ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the complex relationship between gender and modernisation in Japan, with particular reference to women's movements from the women's liberation movement of the early 1970s onwards. It argues that women's movements in Japan and other places initially developed in the context of national modernisation but that the new post-1970 women's movements transcended this national orientation and institutional framework. The chapter explores that women's liberation and the subsequent women's movements in Japan continually challenged and 'crisscrossed' the logic and stages of national modernisation and thus became a force in reflexive modernisation. It reopens the debate on reflexive modernisation through the gendered perspective provided by looking at late twentieth-century Japan. The chapter traces the development of Japanese women's movements after 1970, focusing on the discussion of sexual empowerment, motherhood, and female autonomy in the women's liberation movement; and discussions of the future of gender relations and diverse feminist visions of society in the mid-1980s.
