ABSTRACT
On 2 January 2002, the Osaka Prefectural Women’s Center (affectionately known as Dawn) hosted a lecture called ‘ Gender-free will not stop! Overcoming the feminist backlash’, featuring leading Japanese feminist Ueno Chizuko and Korean-Japanese feminist Shin Sugo. Ueno spoke engagingly to the audience of mostly women about why feminism is disliked and about the need to confront the forces that oppose women’s equality and equal participation in Japanese society. She referred to the popular misconception that a feminist was a woman who had thrown off her femininity to become like a man, but she noted that ‘we feminists have never once thought that we want to become like men’ (Ueno 2002: 32). Ueno argued that backlash is a ‘barometer of feminist power’ that indicates the increasing strength and breadth of the discourse on gender equality and related reforms (2002: 35). For Ueno, feminism in Japan is fi nally a force to be reckoned with and needs backlash the way a yacht needs wind: to move forward.
