“White Banana” at the 1975 International Women’s Conference: Japanese Feminism, Gender Justice, and Anticolonialism

• In Event: Gender and Human Rights: Social Movements, Feminism, and Global Transformations

Abstract

How did Japanese feminists respond when they participated in a global United Nations conference and confronted the legacy of imperialism within international feminist discourse? The 1975 World Conference of the International Women’s Year in Mexico City served as a pivotal ground where feminists from the Global South challenged the universalist agendas of the Global North, asserting that anticolonialism is a prerequisite for liberation (Olcott, 2017). Japan occupied a singular geopolitical space within this arena as a non-Western former imperial power that was simultaneously subordinated under U.S. hegemony and economically dominant in Asia (Dower, 1999; Duus, 1995; Johnson, 1982; Oguma 1998). This case allows for an examination of the entanglement between feminism and imperialism that transcends the traditional binary of Western complicity and Third World resistance. Based on extensive archival research involving over 1000 pages of primary sources from four institutions, such as the National Diet Library of Japan and the University of Chicago Library, this paper maps the discursive positions of five distinct actors. These include the official state delegation, the Japan Communist Party, grassroots organizations such as Agora and Women Who Act, and the journalist Yayori Matsui. Their responses range from the state’s strategic invisibilization of imperial violence to the development of reflective transnational solidarity among grassroots activists. I propose the framework of “nested imperialism” to explain how multilayered structures create discursive conditions where resistance against external hegemony serves to mask domestic roles as perpetrators. By demonstrating how subjects in ambiguous positions negotiate their status as accomplices, this study provides a multifaceted understanding of power and solidarity in transnational feminism.

Author

• Riko Kobayashi, University of Chicago