Contemporary Japanese Thought

In his 1946 “Chōkokkashugi no ronri to shinri” [Theory and psychology of ultranationalism],¹ Maruyama pointed out that in Japan, “The entire national order is constructed like a chain, with the Emperor as the absolute value entity; and at each link in the chain the intensity of vertical political control varies in proportion to the distance from the Emperor.” There exists no “free, decision-making agent” and hence no “despotism as a concept.” This lack of “despotism as a concept” has led to the fact that, “though it was our country that plunged the world into the terrible conflagration in the Pacific, it has been impossible to find any individuals or groups that are conscious of having started the war.” This shows that there was an absence of a “sense of responsibility,” in other words, that this state of affairs “impeded the development of a sense of subjective responsibility.”

The actions of Japanese war leaders were “not circumscribed by the dictates of conscience,” but were, rather, “regulated by the existence of people in a higher class.” Hence, even the prime minister, who “held greater power than any of his predecessors,” revealed the “psychology of a timidly faithful Japanese subject: what instantly came to his mind was a proud feeling of superiority, based on the knowledge of being close to the ultimate authority, and a keen sense of being burdened by the spiritual weight of this authority.” In other words, the justification of domination based on the relative distance from the center gave rise to “a phenomenon that may be described as the maintenance of equilibrium by the transfer of oppression.” By “exercising arbitrary power on those who are below, people manage to transfer in a downward direction the sense of oppression that comes from above.” Individuals who are situated within this system, even those “who in ordinary civilian or military life have no object to which they can transfer the oppression,” are “driven by an explosive impulse to free themselves at a stroke from the pressure that has been hanging over them” once they are in a position of superiority.

Here Maruyama found one of the reasons for the insidiousness of Japanese military culture in which lynching was pervasive, as well as for the military’s “acts of brutality” in China and the Philippines. It is easy to find the same (or a similar) kind of psychology at work in the various social problems of contemporary Japan, such as bullying in the classroom or corporal punishment by teachers.

In his 1949 “Gunkoku shihaisha no seishin keitai” [Thought and behavior patterns of Japan’s wartime leaders],² Maruyama also pointed out the existence of two “thought patterns”: “submission to faits accomplis” and “refuge in one’s competence or jurisdiction.” “Submission to faits accomplis” refers to “the point of view that because something has happened one is obliged ipso facto to approve of it.” “Refuge in one’s competence or jurisdiction” derives from the argument that one’s actions are based on one’s assigned line of duty, that judging the rightness of one’s actions is not included within the jurisdiction of that duty, and that therefore “responsibility” for those actions does not exist in oneself.

As Maruyama points out, this logic of self-vindication in the end results in the same kind of absence of responsibility in the ruling class as described above, thus revealing the “dwarfishness of Japanese fascism.” The same kind of thought patterns or logic of self-vindication is easily found in the political logic that reduces such issues as the liberalization of the rice market to the question of foreign pressure or, again, in the self-vindicating logic that defendants use in construction-industry bribery scandals.

The same can be said with regard to Japanese feminism. The idea of Japanese political society’s premodernity, as described by Maruyama, is still repeatedly reproduced within Japanese feminist discourse.

For example, Suzuki Yumi has pointed out that sexual harassment in Japan tends to be predominantly of the gender-role coercion type. As a characteristic of this type, the agent of action is not specified, specific individuals are not held responsible, and the corporations themselves tend to “allow license to men on the presumption of women’s sacrifice.”³ “In a workplace environment that regards the corporation as ‘one big family,’ there is little recognition that women and men as free individuals have entered into an employment contract with the company, and many of the male workers in particular identify strongly with the company as a ‘community sharing a common destiny.’”

Therefore, there is little inclination on the part of any organization to hold the perpetrators of sexual harassment responsible, and the perpetrators themselves have little sense of responsibility. This has the tendency of turning an organization’s response to sexual harassment not toward punishing the perpetrator and aiding the victim, but rather toward censuring the victim’s act of accusation and excluding the accuser. The victim suffers from the sense of isolation that comes from feeling she would have to fight against the whole organization if she were to risk raising her voice in accusation. She is practically forced to choose “between either staying in the company and enduring in silence or leaving.”

Suzuki points out that these characteristics of sexual harassment in Japan reflect the “premodern mode of relationship between the organization and individual in Japanese society.” It is easy to perceive in this observation the same lack of a “free, decision-making agent” and “sense of subjective responsibility.” In other words, one perceives here the same kind of transferring “in a downward direction the sense of oppression that comes from above,” as described by Maruyama.

This becomes even clearer in the case of the military comfort-women issue. Historical details seem to show that this issue is closely related to a characteristic inherent in the Japanese military, which might be called the archetypal Japanese organization. It is said that the massive roundup of military comfort women began with the Nanjing Massacre. Maruyama argues that the Japanese military’s acts of brutality were committed by rank-and-file soldiers: “Men who at home were ‘mere subjects’ and who in the barracks were second-rank privates found themselves in a new role when they arrived overseas: as members of the emperor’s forces they were linked to the ultimate value and accordingly enjoyed a position of infinite superiority.” The atrocities were the results of soldiers “driven by an explosive impulse to free themselves at a stroke from the pressure that has been hanging over them.”⁴ If the mobilization of military comfort women was a strategy to mitigate this “explosive impulse,” then the “atrocities” suffered by these women were indeed grounded in the psychology of “transfer of oppression.” For military comfort women, predominantly women of the Korean peninsula, had been chosen for the intra-military “management” of this psychology, which would otherwise have been directed towards the Asian populace in the colonies:

In the rapid succession of the wars of aggression onto the continent, such behavior of the Japanese military in the occupied areas as looting, arson, assault, and rape can be considered as acts of sexual aggression, of releasing sexual frustrations against weaker persons, though in this case money was not paid.… Without reflecting on this fundamental mistake, military comfort women were unprecedentedly supplied through public funds in the name of preventing soldiers from raping the local women.⁵

Of course, it was not merely the problem of the Japanese military organization that gave rise to the military comfort-women issue. “It is clear that things got out of the control of certain conscientious military officers, as the problem of the war of aggression was compounded with the sexual consciousness of men who had become accustomed to the policy of licensed prostitution.”⁶ In other words, it is valid to regard the “particularity” inherent in the sexual consciousness of Japanese society as being in the background of this problem.

Minamoto Atsuko ascribes this “particularity” of Japanese society’s sexual consciousness to the “thought and culture of rejecting sex,” as transmitted “even in the transition of historical society from the early modern to the modern era.”⁷ “In the modern era, the modern rational spirit of the West greatly transformed Japan’s cultural climate,” and yet, “while encountering the West, the various layers of modernized Japanese culture still retained large ‘traces’ of the early modern era.” This kind of “actuality of Japanese modernity” is indeed “the actuality of Japanese modernity as analyzed in Maruyama’s Nihon seiji shisōshi kenkyū [Studies in the intellectual history of Tokugawa Japan].” For Minamoto, moreover, this actuality meant that “cultural layers concerning ‘women’ also maintained traces of the early modern era,” or even that “those traces were further reinforced.”

Such statements seem to argue that the most urgent task of Japanese feminism is to describe the nature of “Japanese sexuality” as based on a framework shared with Maruyama, that of the traces of early modernity in Japanese modernity. For the various layers of Japanese society confronting Japanese feminism would inherently involve problems related to Japanese sexuality (and gender), which would in some sense retain the traces of early modernity.

Each time it has confronted various concrete aspects of sexual discrimination in Japan, therefore, Japanese feminism finds qualities particular to Japan that are different from those of Europe and the United States. It has understood this Japanese particularity as retaining the traces of early modernity, that is, as an example of Japan’s premodernity. We could say that Maruyama’s political thought has been one of the theoretical sources providing the basis for such epistemology. In this sense, we are still caught within Maruyama’s sphere of influence.

But although this epistemology bears a certain effectiveness, we must also question its validity. To understand Japanese particularity as premodernity will have the tendency to take on a sheen of modernizationism when evaluated negatively, and one of anti-modernizationism when evaluated positively.

However, it seems to me that this makes it especially difficult in Japan for a subject gendered as female to question modernity. In what follows, I would like to propose several points for considering Maruyama’s “modernity” from a feminist perspective by elucidating the distortion found in postmodern feminism in Japan.

Unlike the first wave of feminism, the second wave maintains as its keynote a strong mistrust of modernity. This is because of the contradictory position offered to women in modern society. In modernity, women have been defined as being at once equal to men as human beings and as being “women,” who are essentially different from men. Within this double definition, women end up being placed in a liminal position. As the normative values of male-female equality became more clearly established, the liminality of women was even further reinforced, especially after the achievement of women’s suffrage. The second wave of feminism in advanced capitalist states was based on this kind of liminality in modern society, particularly after the achievement of suffrage.⁸

Second-wave feminist theory has thus developed as one of its main points the duality of modern society, or the separation of the public and private domains, and the subordination of the latter domain to the former. The separation of the public domain (such as corporate, political, and state organizations) from the private (such as family life and personal life) implicitly positions members of society into one or the other domain, depending on their sex. Nonetheless, modernization theory, which understands modern society to mean the modernization of consciousness and normative values, has argued away this positioning as universal and based on the natural order of the sexes. The logical outcome of this is that the hierarchy within the private domain—in which women are predominantly placed—is obscured as a natural order, with this domain being subordinated to the public one.

Hence, despite the professed principle of “modernity” that forbids discrimination based on attributes, women are clearly discriminated against in the “public domain” (women as second-class citizens!). Within the “private domain,” moreover, they also face discrimination, such as the imposition of unpaid housework and child-care labor as well as the denial of the right of sexual self-determination. All of these have been justified as based on the natural order of women’s sex (and, therefore, not a form of discrimination). Women who were dissatisfied with such discrimination were told to resent nature rather than society. The systematic duplicity of modernity signifies none other than these kinds of experiences as suffered by women.

For this reason, second-wave feminist theory has fundamentally maintained a mistrust of modern society, especially with regard to the kinds of modern consciousness and normative values that promote modernization. On the one hand, modern consciousness and normative values purport to define women as human beings and reject sexual discrimination, but on the other, they define men as the standard for human beings and recognize women as a special privilege only when they fit these masculine standards. This is, in the end, nothing but the most insidious form of androcentrism.

In other words, this reinforces the sense that sexual difference exists only for women. Also it creates divisions between women: it grants the privilege of being considered human only to those who fit the masculine standard whereas to others it affixes the label of remaining within the natural order of their sex; i.e., it marks them with the natural sex of “woman.” As a result, being female becomes a negative symbol for women; it becomes that which they must deny as much as possible in order to be human.

Postmodern feminism in Europe and the United States most clearly presents this basic understanding of second-wave feminism. It states that the universalism of modern consciousness and normative values is exactly the kind of knowledge that has reduced women to nature and physicality as well as obscured their social and cultural construction. It states that in order to elucidate this mechanism of knowledge, we must describe the way universalistic discourse—which acts as if sexual difference did not exist—ends up constructing difference.

This basic position of postmodern feminism, insofar as it is within the bounds of Euro-American feminism, coincides also with the relativizing of modern Western culture. After all, modernity that posits the West as universal had also treated with the same kind of duplicity people from non-Western cultures, minorities from non-Western cultural backgrounds, people of color, the non-middle classes, those with disabilities, etc.

The same can be said in the case of such minority, ethnic, class, and disability issues as in women’s issues. By acting as if these various people’s differences do not exist, modern universalism differentiates those who do not fit the Western standard (the standard of white middle-class able-bodied males) and reifies these differences as natural. Such differences have been reified as natural differences inherent in the body, that is, as differences (in abilities, etc.) that represent these people’s essential attributes. Through this knowledge, the cause of discrimination is thus thrown back upon the discriminated as their own problem. In this way, postmodern feminism claims to be able to act in solidarity with various other movements by confronting Western modernity (“universalism” indeed!) in its reification of these differences.⁹

In the case of Japanese feminism, however, such a critical perspective of modernity results in a strange distortion. This is because Japan is not the West. Insofar as one situates oneself in the West, the postmodern position will simultaneously lead to a critical investigation of one’s own society and culture. Yet this is not the case insofar as one situates oneself in Japan. In limiting oneself to the social changes developing in Japan, one can of course point to trends of “modernization” and “Westernization.” In this sense, modernity has, even in Japanese feminism, become the target of relativization. Yet at the same time, modernity in Japan means the West, and from this perspective, modernity’s relativization would mean not the relativizing of Japanese modernity but rather the relativizing of the West. In this regard, the relativization of modernity would not automatically lead to a critical examination of one’s own society and culture, but could lead to an argument reappraising and affirming Japanese society and culture.

Because of this ambiguity, Japanese feminism has always warned against the Japanese reception, or transformation, of postmodernism. It has thus critiqued so-called Japanism. Yet despite this consensus, or precisely because of it, a strange distortion has also existed, as I will explain below.

This distortion is related to the question of how one understands the difference between Japan and the West. According to postmodern thought, difference is not essential but rather constructed through various linguistic and social practices. In other words, what exists is not difference per se but rather practices of differentiation. In this way, what gives birth to the difference between Japan and the West are those practices that emphasize this difference and attempt to give some kind of political meaning to it.

As such, a postmodern critic of Japanism cannot be satisfied simply by critiquing those ideas that praise Japan. Even if one were to consider Japan critically, one would also fall into Japanism by presupposing Japan’s difference from the West, emphasizing that difference, and privileging such an oppositional axis. From this standpoint, the schema that posits any kind of Japanese particularity must itself become a target of critique.

However, this standpoint might come to resemble that of the universalist or modernizationist, who acts as if the difference between Japan and the West did not exist. If we deny the positing of Japanese particularity itself, we might end up constraining critical investigations into our own society and culture. This is precisely why critiques are leveled from the standpoint that regards as truly postmodern the critical investigation of one’s own society and culture as well as the discovery of modernity’s multi-layeredness. This would run counter to the standpoint that is satisfied merely to question the existence of the Japan-West opposition.

As Ōgoshi Aiko points out, “We must guard against the facile reduction of everything to cultural determinism, but the attempt to solve problems through universalism without considering cultural background is also a futile play of abstractions.”¹⁰ In Japan, “postmodernism lacks confrontation and struggle against its own cultural climate…. This is a problem common to Japanese postmodernists, for whom postmodernism is no more than a critique of Western modernity. But unless there is a critical perspective against the existing cultural climate, Japanese-style postmodernism will remain nothing more than a reactionary play of abstractions.”¹¹

However, this latter postmodernist position as espoused by Ōgoshi paradoxically comes to resemble Maryuama’s modernization theory, which posited Western modernity as the ideal type with which to remonstrate against the premodernity of Japanese society. It is easy to see here a revival of Maruyama, as Ōgoshi assumes the continuity of Japanese sexual culture from premodernity. Also she critiques Japanese-style feminism by comparing it to Western modernity, accusing this feminism of “negating the autonomous individual while leaving the Japanese cultural climate unquestioned.”

I see in the entanglement of these arguments the strange distortion of postmodern feminism in Japan. From the standpoint of the former, the latter are no different from those Japanists who posit Japan as the particular by presupposing the continuity and uniqueness of the Japanese cultural climate. At the same time, however, the latter can be seen as modernizationists who advocate Japan’s modernization according to the standards of Western modernity. Yet from the latter’s standpoint, the former can be critiqued in much the same way: the former can be called universalists and modernizationists who act as if the difference in cultural backgrounds between Japan and the West did not exist, and yet precisely because of this they can be seen as Japanists in implicitly affirming the Japanese cultural climate.

What is this strange distortion in which two opposing arguments can critique each other in the same terms, those of Japanism and modernizationism? How can we understand this situation? We cannot avoid this question if we, as subjects positioned in the locus called Japan, propose a postmodern feminism (which was more or less the basic position of Japanese second-wave feminism) that takes a critical perspective on modernity. What is at stake here is indeed the very possibility of a feminism that questions modernity from the position of a subject situated in the locus called Japan.

It is my belief that this strange distortion inherent in Japanese feminism’s postmodern standpoint can inversely throw into relief the mechanism of knowledge inherent in the concepts of modernity itself, as argued by such “modernization advocates” and “civil society advocates” as Maruyama Masao. Without unraveling this mechanism of “knowledge,” our very questioning of modernity as a gendered female positioned in the locus of Japan is to unwittingly invite accusations of being a Japanist or modernizationist, hence making the accomplishment of our endeavor all the more difficult.

What I wish to question here are of course not the words “Japanism” or “modernizationism” themselves. These words could avoid unnecessary confusion if defined clearly. This would be a more important task for those who wish to posit Japanists or modernizationists as hypothetical enemies, or for those who wish to employ these terms to make an argument.

But this is not my point here. Rather I would like to ask how, as a subject with the sexed body of a woman who is located within the time of the present and the locus of Japan, one might be able to question the various powers that have constructed the self. Regardless of whether these powers be called modernizationism or Japanism, the question is how to understand the concrete operations of the various powers that encircle my body, or the subject called myself. This is also to ask how the confusion of the connotations of modernizationism and Japanism as brought about by the questioning of modernity in Japan makes it difficult to ask that very question. In order to ask these questions, we must take as our task the unraveling of the mechanism of knowledge in Maruyama’s modernity.

Many have already described this mechanism in Maruyama’s political thought. For example, Yabuno Yūzō has stated that while “American political thought projects its future as an extension of the present,” Maruyama’s political thought “projects its future as an extension of the negation of present society.”¹² Modernization theory in American sociology, such as that of Talcott Parsons, was a framework for describing contemporary society and forecasting the future on the basis thereof. But modernity in Maruyama’s thought is a framework for showing what is still missing in Japan, and is thus used for negating contemporary society. Because modernity in Maruyama represented such a benchmark of absence, it could end up being purified and formalized as the “ideal of Western modernity.”

Although modern European society was itself “an extremely multifaceted and multilayered society,”¹³ Maruyama’s modernity is posited where such complexities are abstracted. As a result, those aspects of Japanese political discourse that do not fit the abstracted ideal of Western modernity are seen negatively, as manifestations of Japan’s premodernity. By assuming a historical view that progresses from premodernity to modernity, and by positioning Japan and the West along this axis, the abstracted ideal of Western modernity—which is retroactively positioned in the temporal axis of the modern—is deployed as a basis to negate the political practices of contemporary Japan.

Yet at the same time, since the modernity that is still missing in Japan is posited as the universality that ought to be achieved, it is seen as that which ought to be equated with Japan. Japan and modernity are opposed to each other and yet equated with each other. This duality is the same as that which modernity forced upon women. In this sense, Maruyama Masao is indeed a modernizationist.

Yet this is not all. There is another aspect that I would like to point out in what follows.

One of the criticisms against the mechanism of knowledge in Maruyama’s political thought is that it allows him to claim a privileged position in discussing Japanese society.

Maruyama puts himself and only himself in the position of the West, and from this position criticizes Japanese backwardness as well as the irresponsibility of that emperor system fascism which arises from it. But isn’t this questionable? I mean, isn’t it a bit underhanded to put oneself in such a privileged position and critique Japan’s present situation through idealized Western thought?¹⁴

However, I believe that the greatest problem inherent in this mechanism is not that it allows Maruyama to put himself in a privileged position. Maruyama would probably reply to such a critique by saying, “No, this is not true. I myself have the same backwardness as a Japanese person, which is precisely why I have provided the kind of description that resembles a willful excavation of my own pain.” He would say, “I am Japanese, as should be evident. It should be obvious that there is no way I can avoid my own critique.” But herein lies precisely the problem, for what Maruyama accomplishes by deploying the concept of modernity is to present the (fantasy of) belonging to this implicitly presupposed homogeneous Japaneseness.

This problem can be considered from two directions. One is the issue of the reification of Japaneseness that results from equating modern Western society with the ideal of Western modernity. If one were to compare the various realities of modern societies that developed in various places against the ideal of Western modernity, one would surely find differences. In short, elements of premodernity would surely be found in any modern society.

As such, there is no guarantee that those aspects of difference in modern Japanese society, which were discovered by being measured against the ideal standard of modernity, are indeed particular to Japan. Elements of premodernity could potentially be discovered in Korea, China, or even Europe itself. Yet Maruyama’s political thought nullifies this possibility by equating modern European society with the ideal of Western modernity. This makes it possible to equate the discovered premodernity with Japanese particularity, thus making it easy to discuss—and to reify—Japan.

Second, rather than allowing Maruyama to put himself in a privileged position, this reification of Japan makes it possible to homogeneously dilute the problem of Japanese fascism into the problem of Japanese backwardness. Let us recall how Japanese fascism, as described by Maruyama, was that of a homogenous society, covered from top to bottom by the same logic of the transfer of oppression. Yet between those positioned at the top of emperor-system fascism and those at the bottom, there must have existed tremendous differences in the significance of this logic in actual daily life. For those soldiers at the very bottom ranks of military hierarchy, the resistance of oppression from above would surely have meant risking death.

Before a term like “system of irresponsibility” can be homogeneously applied to Japanese society, then, what must be questioned is the possible extent to which subjects in various positions can actually resist. By pointing out that the lowest-ranking soldiers committed atrocities against the Asian populace, however, Maruyama presents a magnificently homogenous Japan. This is a Japan in which everyone from top to bottom is lacking in a sense of subjective responsibility and is covered by the psychology of transfer of oppression. Maruyama accuses and the Japanese people collectively repent. Here the ground for accusation is modernity as an ideal that does not exist anywhere in actuality.… Haven’t we encountered this scene before?

Indeed, Maruyama is at one and the same time a Japanist and modernizationist. It is true that he takes the universal standpoint of the ideal of Western modernity. In its Eurocentrism, however, such universalism can depict Japan only as particularity. In this sense, Maruyama is a modernizationist, for better or worse. Yet precisely by taking this standpoint of modernizationism, he portrays Japan as a homogenous society. He creates Japan by positing the absent center of the ideal of Western modernity. When regarded from the continuity of these kinds of linguistic practices in Japan, Maruyama is indeed revealed to be a Japanist. Hence, regardless of whether we agree with him or not, we should not be surprised to find ourselves at once modernizationist and Japanist.

But what makes this scene even more depressing is the fact that Maruyama’s mechanism of knowledge renders it difficult for various subjects, who are variously differentiated and positioned in Japanese society, to seriously question the experiences of war and fascism as well as other aspects of modern society.

What is most lacking here is the point regarding “women.” It is no coincidence that women rarely appear in Maruyama’s descriptions. Where, if anywhere, are women located in emperor-system fascism? Were “women” situated like men within the transfer-of-oppression system? Did the difference between women and men not exist in this system? If so, how is one to understand the military comfort-women issue? Or is it the case that women did not exist in Japan as conceived by Maruyama? Were women mere victims, located outside of Japan? Is Maruyama’s gender blindness a result of his modernizationism or Japanism?

This last question misses the point, for the two are actually one. It is because one posits the ideal of Western modernity as standard that a homogeneous space called Japan can be created. Both Western modernity as standard and the Japan that is differentiated from this standard are worlds that are implicitly gendered, and yet are posited as if gender did not exist. Both modernizationist universalism (which neglects the specificity of the Japanese cultural climate) and the theory of Japanese particularity (which paints a homogenous Japan) can function as an apparatus that erases the specific experiences of subjects positioned in the category of woman.

Rather than patterns of thought, Maruyama should have questioned the various differences in experience that these patterns forced on subjects in varied situations. It is only on the basis of such experience that one can concretely formulate a political society that is not a system of irresponsibility.

Within Maruyama’s clever logic, I perceive a parallel with both the reification of the category of woman that universalism forced in modernity and the homogenization of women as forced by such reification. In its struggles, second-wave feminism explained why modernizationism created the category of woman as that which bears exactly the opposite characteristics of modernity. Thus it is precisely Japanese feminism that should be in a position to unravel the clever mechanism of Maruyama’s political thought.

Rather than realizing this potential, however, Japanese feminism seems to be caught within Maruyama’s mechanism of knowledge. This mechanism is extremely powerful and defies the efforts of Japanese feminism to escape from it. Yet clearly it will be difficult for us to question modernity as women positioned in the locus of Japan insofar as we remain caught within its parameters.

Ehara Yumiko, “Feminizumu kara mita Maruyama Masao no kindai,” in Feminizumu no paradokkusu: teichaku ni yoru kakusan [The paradox of feminism: Diffusion through fixture] (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 2000), pp. 87–107. Originally published in Gendai shisō, vol. 22, no. 1 (January 1994), pp. 208–217.

3. Suzuki Yumi, “Sekushuaru harasumento no kihon kōzō to sono Nihonteki tokushitsu” [The basic structure of sexual harassment and its Japanese particularity], in Sekushuaru harasumento wa naze mondai ka: genjō bunseki to rironteki apurōchi [Why is sexual harassment a problem?—Current analyses and theoretical approaches], ed. Kanegae Haruhiko and Hirose Hiroko (Tokyo: Asahi Shoten, 1994).

5. Yamashita Akiko, “Sei shinryaku, sei bōryoku no rekishi to kōzō” [The history and structure of sexual aggression and violence], in Nihonteki sekushuariti [Japanese sexuality], ed. Yamashita Akiko (Tokyo: Hōzōkan, 1992), pp. 5–76. The quotation is from pp. 41–42.

9. On the relationship between postmodernism and feminism, see also Linda Nicholson, “On Postmodern Barricades: Feminism, Politics, and Theory,” in Postmodernism and Social Theory: The Debate Over General Theory, ed. Steven Seidman and David G. Wagner (London: Basil Blackwell, 1992), pp. 82–100.