H199 Changing Lives Ch. 3 "Resenting Injustice" Reading Notes

I chose the title for this chapter from the Chinese Character 怨 meaning "Resentment" that was boldly displayed on a banner unfurled during the pivotal anti-war demonstration on Oct. 21, 1970 that launched a new phase in Japanese feminiusm. [See the photograph reproduced in Changing Lives on p. 96.]

The demonstration was pivotal because it declared the beginning of a something new: "Women's Lib" (ûman-ribu) had come to Japan! This act of unfurling the banner with "Resentment" on it was not merely bold: it was fiercely determined. Young Japanese women wanted people to know that they had new concerns that needed to be addressed.

Consider the poem that addresses "Resentment." It appears in its entirety on p. 96 but here are a few lines:

Women's deep-seated resentment

Is Exploding into the air!

The flag of rebellion is unfurled

It is women's rebellion

It is a revolt...

Against the systems of control that do not allow

Womewn to live as women

It is a women's rebellion against all the systems of control that will refuse to allow women to live their lives as women. Now it is time for women to stand up and declare that they have had enough!

These were new days, and the times called for a new language, a new vocabulary, in order to express these new concerns and allow women to speak openly about them.

For example, they wanted to discuss things like "how sex is used to control [the way in which] men and women relate to one another...and how sex has been used as a fundamental means to make humans into a slave-like class." (Tanaka Mitsu)

While this is a point that feminists, following Marx and Engels, had been making for decades; but what is new here is a focus on transforming both male and female consciouness.

As one of the spokeswomen for the "women's lib" movement, Tanaka Mitsu put it in her infamous Manifesto, "Liberation from the Toilet":

This structure, which uses sex as a fundamental means to subjugate humans is mediated by a male consciousness, which in turn, regulates male sexuality by oppressing female sexuality. In addition to the fact that women’s sex is endowed with reproduction, women’s sex is much more powerful, with essentially anarchistic potential.

Clearly, the women who started expressing themselves in 1970 were not just seizing the day, or seizing the historical moment, they were taking control of the discourse by pointing to the long suppressed female power tied to the reproductive function, and highlighting the "anarchistic potential" of this feminine power. This was both new and shocking and the activists who began to come together at this time had no hesitations about shocking members of polite society and holding their feet to the fire. In fact, they relished it!

Many--though not all--of the women had been to college and had fought in the student struggles against Ampo/Anpo (the anti-US Japan Security Treaty movement), and they learned from that Joint Struggle Movement that males held tightly to the reins of power and controlled the political discourse so that female students were marginalized and relegated to the support roles of cooking and serving meals to the men on the barricades, and providing sex to them when they wanted it. In Tanaka Mitsu's estimattion, this meant that women function as "toilets" for men. This was no longer going to be sufficient for these new activists and they understood that it all had to start with women getting together, on their own, just beyond the reach of the masculine sphere, in order to talk with each other about how things were in their own lives and experiences.

But it was also the case that many of these women had not attended institutions of higher learning, instead they worked as dancers, waitresses in ramen restaurants, bar hostesses and other of the "night work" trades. They could be rude, crude, and very forthright in their language use. When they spoke their minds, they were hoping to unleash a new kind of energy and to find a new pathway to social change by doing so. It was the dawn of a new day and very few people saw it coming.

Ch. 3 Continues with excerpts from Yoshitake Teruko's memoir. Yoshitake was decidedly not one of those younger, under-educated and under-employed female workers. As we know, she was among the first generation of postwar women to enter four-year universities alongside of male students, and she attended Keiô University, one of the best. She became employed after graduation though she expresses uneasiness with the interview procces and the inequities in the workplace. In Ch. 3 she describes how the Anpo Protests unfolded from her perspective, and how she observed people from all walks of life joining in. (86-92)

She worked for Tôei, a film studio, and television was making huge inroads into the industry. In the midst of this transition, Yoshitake learned she was pregnant and was entitiled to maternity leave. When she returned to work aftetr the birth of her daughter, however, she could not just return to her old job as an advertising producer. Moreover, the management of Tôei was no longer in the hands of people who loved movies, but in the hands of the "suits"or the "bean counters" who cared only for the bottom line. (93-95)

In the next segment, she details the transition from Anpo-to the Women's Lib Movement, depicting the suddent ascendancy of figures like Tanaka Mitsu, Asakawa Mari and a Japanese woman who went by the nom de guerre of "Khalid," their Group: Fighting Women. (95-97)

As Yoshitake puts it in her next subsection on "Aiming for a Revolution in My Internal Feminine Consciousness," we see the direction in which she is headed: onna ishiki no henkaku, or, a revolution in feminine consciousness. She hearkens back to the days of Hiratsuka Raichô and the Seitô years, as well she should have; but the primary difference is that back then, women had no standing in the eyes of the law while in the postwar era, thanks to the new Constitution, men and women were now legally equal. So what was needed was not something on paper, not a new law, but a transformation inside women, a transformation in their consciouness as Japanese women.

Yoshitake understands at the deepest levels of her being that women are still bound by pre-existing stereotypes about women and that the process of defining what "femininity" or "womanliness" meant was complicated. Women had internalized a stereotype of an ideal woman that was extremely difficult to dislodge. But women, getting together with other women at "Lib Camps," and at the Shinjuku Lib Center, and through their writings, was surely the place to begin. (97-98) Which meant women telling each other their very opersonal stories which for Yoshitake included the painful memories of her gang rape. She notes that: "That I began to be able to talk about my experience and write about it helped me become aware of the existence of a feminine consciousness located inside each one of us." (101, paraphrase) Powerful stuff!

More details about those heady days and months in 1972-73 follow (101-104) and they are a frank and compelling testimony to the power to women speaking openly and honestly with one another in a way they had never had the opportunity to do previously. This, they learned, is how women can begin to construct their own internal consciousness as women.

It may not be something that had to occur in all women's movements everywhere around the world, but it was something that was required in Japan. And for Yoshitake--as for Kishino Junko in Ch. 4, also a college educated professional woman--it was a way to transcend some of the cultural limitations of deeply internalized, socially constructed ideals of femininity that kept Japanese women from asserting their own re-structured, internal feminine consciousness. But, that was what was new about this movement and it is a key indicator of what was changing in postwar Japanese society. (104-106)