The Women’s Liberation Movement in 1970s Japan

Abstract

Castellini introduces the women’s liberation movement (ūman ribu) that emerged in Japan in the early 1970s. Drawing on the work of Setsu Shigematsu (Scream from the Shadow: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan, 2012), he offers a brief historical and social account of Japanese society in the late postwar period, outlines the movement’s genealogies of political contestation and briefly reflects on issues of translation and transnational dialogue between ribu and US-based Western feminism. He considers the movement’s main philosophical tenets: the notions of consciousness transformation and liberation of female sexuality, the elaboration of new forms of relationality, the formulation of onna (literally “woman”) as a new political subject and a critique of motherhood and the family system that expose an unprecedented gendered critique of Japanese postwar society.