Beyond the Confines of Motherhood and Home: Recent Studies of Japanese Feminisms - Rethinking Japanese Feminisms and Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor and Our Unions, Our Selves: The Rise of Feminist Labor Unions in Japan Available to Purchase

Since the 1980s, there has been no shortage of books on Japanese women. Many of these books, however, have treated all Japanese women as a single category. Other books have been about how women have been represented rather than about the actions and ideas of actual women. Much has been written about women as the objects of state policy. It is thus striking to have three books on Japan within a short interval (2016 to 2018) that have “feminism(s)” or “feminist” in the title. These titles give promise that the work of Japanese women to define themselves and to act on their own behalf will be taken seriously. Despite their common focus on Japanese feminism, however, the three books differ considerably. Reading them in relationship to each other, we see the many issues encompassed by the concept of feminism, the variety of ways that scholars study feminism, and the challenges...