The Kazuko Takemura Fund for Feminist Research for Gender Equality and Justice

Kazuko Takemura first expressed her wish to establish the Kazuko Takemura Fund for Feminist Research for Gender Equality and Justice (hereafter "the fund") in mid-April 2011. After an emergency operation in March, she had been diagnosed with a terminal illness, a malignant tumor for which there was no established treatment. Kazuko invited lawyers to her house to discuss the possibility of creating a research fund. During the second round of discussions when her will was being finalized, I still remember her distress and weariness as she said glumly afterward, "It's so depressing to think about things that will only happen after I'm dead." Yet she talked about the fund again while at a retreat in the Yatsugatake Mountains in Nagano Prefecture. She had suffered a relapse and the doctors had given up. She was admitted to a hospital in Osaka at the end of July. Through numerous phone calls and emails, one of the current directors of the fund led the way and developed a formal proposal for the fund by the middle of August. People readily responded to Kazuko's personal requests for support and started coming together as a group. In early September, at the suggestion of one of the members, it was decided that the fund would be set up as a general incorporated foundation instead of an NPO. The Ochanomizu Academic Association agreed to take care of the administration, and Kazuko was extremely happy with how things were progressing.

A group called "Team K (Kazuko)" had been formed earlier to help support Kazuko in her fight against cancer. Its members got together at the end of October at her request so she could thank the members and ask them to support her fund. At this gathering, a flyer was distributed to all the participants asking for their support, outlining the purpose of the fund and the plans to register it as a general incorporated foundation. It was only a few days later that Kazuko was admitted to a hospital in Nagano, where she remained until she passed away in December. The eight board members of the fund were drawn from Team K. I was deeply inspired by how strongly Kazuko believed in the fund and the energy she focused on it, in spite of her personal fight against cancer. I could write on and on about how the fund evolved--essentially, it is a result of the unstinting, unpaid efforts of those who were determined to carry out Kazuko's wishes despite all odds. If that's not sisterhood then what is?

Details of the fund, including its objectives, can be viewed on the official website. The main purpose of the fund is to provide financial support for researchers and activists who find it hard to (or cannot) access funding. In particular, it prioritizes substance over form unlike, for example, other research grant applications that require one to write up the same kind of thing across multiple categories like research "outline," "aims," and "objectives."

Throughout her own career, Kazuko was fortunate to receive a series of research grants from the Japanese government: her most recent research topic, approved last year, was "An Analysis and Theorization of the Representation of Violence in the Age of Post- humanism: Reconstruction from a Gender Perspective." Given the degree to which violence is being re-established in biopolitics today, I wish she had been able to complete her proposed research.