The movement’s focus on the liberation of women’s sex and the cultivation of a women-centred culture encouraged the politicisation and expression of women-centred relationships and lesbian love. While lesbian social groups like Wakakusa no Kai (Young Grass Group) had existed since 1971, lesbian women involved in the ribu movement began to express their political views and form their own groups within the movement (Welker 2010: 53; Mackie 1980: 107—8). In 1973, the inaugural edition of a bulletin from a ribu cell called Group Kan included lesbian discourse. The author takes the position of ‘a woman who loves women’ and protests against ‘same-sex love’ being regarded as a perversion (Mizoguchi et al. 1992—95, Vol. II: 115). From 1975 to 1976, a group of lesbian women affiliated with the Shinjuku Centre carried out a survey to learn more about lesbians in the movement. In 1976, they published their findings in a publication called Subarashii onnatachi (Wonderful Women), described as ‘a magazine from lesbian women to all women’. These alternative media networks provided space for the affirmation of lesbian existence. Ribu NyUsu (Lib News), published from the Shinjuku Centre, included photos and articles featuring lesbians (Ribu NyUsu 1974). Some of the first volumes of the journal Onna Erosu featured translated reports about lesbian sexuality from Our Bodies, Ourselves (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective 1971) and articles about women’s bisexual experiences (Onna Erosu 2: 86-98; 3: 80-92). These early volumes of Onna Erosu also published Matsumoto Michiko’s photographs of lesbians from the United States, as part of a report about the women’s liberation movement in the US (Onna Erosu 4: 7-8). In these ways, the ribu movement provided the context and networks to circulate some of the earliest 1970s expressions of lesbian life and bisexual women.
Although there was some space for lesbian representation in the movement, and several leading lesbian activists were part of the ribu movement, lesbianism was not privileged, theorised or affirmed as the most radical alternative to a compulsory heterosexist society. Even though Tanaka railed against the compulsory heterosexuality of the monogamous marriage system (which she called the ‘one wife-one husband’ system), she never espoused lesbianism as the ideal political alternative. Instead, she sought to improve relations among women and men as a person who identified explicitly as heterosexual. Despite its women-centred principles, in the absence of a lesbian-positive practice, there were times when homophobia would manifest itself, as it did in feminist movements elsewhere. As women began to identify openly as lesbians, some experienced homophobic remarks from other women in the movement (Shigematsu 2012: 119; Welker 2010). Such contradictions within feminist spaces are certainly not exclusive to the ribu movement, but point to the tensions experienced by women who pushed against the heterosexism within and beyond the movement.
Even though the movement was not free from such contradictions, leading feminist lesbian activists recognise that ribu’s sexual liberation fostered the politicisation of a lesbian movement in Japan. Yonezu Tomoko stated, ‘[m]any ribu women could immediately understand same-sex love… and became lesbians themselves’ (Shigematsu, 2012: 119). Yonezu partnered with a woman and continued her feminist activism around reproductive freedom for the next several decades. Wakabayashi Naeko, who lived at the Shinjuku Centre, would later become a leading lesbian activist, founding one of the first lesbian resource organisations, Regumi Studio (Regumi Sutajio) in 1987. Wakabayashi was also a co-founder of the Asian Lesbian Network, forging ties with other lesbian activists beyond Japan (Ishino and Wakabayashi, 1996: 95). Asatori Sumie, discussed above as a key organiser of the Witch Concerts, has also been a leading lesbian feminist activist with roots in the ribu movement. Freeing women from the confines of the patriarchal marriage-family system was a fundamental first step in the liberation of women’s sexuality, and this encouraged new forms of relationality and love between women.
Conclusion
The seeds of feminist revolt cultivated by the ribu movement took root beyond the movement. Elements of gender subversion and transgression manifested in the realms of shojo manga (girls’ comics), subsequently in commercial women’s magazines, and through the creation of a subgenre of ladies comics that emerged in the 1980s, which included pornography for women (Shigematsu 2005: 555-89). James Welker (2010) has documented how feminists, lesbians and manga artists have transfigured the meaning of sexuality for women, tracing the connections between the ribu movement, the lesbian movement and girls’ manga. Whether it be through the translations of Western feminist discourse, the resignification of Japanese terms such as onna, or the creation of new terminology, such as anti-marriage, the ribu movement had lasting effects through its principled and passionate affirmation of women-centred relationships and female sexuality. The subsequent adoption and wider use of the term onna in popular culture and in academic feminism attests to these influential cultural shifts and discursive transformations catalysed by the ribu movement (Ueno 1994: 4).
In conclusion, the ribu movement formulated an expansive critique of the links between oppression, gender and sexuality, transforming the terrain of sexual politics for women in Japan. This movement produced a new discourse that linked and theorised the interconnections between sex and sexuality, not only linked to the patriarchal state, but also to larger structures of capitalism and nationalist-imperialism and Japan’s legacy of colonialism in Asia. At the core of their movement was the call to understand how discrimination is reproduced through primary familial relations as the basic microcosm of society. Their rejection of the dominant patriarchal- capitalist family state required new conceptions and cultural practices of family, relationship and collectivity. This movement heralded a shift in consciousness about who should control the body, and how human sexuality and intimacy are enmeshed in structures of productivity, value and power. The discourses formulated by the ribu movement constituted an unprecedented critique that emphasised the centrality of sex and sexuality as vital to the struggle for human liberation.