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 critique of the gendered formation of Japanese politics and society. The movement’s call for the liberation of sex involved a specific and expansive re-conceptualisation of sex and the politicisation of gender relations. Drawing on a Marxist understanding of class, ribu activists argued that women were a class that cut across classes — an oppressed group that needed liberation from their male oppressors. They argued that the Japanese family (ie) system was the reproductive unit of discrimination in modern Japanese society because it was the fundamental social institution that reproduced male supremacy (dansei yuetsushugi). The male-centred family system, they argued, served to naturalise discrimination within the core unit of society. Moreover, they argued that the modernisation of Japanese society had occurred alongside the expansion of the Japanese empire. As part of the national ideology, the Japanese family system had been connected to Japanese imperialism, based on the notion that the Japanese nation was a family with the emperor as its head (Mackie 1988: 55). The official state ideology enshrined the emperor as the head of the Japanese national family, as father figure, commander of the imperial army and a god. Ribu activists argued that the post-war family system and marriage system was a continuation of this national-imperial system which perpetuated authoritarian rule (Onna Erosu 1: 8). To rid society of discrimination required the dismantling of the male-centred family system.
The call for the liberation of sex was thus informed by a critique of Japanese imperialism, and not merely a call for free sex. Leading activists of the movement, like Yonezu Tomoko, rejected the advocacy of ‘free sex’ furii sekkusu), which had become the vogue through the counterculture of the student movements. These feminists decried that free sex was another excuse for men to use women’s bodies (Yonezu 1970: 171). Although the immediate post-Second World War years had witnessed a liberalisation of sex, this sexual liberation largely encouraged male heterosexual agency and pleasure (McLelland 2012: 88; Bullock 2010: 35). The central importance of the politicisation of sex was inscribed in the name of the ribu group Yonezu co-founded in April 1970: Thought Group SEX. Yonezu and Mori Setsuko, two co-founding members of Thought Group SEX, became key ribu activists during the early 1970s. They later merged with other ribu activists to establish the Ribu Shinjuku Centre and were central to shaping and disseminating ribu discourse across Japan.
Along with the movement’s call for the liberation of sex were two other key terms: onna (woman) and eros. Ribu activists called for the liberation of onna (woman) as the chosen political subject of the movement. There were other commonly used terms for women, such as the more generic and modern term josei (woman) orfujin (woman/lady), which typically referred to a married woman. Instead, they reclaimed and politicised the term onna. Linguist Orie Endo describes onna as having ‘a strong and often negative sexual connotation’, a term that could be substituted for the words ‘mistress’ or ‘prostitute’ (Endo 1995: 30). In an 2010 interview, veteran activist, Sayama Sachi, stated that precisely because onna emphasised a ‘sexual being, with many desires’ and had a negative connotation during the 1960s, the deliberate adoption of the term was similar to the later reclamation of ‘queer’ by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) movements (Shigematsu 2012: xvi).
Closely connected to this call to liberate onna was the call to liberate eros. The term eros drew from the work of Wilhelm Reich (1967 [1935]), some of which was available in translation. Reich’s The Sexual Revolution (Die Sexualitat im Kulturkampf 1935), which had been translated into Japanese in 1967, was profoundly influential for one of the leading activists and theorists of the movement, Tanaka Mitsu. In the early days of the movement, Tanaka urged others to read this book, and Reich’s writings inform much of her early writings. In one of the first manifestos of the movement, ‘The Declaration of the Liberation of Eros’, distributed as a pamphlet in June 1970, Tanaka writes: ‘The economic factors of a political revolution provide the necessary preconditions for a cultural revolution, which essentially involves a revolution of sex’ (Tanaka [1970a], translated in Shigematsu 2003: 290). Ribu activists called for a revolution of everyday practices that had typically remained outside the purview of politics. This included the gendered division of labour and domestic duties, which required men to work outside as the main income earners and women to stay at home and raise the children. This manifesto was a direct critique of the two-stage thinking characteristic of the left which privileged ‘“economic conditions” over the “problems of daily living”’ (Shigematsu 2003: 290). For radical feminists, the way that patriarchy undergirded every aspect of daily living was the problem. It was this vision that led to their interrogation of daily practices. They wanted nothing less than the transformation of daily practices, human relations, and consciousness. Their comprehensive critique of society from economics to private property and familial relations was akin to other forms of radical feminism. As Machiko Matsui notes, ‘[t]his was a movement for women’s self-expression, self-affirmation, self-realisation, self-determination, and self-emancipation’ (Matsui 1990: 435).
The following excerpt from ‘The Declaration of the Liberation of Eros’ demonstrates the connective logic from women’s economic freedom to the liberation of sex.
Given that the basic cause that prevents women’s economic independence is the marriage system within patriarchy which is based on — the system of private property — leading to the oppression of one sex by the other sex — based on the one husband-one wife system — which basically only requires that women uphold this one husband-one wife system — women’s liberation therefore fundamentally requires the liberation of sex. (Tanaka [1970a] in Shigematsu 2003: 291)
According to this logic, the liberation of sex required the refusal of the one husband-one wife system under patriarchy. They also argued that monogamy in marriage only applied to wives, not husbands (Tanaka 1970b: 202). In practice, this political critique meant that many ribu activists refused to enter the marriage system despite the discrimination they would face as non-married women and mothers. Moreover, their children would also be subject to discrimination as so-called ‘illegitimate’ children according to the family registration system and family law. In the 40 years since the movement began, many ribu activists have continued to abide by their principled refusal to assimilate into the marriage system, indicative of their commitment to the political importance of the marriage-family system within the larger structure of Japanese society. Such forms of resistance against the dominant system have resulted in discrimination and economic disadvantage, including repercussions for the children involved. An example of discrimination against non-married ribu activists and their children is depicted in the documentary film Ripples of Change (Kurihara 1993). In the film, a ribu activist who lives with her male partner, but refuses to register their marriage, discusses how their children face bullying at school as a result of their parents’ non-married status. Even though the marriage system was a primary object of criticism, heterosexual relations were therefore not totally rejected. Some ribu-identified women were already married and remained so, but the movement unequivocally rendered marriage as a political issue and not just a personal choice.