JAPAN SESSION 116

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Organizer: Tomomi Yamaguchi, University of Montana
Chair and Discussant: Sonia Ryang, The University of Iowa

At the turn of the 21st century, Japan continued to be mired in what had become a serious and prolonged recession and was also witnessing a new rise of political and cultural conservatism. A resurgence of pro-militarist nationalism and growing class disparities were coterminous with, and in many ways products of a neo-liberal turn, which paralleled conservative shifts in many other parts of the world. This panel examines, by looking at four divergent and relatively understudied constituencies of women in Japan, the way that new class divides, economic constraints, and often reactionary political conservatism reconfigured gender roles and relations and influenced the possibilities for and patterns of women's resistance. Yamaguchi examines the debate over gender-mixed roll calls in Japan and the way it highlights the multiplicity of feminist positions in the late 1990s to early 2000s, when neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideologies went hand-in-hand. Based on her fieldwork with Korean nightclub hostesses, Chung points to the blurred boundaries between mizushobai/sex industries and the so-called "normal" world in Japan that appeared in the tumultuous and insecure recessionary economic climate of the 1990s. Lewallen traces the empowering efforts of Ainu, Resident Korean, and Burakumin women in Hokkaido to document their social and economic disenfranchisement on their own terms and push the government for change. Edwards explores the ways that the experience of Japan's recession and neo-liberal ideology infused the language and practice of soccer, and in turn, the effects this had on young women who played in the 1990s.

Debating "Gender-Free": The Gender-Mixed Roll Call Controversy and Anti-feminist Backlash in 21st-Century Japan
Tomomi Yamaguchi, University of Montana
In the 1980s, Japanese feminists began a grassroots movement to fight for gender-mixed roll calls—as opposed to more traditional “boys first, girls second” roll calls—in public schools. They argued that while seemingly trivial, roll calls significantly influenced gender relations in school life and beyond. As a result of the tireless efforts of feminist groups and teachers’ unions, gender-mixed roll calls gradually spread throughout Japan. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, however, feminist efforts were increasingly mainstreamed as feminist scholars and activists started to work more closely with national and local governments. Simultaneous with—and in many ways due to this—political shift, there was a decreased focus on the elimination of concrete instances of discrimination against women, and intensified efforts to promote a neo-liberal “sense of self” (jibun rashisa) free from forced gender roles. This new, liberated disposition was captured in the ubiquitous buzzword “gender-free.” When a concerted backlash against feminism began around 2000, conservative policymakers attacked gender-mixed roll calls as epitomizing a “revolutionary” gender-free political agenda that intended to erase all differences between the sexes.
I use the debate about gender-mixed roll calls as an entrance point to examine the transformation of the feminist movement and backlash against it from the late 1990s to the present. I show that the topic of gender-mixed roll calls was a touchstone for larger debates about the history and future of feminist activism. In addition, an examination of these contested interpretations reveals the multiplicity of feminist positions in contemporary Japan and challenges dominant tropes of feminists as government-led housewives and academics.

Marginalized Norm and Normalized Margins: Mizushoubai and the Sex Industries in Japan
Haeng-ja Chung, Hamilton College
What is mizushoubai? What kinds of service are available in the sex industries? Focusing on the late 1990s to 2000s, I will address the following questions. What people patronize, manage, and work at these establishments? How much do customers pay and workers earn? How do mizushoubai and sex industries interconnect and overlap, and how are they different? I conclude that the boundaries are blurred between mizushoubai and sex industries, as well as between mizushoubai/sex industries and the so-called “normal” world (futsuu no sekai). Although these boundaries have never been as rigid as assumed, the economic recession, increasing spatial mobility, and shifting ideologies of gender and sexuality at the turn of the millennium undoubtedly intensified the entangling of categories and transgression of borders. An example of this phenomenon is a Ginza hostess, who used to be a student or office lady, but ends up working at Soapland to pay back debts, and then eventually marries and becomes a housewife and mother. Expressions such as housewife prostitution (shufu baishun), female student prostitution (joshigakusei baishun), and office ladies who moonlight as a nightclub hostess or sex workers (OL hostess or OL fuuzoku-jou) all embody the overlaps of the normal world, mizushoubai, and sex industries. Furthermore, many customers traverse socio-cultural boundaries and categories as they assume roles of husbands, fathers, and/or sons elsewhere. By incorporating my own ethnographic data as a nightclub hostess, I frame mizushoubai and the sex industries as the marginalized norm and normalized margins.

Marginalization and Empowerment in the Economic Periphery: Ainu Women’s Challenge
Ann-Elise Lewallen, Hokkaido University
Despite recent hubbub lamenting growing class disparity in Japan, ethnic and social minority populations have long suffered from economic inequality coupled with structural discrimination. Minority populations and peripheral regions have not benefited from neo-liberal economic solutions. Economic disparities are even greater for indigenous Ainu populations. Hokkaido authorities sought to curb Ainu poverty with the Utari Welfare Act (1974); yet thirty-three years later, Ainu welfare recipients nearly triple the national average.
Economic hardship compounded by “multiple discrimination” is worse yet for Ainu women who identify as subjects of both ethnic and gendered discrimination. To document minority women’s economic situations and to compel policymakers to respond to their needs, Ainu women joined together with Resident Korean and Burakumin women to launch community-wide fact-finding surveys; results will be delivered to the United Nations and the Japanese government. Minority women have not identified neo-liberal initiatives as the immediate problem; rather, chronic poverty has necessitated lifetime work for minority women. In this paper, I will draw from my involvement with the Ainu women’s survey (2004-2005) to argue that while the survey revealed economic and educational obstacles, minority women were empowered—through engaging in the survey—to transform their marginal status. I also consider alternate mediums of analysis, such as life histories and cultural property loss, to understand how Ainu women make sense of their economic disenfranchisement, and how these interpretations articulate with structural factors they link to experiences of poverty.

Sporting Neo-Liberalism: Promises and Pitfalls of Life in the L-League
Elise Marie Edwards, Butler University
Soccer surged in popularity at the end of the 1980s, when the “soccer boom” coincided with the “bursting” of the “bubble economy”. This coincidence positioned soccer as a privileged site for cultural debates about the causes of the “bust” and possible cures. Various interlocutors, including social critics, sports journalists, coaches, and politicians imagined and figured soccer as an ideal vehicle for cultivating qualities such as “flexibility”, “individuality”, “creativity”, and transcultural fluency—skills regarded as critical for Japan to rise out of recession and succeed in the globalizing economy. Much of this discourse reflected and reaffirmed a neo-liberal logic and consistently featured phrases such as “jiko sekinin” (“individual responsibility”), “jiko kanri” (“self-management”), and “serufu-contororu” (“self-control”).
In the early 1990s, the L-League, a corporate-sponsored semi-professional women’s soccer league, was launched to great fanfare. The young Japanese women in the League were inculcated with the ideals of “individual responsibility”, “self-management”, flexibility, and other qualities deemed as necessary for soccer players as they were for modern workers. In this paper, I will look at the effects that enculturation into the world of soccer had on young women at the turn of the 21st century, as well as their abilities, or lack thereof, to reap the rewards promised to those who became “competitive” according to the new paradigms of the era. Reflecting on cautionary tales of team dissolutions, and young women's minimal financial safety nets, I will connect the stories of L-League players with broader discussions of gender bias in contemporary Japan’s neo-liberal political economy.