ABSTRACT
Iijima Aiko was an important feminist activist from the 1970s in Japan, a major theorist whose deep level of analysis drew connections between various forms of discrimination, types of movement and levels of political action. She critically assessed the interconnections of gender and the nation-state in her activist writings on sexuality, labour and ethnicity. Conceptualising women's oppression in terms of discrimination, as she contends in her essay in this chapter, she was able to make links between different anti-discrimination movements. At the same time, she argued that Japanese women who were victims of sexual discrimination could and did, in turn, discriminate against others. Iijima's feminist theory is a contribution to critical thinking about the Japanese nation-state. It is thus part of an alternative history of post-war Japan, its institutional development and international dependencies, a history which needs to be re-examined and rewritten in the wake of the Tohoku disaster.
