Monday 5 December 2022
10:00am – 11:00am

Voices from the Contemporary Japanese Feminist Movement

This event will start at 10am GMT

Organised by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation

Fully booked

Voices 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.

Voices from the Contemporary Japanese Feminist Movement is published by Springer Nature (2022). It is available for purchase via this link.

Date: Monday 5 December 2022

UK Time: 10:00am-11:00am (GMT)
Japan Time: 7:00pm-8:00pm (GMT+9)
Australia Time (Victoria): 9:00pm-10:00pm (GMT+11)

A video of the talk can be found here:

About the contributors

Emma Dalton

Emma Dalton first studied in Japan in 1995 as an exchange student at a girls’ high school in Kobe. She returned to Japan in 1997 as a university exchange student at Kochi University. After obtaining her Ph.D. in Japanese studies from the University of Wollongong, she was a visiting professor at Nagoya City University in 2012 and a lecturer at Kanda University of International Studies for 2 years after that. She has also held research positions at Rikkyo University and Sophia University. She now lectures in Japanese studies at La Trobe University. She researches women’s involvement in Japanese electoral politics. Her 2021 publication, Sexual Harassment in Japanese Politics, draws on interviews with women politicians to show the sexist conditions in which women at all levels of politics work, and the repercussions of these conditions on women’s rights and democracy in Japan.

Caroline Norma

Caroline Norma first studied in Japan in 1997, and afterwards was a student or researcher at Yamaguchi, Hiroshima, and Doshisha universities. She first met Emma Dalton as a Master of Japanese Interpreting and Translation student at the University of Queensland in 2002. Since 2010, Caroline has lectured in the Master of Translating and Interpreting degree at RMIT University. Her research focuses on the ‘comfort women’ Japanese military sexual slavery scheme of World War II, and she collaborates with Morita Seiya in research critical of Japan’s contemporary sex industry.