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 term ribu hereafter refers to the movement, its activists and their discourse.
Ribu groups began to form in cities across Japan beginning in April 1970. Members were primarily urban-based Japanese women in their twenties and thirties. Generally college-educated, most reflected the sense of middle-class identity broadly held by Japanese in the early 1970s regardless of variations in income and privilege (Brinton 2011). Many were university and college students; some were recent graduates who dedicated themselves to organising the movement; others were professionals, writers and journalists; some were married; some were lesbians; some were mothers; others were teenage runaways struggling to create their own space in society.
Many had been involved in the student movements and other Japanese New Left groups that had emerged during the 1960s. Women in these leftist movements became critical of their male-dominated structure and the sexual discrimination they witnessed and experienced first-hand. They were dissatisfied that problems like domestic labour and sexual violence were not taken seriously, and they refused the exclusion of gender and sexuality from the sphere of politics, foregrounding these matters as essential to political change.
The movement did not establish formal leaders or representatives. Each group determined its own agenda, but groups often worked together on shared issues. Their first public rally was part of the mass demonstrations held on International Anti-War Day on 21 October 1970, thereby connecting gender and sexuality to the politics of war. It is estimated that about 80 women participated in this demonstration, which drew considerable media attention. In the early 1970s, ribu activists organised events that drew a few hundred participants, expanding to a few thousand in the mid-1970s at the largest events. Compared to mainstream women’s organisations, Uman ribu was numerically marginal. The historical significance of Uman ribu was not due to its size, but rather to its trenchant critique of gender discrimination in the Japanese Left and Japanese society as a whole (Shigematsu 2012; Mackie 2003: 144-73; Muto 1997).