H199 Setsu Shigematsu, Notes on Scream from the Shadows, Ch. 4, “Ribu and Tanaka Mitsu”

As the radical student movement known as Zenkyōtō (全共闘) or "The All-Campus Joint Struggle League," which peaked in 1968 began to wane, student energies and radicalism sought new outlets. Across the country, 127 universities — 24 percent of the national four-year university system in total — experienced strikes or occupations in 1968. In 1969, this rose to 153 universities or 41 percent. Campus battles were fierce and rhetoric and ideology became intense. Since the Zenkyōtō had no rules that governed either its membership or its leadership, small autonomous groups could participate, but they fought under the banner of each specific university in the Zenkyōtō.

The reality was that the remarkable double-digit economic growth of the 1960s would stabilize the LDP as the eternal governing party. On the other side, the reformers would be cast out in perpetual opposition. The “citizens” who achieved victory in the citizens’ movements chose the path of moving on from the experience of war. Economic growth assured them lifetime employment and consumption. However, the main themes of the Anpō Struggle — peace and democracy — did not fade away after its end. “Postwar democracy” became entrenched in the unconscious of the citizenry. Any attempt to encroach upon the postwar constitutional system immediately elicited a counterattack by intellectuals and the media, and any attempt at constitutional reform became a complete taboo, even among LDP politicians. (from: https://jacobin.com/2021/06/japans-student-movement-and-the-revolutionary-politics-of-1968)

In August 1970 Asian Women Against discrimination conference at Hosei University, Tanaka Mitsu appeared with her 6-page pamphlet, “Liberation from the Toilet.” It became the most well-known Manifesto of the Movement.  A member of the "Committee to Prepare for Women’s Liberation,” she also formed the “Group Fighting Women [Gruppu Tatatakau Onna-- See Yoshitake's references to this group in Changing Lives p. 20, 95, and 102-103].” Over the next 5 years, she played a formative role in the movement becoming its most visible iconoclast.  She was an agitator, activist, organizer, spokeswoman, philosopher, writer, and leader.  She was a vanguard theorist of the movement. (103)

There was a contradiction here, though.  The Ribu movement formally recognized no single leader or representative. But Tanaka was clearly “the eye of the ribu typhoon” (Akiyama Yoko). So her role was paradoxical. Akiyama Yoko stated it succinctly: first, the rise of the ribu movement cannot, and should not, ever be reduced or solely attributed top Tanaka Mitsu; second, Tanaka was nonetheless a remarkably influential figure who definitively shaped the movement.” (104) It was difficult to separate ribu thinking apart from Tanaka’s “originality, power  of language and personality.” (Muto)

She is the person who symbolizes Japan’s ribu…Sometimes an era chooses one, and that one was Tanaka Mitsu.” (Inoue Teruko).

Shigematsu’s “goals are to critically understand Tanaka’s formative presence as an activist and organizer, assess her contributions as a feminist theorist. And elucidate the process and effects of her iconization.” (105)

Tanaka saw herself as ribu’s messenger—its “yobikake nin (呼びかけ人)—she announced the message of ribu and appealed to and moved people with her words.” She was like a miko, a medium, a cornerstone laid not by one woman but through the strength of many women coming together with their combined power. 

She only graduated high-school, went to work in an ad agency, so was never part of the intellectual class. She saw herself as an ordinary working woman.  Without ever reading a single book on women’s liberation, she sat down and wrote her “Liberation from the Toilet” in one sitting. She lived “listening to voices from heaven.” But she felt she “had grasped the spirit of the times.”

She was sexually abused as a child, joined the anti-Vietnam War Movement and read the leftist literature of the day: Marx, Engels, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution. Her speeches and writings were shocking, bold, and moving, heralding a different kind of discourse. Her writing was often chaotic, using and/or creating onna kotoba or ecriture feminine. She spoke the forbidden, spoke from the dark placer of the womb. “This writing of the feminine, her body, her sex, as the repressed and oppressed aimed to speak of the other, expressing the eros of the feminine.” (111)

“In a voice full of insolence and irreverent laughter, she mocked the notion that women would be liberated under a socialist revolution.” (111)

She pointed out how women were forced to do the support work for the male revolutionaries—raising money, doing housework, cooking, raising children…”women could sense the deceit in the air, they could smell the lie of the man’s posturing.” (quoted 112) “The ie or family system was a microcosm of the nationalist-imperialist system.” So “the liberation of onna could not and should not be subsumed under what men defined as human liberation.”

Liberation and sex had to be brought into the picture together.

Tanaka’s notion of sex (sei 性) was multivalent: "sex was not only socially constructed category that functioned as class, but was also at the core of a repressed ontology that constituted a contradictory and potentially liberating force. Tanaka asserted that women’s sex was a target of oppression and also held within it a key to emancipation as a potentially liberating and violent force.” It harbored within it “essentially anarchistic tendencies.” (114)

Therefore, “as a version of radical feminism, ribu sought a total revolution in cultural value that would enable a different kind of relationality, which it saw as the goal of human liberation.” The goal is not to seek power but to live as onna, to live as a human. Ribu was part of other struggles against domination and oppression. “Women’s liberation must be part of a universal, global struggle against authority.” (115) Equality with men was definitely not the aim of the movement. It needed to be an “unhurried process.” Women needed to prioritize how they should live, to circle back to the self.

For some, her discourse was too obtuse and abstract. Also, she seemed to accept heterosexual love uncritically as a natural, normative experience. But, they did create a commune where they tried to live according to their ideals.

Over time, Tanaka began to been seen as too dominant a force, even domineering. Editing others writing until it conformed with her own views. At the same time, she kept maintaining that she refused to be the leader of the movement.

Finally, in 1975, Tanaka, Takeda Miyuki and Wakabayashi Naeko left Tokyo and the Lib Cen in Shinjuku for the US and then on to Mexico for the UN Conference for the International Year of the Woman. While in Mexico, Tanaka met a Mexican man and had a child with him but eventually returned to Japan as a single mother. She studied eastern medicine and became an acupuncturist. In the end, she remained a healer.