The resurgence of Yoko Tajima's personal feminist ideology
On Feb. 17, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe apologized for a remark he made in response to a comment from opposition lawmaker Kiyomi Tsujimoto during a Lower House Budget Committee meeting in the Diet. Tsujimoto was talking about what she perceived to be corruption in ...
There's a student Uprizine that needs to be heard
When students Hikari Hida and Trica Euvrard discovered that their university had no support in place for victims of sexual violence they created Uprizine to help make a change.
#StandUpJapan and other hashtags allow for new voices to be heard
On the morning of Jan. 14, 20-year-old women decked out in brightly colored kimono scrambled to catch trains to take them to ceremonies across the country to mark Coming of Age Day. The day's related ceremonies, targeted at young men and women who have or ...
Manga artist draws on history for tales of politically powerful women
A feminist manga-style artist says she plans to use characters based on an Egyptian pharaoh and a Chinese empress to bring more female empowerment to the male-dominated world of comic books. Queenie Chan is working on a series of nonfictional biographies aimed at children titled ...
'Child of Fortune': Yuko Tsushima's prize-winning and feminist novel on womanhood
Yuko Tsushima's "Child of Fortune," winner of the 1978 Women's Literature Prize in Japan, is a classic novel as relevant today as when it was published nearly 40 years ago. Called an "archaeologist of the female psyche," Tsushima wrote a stream-of-consciousness narrative that follows ...
'20th Century Women': Smoke signals from the late 1970s
American culture in the mid-20th century begs a multitude of descriptions, but if I had to sum it up in one word, it would probably be "smoking." People chain-smoked through the Vietnam protests, Watergate scandal, Stonewall riots and innumerable other events, both historic and ...
High infidelity: Ayumi Ito reprises her role in 'Hirugao'
A Japanese drama that instigated a nationwide debate about female infidelity and societal values, "Hirugao: Love Affairs in the Afternoon" has been made into a heart-wrenching movie that aims to have audiences reaching for the tissues. Set three years after the television series ended, the ...
Tackling the terminology behind feminism in Japan
In 1985, women in gorilla masks gathered at New York's Museum of Modern Art to protest its lack of female artists. Known as the Guerrilla Girls, the group continues to raise awareness about inequality in the art world. Thirty years later, their spirit has ...
Women of Japan unite: Examining the contemporary state of feminism
On Oct. 21, 1970, hundreds of women marched through the streets of Tokyo, an occasion that is often referred to as the birth of the women's liberation movement in Japan. The movement, called ūman libu (women's lib) in Japanese, was eventually adopted by women who ...
Principles of feminism are an all-in proposition
An American female public policy columnist says she is disturbed by the number of feminists defending affirmative sexual consent laws on the grounds that they will rarely be enforced.
Some words can evoke powerful images, values and stereotypes that have crept into our subconsciousness to sometimes dictate the way we think or behave. For Ruri Clarkson, this is something that needs to be challenged in Japan, and which she does herself with art.
