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ICU graduate
【The article below is the same as the article that appears in the eighth issue of the CGS Newsletter.】

“You are pregnant. The expected date of delivery will be December 1st.”
Wow. Toiling through the new personnel training this spring, it had never occurred to me that this larger-than-life episode could happen to me. I was quick in deciding to go ahead with my pregnancy, but my decision was obviously not met with a warm reception at work. In my subsequent dealings with the company, I was brought face to face with the harsh reality of the Japanese working environment for women and witnessed firsthand the unenlightened views of the Japanese corporate world with regard to pregnancy and child rearing.

The Initial Working Group of The Japan Association for Queer Studies (JAQS)

Members of the initial working group towards the establishment of a queer studies association are pleased to announce the formation of The Japan Association for Queer Studies (JAQS), which will be inaugurated in the autumn of 2007. The association aims to provide a forum for dialogue and the interdisciplinary exchange of ideas, in part through an annual JAQS conference and the publication of an annual refereed journal. We welcome membership from not only academics of diverse backgrounds but also from all engaged in discussions of the body, sex, sexuality, gender, and desire. Please see the JAQS website for further details and updated information on membership and forthcoming events.

The Centre for Gender Research (CGR), or in Malay, Pusat Penyelidikan Gender (PPG), is a research center under the administration of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. CGR was established on July 1, 2003. The mission of CGR is to become a center of excellence that seeks to enhance knowledge and expertise in the field of gender studies so that information gathered and the skills acquired through its activities will contribute to the improvement of the quality of life of the peoples of Malaysia and Southeast Asia.

In spring, the Center of Gender Studies at ICU will commemorate its second year and the first students of the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies (PGSS) will graduate in March, with many more interested students in line to take their place. All this is due not only to the passion and energy of the many lecturers and professors but also to the high quality and motivation of about thirty dedicated student staff members who have voluntarily organized reading groups and enthusiastically communicated with people from other countries.There cannot be many other university research centers which depends so much on the energy of students.

Women from poverty-stricken countries are lured to Japan by promises of good jobs and brought into the country by traffickers who supply them with false passports. After detention by a criminal syndicate, the women are sold off to sex clubs or other sex-related businesses and called upon to pay back a debt for various expenses allegedly incurred, such as for transportation. The amount ranges on average from 3 to 5 million yen. Victims are not informed of how much of their so-called debt they have paid back and are trapped into forced sex labour, continually sold from one shop to another.

The question of ‘Loser Dogs’ has been hotly debated in Japan since Sakai Junko’s bestselling volume of essays “The Distant Howl of the Loser Dogs,” prompted the coining of the new term to refer to unmarried, childless women over thirty. Almost concurrently in neighbouring China, debate has centered around the question of ‘Winning Dogs’ - marital relationships and what it means to be a ‘wife’ – largely due to a television drama serial called “Chinese-style Divorce”.

When I was in junior high school, I heard the story of a girl called Rosario on TV. She was one of the so-called `street children,` abandoned by her parents and by society, a drug-addict spending the nights on a heap of garbage. She lived in Olongapo, one of the cities in the Philippines with a thriving sex industry. She worked as a prostitute to survive and had continually been subjected to violations by sex tourists. She died after suffering for three months with a vibrator stuck inside her body. Her case certainly revealed the sordid side of the sex industry. This one incident triggered my interest in issues concerning the commercial and sexual exploitation of children. It is a very complex problem, involving political, economic, social and cultural factors. My senior thesis traces the development of the “Sex and Travel Industries” in Asia and suggests possible solutions to the situation. As this is a problem which I would like to devote the rest of my life to, I did not think that I should leave my research hanging as a mere armchair theory. Thus, after submitting my thesis, I travelled to Thailand and the Philippines for three weeks to have a look at the real state of affairs.

On March 28, 2004, the Osaka District Court ordered Sumitomo Metal Industries Ltd. to pay roughly 63 million yen in compensation to four female employees. The women claimed they had been subjected to sexual discrimination in wages and promotions. In a series of sexual discrimination suits brought against the three companies of the Sumitomo Group, this is the first time that a court has ruled in favor of the female plaintiffs. However, Sumitomo Metal Industries has remained firm in their decision to lodge an appeal, and do not appear to show any signs of expressing an intention to reform their internal personnel management. This is an issue which reflects the dark side of certain Japanese corporations and demands urgent reform.

ICU Graduate School : Hirano, Ryo

In 2004, the Japanese Diet enacted a judicial reform law for a jury system to come into effect by the year 2009. Paving the way for public participation in the judicial process is a significant breakthrough for the realization of democratic ideals. However, there are still a number of unresolved problems with the jury system itself, one of which is the lack of a gender perspective. Legal gender research has called attention to the 'masculinity of the law'. The framework and the practice of law is based on male ideology and there is insufficient implementation of human rights policies for women or sexual minorities. Thus, a jury system must be gender equal and care must be taken not to allow the influence of gender bias in trials. Our group has actively pushed for the government to formulate legislation to address these issues. Although the legislation was not established, we have succeeded in increasing awareness and instigating debate regarding gender issues in a number of meetings of the Lower House Committee on Judicial Affairs.

Senshu Univ. Graduate School : Tamura, Naoko

ICU Center for Gender Studies marks its first anniversary this April, having grown to a large membership with twenty faculty members and thirty students involved. Our center space has also grown to be functional place for students and members to get together. Our activities for the last year have been various. We organized many lectures and casual lunchtime meetings with splendid lecturers invited from inside and outside the university. Our first international workshop was held 25-27 November 2004 on Human Security and Gender in Asia, and saw lively and reciprocal discussions by researchers and activists from 10 Asian countries. Though, the definition of security may differ according to one’s cultural and historical background, we agreed upon the mutual understanding that women’s security have been overshadowed by the concept of national security and its emphasis on military power. We are glad that we have created an intimate network among gender researchers regardless of language and nationality. This experience will prove valuable for CGS. In June 2005, CGS is going to attend the women’s conference, WW05, in Seoul, and to host a panel discussion on the possibility of cooperation between academia and activists.

The Interdisciplinary Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies provides a　model curriculum for students who wish to create an interdisciplinary major that focuses on issues of gender and sexuality. Human experience is inextricably linked with sex and gender. We enter the world with the biologically defined sex of our bodies and then over the course of our lives become gendered social actors. In doing so, we encounter and engage the wide array of socio-cultural ideas, values and practices that define gender, with its associated ideas regarding masculinity, femininity, and other gender identities. In recent decades scholarly research in multiple disciplines has explored the profound ways in gender and sexuality are constructed and defined in social life and also influence and inform social action. This research has demonstrated not only the centrality of sex, gender, and sexuality in social life, but also their critical linkages to such basic everyday issues as access to education, language use, and political participation, or such large scale theoretical issues as inequality, class, power, and nature versus nurture debates.

The Law for the Prevention of Spousal Violation and the Protection of Victims was amended in May 2004. It will be enforced in this December. The major changes are as below: (1) the extension of the period of Vacation Orders from 2 weeks to 2 months, which the court orders to the assailant, (2) the inclusion of children to the protection by the prohibition against approaching a victim, (3) determining the promotion of the victims become self-reliance under the responsibilities pf local government, and (4) the inclusion of mental violence to the definition of domestic violence, which used to refer only to physical violence.

Dowry has become a very common word and it is practiced in Indian society without any inhibitions or ill feelings. Dowry is a payment from the bride’s family to the groom or groom’s family at the time of marriage. Upon marriage, daughters are given all modern household gadgetry as dowry such as furniture, crockery, electrical appliances (in recent years refrigerators, television etc.) as well as personal items of clothing, jewellery and cash. Some parents also give a car among dowry items. The value of the dowry depends on the jobs the grooms may be holding at the time of marriage, ranging from 250,000 Yen to 5 million Yen or more in a country where a basic graduate’s salary starts from 6,250 Yen (with the exception of medical and engineering graduates.) The fact is that no good alliance can be made without offering the above-mentioned gifts. This system is more rigid in the northern Hindi-speaking region consisting of Bihar,　Uttar　Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Haryana states, although it is against the law. The Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961, amended in 1984 and 1986, treats the offence of dowry as cognizable and non-bailable, giving and taking dowry is prohibited, cruelty of others to the woman driving her to suicide is punished. Inquiries are made into any woman’s suicide or death in suspicious circumstances within seven years of her marriage. You can find a lot of information on this social evil on the Internet and in books available on women’s issues in India. In fact, there are a number of books available in our ICU library itself. In this paper, I would like to mention my own family’s experience regarding dowry at the time of my elder sister’s marriage.

Following the establishment of the Japan Society for Gender Law last year, a new movement has also arisen in the field of Economics. On the global level, the International Association For Feminist Economics (IAFFE) was established in 1992. Through this association, many issues are being debated, such as the structural change in socio-economic systems, the effects of policies on women, globalization, and the economics of caring. I can still remember my excitement as I read about the activities and research conducted by the IAFFE, in Yoshiko Kuba’s Economics and Gender: New Development of Feminist Economics. I was thrilled and realized, “This is where the economics for me will be created.”

Entering to the twenty first century, the backlash against feminism movement in Japan and gender policy incorporating their claims has been rapidly widespread. To begin with, we will first ascertain what the feminism movement has brought about up until 2001.