Hong Zhi, called Koko-chan, is a
Chinese student who attendsa third-rate private university in Japan. Not being
good at studying, she failed the entrance examination in China and came to
Japan counting on her sister who is married to a Japanese. Encouraged by the
sister, she starts working part-time at an exclusive beef nabe [hot pot] shop in Den-en-chofu. In this book Suki Yaki everyday life of Koko-chan is described who is leading a Japanese-speaking life
while living with her sister’s family.
Koko-chan, who struggles with
putting on a kimono, meets various
regular customers in the shop --- a rich man and bar girl couple, an old couple whose wife is suffering from
dementia, a man frequenting this expensive place disproportionate to his income
because he wants to see a waitress, and etc.
Koko-chan hovers between the shop manager who has a plain face with narrow eyes and Korean student Ryuyu Hyeon Cheol who is crazy about her.
And the communication between Koko-chan and Ryuyu is funny. That reminds me of
my experience where all of us were desperate to communicate with the other
foreign students in a language other than our native tongues.
But, while Koko-chan comes into
contact with foreign cultures at a beef nabe
shop, the customers here and the kimono
are in fact foreign cultures even to me as a Japanese. I don’t have any kimonos, not to mention being able to
wear one by myself.
“Backlash” refers to right-wing movements which detest gender equality.
“The head of a gender equality center” refers to myself. I was the head of STEP,
a gender equality center in Toyonaka, Osaka. Backlash movements are prevailing
all over Japan, spreading false rumors and threatening people. They exclude
books and teachers that oppose their ideology from the society and water down
the gender equality policies. This prevents the government from implementing
the policies, withering them rapidly. The same can be said about Toyonaka. The
local government gave in and dismissed me from the head of the center. The
government sacrificed me to the backlash movement.
I filed a lawsuit against the decision and the case lasted for 7 years,
ending up in the Supreme Court. And finally last year, the Supreme Court judged
that the dismissal was unfair and underhand, and it invaded my personal right. This
became final and binding, bringing a historical victory to supporters of gender
equality. We successfully counterattacked the backlash movement in Japan for
the first time in the solidarity with the defense lawyers, scholars and
supporters.
This book, The Sacrifice of
Backlash, comprises my essay based on the massive statements submitted to
the Osaka District Court, “The Theory of Personal Right Invasion” by Professor Mutsuko
Asakura, memoirs on the trial by Katsuko Terasawa and Mitsuko Miyaji, the attorneys
who supervised the lawsuit, and a timeline of the trial. The book also includes
the flyers, conversations, newspaper articles and photographs of the trial.
Nothing would make me happier, if our readers
would realize "the terror of Fascism” from the viewpoint of gender
equality.
In the anti-nuclear movement up to now, some women have stated their opinions from the viewpoint of a mother and others have criticized them, as pointed out by Ms. Ida and Ms. Furukubo. The conflict comes from the fact that women end up taking a role as caretakers while they are pinpointed into the stereotypical gender roles, and that “mother” exists at the point where these roles meet.
When the element of body is added to “mother,” the words of these statements intensify rapidly.
Since 3.11, various statements on exposure and childbearing have been made. They were so point-blank that I felt as if I was told that women live only to bear children.
I wonder since when the concept of eugenics has been so pervasive. I was so scared because I felt like my body was engulfed into the dark current of those words.
The scare is still stuck in me. It stings my feeling when women, their body, their exisistance are referred to only as “mother” (Ms. Ohashi also talks about this uncomfortable feelings concerning the way the word “mother” is used).
Ms. Yauchi mentioned Mitsu Tanaka in her article. Tanaka described the division of women between “mother” and “whore” using the phrase “the liberation from the toilet”. Woman lib movement rebelled against the norm imposed on women and mounted a campaign against the corruption of Eugenic Protection Act.
Of course, many women had thought, talked about, and been angry about women’s body before that. I wonder how much of this accumulation has ever been reflected in the words about 3.11 and childbearing. This evokes a different kind of anger inside of me.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “Inochi no Onna-tachi he---Torimidashi Women's Live Ron”
[To Women of Life---Distraught Theory of Women's Live]
I’d like to review some recent manga[comics]here. in these manga, I think women today talk about their body with the words developed by women of former generations.
The heroine of this manga is a woman who is worried about the no-sex relationship with her live-in partner. As her desires conflict with his sexually conservative words and actions and with her own idea of sex being something shameful, their relationship has been awkward. One day she gets to help the job of her mother who sells sex toys, and while meeting many different people and keeping asking herself questions, starts to change her view on sex. Little by little she is getting back her own body which she used to feel as trash.
The way the matters concerning her own body harm her is truly heartrending.
This manga
describes everyday life of a sister and her younger borther. She keeps shattering her brother's fantsy about women with sharp, accurate words. The brother says to the
sister, who has been looking at her nails just after she had them painted at a
salon, “Men do not care women’s nails anyway.”
She replies, “You always get stiff shoulders and back pain after a nail
salon, since you have to stay seated in a fixed position for such a long time. How
could you do that for other than yourself?” She continues, “We grow up in an
atmosphere that "being pretty" should be the top priority for a woman. But not every
woman can work that out. And so I guess we all want to have something pretty
that we can obtain easily.”
Yes. I want to wear pretty clothes and put on pretty
things for myself. My body exists for the sake of myself, not for anybody else.
This manga is
set in the near future, when having cosmetic surgery is common practice.
Yamamoto, a junior high school student, is one of few “untouched” in such a
world. She misrepresents her age and is working at a hostess club specialized in busu [dingos] because her family is
poor. At the club, many employees who could not attract customers in normal
clubs have had “reverse surgery” to become ugly to entertain geeks. Being a
“real busu,” Yamamoto is very popular
and earn a good income there. She actually has had surgery for elsewhere
of her body though. She has taken a huge bank loan for the wings attached to
her back.
Not being rich, she knows all too well that she could
never be a winner in life even if she fixed her face a little bit. (Pursuing
beauty costs a lot of money.) What she chose was the wings which were totally
useless. That is the body she has acquired.
Mitsu Tanaka says she wants to stand tall without caring what people say
about her, but that at the same time she wants to look as young as possible.* She
admits that this contradictory existence is her who "is here as a woman." Women are bothered by their own desires.Women try to be “pretty” and people assume they do
so in order to get men’s attention. I feel I’m conneceted to that sort of woman’s body spoken here, but I felt
there is nobody like ”the mother” spoken in the context of 3.11 and the
exposure. The woman’s body isn’t a “machine to reproduce children”.
*Asahi Shinbun, March 2, 2011
“’Onna’ de Arisugita Yoko Nagata” [Yoko Nagata, Who Was Too Much of a “Woman”]
In August 1991, former “comfort women,”
(Korean women who were forced to serve as sex workers for the Imperial Japanese
Army) including Kim Hak-Sun, started to raise their voices. Before then, the
issue had only been discussed quietly here and there in postwar Japanese
society. Some of these testimonies came from soldiers, partly as romanticized
memories of their time spent with these women.
One such witness is Shigeru Mizuki, a well-known Japanese comic artist, who gave detailed descriptions of a “comfort station,” or brothel, in his book “Soin Gyokusai Seyo [All of You Shall Die for Honor]” (pp. 14-15.) based on his own experience. In the afterward of his book, he wrote, “I can’t help but feel irrational resentment when I write war chronicles. Maybe the spirits of the war dead make me feel like that.” There Mizuki told of a soldier who shouted, “Thirty seconds for each!” and another who said, “Hey Sis, about 70 more to go. Be patient,” when looking at the long queue in front of the station. It’s an important historical testimony, which proves how the Japanese army set up comfort stations in the very front lines at that time.
The existence of comfort women, which had been a silent issue, almost forgotten in postwar Japan, came to the foreground in 1991. That was when the surviving comfort women started to talk about their own experiences. Women who were forced into providing sexual services started making people aware that the “comfort women” system had been nothing but sexual slavery. Until then, discussion of the issue had been long considered taboo in Korea, and many victims hadn’t been able to talk about it at all, even with their families.
In January 1991, some of Korea’s former comfort women and their supporters started a protest march in the busy lunch-time street in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul. They had only one demand: acknowledgment of this past crime in the form of an apology from the Japanese government to each and every one of the former comfort women still living. The apology — meant to make the Japanese public widely aware of the harm done to these women as a historical fact — includes a vow to never repeat the same mistake, and to acknowledge that the issue has not yet been settled legally.
Every week for the past 20 years, 1,000 times now since its beginning, they have continued the Wednesday protest. On December 14th, 2011, the group marked its 1000th protest. Simultaneous protests were also held in several places in Japan, and were attacked relentlessly by vocal opponents.
In Osaka, some shouted “Liars!” at the protesting women even though the Japanese government had already acknowledged the existence of “comfort places” and “comfort women” based on official wartime documents. A high school girl responded to the opponents by saying, “I wish it were a lie.” Don’t we all. More than anyone, the victims no doubt strongly wish that their gruesome experiences were just a nightmare.
On the 1000th day in Seoul, Kwon Hae-Hyo, who was acting as the M.C. of the event, put it this way: “The harumonis’ [Korean words meaning “old women”] wish is that they won’t need to hold the Wednesday protest anymore after next week.”
On that day three actresses presented the Harumoni’s feelings in a Korean translation of the following monologue by Eve Ensler.
