the 1970s as exciting; a high-schooler who did not fit in the with young women of fashion, she wanted something different and something more. She read the classic feminist text, the Second Sex by Simone de Bouvoir – note how Kishino Junko did, too – and read Tanaka Mitsu’s Liberation from the Toilet where she talked about wives (shufu) and prostitutes not being that different. She went to visit these women at the Shinjuku Lib Cen where Asakawa Mariko grilling some salmon topless.  She thought, these women are awesome – sugoi!  She felt like she had found her place, where she belonged.  People were having fun, laughing.  Freedom filled the air.

Three women talking: Mori Setsuko, active in Joint Struggle Movement, but refused to participate in the “Riot Drills” when the males wanted to engage police with violent tactics. She found this “okashii” – strange – and said, “I’m out” (nukemasu).

She found that women were despised and denigrated because they were women and this was why she knew women needed their own movement. 

 

The two other women were: Fujimoto Yoshiko and Asakawa Mariko – who was mentioned by Yoshitake along with Tanaka Mitsu and Khalid as the three women who called for the women’s demonstration in 1970.

Formed Shisô-shûdan (思想集団) or the Ideological Collective S-E-X to be very blunt and direct about the significance of women's sexuality.

Tanaka Mitsu, “Liberation from the Toilet”

Men have two images of women: either the tenderness of maternal love or the tools to satisfy their sexual desire = a toilet.  Given the interrelation between men and women, the misery of women’s sexuality is that of men, too, and its emblematic of the misery in this society.”

See Ichiyo Muto, p. 163, where he elaborates this misery of modern society in a long quote from Tanaka:

When we say that sexuality is used as a basic means to keep human beings subjugated, we mean a mechanism that oppresses women’s sexuality through the medium of man’s consciousness, a consciousness that in turn oppresses man’s sexuality.  Men’s consciousness, which works as a medium of this dual oppression, is one that fails to find woman as whole woman who has both tenderness and sexuality as the expression of her tenderness.  For men, women’s image is divided—one image represents mother’s tenderness (motherhood) and the other represents a mere tool to satisfy his sexual desire (toilet).  Within this divided consciousness, man allocates his two separate feelings, one each to one of the two imagined aspects of woman, which are again abstractions created by man. 

Facing this disjointed consciousness of man—a consciousness formed to suit the convenience of the ruling classes—woman, in whom sexuality as tenderness and sexuality as sensuality are one, is dissected and she is forced to live as dissected parts.  But the man who compels woman to live only as her parts, by the same token, must also live only as his parts, suppressing his own sexuality.

Since men and women are mutually related, the misery of women’s sexuality is the misery of men’s sexuality, and all of this symbolic of the misery of modern society.

How can women free themselves from this man’s consciousness-bound being?  By realizing that toilet and mother are two sides of the same coin.

When a woman becomes aware of that it is essentially the same thing and that it makes no difference which category she is classified in, then she stands up against man and against the powers that be. 

This stand up = inaoru (居直る) implies that you refuse to flatter or conform to dominant others, so you affirm yourself by shouting “What’s wrong with me as I am. I am I.”

A cute and lovely woman, shaped in that image by man and favored in that definition by state power, begins to establish herself as subject of her destiny when she stands up with her sexuality as the foothold.  She then begins to confront the ruling power, which survives only by turning the woman into the toilet.  Here, she encounters her [own] “security treaty system (ampo taisei)."

In other words, the way women must confront male dominance is analogous to the way all Japanese tried to stand up to the Kishi government in the Ampo Demonstrations. This is a powerful analogy that clearly establishes the link between the Ampo Protest Movement and the birth of the Women's Liberation Movement.

Also, it seems to me that Tanaka's notion that women are perceived as either kind, nurturing mother figures or just Toilets to satisfy men's sexual desire is similar to the way that the Madonna-Whore Dichotomy (MWD) operates in Western Feminst theory. In other words, it signifies a polarized perceptions of women in general as either “good,” chaste, and pure "Madonna" lik figures, or as “bad,” promiscuous, and seductive whores. Feminist theory argued that this MWD stems from a basic desire to reinforce patriarchy. What do you think?

From this, Tanaka goes on to develop her notion of derangement. To talk about the way a woman must struggle between the two selves that are part of every woman.  Tanaka refers to her “wonderful self” and her “not so wonderful self” as both halves that she must accept if she is to accept herself as she is. 

In asserting her own self, her agency, Tanaka asks in the film:

TM: Who am I? I am the woman whom society portrays as an object.  I am the woman nobody knows but me.  When society looks at me, to a certain extent I act a certain way, I pretend to be someone else.  I pull myself out from the inside and let out a deep sigh when nobody is looking at me.  That is why I feel like I have been torn in two (itsumo bunretsu shite shimatte-iru, futatsu ni hikisagatte-iru koto o kanjite) so I am not whole. [Note how Kishino Junko also wrote about feeling "disrupted" using the same bunretsu(分裂) term.] One thing is clear.  I do not want to be anyone else but me.  I thought I could meet the self I wanted to find by searching along the road I had traveled to become the person who is nobody but me.

The problem was that in postwar society, women actually had equality under the law so it was like trying to work with smoke when there was no fire. Women thought there was no need to do more but we felt deeply that we were being looked in a certain way as women simply because we were women (onna de aru).  We knew that we had strong intuition and this was different from the male logic of the patriarchy.  We needed a new way of life for women.  If we did not do it, who would?

I don’t know if they knew it consciously or not, but the women who came to Lib Camp became capable of uttering words that up until now had been like stuck deep down in their throats (nodo no oku ni tsume konde-ita kotoba wo dasete; dasu koto ni yotte jibun ga negate-ita mono, yokubô, kibô, ga ki ga tsuku).  By speaking out, they became aware of the things that they wanted: their desires, their hopes.  You come to this awareness not by figuring things out in your head first and then acting, but by doing things.  Acting leads you to see things anew.  That is how we got into that “natural high” state (jôtai) feeling that the future is on our side.  That’s it.  This feeling floated all over the whole lib camp. 

We experienced (taiken) this feeling—all of us, rikutsu-nuki, without following logic—that each of us had power.  [Taiken dekita imi ga ôkiku atta n ja nai ka ne]

The absolute difference between men and women is that women bear children, and men do not, and this automatically gives them a vertical, historical relationship to the human experience.  Men do not have this, so for them, they need “Logic.”

Man needs logic in order to understand himself as a historical being, but woman is already historical in her existence.  Man is more authoritarian than woman precisely because his existence is more precarious…Woman, because her existence is already historical, can locate herself more easily in the social context and horizontally relate with, for instance, farm women at Sanrizuka and Shibokusa, without whose strength these struggles would not be maintained. They are powerful because in the struggle they have situated themselves in vertical (historical) and horizontal (social) relationships. (Muto, pp. 164-65)

We who have read in Changing Lives how Yoshitake joined the women at Shibokusa and the struggle against the North Fuji Practice Range, how she made one with their cause, may already have grasped this point. (75-76)

The August 1971 Lib Camp

Miki Soko went; had seen a flyer and thought she would try it out.  She wound up riding the same bus with Saeki Yoko and they became best friends. The retreat was revolutionary.  300 women gathered from all over Japan. (Miki) first met Saeki there on a bus going to the lodge; Saeki had been married at 21, divorced at 23, then had a child with another man to whom she was not married.  The two women walked from the bus stop to the camp together, then in the ofuro - Japanese bath—and this became symbolic because they had barely met and they were getting nude and taking a bath together.  They had nothing to hide from each other. Saeki Yoko and Miki Soko would collaborate to publish a newsletter for years and later to co-edit along with Mizoguchi Akiyo the 3 volume History of the Women’s Lib Movement in Japan: A Resource Guide.
 
Kuno Ayako recalls how at Lib Camp people just went around, introduced themselves, talked about their lives, the experience of having an abortion, discrimination in the workplace – all these painful subjects.  It took a long time to go around and get things out on the table. 

Kitmaura Mitsuko, from the Kansai Women’s Lib group, talked about her background in the leftwing Social Labor Movement but how she realized how much deference to men was required: women were expected to be prim and proper. She loved the way women could now talk openly and tell their very personal stories to each other. 

There was a 2nd Lib Camp in Hokkaido and a 3rd in Shinkinejima.

Akiyama Yoko, started reading women’s history like Inoue Kiyoshi’s Women’s History of Japan.  She created WOLF – Women’s Liberation Front – first translating articles into Japanese then collecting and publishing Japanese women’s writings.  Just as Enomoto Fumiko of Onna Eros stated in the Ripples video, Lib Women wanted to write for themselves and to hear what each other had to say. 

All the laughter was great.  The Silly Pumpkin Theatre: it was great fun, a way for women who had not necessarily read a lot of stuff but understood things directly from their experience.  It was empowering to laugh at yourselves and your opponents.  Women had been so suppressed, conditioned to be quiet and demure.  Now they could be crude, funny, iconoclastic, sacreligious, defiant all at once.  There was such great energy, such release.  It was a time of liberation. 

Watanabe Fumie from Hiroshima found a women’s group in Osaka.  She had come to the WLM by way of a Social Science Study group but at one of their retreats, she was raped by one of the young men.  She knew the rape was wrong – she assumed he would be caught and punished for it – but she could not talk about it.  She somehow felt she was responsible.  She felt impure, soiled (as had Tanaka Mitsu).  A turning point for her was reading Komashaku Kimi (1925-2007, also a friend of Kishino Junko’s)'s notion of the “master-Servant” relationship in literature.  Komashaku also wrote about the “Witch’s Logic” or women’s perspective on literature.

Tanaka Mitsu talks about the feeling that many young people did not feel at home anywhere; they were wandering around, lost – they did not have a place in the family, or in the workplace as others did.  Ibasho ga nai 居場所がない, literally, one does not have a place to "be." But, you have to have your own place, a place inside yourself, where you can still accept yourself. When the world outside of yourself speaks ill of you, you have to be you own greatest supporter.  This is the base I created on which I stand, rooted in the WLM and it gave me the determination not to be anyone else but me. I included the wonderful parts of me and the not so wonderful arts of me. The sutekina watashi to sutekijanai watashi (素敵な私と素敵じゃない私).

We had to know that we could speak freely and this was crucial to the movement.  It had to be our movement coming from the inside out.

 

The Synopsis of the DVD Below is from a PDF that is also available on WISE under

H131 SisterhoodProgram.pdf:

 

Synopsis of 30 Years of Sisterhood

This film is a documentary based on the stories of 12 women who lived the Women’s Liberation movement in Japan in the 1970s. Its creation was motivated by a desire to tell what the “women’s liberation movement” was, to show the trails they blazed and where they went.

In the 1970s, women were considered to be second-class citizens in society in general, within social movements (including the radical student movement), and in the family. However, there was no social consensus that women were being discriminated against for being women, and women who complained were subjected to ridicule. The fact that women were considered to be lesser beings in society meant that women’s rights were not regarded as necessary. At the same time, it also meant that women were used as the objects of men’s sexual desires, and women could not claim their own sexuality as truly theirs.

This was the context in which the Women’s Liberation Movement voiced the slogan “Sexual Liberation.” Moreover, aside from sexual liberation, they also problematized the sexual division of labor within the household, which had previously been considered to be a private realm, and closely intertwined it with the sexual division of labor within society. This division placed women in “feminine roles” and prohibited them from living freely outside the narrow confines of the existing norms and roles for women. Women realized that women’s liberation would not happen through a “socialist revolution” or through patiently waiting for “women’s advancement in society,” and decided that the direct liberation of women by women was necessary.

During this period, people with similar thoughts and feelings started to raise their voices in many different areas of Japan, and a “Lib Camp” was held. The women in attendance at the camp raised their own voices in order to create a movement by talking about their own problems in their own words. Some women also obtained information about the women’s liberation movement in the United States. In translating such information, Japanese women realized that these issues were not just their own problems, but were problems shared by women all over the world. However, this radical movement was attacked and repressed by society. But this social reaction actually gave fuel to the movement. Societal opposition created an extremely harsh environment in which women had to continue fighting 24 hours a day in order to carve out their own place in society.

In Tokyo, the reactions in the mass media forced the activists and the lib organization into an extremely difficult situation. However, at the same time, the women involved lived by their own feelings and sought their own ideas about society that could not be fully expressed in words, and their lives were not always serious but were also sometimes filled with humor.

On the surface, the Women’s Liberation Movement is said to have lasted no more than several years. One of the reasons could be that the Movement did not have enough time to find new ways to create and operate their organization. However, the Movement did not truly die out after their few most flourishing years. Women’s Liberation, spread throughout Japan by the Lib Camp and the network created there, still endures today, in local areas and within individuals. Women’s Liberation influenced individuals’ lives, and those who encountered Women’s Liberation realized the importance of living their own lives honestly with their own feelings and thoughts, rather than being bound by traditional values and norms. In their later lives, they still continued searching for how to live their own lives without compromise. This film is based on interviews with women who continue to live as liberated women. This film was made in order to recount the diverse courses of women’s lives in the women’s liberation movement.

Some comments that appear in the film:

Miki Soko: The result of our friendship is this! Look, I am still putting Post-it notes in my editing book!

Saeki Yoko: It took 10 years to finish them.

Miki: No, 15 years!

Doi Yumi: The left wing laughed at us. The mass media called as a bunch of ugly women. My parents worried about me till they were sick. Despite all these odds, I believed that woman's bright future would be there and worked hard in the movement. I definitely identify myself as a Woman’s Libber. I value it very much.

Akiyama Yoko: I used to live only with my brain. I was living, feeling as if I would have been much better off without my own body. In that aspect, we truly dealt with our bodies, and I understood that I was not just composed of my brain, and with my own body, I became myself. In that sense, that time was so important to me.

Tanaka Mitsu: I was thinking to say no to the idea of an appropriate age for marriage, and to start our actions. But the same me, who was the person in charge, also liked to be seen as as youthful as possible. I thought to myself, “Who are you? What are you thinking?”

Kitamura Mitsuko: Now I have been working as a caregiver for elderly people at a nursing home for 12 or 13 years. There, while I was doing physical labor, there were things I came to be able to see. I compared women, and realized something. There are women with many kinds of occupations. But whatever jobs they may have, women are women, and we all share something with other women.

Watanabe Fumie: I was encouraged a great deal by the views of lib that women should have self-confidence and that it’s OK to live our lives by doing things you want to do because they are important.

Kuno Ayako: The Lib Camp was introduced in the Sunday Mainichi Magazine or something. Then I was told that I was fired. They said I went to such a suspicious group. There was a photo showing that we hung our underpants to dry in the camp. (Laugh)

Wakabayashi Naeko: I had a natural food store from 1982 to 1996. It was an independent, self-employed business of my own. Then I engaged in lesbian activism, such as Regumi, and Asia Lesbian Network.

Mori Setsuko、Fujimoto Yoshiko、 Asakawa Mariko: Let’s do it again!

(these comments above come from the last scene of the movie )

 

Film Review by Livia Monnet (Professor of Comparative Literature, Film and Media Studies, University of Montreal)

30 Years of Sisterhood‐Women in the 1970s Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan

(Sanjunen no Sisterhood: Senkyuhyaku nanaju nendai woman ribu no onna tachi, 2004)

is a powerful documentary focusing on little known aspects of the history, unfolding, and multiple legacies of Japan's Women's Liberation Movement, or Woman's Lib (Uman ribu/Ribu).

Adopting a different approach from Nanako Kurihara's Ripples of Change (1993) the only film engaging with the Japanese Women's Liberation Movement that has so far been shown, and received coverage internationally, Thirty Years of Sisterhood records the testimonies and reminiscences of 12 participants at an annual gathering for former Woman's Lib activists at a hot spring resort in Shizuoka prefecture. The Libbers' conversations are interspersed with rare archival footage of actions launched by the Movement -- mass demonstrations, consciousness-raising musicals and plays, the publication and distribution of fliers, manifestoes, and magazines -- to bring about significant changes in Japanese women's self-perception, thinking, and behavior, as well as in 1960s-1970s Japan's patriarchal, conservative society as a whole.

What emerges from the film's vivid montage of objective retrospective assessment, subjective memories, and highlighting of radical political actions is a fascinating, layered portrayal of a group of committed feminists and women activists who, three decades after the momentum of Woman's Lib subsided, have lost neither their utopian belief in the power of women's community, creativity, and imagination, nor their will to continue the fight initiated in the 1970s.

Another notable achievement of the film is its highlighting of the cultural specificity of Japan's Women's Liberation Movement; as well as its depiction of the latter as a heterogeneous network of groups, organizations, and individuals motivated by common goals, but whose political orientation, ideological commitments, statements, and actions could be conflicting, puzzling, or paradoxical. The viewer is offered an inspiring, intimate perspective on Women's Liberation Movement's major role in changing women's status, as well as in paying the way for women's prominent contributions to the culture, arts, and society of contemporary Japan.

 

The Characteristics of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan

1) We demanded“Sexual Liberation”. This meant liberating women from the various forms of oppression of our sex: no sex education; pregnancy and childbirth not accepted outside of marriage; access to abortion greatly limited by law, women’s sex for sale (via prostitution and pornography), forced femininity, rape, sexual harassment, etc. We wanted to liberate ourselves—our bodies and lives—from the control of men.

2）We tried to be just us, as natural as we could be. We women have been labeled and defined as daughters, mothers, wives, daughters- or mothers-in-law, married or unmarried, virgins, prostitutes, bitches, etc. and we were forced to live the life they named for us. Those labels limited our lives and divided women and turned us against each other. By just being a woman, natural and untitled, we tried to regain our freedom to live. By being just ourselves, we wanted to meet other women as they were.

3）The movement had underlying socialist ideas and ideals. The Japanese Women’s Liberation Movement criticized the ways of left wing movements, but not socialist ideas per se. We criticized and questioned the policies and authority of the Student Movement, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China, but we still supported socialist ideals. In other words, we were against capitalism with its money, power, and violence.

4) We were anti-authority, anti-power, and anti- establishment. We believed in anarchism. Being the lowest in the power structure, it was natural for women to be anti-power and anti-establishment. We were class-conscious and we called ourselves “Woman-class.” We did not follow authoritarianism (which continues today), which was (is) oppressive. That means we did not want to oppress other people in such a way.

5) We objected to capitalistic efficiency and productivity as a primary principle, because it turns away from the workplace “the weak”, such as women who need leave for pregnancy and childbirth, old people, and the handicapped, because they are not seen as efficient enough. We sought for an alternative way of working instead of profit-centered working.

6) We tried our best to create “Women’s Culture”. In order to create “Women’s Culture,” we made women’s coffee shops, women’s bookstores, concerts and festivals, etc. We knew it was necessary to make our own culture that would liberate us from the male-dominated one.

7) We were against the marriage system. That was because the legal system of marriage itself was (and is) an oppressive system against women. One could see the reality of marriage in and of itself as oppressive. One clear example of that was the fact that 97% of women change their family name to their husband’s. At that time it was difficult for a woman to be single and independent but we chose a difficult way of living: freedom!

8) We wanted Revolution, not Reform. Although from the late 70’s to the early 80’s there were women who tried hard to change society within the framework of the existing system, like being a member of the Diet or trying to pass an equal job opportunity law. We had little hope of changing society since Japan was/is a country that despises women deeply. We wanted a revolution to live the life we believed in.

9) The Women’s Liberation Movement was an alliance of small groups. This alliance was formed in order to eliminate power and authority from our Movement. A smaller group structure enabled women to talk directly to each other in a democratic way. (Written by Miki Soko)

Messages from the Directors YAMAGAMI Chieko Although I have made only a small number of films, I think I have always been making documentaries for myself. For me, making documentary films can be a means of asking what I am looking for. I have always gained strength from the women in the women’s liberation movement. However, the libbers are considered in our society to be scary women. Of course, that is only the image of them created by the mass media. I did not want women’s herstory to be recorded with such a mistaken image. I wanted to record the women’s liberation movement as I know it, as they really are. That was the starting point of the film 30 Years of Sisterhood, a film about 12 libbers. As the terminology changed from “women's liberation” to “feminism” and feminism spread widely, current society may have come to look on the surface as if it is free and equal. However, in the present day, oppression and discrimination against women, as well as against the weak, is becoming more convoluted. Under such circumstances, I sometime can’t figure out exactly what I really want and what I am looking for. By looking back on the herstories of 12 women’s libbers, I wanted to reconsider the roots of living in a way that was true to myself. In this confusing era, I wanted to gain the strength to survive as myself in my own unique way. By seeing this film, I would like you to gain strength from these 12 women who have tried for the past 30 years to live in a way true to themselves and their own senses. I am pleased if this movie becomes a catalyst for discussing together what we, as women, really want.

--1982 Began to make videos from women's point of view. “We are lively women! -Abortion rights” “Abortion -To live myself”

--1990 Established non-profit video group WORK-INN, making women's issues video series supported by the Yokohama Women's Center. Worked for television broadcasting as a director.

--2001 First independent documentary “Dear Tari,” was given People's Choice Award at 3rd Women's Film Festival in Seoul.

--2004 Produced & directed “30 Years of Sisterhood” with Seyama Noriko