"Queering Friendship: Takemura Kazuko" by J. Keith Vincent

Queering Friendship:
Takemura Kazuko: Feminism and Queer Theory in a Global Context
J. Keith Vincent
Boston University
(A Talk Presented at “Sex, Gender, and Society: Rethinking Japanese Feminism”, Emory University, April 20, 2013)


Takemura Kazuko was a key figure at the intersection of feminist and queer thought in Japan from the 1990s until her death in 2011, at the age of 57. She was well known as a queer feminist scholar of English and American literature, and for her translations of work by Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, Trinh T. Minh  Ha, and Slavoj Zizek. She was also an old friend of mine since the mid 1990s when she and I both became involved in thinking about issues of gender and sexuality in Japanese scholarship and activism. The last time I spoke to Kazuko was in March of 2010, when my partner Anthony and I had dinner with her near her home in Tokyo.  We talked about her coming to Boston to spend some time with us in Provincetown on Cape Cod, but sadly she had to cancel because of illness.  I only later learned how ill she was at this time, and that she had a heroic team of women friends and colleagues who called themselves “Team K” who supported her in the last days of her illness.

When I proposed this paper for this conference I was especially happy to be accepted because I knew it would give me the opportunity to sit down and read more of Takemura-san’s work.  Although I knew Kazuko for quite some time (almost 20 years!), and have marveled at the elegance and accuracy of her translations of Butler and others, I had not actually read much of her own work, which focussed on 19th and 20th century American and British writers including Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Louisa May Alcott, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner, as well as Hollywood film. We often joked about the fact that she spent her time studying my country and I spent mine studying hers.  But somehow this difference in our fields did not seem to matter all that much, since we shared an interest in and commitment to feminism and queer theory. And yet now I find myself regretting not reading more of her work while she was alive.  I also find myself asking why I didn’t. I had no good reason not to read it since I do make it a point to read work about English and American literature that has to do with gender and sexuality.  I suppose I thought if I was going to take the trouble to read something in Japanese, it would make sense for it to be about Japan.  

I am quite embarrassed actually to admit this, but I’m afraid it was just such a calculation that was keeping me from learning more about Kazuko’s work. As someone who writes about Japanese literature in English, I really should know better.  I ought to know that if this policy were applied in the other direction I could never expect a Japanese person to take an interest in my own work. Why read what this American white guy has to say about Japanese literature when you can go directly to the source?  This sort of attitude is not at all uncommon in Japan and in the US for that matter, and it is one that I am always eager to denounce as narrow minded and essentialist.  And yet, with regard to Kazuko’s work, I was clearly not practicing what I was preaching.

So I am doubly grateful, as I said, to have been accepted to speak at this conference, for the chance it has given me to go back and read more of Kazuko’s work.  In doing so, it has been a real thrill to re-acquaint myself with, and in many cases to learn about for the first time, aspects of the history of feminism and queer theory in the United States, through Kazuko’s eyes.  Thanks to her 2012 book Bungakuryoku no chōsen I now know, for example, that Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women can be read as a queer text. I also learned that Kate Millet’s classic 1970 work of feminist literary criticism Sexual Politics ends with a chapter in which she writes approvingly of the gender politics of Jean Genet, and that Millet’s analysis of homophobia and misogyny in D.H. Lawrence presages the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 15 years later in Between Men *1 . In a brilliant chapter on American anti-intellectualism, Takemura draws on Richard Hofstadter’s classic book on the subject going back to the 19th century “Know Nothing Party” to contextualize the awarding of the “Bad Writing Prize” to Judith Butler by the Johns Hopkins-based journal Philosophy and History in 1998.  As Kazuko points out in that chapter, there were plenty of poststructuralist theorists whose prose was more difficult than Butler’s, and plenty of other winners of the award whose selection failed to bring any notice from the mass media.  But these two facts together suggest that what was at issue was not so much the fabled “difficulty” of Butler’s prose but the challenge it posed to fiercely guarded “common sense” notions about gender and sexual norms that were themselves rooted in deep currents of good-old American anti-intellectualism.

For Kazuko herself, of course, Butler’s prose was not difficult, but a “thrilling” and clear articulation of ideas that she herself had been groping towards as a way to fight against the violence and injustice of misogynist and heteronormative ideology in Japan *2 . Gender Trouble, she wrote in her translator’s afterword, spoke "directly, unerringly, and penetratingly of our reality [emphasis mine]" *3. She encouraged her Japanese readers not to be discouraged by the difficulty of Butler’s language, to read her work slowly and to savor it, "yukkuri, jikkuri."

All this talk about Judith Butler might have you wondering whether this talk will be about Japanese feminism. “Japanese feminism” is, after all, the theme of this conference. I might well respond, “But I am talking about Japanese feminism!  Just because Takemura-san translated Judith Butler and worked on English and American literature doesn’t make her any less of a ‘Japanese feminist.’  By that logic, few of us here could be ‘American feminists’ and I could not count myself as an ‘American queer theorist’ as  long as I continue to work in the field of Japanese literature.”

I could respond that way. But I won’t. Instead I would like to take this question quite seriously, because I know that Takemura-san did.  The question I am referring to is: “What does it mean to be a Japanese feminist working on American and British literature?” There is also a group of other, similar questions that cluster around this one, and that are, I think, extremely relevant to all of us in this room.  What does it mean to do queer or feminist work with a focus on another culture beside your “own?”  What are the institutional politics that subtend our ability to study Japanese feminism in the United States or Takemura-san’s to study American feminism in Japan? In order to start to answer this question I would like to say a little bit more about how I met Kazuko and then close with a reading of another essay of hers, the final chapter in the 2012 book that I just mentioned, that addresses this question head-on.

In the mid 1990s I was in Tokyo supposedly doing research for my dissertation, but actually spending most of my time working with a group called “OCCUR: The Japan Association for the Lesbian and Gay Movement.” (アカー：動くゲイとレズビアンの会）  OCCUR was involved on a number of fronts in the struggle for the rights and recognition of sexual minorities in Japan.  They were the plaintiffs in the first-ever legal case involving gay rights in Japan, in which they sued the Tokyo Metropolitan Government for excluding homosexuals from its youth hostels. They were working both at the community level and with the Ministry of Health in HIV prevention and treatment issues. They were the Asian representative in the International Lesbian and Gay Association. They provided anonymous telephone counseling for gays and lesbians, and even queer-friendly English conversation classes.

But OCCUR’s work did not stop with its activism. This was the 1990s--the early, heady days of queer theory coming out of the U.S., and my friends in OCCUR were eager for more theoretical tools with which to strategize, to better understand and theorize the structure of Japanese heteronormative society. To that end, for several years we had a monthly seminar called the “Identity Research Group,”(アイデンティティ研究会）--eventually, affectionately abbreviated as the “ID-ken”--in which we read and discussed work in feminism and the emerging field of queer theory, including that of Monique Wittig, Luce Irigaray, Gayle Rubin, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, D.A. Miller, Lee Edelman, and others.  Most of this work remained untranslated at the time, and it was often my job, with the help of those members of OCCUR who were also able to read the texts in English, to attempt to convey the arguments in Japanese.  This, as you might imagine, was not the easiest thing to do, and so we were very eager to have help from scholars—and also to  have proper translations into Japanese.

It was in this context that I first met Takemura Kazuko. I think it was in 1995 or 1996. I can’t remember the exact occasion of our first meeting, but I do remember very clearly a trip to her apartment near Tsukuba University, where she was teaching English and American literature.  I went with several other OCCUR members including Kawaguchi Kazuya（河口和也） and Niimi Hiroshi（新美広）--all gay men, and we spent the day eating pizza on the floor, smoking innumerable cigarettes, and talking for hours about how to make queer theory matter in Japan and in Japanese. This was a serious issue for us because queer theory was just starting to become a sort of fad in academic publishing in Japan, and this was happening in almost complete isolation from the activist community and even from the queer community.  Kazuko, who was teaching at Tsukuba University at the time, was one of the only academics in Japan who was not only conversant with queer theory and its feminist roots, but saw it, like my friends in OCCUR and I did, as a sort of life line--a mode of resistance and a form of cultural activism. So we were thrilled to have her come to our kenkyukai from time to time and eventually to get her help as we began to publish our own translations of queer theory into Japanese *4. She was already an accomplished translator, having just published a translation of Trinh T Minh-Ha’s Women, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism in 1995. In 1999 she published her flawless translation of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and would go on to bring out many more important translations, including Butler’s Antigone’s Claim in 2002, Excitable Speech in 2004, and Butler and Gayatri Spivak’s Who Sings the Nation State? in 2008.

But Takemura-san was not only a gifted translator. Actually, let me rephrase that. Takemura-san was a gifted translator, and for her, I think, translation of U.S. feminist and queer theory was very much part of a larger project--namely the fight against misogyny and heteronormativity within Japan. Her work as a translator was perhaps not unlike Yamakawa Kikue’s translation of the work of Edward Carpenter that Sarah Frederick will be speaking about on this panel; it was a natural outgrowth of her work as a feminist and a integral part of her scholarship. Takemura-san was, I think it is fair to say, one of, if not the most important figure in the founding of sexuality studies in Japan.  When I met her in 1995 she was also in the midst of publishing a ground-breaking six part essay on “The Possibility of Lesbian Studies” in the journal Eigo Seinen, despite well meaning advice from other academics that to write about such things was “vulgar.” [品位を落とす]*5.  And she would go on to publish much more brilliant work right up until, and indeed even after her tragic death on December 13, 2011. She seems to have had three additional books “in her drawer” at the time of her death.

I would like to discuss just one piece of that work in the time remaining to me today. Takemura-san’s 2012 book The Challenge of the Literary: Family, Desire, Terrorism [Bungakuryoku no chōsen: famirii, yokubō, terorizumu is an extraordinary work about which there is much to say, but I would like here to focus in on the final chapter, titled “Renaissance of a Discipline? On Researching Anglophone Literature in Japan Today.”  In this chapter, Takemura-san directly addresses the question “What does it mean to study literature written in English while living in Japan?  And what does it mean to do this as a feminist?” As I mentioned earlier, this is something that we, feminist scholars of Japanese literature writing in the US could stand to think about as well, and I think Takemura-san’s approach is really exemplary.

If Japanese studies in the US has as its “original sin” its Cold War origins in Area Studies, English literature in Japan has its own checkered past *6. It emerged in the early 20th century, as part of a woefully uncritical identification with Britain and British imperial culture, even as Japan was in the process of becoming an Empire itself. The postwar period, moreover, saw the emergence in Japan of an American Studies with a similarly problematic origin.  In her essay, Takemura points out the interesting fact that the institutional structure for the study of both British literature in the early 20th century and American literature in the postwar period did not follow, but was at least co-eval with, or even prior to the institutionalization of these disciplines in Britain and the United States. Thus Tokyo University had a program in English literature starting in the 1890s (famously taught first by Lafcadio Hearn, then by Natsume Sōseki, and later by Yone Noguchi), while Oxford only started teaching it in 1894 and Cambridge not till 1911. Similarly, the Japanese American Studies Association was founded in 1946, five years earlier than anything like it would exist in the United States. In pointing this out, Takemura is not making a claim for Japan’s admirable precocity. Far from it. For her, what is readable in this historical chronology is a powerful mimetic desire on “Japan’s” part towards these dominant Western powers--a desire to get closer to them, to “befriend” Britain and America, and in embracing that friendship---a kind of male homosocial friendship, in fact--to avoid having to think about its own subject position either as pseudo-colonial subject or as an imperial subject in its own right.

“What has prevailed then,” write Masao Miyoshi in an essay about the history of English literature in Japan,

is the ongoing doctrine of equivalence, which, by emphasizing identification minimizes the significance of difference. The problems of English literature as they are faced in England are transplanted to become the problems of the Japanese study of English literature. There is nearly total indifference to the Japanese context in which such such naturalization of alien perspectives must continually occur *7. 

Miyoshi does not mince words in this essay. He talks about the “intellectual vacuity,” of English literature in Japan, about its tendency to “merely celebrate in reverence,” and at one point he describes how, “The journal Eigo Seinen (literally, English-language Youths, translated as The Rising Generation) was launched in 1898 to serve—despite its ghastly title—as the central organizing paper of the English establishment of Japan to this day” *8. As is often the case with Miyoshi, his critique here is spot on--but somewhat vitiated by his own desire to establish himself as the one who knows better.

It was in this same journal, Eigo Seinen, despite its “ghastly title” and its complicity with Japanese and British Imperialism, in which Takemura-san published her six-part essay on lesbian studies I mentioned earlier. Unlike Miyoshi, who left Japan soon after the war and whose professional identity was very much tied up in that departure, Takemura-san stayed in Japan and did work within English and American studies there. And while she was certainly in agreement in many ways with Miyoshi’s critique (and indeed quotes quite liberally from it and from other recent books in Japanese making similar arguments) she is less interested in this kind of “unveiling” of the ideological foundations of her own discipline and its complicity with imperialism, than in working to articulate and theorize her own particular position as a Japanese feminist working in this field *9 .

This is a question, she writes, that she only began to think seriously about in the early 2000s. She mentions three incidents in her life which provoked;this serious thinking. The first incident occurred during a panel that she moderated at a conference in 2003 of the Tokyo branch of the American Literature Association. The topic was:  “The “Chaos and Violence of the Post-Family Era: Feminist Readings of American Literature in Late 2003.”  The papers were wonderful, and the panel was a great success.  But during the question and answer period, “a certain sociologist” in the audience (Ueno Chizuko tells me it was she) asked the following question:

“What does it mean to have this kind of discussion of American literature in Japan, in Japanese, in front of a Japanese audience?” *10

 Takemura-san writes that her first reaction was to think that in this post-post structuralist age such a question was at best naive and at worst unnecessarily provocative. I imagine that she felt a lot like I did when, at the Association of Japanese Literary Studies conference at Rutgers University a few years ago--on panel for which Takemura-san was supposed to be the discussant had illness not prevented her from coming-- I gave a paper on Eve Sedgwick and Soseki, only to be asked, “What possible relevance can Eve Sedgwick have to Japanese literature?  She writes about British literature doesn’t she?”

Well, Takemura-san responded to this sociologist’s question in the same spirit that I am afraid I did to that question at the AJLS, although no doubt much more elegantly.  In the book, she reproduces her own response—I think intentionally— as a kind of parody of rootless and ludic postmodern theory. Marshaling the heaviest of theoretical guns — quoting Derrida and Homi Bhaba, and reader response theory, she launches in:

As readings multiply and we move further and further away from the original, the text only becomes richer, reproducing itself in ever more productive ways, as these manifold readings circle back into the text, enabling the production of new texts.  Therefore there is absolutely nothing unproductive about discussing American literature in Japan, in Japanese, to an audience made up exclusively of Japanese people. *11

While she felt good about this answer at the time, Takemura-san writes that she became increasingly dissatisfied with it.  She began to ask herself more critical questions about her own status as a Japanese scholar of Anglophone literature.  This did not mean, she insists, that she came to think that American and British literature should only be discussed by Americans and Brits, but rather that she began to take seriously what she at first thought was a naive (or just an annoying) question:  What does it mean to read Anglophone literature in Japan? What does it mean to do that as a feminist?

The second factor that got her to start thinking differently about her identity as a scholar of Japanese literature was her attendance at a number of international conferences in Asia in the early 2000s, where she began to meet other Asian scholars working on Anglophone literature.  For the first time, she found herself discussing American and British literature with other scholars whose native language was not English and who came from countries that each had their own local institutions devoted to the study of “English” and “American” literature.  She describes the collective impact of these encounters as constituting something like a “body blow” to her own self-understanding.  As a result of this “body blow,” she describes, “a dawning awareness that even as English literature existed in each country as an institutionalized system, something was deviating from these institutions, something was wriggling up and crawling out from in between them.  What sort of professional identity, then, should I have in such a context?” *12 The verb that Takemura-san uses here and that I have translated as “wriggling up” is “ugomeku,” — not a very appealing term, and quite a frightening-looking kanji (蠢く）, one that brings to mind a nest of worms or maggots all squirming in different directions.  This is not, then, exactly a vision of pan-Asian solidarity (Takemura-san was, I think, quite free of such sentimentalism) as much as a metaphor for a truly, even disturbingly diverse set of reading practices. If English literature as an institution in these Asian countries could be said to be part of the apparatus of a sort of post-colonial cultural imperialism, organized in order to bring the subaltern into closer, more intimate contact with the metropole (as we saw Miyoshi noting earlier),  it was also true that countless acts of actually reading literature, and reading it closely, were producing a different sort of energy—less an organized collectivity with a single purpose (such as coming closer to England and America) but a kind of swarm of difference.  “The third reason,” she writes,

is even more individual, more about myself.  I started to write about sexuality in the early 1990s.  Or rather, I first became able to write about sexuality at that time. But I began to wonder about the connection between my being a scholar of Anglophone literature  and my writing on sexuality. What does it mean for me to be a scholar of English literature? What is it that underwrites my professional identity as such? *13

Having listed these three factors that she says caused her to reevaluate her own professional identity as a scholar of English literature, Takemura recalls the one figure in the history of English literature in Japan who thought about this most carefully, who remained outside of its blind adoration of England and “doctrine of equivalence” and struggled to find a different relation to it. For Takemura (and for Miyoshi as well) this figure is Natsume Soseki, who, as is well known, studied in England for the first two years of the last century--and who seems to have hated every minute of it.

As Miyoshi puts it,  “Soseki had no one to talk to and was desperately lonely. He persisted nevertheless in pondering what literary studies meant and, what was more important for him, what it could mean for a Japanese to study English literature. He read, wrote, and collected books in nearly total isolation until he had a severe nervous breakdown” *14. Soseki, like Takemura-san, persisted in questioning his own positionality, and yet “The critical issues Soseki confronted were never vigorously discussed [by those who succeeded him], but rather were deliberately avoided, and the institutionalization of English literature continued on” *15 .

Takemura-san does a lot with the contrast which I hope you have begun to notice creeping into my talk today, between “friendship” and “loneliness.” On the one hand, there is the institution of British or American literature in Japan, whose goal is to bring two nation states, two Empires into a relation of “friendship.”  By being good boys and studying hard, by looking up every word in the OED, scholars of English literature in Japan try to get closer to the mother (or father?) text, to reduce as far as possible to the distance between themselves and England or America, and to revel in a sort of spurious cosmopolitanism.  This, for Takemura, however, has nothing to do with the actual encounter with literature (and here I recall the title of her book, so hard to translate, The Challenge of the Power of Literature, or The Defiant Power of Literature?), which problematizes rather than assumes community, and the quasi-familial, usually heteronormative gender relations that go with it. She quotes Natsume Soseki talking about this very issue in his famous speech “My Individualism,” where he argues against groupthink.

Simply stated, individualism is a philosophy that replaces cliquism with values based on personal judgement of what is right and wrong. An individualist is not forever running with the group　（朋党）, forming cliques that thrash around blindly in the interests of power and money. That is why there lurks beneath the surface of his philosophy a loneliness unknown to others. As soon as we deny our little groups, then I simply go my way and I let the other man go his, unhindered. Sometimes, in some instances, we cannot avoid becoming scattered. That is what is lonely *16. 

In a brilliant move, Takemura brings Soseki’s critique of what he calls “cliquism” and his recognition of the inevitable “loneliness” of his “individualist” to Gayatri Spivak’s recent critique of both the “old” comparative literature for its humanism and the “new” cultural/ethnic studies for its identity politics.  Both, she says, in what Takemura describes as an uncanny echo of Soseki, are engaging in an “unexamined politics of collectivity"*17.

Of course Soseki was not exactly a feminist. Nor could he stand completely outside the male homosocial world that he so faithfully described and critiqued in his fiction. In the same lecture on “My Individualism” he shows himself to be completely unsympathetic to the cause of women’s suffrage in Britain. (Although his argument that their bad behavior is “un-British” sounds a bit different once you remember how much he hated Britain). But he was able, Takemura argues, to maintain a critical stance toward the institution of English literature, even as he worked to found it.

There is something queer about this.  And Takemura-san was quite clear about it. She explains that the title of her essay (“Renaissance of a Discipline?”) is a sort of hybrid.  Half (the “Discipline” part) is taken from Spivak’s book Death of a Discipline. In that book Spivak argues for a new kind of Comparative Literature that does not rely on an “unexamined politics of collectivity” be it liberal humanism or naive identity politics. Questioning these unexamined collectivities is crucial, she argues, so as to arrive at a new form of democracy that is consonant with a feminist and post-colonial politics. In order to do this, she borrows from Derrida’s work on friendship to ask, "Can democracy--invariably claimed as a politics, or perhaps the politics of friendship--function without a logofratrocentric notion of collectivity: With the sister allowed in rarely, and only as an honorary brother?" *18

The other half of Takemura’s title (the word “Renaissance”), she says, is taken from F. O. Mathiessen’s 1942 book American Renaissance, the text that founded the field of American literary studies in the US by establishing as its “canon” the works of Melville,  Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne and Whitman. As Henry Abelove explained in a powerful essay,  a certain queerness is readable in this choice of works to canonize and throughout this founding work of American studies, but the institution of American studies has been busy disavowing this queerness ever since. I quote from Abelove’s Deep Gossip, a book which I am not sure that Kazuko read, but that I feel certain she would have liked very much.

Matthiessen’s explicit theme is the culture of democracy in mid-nineteenth century America. What is inexplicit, what is merely suggested, is the question the book frames without asking: what was the erotic meaning of that democracy, the erotic dynamic, the ties, affections, that bound together those white men, suppositionally equal, suppositionally brothers, who were the privileged subject of the old republic? And if we knew that erotic dynamic, would we know something pertinent to the tasks of improving and deepening and expanding and advancing and even reconstituting democracy in the present?  Whitman had long before described the old democracy as ‘boys, together clinging, fulfilling our foray.’ What was that clinging? Was the old democracy distinguishable from white male homosexuality as Matthiessen knew it, and if so, how? *19

“Queer studies,” Abelove goes on to say, was thus always there at the start of American Studies as part of its “unconscious.”　Mathiessen himself, harassed for his leftist politics and his homosexuality, would kill himself, out of despair and loneliness, by jumping from a hotel window in 1950. As was the case with Soseki’s skepticism about English studies in Japan, this queer unconscious of American studies was ignored and repressed as the institution grew. And yet the future of American Studies, Abelove writes,　“will depend in large measure on whether or not that unconscious is permitted to return” *20. Kazuko recognizes in her own essay, in a similar vein, that Soseki, arguably, like Mathiessen, a “founding father” of both English literary studies in Japan and of modern Japanese literature itself, was putting a similar question about the place of male-male eroticism in his vision of Japanese democracy. He wrote his senior thesis, it bears remembering, on Walt Whitman’s ideal of the “Manly Love of Comrades”*21.

One the one hand: Spivak’s question, in Death of Discipline, about how to find a place for the sister, for women in a democracy too often imagined as a band of brothers.  On the other, Mathiessen’s--and Soseki’s--unasked question, about the male homoerotics of democracy.  Kazuko’s hybrid title is also a question: “Renaissance of a Discipline?”  She writes that she explained this to Spivak in an email and the latter fired back a response, saying that “There can be no Renaissance of English literary Studies in Japan. That’s not the kind of Comparative Literature I was writing about.”  Kazuko wrote back.

No, that’s not what I mean. I’m not talking only about Comparative Literature. I mentioned Mathiessen only because I wanted to say that the kind of English literary studies that I am hoping for has not yet been born, so it can hardly be reborn. I mean something else with the term “renaissance.” Something else, that has to do with “friendship” *22.

What does it mean, then, to write about Anglophone literature in Japan, as a feminist, as a queer theorist? What does it mean to write about Japan from the U.S. or elsewhere?  Takemura-san mentioned three things, you will recall, that got her thinking about this question seriously.  First--being asked at that conference in Tokyo--What does it mean to study American texts inside Japan?  Second, asking herself at conferences in Asia, What does it mean to study American or British texts with other scholars outside of America or Britain?  Both of these questions, it is fair to say, are about destabilizing both one’s own subject position and the putative “object” of one’s study.  If that object is “attractive,” is it intrinsically so? Or are there external forces that have made it so?  Or both?


The answer is, and I think, must be: “both.” And this, I think, is why the third factor that Takemura wrote about is so important.  This was her own increasing focus on questions of sexuality since the early 1990s.  When I mentioned this earlier, the reason for this may not have been clear. But let me spell it out here at the end. To study sexuality is to study the forces--the powers of “love” or “libido” or whatever you might call them--that draw us both towards and away from each other and from the various objects we cathect.  It is to take seriously the question: “What does it mean to ‘love’ what we study?  Or to hate it?  How much of this is about individual taste, and how much of it about structural forces outside our control? How do the institutional histories of the disciplines that we work within shape, enable, and limit this?”


The subtitle of Takemura-san’s book that I been discussing is “Family / Desire / Terrorism.”  The full title, then, is “The Challenge of the Power of Literature: Family / Desire / Terrorism.”  When I first saw these words on the cover I read them paratactically, as a simple list of keywords that the book treats.  But as I read the book itself, I realized that this is not just a list of terms. Rather they represent a kind of spectrum of different forms and intensities of the same libidinal and social “glue,” -- the glue that connects all kinds of groups, from the romantic couple, to the family, to the community of English literary studies in Japan, to the nation, and even, at its most extreme, the terrorist cell.  Taking that “glue” seriously, and recognizing that -- and how -- the line between family, friendship, and erotic desire is always shifting, is what it means to write about sexuality seriously. And this, I think, is why sexuality was key to Takemura-san’s ability to confront and think through those questions about her own positionality among the world historical forces that shaped “English literature.”  This is what makes her work feminist and queer at once.  And this is why it is worth reading for feminist and queer scholars in Japan Studies, even if it is not “about Japan.”

But I cannot end, as a literary scholar, without also saying that what is really thrilling about Takemura-san’s work, and the reason that she and I were friends, is that it does not stop with this question of “positionality.”  It is also about the literary, “The Challenge of the Power of Literature,” as the book’s main title reads.  This is why, in the texture of its close and loving readings of actual literary texts, Takemura-san finds room for something else, something unexpected, and moving, to “crawl up and wriggle out,” from between the lines.


*1 Takemura Kazuko, Bungakuryoku no chōsen: famirī yokubō terorizumu. Tokyo: Kenkyūsha, 2012.
*2 Takemura describes her encounter with Butlers’ work in “Kiki-teki jōkyō no naka de bungaku to feminizumu wo kenkyū suru imi.” In Kenkyū suru imi. Ed. Komori Yōichi. Tokyo Tosho, 2003. 138-163. 「バトラーは、私が求めていたもの、ずっともやもやしていて、研究の場に引き出せないと思っていた事柄を、明確に分節化してくれました．『ジェンダー・トラブル』は難解だとよく言われますが、むしろスリリングな書物で、私は興奮して読みました。」145.
*3 “Yakusha atogaki.” Jendā toraburu. Tokyo: Seidosha, 1999. ジェンダー・トラブル』は...わたしたちの現実に、直接にためらいなく、わたしたちの隠れた現実を目の前に引きずり出してくれるものである...どうか複雑な言い回しに気持ちを萎えさせないで、バトラーにつきあうつもりで、ゆっくり、じっくりと読んでほしい（295）。
*4  The culmination of this work was a special issue of the journal Gendai shisō, titled “Lesbian Gay Studies.”  The issue included an essay by Takemura on bisexuality.  See Takemura Kazuko, “Bōkyaku / torikomi no senryaku: baisekushuariti josetsu” Gendai shisō. Rinji zōkan, vol. 25-6, May 1997. 248-256.
*5 Bungakuryoku no chōsen, 319. The articles on lesbian studies appeared in Eigo Seinen, volume 142, issues 4-9 (July-December, 1996).
*6 Masao Miyoshi has memorably described the situation of area studies in the U.S. thusly : “More than fifty years after war’s end, American scholars are still organizing knowledge as if confronted by an implacable enemy and thus driven by the desire either to destroy it or to marry it.”  Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies. Ed. Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian.  Duke University Press, 2002. 5.
*7 Masao Miyoshi, “The Invention of English Literature in Japan.” Japan in the World. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. 271-287. 284.
*8 Ibid, 283.
*9 The other two books she mentions are 齋藤一『帝国日本の英文学』人文書院、二〇〇六年。And 宮崎芳三『太平洋戦争と英文学者』研究社、一九九六年。
*10 Bungakuryoku no chōsen, 289. [このようなアメリカ文学の発表や議論を、日本で，日本語で、日本の観客に向かってだけ発する意義はどこにあるか]
*11 Bungakuryoku no chōsen. 289. 読みはつねに、多様に、そして遠くへ，それゆえさらに豊穣に，さらに生産的なかたちで再生産され、翻ってその読みが置換され、変容したかたちでテクストに舞い戻り、新しいテクストの生産へと導いていく、したがってアメリカ文学を日本で，日本語で、日本の観客だけに論じることが非生産的だということは毛頭もない。
*12 Bungakuryoku no chōsen, 290. それが英文学がそれぞれの国において制度として機能しているという自覚と、そういった制度から逸脱してあるいは横断して、なにが蠢いているのか、蠢きうるのだろうか、そのとき私は英文学者としてどんなプロフェショナル・アイデンティティをもっていくのだろうかと考えるようになったことです。
*13  Bungakuryoku no chōsen, 290. 三番目はさらに個別的なこと、わたし自身のことです。一九九〇年代の前半あたりからセクシュアリティについて書くようになりました。というか、セクシュアリティについて書けるようになったのですが、書き進めるにしたがって，自分が英文学の研究者であるということと、セクシュアリティについて書いていることがどのように繋がるのだろうと考えるようになり，ひいては，自分が英文学の研究者であることは、どんなことなのか、そもそものプロフェッショナル・アイデンティティは、なべて何によって裏書きされているのかと考えるようになってきたことです．
*14 Miyoshi, “The Invention of English Literature in Japan.” 281.
*15 Ibid, 283.
*16 Quoted in Bungakuryoku no chōsen, p 302. 「もっと解りやすく云えば、党派心がなくって理非がある主義なのです。朋党を結び団隊を作って、権力や金力のために盲動しないという事なのです。それだからその裏面には人に知られない淋しさも潜んでいるのです。すでに党派でない以上、我は我の行くべき道を勝手に行くだけで、そうしてこれと同時に、他人の行くべき道を妨げないのだから、ある時ある場合には人間がばらばらにならなければなりません。そこが淋しいのです。」For the English translation, see Natsume Sōseki, Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings. Edited by Michael K. Bourdaghs, Atsuko Ueda, and Joseph A. Murphy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. 260.
*17 Gayatri Spivak, Death of A Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 28.
*18 Spivak, 32.
*19 Henry Abelove, Deep Gossip. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 62-63.
*20  Ibid, 69.
*21 「文壇における平等主義者の代表者ウォルト・ホイットマンの詩について」『漱石全集　第13巻』岩波書店、1993年、13‐20頁。
*22 Bungakuryoku no chōsen, 321.「いや、そういう意味で−−つまり比較文学だけの土壌で−−わたしは話そうとしているのではない．わたしがマシーセンをだしたのは、そもそも初めから、私が望む英文学という装置は生まれていないので、それを『再生』することはできない。だけれども、再生ということを使って、別のことをいいたい。それは『友情』に関係することだ。」



Japanese Translation by Naoko Uchibori is available on WAN: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Posted by Aya Kitamura

This Book Is an Event, Prof. Muta!

--- Book Review for “That Love Is Sexual Harassment, Boss!”

“That Love Is Sexual Harassment, Boss!”
Written by Kazue Muta
(Shueisha, 14/06/2013)

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It’s been nearly a quarter-century since the first sexual harassment lawsuit in Japan (the Fukuoka Sexual Harassment Case in 1992). Until then there was no such term or idea of sexual harassment in this country. And one of the key players who got it entrenched here as sekuhara was Proffessor Kazue Muta, the author of this book.

You might think there must be a lot of rebukes to men in this book if Ms. Muta, a renowned feminist, says, “. . . is sexual harassment!” But, in fact, I don’t think I’m the only one who felt her compassion for those doing the harassing at the back of her deep insight. For example, she comments like this, referring to somebody accidentally saying or doing sexually discriminating things:

“If you are an ordinary man, it’s possible that you will occasionally be a little under the influence of drink, and might let slip some barnyard words in front of your female staff. That’s for sure a yellow card for sexual harassment. But when you’re sober the next morning and realize you said the wrong thing, just apologize straightforwardly. Then it will hardly be a serious affair.” (p.54)

This remark of Ms. Muta must come as such a relief to not a few people (perhaps including me).

For a long time there has been common belief that feminists are man-haters. But I believe this book demonstrates that a feminist attitude which can provide women with a comfortable work environment and support their lives will lead to a better society for men also.

Actually, many sexual harassment cases are not fundamentally black and white. But most of them end up being “black” after the longtime development of troubled relationships between colleagues, a boss and a subordinate, or a teacher and a student. (p. 136)

This book is full of practical lessons about things such as, “the deep division between men and women,” “the way things become complicated,” “sexual harassment advisories and sexual harassment warnings,” “three requirements of an office romance,” and even “in case you should be sued.”

Professor Chizuko Ueno recommends this book as “a household necessity like Home Health Handbook.” Absolutely. This is a must-read not only for men, but also for women in order to understand the feelings of “insensitive” middle-aged men.

I feel guilty that I read through the whole book with such amusument despite the matter’s life-changing seriousness.

I bet this book will be an event in the sociology world. At the end of this book there is a story of Ms. Muta’s “personal experience of secondary damage from sexual harassment,” which signals her long, hard, everlasting battle against sexual harassement.

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Original article written by moomin (http://wan.or.jp/book/?p=6940)

Translated by A. Tawara

“Women’s Thoughts” ―We Remember You  

Chizuko’s Blog No. 50

“Women’s Thoughts” ―We Remember You

Written by Chizuko Ueno

(Shueisha International, 2013/6/26)

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I’ve got a new book published: “Women’s Thoughts” ―We Remember You. It’s the first book I’ve written solely about feminism for quite a while.

It’s divided into two sections: Ⅰ．Re-reading “Women’s Books” and Ⅱ．Reinterpreting the World with Gender. In Section Ⅰ, I wrote about books written by five Japanese women (Kazue Morisaki, Michiko Ishimure, Mitsu Tanaka, Taeko Toyooka and Noriko Mizuta), and in Section Ⅱ, books by six foreign authors (Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Eve Sedgwick, Joan Scott, Gayatri Spivak and Judith Butler).

I wrote brief introductions to their works on the cover page of each section. I put great effort into this book, though I say so myself.

Ⅰ．Re-reading “Women’s Books”

“The words that became my body and soul” ― is how I would describe their writing. To read books is to retrace others’ experiences. I’ve been reading their books since I was young. Then, I was too young and too immature to find the right words to express myself. Even when I tried, the words I had with me were so few that they never felt right. It was then that they gave me the “women’s words” through their books. I found that these women had created their words from struggles similar to mine. It was because they were written in my mother tongue that their words touched my heart. I’d like to tell you how much I was inspired by these women who came a little ahead of me. This was my motivation to write this book.

Section Ⅰ is a collection of works by Japanese female authors. I introduced them chronologically, so you will see that they were mainly published from the 60’s to 80’s. This is because this period was the predawn of feminism and the time when “women’s thoughts” were formed. Maybe I was lucky that I developed my character in that period.

In this section, I covered Kazue Morisaki, Michiko Ishimure, Mitsu Tanaka, Taeko Toyooka and Noriko Mizuta. These five women are a little older than me. Their words touched my heart deeply. Words of male writers never touched me the way they did. Only female writers gave me words which inspired me so much. How could it be just a coincidence? I’ve lived in their era and listened to their words. I’d like to hand down what I received from them to women of the next generations.

Ⅱ．Re-interpretating the World with Gender

Some books influenced me so deeply that they don’t appear in my bibliography. It’s been a while since I had this idea. They’ve developed my theories and thoughts so deeply that they’ve become part of my body and soul, so how can I separate them from me and cite them as references for my own books? I even find it hard to cite particular sentences from them because I can’t specify which sentences inspired me. I usually borrowed thoughts and theories of other authors to create my own, but I’m not ashamed of that. The point is how and from whom I borrowed the thoughts, and how I used them to form my own ideas. The foreign books I dealt with in this book are the ones that influenced me deeply. I also introduced them chronologically. 

Some readers may find it strange that I included two male philosophers in this book, Foucault and Said, although the book is titled “Women’s Thoughts.” But I’d like to interpret “Women’s Thoughts” as “the thoughts which create a borderline between men and women.” Or, more technically, they’re the thoughts that expose the system which creates a borderline between men and women. If that’s true, I can’t omit Foucault’s contribution to the exposure and can’t ignore Said in post-colonialism.

And of course, I learned a lot from the pioneers of gender theories from poststructuralism to deconstruction, such as Scott, Spivak, Sedgwick and Butler. There are those who criticize gender theories as being “imported theories,” and I’d like to respond to them with Spivak’s words. When asked if gender theories weren’t foreign words to Japanese women, she said, “We can use whatever tools available no matter who made them.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Original Text by Chizuko Ueno （http://wan.or.jp/ueno/?p=3183）
Translated by N. Tajima

Book Review: Women's Pro-Wrestling Theory of the Women, by the Women, for the Women

The Bodies of Women Pro-Wrestlers and Gender 
--Beyond Normative "Femininity"
Written by Keiko Aiba
(Akashi Shoten, 03/04/2013)



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I spent my TV childhood in between the Beauty Pair and the Crush Gals, I didn't watch women's pro-wrestling until after I became age 30.
*translator's comment: The Beauty Pair and the Crush Gals were the famous women's tag team in Japan. The former were active during the '70s, and the latter were the '80s.

When I watched women professional wrestlers in the ring shouting around "Bitch" or "You nuts!", making attacks, and receiving the opponent's favorite moves "on purpose", I found a different image from the poster of women's pro-wrestling on local tour that I had seen in my childhood (I never had a chance to see such shows and I rather treated them with no respect), I felt like being dropkicked in the head.

I found women's romanticism, toughness, bonds, and heroism especially  in the aged women pro-wrestlers who have now become veteran fighters.

It can be said that this book is the first book that tried to interpret the gender issue through women's pro-wrestling. Proposing the new concept "body feminism", the author analyzes that how the experiences and embodiments of women pro-wrestlers could oppose to the conventional gender limit, which forces women to take the fragile and passive roles in Japanese society, and how the bodies of women wrestlers are challenged by Japanese society.

The recording of matches and interviews with twenty-five women wrestlers that the author engaged in is valuable. By reading this book, a lot of readers will know where to find the fascinating aspects of women's wrestling. I myself, after reading this book, could not help watching a Youtube video of an audition of All-Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling.

Unlike previous books on women's wrestling, this book has a large implication for feminism as it tries to deduce the new possibilities of women's bodies which women wrestlers are showing to Japanese society.

In any case, I do recommend all the fans of women's wrestling to read this!

Personally, I love the part in this book where a women wrestler says "My sportswear for training is my formalwear" in an interview (on page189). Because when I try to wear suits size7 (no, actually size8...), I always think why the hell these sleeves and waist are so tight? (At any size, all the ready-to-wear clothes don' t fit to my body).

Sportswear is formalwear.  Very good!

Original article written by moomin (07/05/2013)
Translated by T. Muramatsu

Book review: Why Couldn’t Hiroshima Stop Fukushima?

by Mikiyo Kano

(Translator’s note: Kano was born in Seoul, Korea in 1940. After returning to Japan in 1945, she became a victim of the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima. She graduated from Kyoto University and worked at Chuo Koron Publishing Company. Currently a scholar in the history of women, Kano publishes books and gives lectures throughout Japan. This review is by Kano of her own book titled Between Hiroshima and Fukushima: From the point of view of gender .)

This question is what drove me to compile the book. Being a survivor of the atomic bomb of Hiroshima, hearing the question, “How did a country that suffered a nuclear attack ended up a nuclear powerhouse?” was painful. I felt that the survivors of the atomic bomb were being condemned for not being active enough. I quickly started a re-examination of postwar history with a focus on the time of the introduction of nuclear power generation in Japan, and the topic that emerged was the issue of gender. After the disaster of March 11, 2011, there has been a rush of publications on nuclear power generation. If there is any significance to adding this book, it would be its focus on gender.

In Hiroshima, people call the period from the atomic bomb attack to about the mid-1950s “the lost ten years.” During this period, the horrific state of Hiroshima was not shared with the outside world, and no relief measures were taken. It has been said that the reason for this state of affairs was mainly the reporting ban on the atomic bomb under the occupation.  But there was information — plenty of information about the great powers of nuclear technology and the “bright era of nuclear power.” And all this preceded women’s demands for liberation. 

Gender was at work in the introduction of nuclear power. From 1954 to 55, nuclear power became “national policy” in the name of “peaceful use of nuclear energy.” Meanwhile, the anti-nuclear bomb movement gained a lot of momentum, and it was women who took the lead.

From there arose the “mothers’ movement” with the slogan, “Mothers create life and wish to protect it.” Men took on the role of growing the economy using nuclear power, while women picked up after the war and engaged in the peace movement. Isn’t it this gender-based division of roles that enabled the concurrent development of nuclear power promotion and the anti-nuclear generation movement? This division also matched the gender roles of the contemporary family, which was becoming popularized in Japan at the time.

In the second section, I have included some of my writings on the anti-nuclear movement and motherhood since the 1980s.

Adopted and translated by Naoko Hirose

Original article http://wan.or.jp/book/?p=5853

Eulogies to Kazuko Takemura (9): J. Keith Vincent

To honor the memory of the late Kazuko Takemura, a feminist famous for her activism as well as introducing theorists such as Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, Gayatri Chaktravorty Spivak and Trinh T. Minh-ha to Japan, WAN is posting a series of eulogies delivered by her fellow activists and scholars both from Japan and overseas.

                                                                                                                                         

I can’t remember the exact occasion of my first meeting with Kazuko, but I do remember very clearly a trip to her apartment near Tsukuba University in 1995 or 1996.  I went with several other members of the gay activist group OCCUR, including Kawaguchi Kazuya （河口和也） and Niimi Hiroshi（新美広). We spent the day with Kazuko, eating pizza on the floor, smoking innumerable cigarettes, and talking for hours about how to make queer theory matter in Japan, and in Japanese. This was a serious issue for us at the time, because queer theory was just starting to become a sort of fad in academic publishing in Japan, but in almost complete isolation from the activist community and even from the queer community.  Kazuko was one of the only academics in Japan at the time who was not only conversant with queer theory and its feminist roots, but who understood its connection to activism. She, like my friends in OCCUR and I, saw it as both a source of empowerment and a mode of resistance against the entrenched heteronormativity and misogyny of Japanese society. She worked with us to publish a special issue of Gendai Shisō  on lesbian and gay studies in 1997 and she was always a supportive and engaged participant in the workshops on queer theory that we held throughout 1995 and 1996. In my mind, she was the most important figure in the establishment of a politically engaged and intellectually rigorous queer feminist theory in Japan.

The last time I spoke to Kazuko was in March of 2010, when my partner Anthony and I had dinner with her near her home in Tokyo.  I had not seen her since 2004, when she invited me to come to Ochanomizu to speak as part of her wonderful, multi-year "Frontiers of Gender Studies" series.  After that, she was scheduled to join me on a panel on "Eve Sedgwick in Japan" at the Association for Japanese Literary Studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey in 2009, but had to cancel because of illness.  I never imagined, when we were first discussing this panel in honor of Sedgwick's memory, that we would lose Kazuko so soon as well. When we met in 2010, we talked about her coming to Boston to spend some time with Anthony and me in Provincetown on Cape Cod.  I was working on some translations myself at the time, and our plan was to make it a "working vacation."  But sadly she had to cancel that too because of illness.  In the email in which she told me that she couldn't come, she wrote, "It's really a shame.  I did want to spend several days with you and your partner---chatting, walking, rambling downtown, and translating Spivak(!!).  It must be fun.  Pleasure and work!!"
Looking over my correspondence with Kazuko now, and remembering all of our interactions over almost two decades, what I remember most is this delightful way she had of mixing "pleasure and work." She got so much pleasure out of her work, and her work gave so much pleasure to others. I remember her quiet voice and bright smile, and the calm, gentle way she had of talking about difficult and pressing issues. I always felt energized and optimistic after speaking with Kazuko, no matter how frustrated we both were with the state of the world. I am proud to have known her and I miss her terribly.

J. Keith Vincent
Associate Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature
Dept. of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature
Boston University

                                                                                                                                         

Posted by Aya Kitamura

Association of Article 96 Started, Protesting against Prime Minister ABE’s Attempt to Amend It

THE CONSTITUTION OF JAPAN

Promulgated on November 3, 1946

Came into effect on May 3, 1947

 

Article 96. Amendments to this Constitution shall be initiated by the Diet, through a concurring vote of two-thirds or more of all the members of each House and shall thereupon be submitted to the people for ratification, which shall require the affirmative vote of a majority of all votes cast thereon, at a special referendum or at such election as the Diet shall specify.

Amendments when so ratified shall immediately be promulgated by the Emperor in the name of the people, as an integral part of this Constitution.

Essay Written by OKANO Yayo

On June 14, 2013, I participated in a panel discussion held in Sophia University as part of a symposium to oppose amendment of the Constitution without thorough discussion. The symposium also marked the start-up of the Association of Article 96.

HIGUCHI Yoichi, representative of the Association, gave the keynote speech of the symposium, titled “What does it mean to ‘amend’ Article 96 in terms of constitutionalism?”  “We cannot change Article 96 by using Article 96,” said Higuchi in his speech, introducing the philosophical argument concerning the right to establish the Constitution.  He also said “It’s just like a back-door admission, or like a baseball player in a slump asking for a change of the rules so he can have one more chance after a strikeout.”  Through these humorous analogies, he made it clear how Prime Minister ABE Shintaro’s draft for amendment violates the idea of constitutionalism itself.

 

I still remember very well that Abe stated in Kyoto in March, 2012, when his party  was in the opposition, “It would be absurd if the Constitution could not be amended just because of one third of the Diet members.  I’d order such arrogant politicians out of the Diet.”

According to Higuchi, it is  quite arrogant of Abe himself to treat one third of the legitimately elected representatives like that.  “Abe doesn’t even know how to use the word “arrogant,” Higuchi added in his comment.  Abe certainly didn’t even understand the significance of the provision of Article 96 which requires much deliberation so that two thirds of the Diet members can be convinced to agree.

 

It is Article 13 that Higuchi, an active leader of constitutional studies for many years, singles out as the most important article of the Constitution.  The article requires the state to “respect individuals.”  The Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (hereinafter, LDP) intends to change “individuals” to “mankind” as a whole without appreciating the significant historical value of the individual at all in attempting to change the Constitution for the worse.

 

(How We Should Consider Amendment of the Constitution: The Significance of Conserving “Postwar Japan”—a book authored by Higuchi, published in May, 2013.)

 

 

 

After his keynote speech, I joined a panel chaired by SUGITA Atsushi, a scholar of politics, together with YAMAGUCHI Jiro, another scholar of politics, KOMORI Yoichi, a scholar of literature, and HASEBE Yasuo, an expert of constitutional studies.

 

The following is what I said as one of the panelists, with major focus on “we” in relation to the Constitution.  My speech was based on three perspectives; (1) the relationship between the people (“we”) and democracy, (2)  issues of us women, and (3) our own being as secured by the current Constitution.

 

(1) As those who insist on having our own constitution made by ourselves have been arguing, it might be the prerequisite of democracy and people’s sovereignty that “we” determine the Constitution under a democratic system and live in conformity with a Constitution we have enacted by ourselves.  But the principle of this “democracy” has its own paradox. Based on the universal truth that people are born and destined to die, we can assume the “we” of today are not the same as the “we” of tomorrow. 


If so, fundamental difficulties are inevitable as to whether we should hold a referendum every day so that it properly reflects the ever-changing views of the people.  And of course, “we,” having various views and opinions, will be divided on a critical issue like the basic principles of the state as is obviously shown in the current controversies.  So long as the Constitution is the paramount legislation, it is by no means acceptable to change an article and amend it through simplistic democratic procedures, namely a rule of majority.
 

To put this into somewhat more concrete terms, I would like to refer to the function of a Constitution serving as a fortress to shelter social minorities.  The Constitution is not something to be altered by majority opinion of anytime, but it has rather been a last resort for the people who were historically forced into disadvantageous positions, and still remain so as well as being deprived of political voices.  This leads to my second perspective, which is women’s viewpoint.

 

(2) Democracy by definition is a system where we obey the laws determined by ourselves, not by others, which enables us to be free as well as obedient.  However, as I mentioned earlier in (1), “we” are so diverse that it would constitute nothing less than violence to put those who are different from the majority in terms of opinions and experiences into the same basket of “we.” 


In the present Constitution, in particular, Article 97, the fundamental human rights guaranteed to the people of Japan are described as “fruits of the age-old struggle of man to be free” which “have survived many exacting tests for durability.”  This is the article that LDP proposes to delete in its draft of amendment.

 

The present Constitution, for example, was born out of a historical commitment to secure women’s right to equality and freedom after many years of struggles and trials which women in former times experienced as second class citizens.  They were deprived of matrimonial rights as well as rights of property and education, the freedom of occupational choice, and of course, suffrage.   Because of such a deprived status, women had been treated as instruments at home, in the society and by the state.

But unfortunately, Prime Minister Abe and other politicians who consider the amendment of the Constitution as their political mission, still regard women as if they were latent assets or hidden assets, and even as “reproductive machines” as I recall a certain politician mentioned just some time ago.  As the plan to introduce “pocketbook for women”[1] revealed, women are treated just as an object to be controlled for boosting Japan’s birthrate or to be activated for economic growth, and, once a war breaks out, as an instrument mobilized in the way comfort women were in the past.

In other words, the important function of the Constitution is to remind us that the nation exists to prevent the state from being abused by the powerful of the time and to keep it away from human lust for power, or, equivalently, to protect the individual’s dignity. This fundamental principle of the Constitution has been meaningful particularly for those who are forced to be historically and socially weak. In sum, it is the minorities who could never form the majority that this important principle should apply to.  

 

(3) Finally I would like to touch upon our own being, namely how “we” can be.  In my view, the largest difference between the LDP’s draft for amendment and the present Constitution can be found in the historical and spatial extent.  Let me quote Article 97 again to reiterate that fundamental human rights are conferred upon not only “this” generation of today but also “future generations" in trust. 


Based on the reflection and regret about the historical tragedies and crimes committed by the state, an apparatus for monopoly of violence, the present Constitution is addressing future generations.  It vows with modesty even to those who are unable to participate in the discussion in the ongoing “here and now” that the state promises to protect the fundamental rights of individuals.

Furthermore, I believe that the fundamental spirit of the current Constitutions lies in the concept of fundamental human rights based on natural rights and that of individual dignity as is guaranteed by the Constitution.  As long as this holds true, the present Constitution can not only address the Japanese people but also deal with the rights of other non-Japanese people who are also part of Japanese society.  As a matter of course, “we” include people of non-Japanese nationality who are also constituent members of Japanese society.  In this regard, the right of foreigners to vote in local elections, which is not explicitly prohibited in the current provisions, is disabled by the article of nationality in LDP’s draft.

In summary, I consider that the will for power as is demonstrated in the amendment draft of Article 96 is the will to suffocate the life of “we, the people” who can be, and are, in fact, as diverse as ever.

 

[1]　
 In early May, 2013, the Cabinet Office's task force suggested a plan to distribute pocketbooks among young women with the aim of providing knowledge of pregnancy and childbirth as part of its effort to boost the birthrate. But with growing concern about public intervention into women’s decisions as to whether or not or when they have a child, the plan was criticized by opposition parties and women's organizations.  As a result, it was virtually withdrawn by the Cabinet Office as of May 28, 2013.

Original Article on WAN Website

 

http://wan.or.jp/reading/?p=11472

 

Translated and Adapted by FUKUOKA A.A