Ribu’s approach to abortion demonstrates how the movement affirmed women’s procreative capacities and resisted the government’s attempt to control their sex. The movement’s stance on abortion should be contextualised within the history of abortion in Japan. Part of Japan’s rapid modernisation process during the last few decades of the nineteenth century involved population control legislation. […]

Another distinguishing characteristic of the ribu movement was the extent to which its activists affirmed onna (woman) as a subject with the capacity to give birth. In contrast with Shulamith Firestone’s argument in The Dialectic of Sex, which posited that women needed to be freed from ‘the tyranny of their reproductive biology’ (Firestone, 1970: 206), […]

One of the myriad publications produced by the movement during the early 1970s was a journal which brought together two key movement terms in its title: Onna Erosu (Woman Eros, founded in 1973). The editors were professional journalists, writers and poets, who saw the need for a new forum for feminist expression. In its inaugural […]

Ribu activists powerfully articulated the political significance of sex in alternative media publications (mini-komi, from ‘mini-communications’), manifestos, pamphlets, newsletters, bulletins, newspapers and journals. They spoke at rallies, organised public demonstrations and sit-ins, and publicised their views through major newspapers such as the Asahi Shinbun and Mainichi Shinbun, intellectual journals and magazines. They launched an unprecedented […]

This movement was known as Uman ribu (woman lib), an adaptation of the transliterated English phrase women’s lib, which was, in turn, an abbreviation of ‘women’s liberation’. This name signalled both the activists’ solidarity with other women’s liberation movements around the world and their specificity as a new Japanese women’s movement. In this chapter, the […]

Setsu Shigematsu In 1970, a new women’s liberation movement emerged, marking a watershed in the history of feminism in modern Japan. The history of feminist consciousness, discourse and activism in Japan has been well documented in works such as Flowers in Salt (Sievers 1983) and Feminism in Modern Japan (Mackie 2003). This history included groups […]

The current situation contrasts in significant ways with the situation in pre-revolutionary Mongolia. Traditionally, Mongolia was a society placing little onus on female virginity and relatively tolerant of extramarital sexual relations — as long as these were carried out with discretion. This predisposi­tion was compounded on the one hand by a very high number of […]

While overtly focused on China, contemporary nationalist discourse in Mongolia is in fact mostly concerned with Mongolian women. It is women who are policed and threatened and the nationalist battle is waged over the terrain of female sexuality. In addition to the rumours described above, other stories circulate in which Mongolian women are seen to […]

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and especially over the last decade, China’s increasing economic clout and its resultant involvement in Mongolian affairs has intensified deep-rooted Mongolian animosity towards the Chinese. Socialist and post-socialist literature — Mongolian, Russian as well as Western — overwhelmingly describes historical relations between the two countries as antagonistic, typically […]

Franck Biiie Introduction In 2009, a video on YouTube went ‘viral’ in Mongolia. It showed a young woman’s hair being shorn, a culpable-looking man sitting by her side, his head in his hands. The aim of the video, posted by the extreme nationalist group Dayaar Mongol (All Mongolia), was to publicly humiliate the young woman […]