‘Liberation from the Toilet’, authored by Tanaka Mitsu, was one of the most famous manifestos of the movement. This manifesto decried the ideological division of women into ‘bad women’ and ‘good women’, who were treated as either ‘toilets’ or ‘mothers’. The former were used by men to relieve their sexual needs whereas the latter were the kind men ought to marry. The author lambasted this bifurcation that required women to ‘act like virgins’ regardless of their sexual experience (Tanaka 1970c: 265). Tanaka argued that ‘good women’, by accepting this Manichean division of women, were complicit in discrimination against the so-called bad women, namely: unwed mothers, violent women and women who worked in the sex-entertainment industry (mizushobai).
Tanaka traced this framework back through the wartime sexual division of labour which privileged the status of presumably chaste Japanese housewives in contrast to those euphemistically referred to as ‘military comfort women’ (jugun ianfu). The so-called ‘comfort women’ were those required to ‘sexually serve’ the soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army in military comfort stations established across the Japanese empire. It is estimated that between 100,000 and 200,000 women were made into military ‘comfort women’, many of whom were deceived and forced to serve as sexual slaves (see also Mackie and Tanji in this volume). Tanaka decried that the chastity of Japanese wives was esteemed and protected, in contrast to the ‘dirtied sex organs’ (yogoreta seiki) of the so-called ‘comfort women’ (Tanaka 1970c: 277). The sexually explicit language used by Tanaka and other ribu activists was a shocking form of political discourse and was emblematic of the militancy of these radical feminists. Tanaka’s analysis also demonstrates how ribu activists critiqued the status of Japanese women within a larger context of Japanese imperialism.
This denunciation of the division of women into good women and bad women also spurred some activists to transgress these boundaries and engage in work in the sex-entertainment industry (mizushobai). In the early 1970s, several ribu activists (such as Tanaka Mitsu and Takeda Miyuki) worked as hostesses and go-go dancers. Although such work was relatively short-lived, lasting from several months to a few years, and can be criticised as experimental, this feminist attempt to engage in such work is notable in the history of feminism in Japan. The act of choosing to engage in the sex-entertainment industry for feminist reasons is symbolically and structurally distinct from having to work due to a lack of options and class (im)mobility. However, this short-term experience enabled these activists to write and speak about their work as hostesses serving Japanese businessmen and US soldiers stationed in Okinawa. These writings constituted another historically unprecedented discourse to emerge from the movement (Takeda 1972). These actions were also informed by the radical social movements of the late 1960s which emphasised action-oriented knowledge and learning through doing. Both Takeda Miyuki and Tanaka Mitsu refused the marriage system and also had children with non-Japanese fathers. At this time, mixed race (konketsu) children challenged the discourses of Japanese ‘racial’ homogeneity. The politicisation of the act of giving birth outside the marriage system, and having non-Japanese men as the biological fathers of their children, symbolises the multiple ways that ribu activists lived this sexual revolution.