Title: The Japanese Women's Liberation Movement and the United Red Army
Abstract: Abstract This article examines how the Japanese women's liberation movement responded to the news coverage of the United Red Army Incidents in 1972. The United Red Army was considered to be Japan's most violent domestic revolutionary sect. The United Red Army's misguided use of “revolutionary violence” in 1972 was devastating for Japanese leftist radicalism. The Japanese women's liberation movement was a political formation that emerged in 1970 in the wake of the Anti-Vietnam War and student movements of the late 1960s. In contrast to how the United Red Army received condemnation from across the political spectrum, from the right to the far-left, I focus on how these activists supported and identified with the women of the URA as an expression of their feminist politics. Through my analysis of the alternative media produced by these Japanese feminists and their multi-faceted support for the women in the URA, I argue that their intervention constituted a feminist praxis of critical solidarity and provides an illuminating feminist response to political violence. Keywords: Japanese feminismUnited Red Armypolitical violencewomen's liberationterrorismJapanese feminist media Notes 1. Several Japanese feminist scholars have described this movement as the genesis of second wave feminism in Japan (Inoue Teruko 1992 Inoue, Teruko. 1992. Joseigaku e no Shôtai, Tokyo: Yûkaku. [Google Scholar]; Ueno Chizuko 1994 Ueno, Chizuko. 1994. “Introduction”. In Nihon no Feminizumu Vol. 1 Ribu to Feminizumu, Edited by: Teruko, Inoue. 1–35. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. [Japanese Feminism: Ribu and Feminism], [Google Scholar]), adopting the dominant periodization that centers Euro-American feminist movements. 2. Ûman ribu is the phoneticization of the phrase “woman lib,” altered from the original English phrase “women's lib.” 3. Part I, “Genealogies and Violations,” in Scream from the Shadows (Shigematsu forthcoming) details the domestic genealogies of women's movements and the Japanese left from which ribu emerged. James Welker's dissertation (2010) addresses the transnational and transcultural dimensions of the ûman ribu movement. 4. Ribu's largest publications, such as Onna Erosu, sold between two and three thousand copies through the 1970s, indicative of the approximate size of the movement. Interview with Saeki Yôko, one of the editors of Onna Erosu, Tokyo, 28 November, 2002. Some postwar mainstream women's organizations, like Chifuren, had six million registered members by the 1950s. Many ribu women continue their various forms of ribu activism today. 5. The organizational style emphasized non-hierarchical and decentralized autonomous action. However, de facto leaders like Tanaka Mitsu emerged, and her relative power within the movement and status as an icon of that era remain as contradictions of the movement's legacy (Shigematsu forthcoming Shigematsu, Setsu (2003) Tanaka Mitsu and the Women's Liberation Movement in Japan: Towards a Radical Feminist Ontology, PhD Dissertation, Cornell University [Google Scholar]). 6. Cf. note 4. 7. Ribu's direct-action style, street protests, alternative media production, and anti-imperialist politics were learned from the political organizing style of the Anti-Vietnam War movement known as Beheiren and the new student movement known as Zenkyôtô, which encouraged spontaneity and autonomy in contrast to the strict political dogma that characterized the culture of the New Left sects (Shigematsu forthcoming Shigematsu, Setsu (2003) Tanaka Mitsu and the Women's Liberation Movement in Japan: Towards a Radical Feminist Ontology, PhD Dissertation, Cornell University [Google Scholar]). 8. Since November 1971, nine of the ten most wanted “criminals” in Japan were members of the two sects that comprised the United Red Army. These political radicals began to be categorized as terrorists during the early 1970s. See http://www.npa.go.jp/keibi/kokutero1/english/pdf/sec03.pdf (20 Aug. 2009). 9. According to standard practice, Japanese names and authors of Japanese language literature are listed with family name first, followed by given name. 10. The Revolutionary Left Faction was an offshoot of the Marxist Leninist Faction (ML Ha) that had been ousted from the Japanese Communist Party. Patricia Steinhoff describes this faction as a “group with ideological ties to a Maoist group that had been ousted from the Japan Communist Party” (1996 Steinhoff, Patricia. 1996. “Three women who loved the left”. In Re-Imaging Japanese Women, Edited by: Imamura, Anne. 301–324. Berkeley: University of California Press. [Google Scholar], pp. 308–309). 11. For two filmic renditions of these events see United Red Army (2008 United Red Army [Jitsuroku rengo sekigun] (film) (2008) Wakamatsu Koji (dir.) [Google Scholar]) and Hikari no ame (2001 Hikari no ame [Rain of Light] (film) (2001) Banmei Takahashi (dir.) [Google Scholar]). 12. This statement is from the National Broadcasting Corporation, called the Nippon Hôsô Kyôkai (NHK), regarding the history of television in Japan (NHK n.d.). 13. Zengakuren was the largest communist (anti-Japanese Communist Party) student organization. 14. Nagata's first death sentence was decided in 1982, and confirmed again in 1986. She unsuccessfully attempted to appeal her sentence in 1993 and 2006. 15. Ribu activists, such as Tanaka Mitsu, often wrote about how Japanese women were complicit in reproducing a division among women into the categories of “mothers” and “pure housewives” versus “prostitutes” who were used as “public toilets.” “Benjo kara no kaihô” [Liberation from the Toilet] in Mizoguchi, Miki and Saeki (1992 Mizoguchi, Ayeko, Miki, Sôko and Saeki, Yôko, eds. 1992. Shiryô Nihon Ûman Ribu Shi Vol. I 1969–1972 [The Documents of the History of Ûman Ribu in Japan Vol. I. 1969–1972], Kyôto: Shôkado. [Google Scholar], pp. 201–207). 16. Interview with Mori Setsuko, Tokyo, 5 February, 2003. 17. See my translation of Part V, “Ribu to Shinsayoku” [“Ribu and the New Left”], Appendix III in Setsu Shigematsu (2003 Shigematsu, Setsu (2003) Tanaka Mitsu and the Women's Liberation Movement in Japan: Towards a Radical Feminist Ontology, PhD Dissertation, Cornell University [Google Scholar]). 18. Although there were several existing terms for women and lady, the term “onna” became a key word that ribu activists deliberately re-appropriated and politicized. According to linguistics scholar, Orie Endo, the term onna “contains a strong and negative sexual connotation … [and] can be substituted for sexually related terms such as mistress or prostitute.” Endo argues that this term can be considered disrespectful, taboo, even “dirty” (Orie Endo 1996 Endo, Orie. 1996. “Aspects of sexism in language”. In Japanese Women: New Feminist Perspectives on Past, Present and Future, Edited by: Fujimura-Fanselow, Kumiko and Kameda, Atsuko. 29–42. New York: The Feminist Press. [Google Scholar], p. 30). Ribu activist Sayama Sachi writes that “onna” marked a distinction from the existing “fujin (women's) movements” and the common phrase “josei mondai” (women's problems/issues). Sayama states that reclaiming “onna” was similar to the way queer movements have reclaimed this term. Email interview with Sayama Sachi, 20 August, 2010. 19. For an explanation of ribu's concept of the liberation of sex, see Shigematsu (2003 Shigematsu, Setsu (2003) Tanaka Mitsu and the Women's Liberation Movement in Japan: Towards a Radical Feminist Ontology, PhD Dissertation, Cornell University [Google Scholar]). Many ribu activists later became involved in lesbian activism in Japan (Welker 2010 Welker, James (2010) Transfiguring the Female: Women and Girls Engaging the Transnational in Late Twentieth Century Japan, Dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [Google Scholar]). 20. These notes on the URA were written by the editors Miki Sôko, Saeki Yôko and Mizoguchi Ayeko. 21. This newsletter, edited by Miki Sôko and Saeki Yôko, was published from 1972 to 1982. 22. Such photographs have been reprinted decades later, in magazines such as Flash, 22 February, 1992, p. 70. Flash is an entertainment magazine marketed for a male readership. 23. This article is based on a review of two top-selling Japanese dailies, Asahi Shinbun and Mainichi Shinbun and the main English language newspaper in Japan, The Japan Times, comparing reports about the URA internal purge in March 1972 until December 1972. This article compares this news coverage to how the alternative media of the ribu movement covered the URA and Nagata Hiroko from 1972 to 1982. The latter involved an analysis of a few hundred newspapers, newsletters, articles and pamphlets. Asahi Shinbun is cited in this article as it was criticized by ribu activists. This study is also based on interviews and correspondence with ribu activists Saeki Yôko, Miki Sôko, Yonezu Tomoko, Tanaka Mitsu, Mori Setsuko, Endô Misako, Sayama Sachi, Wakabayshi Naeko, Watanbe Fumie and others, from 2000 to 2010. 24. The following references from different ribu groups indicate the consistency to which ribu activists addressed the phenomenon of mothers killing their children: Mizoguchi, Miki and Saeki (1992 Mizoguchi, Ayeko, Miki, Sôko and Saeki, Yôko, eds. 1992. Shiryô Nihon Ûman Ribu Shi Vol. I 1969–1972 [The Documents of the History of Ûman Ribu in Japan Vol. I. 1969–1972], Kyôto: Shôkado. [Google Scholar], pp. 164, 165, 176, 184, 186, 228, 240–246, 251, 323, 354; 1994 Mizoguchi, Ayeko, Miki, Sôko and Saeki, Yôko, eds. 1994. Shiryô Nihon Ûman Ribu Shi Vol. II 1972–1975 [The Documents of the History of Ûman Ribu in Japan Vol. II. 1972–1975], Kyôto: Shôkado. [Google Scholar], pp. 15, 17, 24–25, 30, 37, 61, 68–69, 114, 150, 178, 200, 232, 246–247, 315, 326, 363–364, 365, 379, 381). 25. Most ribu activists I interviewed did not identify as pacifists or espouse “non-violence.” Some ribu activists trained in the martial arts, advocating the right to self-defense. 26. Ribu used the term “support activities” (kyûen katsudô), rather than solidarity to describe their work around the women of the URA. However, they used the word solidarity (rentai) for their support of mothers who killed their children. I coined the phrase “critical solidarity” to indicate how the ribu women were critical of the philosophy and tactics of the URA, but still engaged in a wide range of supportive political actions. 27. “Koto no honshitsu ni semaru kai” was the Japanese name of the support group. Their meetings were held at the Ribu Shinjuku Center in Tokyo and specifically addressed the women of the United Red Army and Nagata Hiroko. 28. This newsletter was referred to as the preparatory newsletter, printed just before the inaugural edition published in March 1973. 29. Two other members of the Revolutionary Left Faction had been killed in August 1971, when they had tried to leave. The fifteenth comrade Nagata is referring to is Mori Tsuneo, who committed suicide in jail in January 1973. 30. Interview with Yonezu Tomoko, Tokyo, 12 July, 2009. 31. The ribu women would often wear disguises to the court hearings and try to lose the police who were following them by changing their clothes and hairstyles. 32. Miki Sôko points out in the inaugural edition of From Woman to Women that on 11 March, 1972, the Asahi Shinbun reported that one of the members of the Red Army was also a member of ribu's most well-known group, called the Group of Fighting Women. Although this information was not accurate, ribu women recognized that such reportage was an attempt to use the violence of URA as an ideal opportunity to cast a shadow over their own movement, by “blurring the distinction between the existing struggles and ribu” (Mizoguchi, Miki & Saeki 1992 Mizoguchi, Ayeko, Miki, Sôko and Saeki, Yôko, eds. 1992. Shiryô Nihon Ûman Ribu Shi Vol. I 1969–1972 [The Documents of the History of Ûman Ribu in Japan Vol. I. 1969–1972], Kyôto: Shôkado. [Google Scholar], p. 346). Such reportage was interpreted by ribu activists as an attempt to malign ribu's reputation and the image of women's participation in revolutionary politics. 33. This article is written by “Nomura.” Many ribu activists adopted a “movement name,” which they also used to author their political literature.
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-08-19
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 4
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