Japanese Feminist Philosophy

In the rapidly changing arena of global politics today, nothing looms larger than the framework technology provides in determining the cultural, political, and economic fate of a people. Japanese philosopher Kiyoshi Miki observed already in the early 1940s that technology is not merely a sophisticated manipulation of tools but that it is fundamentally a “form of action” expressing a cultural and political orientation through the means of material production.1 The power of technology, according to Miki, has to do with its (...) ability to make our imagination concrete. But in this process, our values are concretized as well, so while the scientific principles that are used in engineering might be value neutral, the decision-making and actual implementation are always embedded in historical, aesthetic, political, and cultural meaning. If this is true, then a philosophy which claims to theorize about the human condition must also address the realm of praxis mediated by technology. A robust philosophical account of our historical development and political struggles would have to consider the real changes technology makes in material conditions and its long- term impact, as these are clearly existential manifestations of our cognitive grasp of the world. Critical Theory has made an important contribution to analyzing political struggles and examining the various conditions of oppression and cultural transformation. Beginning with the early Frankfurt School thinkers to Marcuse in the 1960s and Habermas in more recent times, updated approaches today cross diverse grounds— feminism, race theory, and globalization, among others. However, despite the fact that technology has indeed been a fundamental medium of culture and politics and many discussions touch upon the topic, the link between a robust critical political theory and technology has been a relatively unexplored territory. Marcuse produced a rather dystopian account of technocracy in the 1960s, but with the exception Andrew Feenberg who has most consistently worked on this theme, a positive connection between Critical... (shrink)

The list of publications having to do with Japanese intellectual history in general and Kyoto School philosophy in particular has grown steadily over the past years, both inside and outside of Japan. This is due in no small part to the important contributions made by those whose papers are included in this volume, the proceedings of an international conference held in June 2009 at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Although much remains to be done if Japanese philosophy is to (...) shed its esoteric and exotic image in order to take its rightful place in the curriculum as one of the many valuable sources of philosophical reflection, the ongoing dialogue among veterans in the field and younger scholars reflected in these pages is as promising as it has ever been. (shrink)

is a troublesome loanword in Japan. While this term has been prevalent in feminist and scholarly circles, it has evoked confusion in the government and stimulated a backlash from the ultra-conservatives against gender equality. Japanese reactionaries have attacked the concept of gender because of their anxiety about cultural destruction old guardgendergendergender’. In doing so, I elucidate the extent to which the concept of gender has infiltrated Japanese society through the dispute.

This study focused on cultural differences in the portrayal of gender in British and Japanese television advertisements. In all, 196 British advertisements were analyzed using a coding scheme based on established coding categories. Contrary to prediction, chi-square analyses showed less gender stereotyping in these advertisements than reported in previous British studies. Next, 228 Japanese advertisements were analyzed. It was found that Japanese advertisements showed a high degree of gender stereotyping as could be expected from Japan's high masculinity score. Analyses were (...) carried out for ‘visual’ and ‘aural’ characters, and for advertisements with both one and two central figures. Results for the aural and 2-central figure sub-samples were more significant. (shrink)

Our paper explores several factors related to the relatively small percentage of women managers in organizations in Japan (especially in comparison to otherindustrialized nations) and examines the strategies of several major corporations that have incorporated diversity management into their corporate social responsibility programs to address problems of gender equity.

Women make up about ten per cent of the scientists and engineers in Japan. The aim of this essay is to make clear why, even in the year 2001, there are so few women in these disciplines. I will suggest that the socio-economic structure and gender ideology of Japan since the Second World War is responsible for this shortage which is often erroneously attributed to the cultural traditions of feudal Japan.

Since the global success of the Made in Italy brand in the 1980s, Japan has witnessed an Italian boom which has turned Italy in the last decade into the most loved foreign country in Japan, especially among women and youth. This popularity is unparalleled in intensity and duration, but had seen little academic investigation. This essay explores how the transnational space of Italianness takes form through cumulative encounters between emotional geographies of 'the West' articulated in Japan, as well as of (...) 'the East' in Italy. There is a focus on the fluid intersections with the lived experience and projections of both Japanese and Italians in contemporary Japan to issues of nation, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to consider some of the philosophical problems on gender in sport in terms of practical philosophy by examining previous studies on sports and gender in Japan. The previous studies of the Journal of Sport and Gender Studies, an institutional journal of the Japan Society for Sport and Gender Studies , and were reviewed to explain the characteristics and the limits of previous sports-gender studies in Japan to establish the parameters for a philosophical discussion of (...) sport-gender studies. A philosophical examination of the issues of affirmative actions, which is the least discussed topic among those listed in ‘JSGS’, is presented. By revealing fundamental problems in research on sports and gender in Japan, this study may potentially contribute to the resolution of multiple issues surrounding women in sports in Japan. Also, by exposing general and omnipresent problems, the study transcends the limited framework of sports in Japan, and can point to those common and overarching gender issues that need to be resolved around the world. (shrink)