The word "feminist" has been stripped of the luster it had back in the 1970s, and few Japanese women are more aware of this than Michiko Kasahara. Widely regarded as one of Japan's leading feminist curators, Kasahara was responsible for groundbreaking exhibitions such as "Gender: Beyond Memory" at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in 1996.
Her latest, and she says, best, group exhibition is called "Life, Actually." The wide-ranging roundup features drawings, paintings, photography, video and installations by 10 female Japanese artists ranging in age from their mid-20s to mid-60s, and is now showing at the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art (MoT) in Kiba, way out on Tokyo's eastern flank.
"I am a feminist, even a radical feminist, and I don't mind saying so," Kasahara told me in an interview last week. "But the Japanese mass media have unfavorably colored the words 'gender' and 'feminism,' so I hesitate to use them. About the definition of feminism, here in Japan if you talk to 10 feminists, you will find 10 different 'feminisms.' Feminism is not a dogma like Marxism; being a feminist means finding a way to survive in a positive way."