Dalton Emma, Norma Caroline. Voices from the Contemporary Japanese Feminist Movement

Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. — 141 p. — ISBN 978-981-19-2227-5Voices from the Contemporary Japanese Feminist Movement introduces six influential activists from Japan’s contemporary feminist movement and examines Japanese women’s experience of and contribution to the international #MeToo movement. Set against a backdrop of pervasive sexual inequality in Japanese society – on a scale that makes Japan an outlier in Asia as well as the rest of the advanced democratic world – this book offers a snapshot of Japan’s contemporary feminist movement and the issues it faces, including sexual violence and harassment of women and girls. The six feminist activists interviewed to create this snapshot are all working toward eradicating sexual violence against women and girls. The authors, both based in universities in Australia, where Japanese studies and the study of Japanese language is very popular, wrote the book to fill a gap in Australia-based Japanese studies, which over the last two decades has overly focussed on research in cultural studies and linguistics to the exclusion of structural analyses of the status of women in Japan.For this book launch, the authors described Japan’s grassroots feminist movement based on testimonies from female activists from different organizations, generating insights about some of the most serious problems faced by women and girls in Japan, as well as comparing the approaches of Japanese activists with those of the global feminist movement.