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Psychological studies of the denial of prejudice and discrimination have suggested that although members of target groups are sensitive to episodes of discrimination, they may deny episodes of discrimination to maintain a positive self-image. Here, through two studies, we investigated the role of the perceiver and target gender in shaping perceived barriers to education from a transnational feminist perspective. The participants were 132 Japanese university students (Study 1) and 1143 students from four Asian countries (Bangladesh, China, Myanmar, and Japan) (Study 2). They read three vignettes depicting different types of obstacles to higher education and rated the extent to which each example constituted a barrier to education. Our results support the sensitivity hypothesis. Regardless of their cultural background, the female participants tended to perceive more barriers to education than their male counterparts. However, the denial hypothesis was not consistently supported. The authors discuss the meaning of denial of educational barriers among female students and future directions.

Background: This paper analyzes a remembered shared experience of cocurricular designing and coteaching an experiential learning pilot project in a university study abroad program (SAP) that emphasized social justice. Purpose: We look back because the pilot program is a significant demonstration of what complexities can arise when feminist educators bring their own politics and pedagogies to experiential learning and study abroad education contexts; we understand this as valuable because "experience" broadly is complex. Memory is crucial to feminist educators because it indicates the development of care, ethics, pedagogy, politics, and priorities, and so, we ask: what pedagogical insights can be gained through revisiting our enmeshed personal/professional memories of cocurricular designing and coteaching an experiential learning series for study abroad students? Methodology: We use self-study and memory work to analyze memory objects (curriculum materials) and narratives (of teaching) to explore this pedagogical work and highlight generative tensions that emerged while employing a critical feminist approach to work not initially conceptualized with this framing. Findings: We uncovered three key tensions: personal, community, and racial that troubled emergent issues related to difference, discourse, and positionality. Implications: This project offers pedagogical insights into how oppression and inequality may enter experiential learning and study abroad spaces.

Both education for democratic citizenship and human rights education tend to emphasise political and legal learning. In both human rights education and moral education in Japan, however, there has been a tendency to give particular attention to interpersonal elements of learning such as kindness and sympathy. This article draws on feminist thinking and on Nel Noddings' concept of the ethics of care to propose a learning framework that combines emotional and socio-political elements, arguing that since motivation is an important element in acting for social justice, learning for social justice must be cognisant of emotional learning. The authors then present the case of a university teacher in a gender studies classroom to consider how these two elements, the emotional and the political, might be combined to enhance students' commitment to social justice when the topic under consideration is LGTBQ+ rights.

Little attention has been given to principles of Buddhist moral conduct in the West. There are ten virtuous actions of Buddhist moral conduct, called the Ten Virtuous Deeds of the Bodhisattvas. Drawing from the works of contemporary women thinkers and artists, this article considers how the beauty of human nature and spirituality can be cultivated based on Buddhist feminist perspectives. There are many oppressed women in Asian countries whose voices are not heard in society. Buddhist feminism based on the Ten Virtuous Deeds of the Bodhisattvas can probe deeply into the heart of the moral issues and nurture the powerful flow of spiritual energy for the women. This is a theoretical study that elaborates on women's struggle for their liberation as inspired by the art of Rima Fujita.

This article explores how five international colleagues from the USA, Canada, China, and Japan use self-study methodologies and online journaling to systematically examine the tensions surrounding the lived experiences of feminist academics in diverse global contexts. It draws from the theoretical foundations of critical qualitative inquiry, self-study, feminist epistemologies, and fiction as research. The main research questions guiding the study are: what is the role of self-study and journaling in an international research collective?, how can contemporary literature inform a self-study about the intersection of gender and career?, and in what ways does journaling with international partners support personal and professional development of multicultural teacher educators?. For 6 months, the authors explored these questions with one another in an interactive online journal. Collaborative analysis of the journal entries produced three major themes: fiction as self-study, scholarship as hope, and scholarship as freedom. The article concludes with the authors' personal views on the importance of online journaling and self-study among educational researchers who are interested in finding tools and structures for navigating the contemporary women's movement within academia.

This study explores the processual identity formation of six Japanese women who gave up a job, turned to higher education, and became university EFL teachers in Japan. My research questions include: (1) How did they change their careers and become university EFL teachers? (2) Since they entered the university EFL teaching profession, how have they felt about their own gender? and (3) How did their working experience influence their EFL teaching? Drawing on a poststructural feminist theory of identity, I examine their nonlinear, changing and contested teacher identities in social, economic and political contexts. Their stories help us understand the complex relations between individuals and the gendered social world and hidden issues involving self-conflict, a sense of unfairness, the burden of gender-differentiated expectation, and emotional strain. I also draw attention to the use of their former identities as a component of their pedagogy, which leads to feminist teaching.

The article discusses a sustainable educational approach for developing a moral value of peace by using a historical event, the bombing of Hiroshima. To make the case, the article uses the care theory of Nel Noddings to discuss the interpersonal aspects of peace education. The article asks how care theory handles tragedies like Hiroshima and it can contribute to a moral value of peace. The idea of caring is also examined, through Hiroshima, from a different angle, of the relationship between nature and human beings. The political position of this article is to expand the idea of sustainability by creating values for peace using material related to the bombing.

Based on a qualitative, comparative, multiple case study of the contributions and status of 21st century women's colleges and universities, this article analyzes the topic of women's access to postsecondary education in ten nations. Despite decreasing numbers of women-only institutions in some regions (e.g., North America), the sector is growing in others (e.g., South Asia). In all regions, they provide access for women who would not be able to attend postsecondary education, a phenomenon mediated by cultural, religious, and economic factors. I describe three main mechanisms through which women's institutions provide access: legal, practical (financial and academic), and cultural.

In the last two decades, the issue of comfort women--the women and girls who were forced into sex slavery for the Japanese army before and during WWII--has risen to global attention. Tens of thousands of comfort women (the average estimate is anywhere between 80,000 and 200,000) were confined at comfort stations managed by the Japanese Imperial Army throughout the Asian Pacific. The vast majority (an estimated 80% to 90%) of these women were from Korea, the closest Japanese colony at the time, though they were also from China, the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and throughout Southeast Asia. Memorials and dedications have cropped up everywhere outside of Asia, including, in the United States alone, Glendale, California; Fairfax, Virginia; Southfield, Michigan; and Union City, New Jersey. In Winnipeg, the recorded testimony of comfort woman survivor Lola Fidencia David (''Lola Fidencia David Breaks the Silence'' 2013) when she visited in October 2013 will be part of the oral history collection at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR). Starting with the accounts of this visit sponsored by the CMHR, this article recounts the recent history of how the issue of comfort women has risen to global prominence and come to be a persuasive emblem of human rights. The comfort women movement, originally rooted in a deep and specific anticolonial activism dedicated to demanding legal redress from Japan, has morphed into a global women's and human rights agenda based on testimony, sympathy, and remembrance. This article considers what has been lost and gained in this shift, as well as its consequences for an ever-expanding human rights industry. It is divided into three parts. First, the author recounts details of the CMHR event in October 2013 and provides an overview of comfort woman testimonies, including the narrative and political constraints within the presentation of this history. Second, she traces the 20-year-old grassroots activism movement within Korea regarding military sexual slavery, and how this became subsumed under a global women's and human rights discourse. Lastly, she concludes with a comparison of comfort women's art to a Park Gun-Oong (2013) cartoon to argue for how distance and anonymity may be more strategic and ethical ways of caring for difficult knowledge than commemoration and memorialization in what Erika Doss (2013) refers to as the current era of ''memorial mania.''

This paper addresses the life and educational experiences of Ainu women, using the framework of postcolonial feminist theory. It explores the extent to which two factors--gender and ethnic minority status--affect young Ainu women as they attempt to enter mainstream society. The authors analyse life history interviews from three Ainu women aged 25. These women face hardships in continuing their education because of unsupportive school atmospheres and family financial difficulties. Ainu women also face discrimination because of gender and ethnicity throughout their lifetimes, especially in employment. The authors suggest anti-discrimination education, more comprehensive policy reforms for indigenous peoples, support for the voices of indigenous women, and continuous advocacy on Ainu issues. Moreover, companies should have monitoring mechanisms to follow up on the gender equality policy, along with regular training programmes on gender and ethnicity.

Food safety and quality assurance systems have emerged as a key mechanism of food governance in recent years and are also popular among alternative agrofood movements, such as the organic and fair trade movements. Rural sociologists have identified many problems with existing systems, including corporate cooptation, the marginalization of small producers, and the depoliticization of consumer consciousness. Tackling these problems requires an epistemological shift. This article argues that the existing systems are based on positivist epistemology and calls for a feminist intervention. To show a concrete example of a feminist departure from the conventional assurance systems, I look at the case of a Japanese women's food cooperative and analyze its unique system, comparing it to its conventional counterpart, Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP). Feminist epistemology can change assurance systems from being closed, nondiscriminatory, and technical to being participatory, differentiated, and normative.

Having limited access to colleges and universities offering women the same educational opportunities available to men, elite women of the 19th century crossed national borders for advanced study and teaching opportunities. The career of Tsuda Umeko, founder of one of the first private institutions of higher education for women in Japan, leader in English-language instruction in Japan, author, and first president of the Tokyo YWCA, demonstrates the significance of a transnational network of advocates for women's education. Tsuda forged a network of personal and professional contacts in the United States and Great Britain that enabled her to envision, fund, and staff an elite academy for women in Japan. In this study, the author analyzes Tsuda's development of a transnational network of supporters and argues that it was made possible by her skill in articulating shared values of educational reform. (Contains 16 notes.)

The well-developed body of theory and research on men's gender role conflict provides an excellent foundation for developing increasingly complex models of men's gender-related concerns. Theorists and researchers are encouraged to incorporate themes related to social structural aspects of gender as well as to examine the ways in which men's multiple identities and the intersections among these varied identities are experienced by men and boys. The complexity of men's gender-related challenges are illustrated through the exploration of the various individual, interpersonal, structural, and cultural components of gender issues faced by contemporary men in Japan.

This paper describes how the patriarchal structure of Japanese society and its notions of women, femininity, and gendered stereotypes produced strong cultural barriers to increasing the participation of females in science education. Baseline data on attitudes toward science and the perceptions of gender issues in science education, academic major and career choice were collected from 175 university students (124 female, 51 male). Students responded to a Likert scale that included the option "I don't understand the question". All respondents took advantage of the option for items related to gender issues. On some items up to 67% of the males responded that they did not understand the question. Females in science choosing this option did not exceed 19%. In Japan, gender is an invisible, pervasive construct that impacts females' participation in science and science education. In other ways, attitudes toward science among Japanese students mirrored those found in the United States and in other countries. Respondents held the most favorable views of science when they were in elementary school and females preferred biology while males preferred the physical sciences. The exception to the Western pattern of liking science and science teachers is that male non-science majors rather than female non-science majors reported poor academic performance in elementary school, declining attitudes in middle school, and they held the most negative attitudes toward their science teacher and science subjects.

This paper proposes a theoretical framework to analyze global dimensions of contemporary social movements and attempts to answer the empirical question: why did the social movement for former comfort women emerge in the late 1980s after more than 40 years of silence? The theoretical framework integrates the world polity approach into social movement theory to argue that global political and cultural transformations in recent years have expanded political opportunities at the global level and intensified international flows of mobilizational resources and discursive frames, increasing the potential for social movements on globally legitimated issues such as human rights. The empirical analysis on the rise and development of the comfort women movement shows that these global factors have been crucial in the emergence and success of the movement. (Contains 5 figures, 1 table and 20 notes.)

This article discusses the dilemma of discipline in the classroom of a Japanese women's university, from the point of view of an American professor whose assumptions about one particular behavior, leaving class in order to go to the bathroom, differ from those of his students.

Reports on a case study of two feminist English classes in Japan. The two classes described are grass-roots examples of Japanese women combining their study of English with the study of feminism, consciousness-raising, and action in the world. (JL)

Discusses the backgrounds and current status of Women's Studies in Japan today. Research on which it is based was conducted while the author was visiting scholar and guest lecturer in Women's Studies at Toyo University in Tokyo in spring and summer 1984. (Author)

Examines the role which women's study groups and writing circles have played in the education of women in Japan, China, and the United States. Serves as an introduction to a cross-cultural study of women's history in the three cultures. Points out that the course raises questions about the politics of women's education. (LS)

During the Asia Pacifi c War (1937-1945), the Japanese Imperial Army forced women in Japanese East Asian colonies to work as so-called “comfort women” (sex workers). The justice movement for these women is an international intersectional alliance of feminists from Japanese ex-colonies in East Asia, the former colonial power Japan, and other societies, such as Australia, Germany, and the USA. This long-term feminist justice movement has campaigned for an apology and compensation from the Japanese government, as well as for recognition of “comfort women‘s” suff ering and of sexual violence in war in cultural memory. Through researching this justice movement from a processual intersectionality perspective, this paper shows that it gained power and legitimacy from refl ecting and working on its internal intersectional inequalities. This included refl ecting on the class hierarchies between many former “comfort women”, who had power of defi nition, and intellectual feminist activists, as well as on the postcolonial divide between former Japanese colonies and the former colonial power Japan, leading it to develop horizontal cooperation and practices. Following an overview, the paper outlines the movements in South Korea, Japan, and Germany, and highlights the different postcolonial constellation between East Asia and Germany, the main actors, and their aims. While the Japanese government rejected the justice movement‘s demands and the right wing mobilised against it, has been able to infl uence cultural memory to widely recognize sexual violence in war and the dignity of the “comfort women”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the efforts to advance women's rights in Latin America and Japan since the 1800s, including the first wave of feminist movements and the role of women's magazines. Other topics include literary subjectivity, the programs to advance women's education and literary culture in the Americas, as well as some feminist magazines like "Seito" and "Bucaro Americano."

This paper examines Japanese female Christians' writings published during the 1970s in a Japanese ecumenical periodical, Gospel and World , to explore their relationship to second wave feminism in Japan, ūman ribu , as a religious minority's complex way to engage politics and other Asian women. These feminist Christians are an example of women located in-between colonizers and the colonized as well as among the racial and religious majorities and minorities of the time; illuminating their activism allows us to consider effective and discursive forms of engaging women, politics, and religion. On the one hand, Japanese Christian feminists expanded their sense of agency both by relocating the oppression of women in the church within the larger issues of Japanese colonial legacy and by reimagining social justice within sacred space. On the other hand, their lack of reflection on race and their reliance on the majoritarian identity of onna (middle-class Japanese women) blurred their vision and invitation to activism around "pan-Asian solidarity." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two Japanese women's organisations - Shufuren, founded in 1948 and still in existence, and Chūpiren, founded in 1972 and disbanded in 1977 - appear to be vastly different from one another. And yet, they had one critical similarity: their use of accessories to make a political point. Shufuren members were advocates for consumer rights (and in the immediate postwar era, for food availability). Since then, they have demonstrated for such political issues as food safety, recycling, environmental protection and anti-nuclear energy, all in the name of their roles as wives and mothers. When demonstrating, they always appear bearing large mock-ups of the rice paddle used in Japan to scoop rice from the cooking pot. The rice paddle was a powerful symbol of women's domestic and political strength. Chūpiren women, on the other hand, distinguished themselves in their advocacy of reproductive rights not only by their forcefulness but also by wearing pink helmets. Chūpiren saw value in street theatre and sensationalism. No other radical feminist group in the mid-1970s wore uniforms. The media at that time mocked Chūpiren's helmets and attention-grabbing tactics, and in the process disparaged contemporary feminism as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In 1971, a young woman attempted to enter graduate school at Kyoto University. Her undergraduate advisor attempted to dissuade her. This 'incident' prompted a heated dispute that rallied student activists to support the young woman, dubbed R-ko, and channeled the anger of female students at this elite university toward what they understood to be implicit gendered bias undergirding the university and its definition of who constituted an academic. This article considers this dispute in detail, and attempts to understand this localized campus dispute in the wider context of postwar public debates in Japan on the question of women's access to higher education. Universities serves as a key sites for the production of new knowledge and for the training of those deemed suitable to become professionalized knowledge producers in modern societies, and the public debates examined here indicate the processes by which gendered logic produced the 'common sense' of knowledge production in postwar Japan. To illuminate the gendered implications of these negotiations over who can and should participate in knowledge production in postwar Japan, this article adapts Gramsci's insights on the power arrangements embedded in 'common sense' and employs a feminist analysis to investigate how a gendered logic inflected a more widely accepted 'common sense' that could obstruct women from entering educational institutions and participating in producing knowledge. It takes seriously the documents left by a transitory activist movement – a moment – to understand the historical strategies mobilized to counter such 'common sense', and also the challenges such critiques have met. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I follow the mystery of millions of tons of materials washed out to sea by the March 2011 Japan tsunami: a massive wave of lost materials expected to reach North American shores that never seems to officially arrive. I bring Gordon's conceptualization of haunting together with STS conversations about absence and invisibility to build on feminist approaches that do not take as given what is missing or what should be done. I begin by situating efforts to respectfully distinguish materials survivors call 'floating things' amidst a sea of concern for ocean plastic pollution. These efforts are then contrasted with what I initially perceived as the institutional erasure of floating things at sea, re-counting how some practices work to ensure materials can be ignored, cleaned-up, or used for other kinds of ocean science research. Yet, floating things refuse to disappear completely, as potential traces wash up on beaches, trajectories are modeled back into existence, and individual practices exceed institutional obligations. I argue that attending to hauntings by listening to ghosts and drifting with them is necessary for justice-oriented forms of care for absences. In the case of floating things, this means honoring survivor relations while resisting the perpetuation of Pacific narratives of danger from the outside.

This article gives an overview of the last 20 years of gender studies in the context of Japanese sociology. First, it discusses women's studies as a predecessor of gender studies and its historical development. Next, it outlines the annual changes observed in the number of publications that included the word 'gender.' Then, the article explains the two main tasks that gender studies have pursued – using actual research as examples. After that, the influence that translations of foreign research have had on Japanese gender studies is discussed. Finally, the article points to the three important challenges Japanese gender studies face currently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how Chinese female students in Manchukuo expressed female emancipation and anticolonial ideas in their secondary schools. The colonial government tried to teach a conservative "good wives and wise mothers" ideology, and many students replied by advocating rhetoric of female emancipation that some called "beyond good wives and wise mothers." Although they were not free to openly oppose the existence of the colonial regime, their advocacy of female emancipation can be read as acting in lieu of such open opposition. Examining the interplay between the state's messages and the students' advocacy in school journals clarifies the tensions among colonialism, anticolonialism, patriarchy, and feminism. The articles published in these journals suggest Manchukuo women saw a link between their opposition to Japan's conservative gender policies and its colonial rule. This linkage helped Manchukuo women avoid the tension found in other colonial societies between efforts at female liberation and anticolonial nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to evoke an alternative viewpoint on surrogacy, moving beyond popular Western feminist beliefs on the practice, by introducing the history and current context of East Asian surrogacy. To elaborate a different cultural perspective on surrogacy, this paper first introduces the East Asian history of contract pregnancy systems, prior to the emergence of the American invention of 'modern' surrogacy practice. Then, it examines Japanese mass media portrayals of cross‐border surrogacy in which white women have become 'convenient' entities. The results of the analysis show how Japanese culture has adopted a rhetoric about the use of white women as convenient surrogate mothers in the global commercial surrogacy market. An essential aspect of surrogacy is the premise that a woman's reproductive function should be accessible to others. Past discussions among feminists have neglected this important point. Moreover, they share the assumption that white surrogacy clients are exploiters, who take advantage of women of colour as surrogate mothers. The current situation in Asia flips this perspective—with white women regarded as easier targets for exploitation by wealthy people of colour. For Asian clients, Westerners can be easily regarded as 'others' whom they can use for their reproductive needs. In today's globalized era, the surrogacy industry is no longer for affluent Westerners only. Considering this change, it is crucial to discuss surrogacy issues by reconstructing feminist perspectives with a globalized view, to help protect women's bodies, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, skin colour, or religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advertising is a powerful tool that encapsulates and reinforces gender ideologies through the repeated presentation of stereotyped visions of femininity. In response to societal change, however, advertising has recently begun to incorporate postfeminist ideals of 'power femininity' alongside traditional gender stereotypes. In Japan, this duality is further complicated by the dominant spread of kawaii 'cuteness', which has become a crucial feature of normative femininity. The present work demonstrates the importance of investigating Japanese television advertisements to uncover the layered nature of women's portrayals, which blend traditional gender roles and the reigning contemporary ideology of kawaii, along with sporadic infusions of postfeminist values. Based on quantitative and qualitative multimodal discourse analysis, this article examines the use of women's language and visual images in 50 Japanese televised 'beauty ads', exploring the tactics they use to maintain and promulgate an idealised but powerless femininity of kawaii. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]