Tag: #KuToo

A Must-read on Japan’s (and Korea’s) #MeToo

Korea’s #MeToo movement was much more successful than Japan’s. This must-read 2025 interview from Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus suggests some of the differences responsible.

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes. Screenshot, Company Retreat homepage.

It’s such a relief to have made the decision to share things that are simply of interest from now on, feeling no shame if I’m unable to substantially add to them. While I’m still definitely working on my own original posts, that means in the meantime I have years’ worth of links to pass on.

With apologies to the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus for the large copy and paste below then, what I’m sharing today is actually just a short excerpt of art historian Asato Ikeda’s lengthy, November 2025 interview there of film director Atsushi Funahashi about his 2022 film Company Retreat, a fictional #MeToo scenario based on a true story. In it, they cover much about the pernicious effects of a culture that strongly discourages challenging superiors, asking questions in Japanese schools, and how paying special attention to reading the room (a.k.a., not ruffling feathers) has significantly hindered the progress of Japan’s #MeToo movement. Indeed, “this basic inability to have debate” about uncomfortable, thorny problems has previously been cited as why the “comfort women issue still remains unresolved in Japan—and East Asia—nearly a century later.

Those familiar with Korean society will find much to recognize here. But don’t worry—this is no essentializing screed, which I highlight only because it confirms my own Orientalist stereotypes about collectivist Asians and their fixation with saving face.

Rather, recall that Korea’s #MeToo movement was much more successful than Japan’s? Meaning that the differences are more important.

To get a sense of those then, I encourage you to read the excerpts below if you’re pressed for time, or the entire interview if you’re not.

What are you waiting for? ;)

(I do have one, very familiar complaint about Company Retreat though—like much pop culture produced in Japan, it’s unavailable outside of it. Grrr.)

Source: Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus

Ikeda: Thank you for making the time for this today. I re-watched Company Retreat for this interview a few days ago, and I’m still struck by how uncomfortable the film made me. As somebody who grew up in Japan, I remember how human relationships there can be convoluted in a particular way. There are certain very abstract phrases that are often used in Japan, such as “you are relying too much on other people” (amaeteiru), “you must work hard” (ganbatte), “we are a team” (nakama dakara),” or “don’t run away” (nigenaide). I am working on collaborative research on NHK data regarding sexual violence and consent with other researchers, but the survivors’ voices there are isolated from the cultural context.2 I thought your film did a great job presenting that context—the dark aspects of Japanese culture—though I am having a hard time articulating exactly what they are. Perhaps narrow-mindedness and herd/village mentality? I know you talked about the goal of your filmmaking as capturing the “unconsciousness of the times” (jidai no muishiki), which might be relevant here. Would you like to elaborate on this?

Funahashi: There might be many answers to this question, but I often talk about how there is no education in Japan that allows people to have debate. They cannot debate. I think they take things personally. In our East Asian culture, the hierarchical thinking—the idea that we cannot challenge somebody in a higher position—is deeply ingrained in our unconscious. There are cultural codes about how we are expected to behave toward our boss (jōshi), the senior (senpai), and the junior (buka) and to be mindful about that relationality. When somebody “lower” than you speaks in a certain way, you get to think “how dare you talk like that” and that emotional reaction comes first. That cultural code prevents us from having a frank “debate” about something on an equal level. You are supposed to “read the air”—the hierarchy among people.

When I was in New York and I worked on the NHK production team for a show called “New Yorkers.” For a special episode on American education, I went to an elementary school in Brooklyn. Everybody raises their hands when their teachers ask if there are any questions and they grow up like that. When I went to a Japanese elementary school, first and second graders usually raise their hands, but around third and fourth grades, the students stop raising their hands. They will start looking around and see if it is okay to raise their hands or speak up and say certain things. For fifth and six grades, nobody raises their hand and there is only silence. That moment of silence where everybody is looking around trying to “read the air” is quite unique to Japan, I think. It is the culture of “hirame-kyorome,” referring to somebody who only looks upwards at “superiors” and sideways at “equals,” not caring to see people “below” or “inferiors.”

The underlying problem regarding sexual violence in Japan is this basic inability to have debate. When sexual harassment happens, there is no clear debate about what caused it. In addition to the lack of practice of debate, sexuality is a complex and sensitive issue to begin with, and sexual violence becomes a topic that people cannot discuss for multi-layered reasons. So consequences or narratives of sexual harassment get decided by people on “the top” and everybody else has to follow them without questioning. And often the understanding of sexual violence or harassment by those people in senior management positions has not been updated, so I can see how this could easily become a problem.

Read the rest here.

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If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)

“Hashtag activism found in translation: Unpacking the reformulation of #MeToo in Japan”—Zoom Presentation by Ms. Saki Mizoroki, Friday April 28, 5:30-7pm JST

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes.

Do any of you reading this in Korea volunteer for a local feminist organization?

As a Western male feminist, or feminist ally if that’s your jam, frankly I’ve never seriously considered it. I’ve always just assumed my presence would be more awkward and complicated than helpful, and probably quite rightly so. There’s visa restrictions against non-Koreans participating in “political” activity too, even for permanent residents.

But are my assumptions correct? Or are they really just excuses?

Because I’ve recently become more interested in contemporary Korean feminist activism than ever. Perhaps, the day I get off my armchair and test those assumptions will come sooner than I think.

If you do ever see my bald head pop up on mutual Instas we follow then, blame Ito Shiori’s Black Box: The Memoir That Sparked Japan’s #MeToo Movement. Not just because because it well deserves its seminal title, but because I was shocked to learn just a few weeks later of the relative failure of that movement compared to South Korea’s. Why? What are the similarities and differences between #미투 and #KuToo? What mutual lessons do they offer for each other? I have to know.

Naturally then, I’ll be all over next Friday’s presentation below (note the open access accompanying article). I’ll also soon be cracking open my copy of Flowers of Fire by Hawon Jung (of course), but first will have to try the more specialized but older (2014) Practicing Feminism in South Korea: The women’s movement against sexual violence by Kyungja Jung while it’s hopefully still relevant.

If you have any other recommendations, please let me know. And I hope to hear your thoughts about next Friday’s presentation too! :)

Join Zoom Meeting https://sophia-ac-jp.zoom.us/j/99468537215 Meeting ID: 994 6853 7215 Passcode: 982771

In 2017, the MeToo hashtag spread across the globe. However, it showed limited success in the Japanese Twittersphere and instead inspired local initiatives such as #WeToo and #Furawādemo (“flower demo”). To understand this reformulation, we analyzed 15 interviews with Japanese social media users and 119 Japanese newspaper articles. The results corroborate the framework we label VTM (values, topics, media), suggesting that an intersection between perceived Japanese values, the topic’s gendered and sexual nature, and media affordances explain the movement’s local development. While perceived Japanese values clash against those associated with #MeToo, new formulations “soften” the protest by blending in values such as reserve and harmony. Overall, we show how perceptions of popular values rather than values as essential orientations shape activism. Finally, we discuss the study’s implications for understanding cultural variance in cyberactivism, highlighting how divergent notions of “safe space” shape such movements.

Saki Mizoroki is a doctoral student at the University of Tokyo and a visiting research fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Her research focuses on feminist media studies, drawing on her extensive experience as a journalist. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Sophia University and a Master of Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley. She has worked as a journalist for a top-national Japanese newspaper, The Asahi, as well as internet media, BuzzFeed Japan.

This talk is organized by David H. Slater (Professor of Anthropology, FLA).

*Mizoroki, S., Shifman, L., & Hayashi, K. (2023). Hashtag activism found in translation: Unpacking the reformulation of #MeToo in Japan. New Media & Society, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231153571

Flyer (PDF): Download from here

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If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)

In Just Two Minutes, My Eyes Were Opened to Why Resolving the Comfort Women Issue is so Necessary for Japan’s #MeToo

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes. Image by Jr Korpa on Unsplash.

For sixteen years, I’ve maintained a strict policy of never covering anything related to the “comfort women” issue. I already have my fair share of trolls, thank you very much, so don’t need to add Japanese and Korean ultra-nationalists to the mix.

With this convenient out-of-sight, out-of-mind attitude though, I recently realized I’ve been missing a crucial connection to present discourses about sexual violence today, especially in Japan.

It just took two minutes, taken from the New Book Network’s podcast interview of Robert O’Mochain and Yuki Ueno about their book Sexual Abuse and Education in Japan: In the (Inter)National Shadows (Routledge, 2022):

“The fixation with depicting comfort women as fake victims has repercussions for survivors of sexual assault today. Even if victims of abuse are not aware of comfort women issues, they are aware of the danger of being labeled a higaisha-buru (“fake victim”), and in the book we show how the association of ideas between ex-comfort women, and fake victims, and contemporary women who report sexual assault, is still a factor in the silencing of women, who have a right to report sexual assault, but…they remain in the shadows.

And, I think a good illustration of how this is relevant still today, is something that happened in 2020. There were prominent members of the main political party, the LDP, and there was an event there on a program that was looking at (unintelligible Japanese term?) through comfort women issues, and when the issue was under discussion a member of the House of Representatives, Sugita Mio, she made the comment “Women can lie as much they want.” Now she did issue an apology later for saying [that], but she wasn’t censured by her party for the comment. They actually refused to receive a petition against her then, when it came to the LDP headquarters…she is still around—she continues to exert influence as a lawmaker in the Diet. And the comment [about the refusal?] was “Why do you report it?”, so it’s part of public discourse. So I think it indicated there’s a determination there amongst ultra-conservative groups to depict ex-comfort women as fake victims, to cast doubt on their oral evidence, and that will affect all sexual assault survivors. I think that’s an important question that we’re exploring in the book.”

(Robert O’Mochain speaking,16:24-18:33)

Unfortunately for those of you who likewise now want to get their hands on said book, I think I speak for most of us when I say US$160–$204 is slightly out of our price range ㅠㅠ. So too, even US$44–$50 for a copy of Voices from the Contemporary Japanese Feminist Movement edited by Emma Dalton and Caroline Norma (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) that I’ve long had my eye on, when you realize it’s only 141 pages long!

I therefore recommend the podcast interview again then, for more on links to the relative failure of Japan’s #MeToo movement (also Lile Otaki Donohue’s article in Trinity Women & Gender Minorities Review for an excellent 8-page summary and comparison with other countries), and the Daiwa Foundation’s video below for short interviews of the contributors to Voices:

Finally, it’s my birthday next week on—yes, really—International Women’s Day(!), so I think one source on Japan’s #MeToo movement even I can indulge myself on is the self-explanatory Black Box: The Memoir That Sparked Japan’s #MeToo Movement by Ito Shiori :)

Has anyone read any of those books? Or have any other recommendations? Can any Japanese speakers please help with the term I couldn’t make out in the podcast at 17:25? Thanks!

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If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)