ABSTRACT

This chapter illuminates the extent to which gendered, nationalized and racialized self-concepts of Japanese women, empowering oppositional positions within Japan, emerged from transnational communications and how these self-concepts, in turn, produced diverse conceptions of a transnational community of women. It traces the transnationality of the nation in the broader context of two key competing oppositional discourses in postwar Japan, the first focused on universalizing discourses, the second on the authentic ethnic nation. The chapter takes a closer look at the politics of meaning at work in the reimagining of Greenham by Japan's autonomous peace activists. It concludes that the emphasis on difference from Greenham or Europe was not so much intended to reiterate the Japan/West binary, but rather to establish an imagined community of Japanese women. The narratives by activist women in 1980s Japan, which analyzed in this chapter, are crying out for such complementary research.