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This book provides an overview of the Japanese sex industry in the years of Japan's postwar economic boom. It argues that the origins of gender inequality in contemporary Japan resulted from the policies put in place during this period, when there was instituted a "sexual contract "which provided male salarymen whose work was arduous, underpaid and subject to military-like organisation with easy access to women's bodies, through workplace getaway trips to hot springs resorts, hostess bars, and prostitution tourism to South Korea, as sexual inducement to acquiesce to their own exploitation. Japan's economic growth, the book thereby contends, came at the price not just of environmental and labour degradation, but also gender inequality

Intro -- Acknowledgements -- Japanese-Language Transliteration Conventions Followed in This Book -- Contents -- About the Authors -- 1 Introduction: The Modest but Urgent Voices of Contemporary Japanese Feminism -- Other 'Voices' of Japanese Women -- Conclusion -- 2 Kitahara Minori: At the Heart of Japan's Feminist Movement of the #MeToo Era -- The Day Pornographic Magazines Disappear From Convenience Stores -- The First 'Flower demo' of 2021 -- 3 Yamamoto Jun: Survivor-Activist for the Sexually Abused -- Spring -- Shifting Social Awareness Leads to Policy Change -- Still a Long Way to Go: The Root of the Problem -- Working with Politicians: The Pragmatic Feminist Approach -- 4 Nitō Yumeno: Collaborating for the Rights of Teenage Girls -- Feminist Self-Awareness in Response to Backlash -- Child Prostitution -- Homelife Vulnerability -- Inadequate Welfare Services for Abused Girls -- Rise in Vulnerable Girls During the Pandemic -- Where Are the Responsible Adults? -- 5 Tsunoda Yukiko: Feminist Activist Lawyer -- Tokyo Rape Crisis Center -- Learning From American Feminists -- Catharine MacKinnon -- Japan Lagging Behind the World -- Dignity as Relevant to Crimes of Sexual Violence -- Action on Sexual Harassment -- Female Journalism in Japan -- 6 Mitsui Mariko: A Feminist Leading Feminists -- Feminist Beginnings and International Influences -- Feminist Activist Teacher -- Feminist Activist Assembly Member -- Femigiren: The Belief that More Women in Politics is Good for Women -- Taking on a Local Government and Winning -- Progress and Reflection -- 7 Yang Ching-Ja: Seeds of Hope -- The December 2015 Agreement -- Directly Engaging Japanese Youth -- Feminism and 'Comfort Women' Campaigning -- Early Activism -- Lessons from Survivors -- Song Shin-Do -- Kibōtane in the Contemporary Japanese Women's Movement -- 'Flower Demo'.

This book introduces six key influential feminist activists from Japan's contemporary feminist movement and examines Japanese women's experience of and contribution to the international #MeToo movement. Set against a backdrop of pervasive sexual inequality in Japanese society--on a scale that makes Japan an outlier in Asia as well as the rest of the advanced democratic world--this book offers a snapshot of Japan's contemporary feminist movement and the issues it faces, including, primarily, sexual violence and harassment of women and girls. The six feminist activists interviewed to create this snapshot all work toward eradicating sexual violence against women and girls--they are: Kitahara Minori (instigator of the Flower Demo and public commentator), Yamamoto Jun (activist for sex crime law amendments), Nitō Yumeno (advocate for sexually exploited girls), Tsunoda Yukiko (feminist lawyer), Mitsui Mariko (former politician and current activist), and Yang-Ching-Ja (comfort women activist). Emma Dalton is lecturer in Japanese Studies in the Department of Languages and Cultures at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of Sexual Harassment in Japanese Politics (2021) and Women and Politics in Contemporary Japan (2015). Caroline Norma lectures in the Master of Translating and Interpreting degree at RMIT University in Australia. She is the author of Comfort Women and Post-Occupation Corporate Japan (2018) and The Japanese Comfort Women and Sexual Slavery During the China and Pacific Wars (2015).

In this article we describe pornography's harms in Japan, which are known about from surveys and research, and from the outreach and consulting activities of Japanese feminist-abolitionist groups. Among these are the Anti-Pornography and Prostitution Research Group (APP) and People Against Pornography and Sexual Violence (PAPS). We then propose a renewed classification scheme for pornography's harms that centrally considers the experiences of victims in Japan. Lastly, we consider various legal approaches to addressing the myriad harms we describe and suggest possibilities for a new legal strategy. The article's research comes from Japanese-language materials produced by the above-mentioned activist groups, as well as media reports of pornography-related crimes and court cases. Our aim in this article is to isolate each category of pornography's harms so that individually tailored legal and public policy solutions might be tactically proposed and campaigned for, so that gains against the pornography industry can be made to the point where its operating environment as a whole becomes threatened.

In late 2016 a feminist movement against problems of commercial sexual exploitation, and especially issues of coerced pornography filming, arose in Japan. This article describes the history of this movement as it mobilized to combat human rights violations perpetrated by the country's pornographers. The movement's success came not spontaneously or haphazardly; in fact, it was orchestrated earlier over a full decade-and-a-half by activists who persevered in researching and highlighting pornography's harms in a civil environment of hostility, isolation and social derision, even among progressive groups and individuals. The Anti-Pornography and Prostitution Research Group (APP) was particularly prominent in this history. Its members were inspired and instructed early on by the work of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin in bringing to public attention victims' accounts of pornography's harms in the US from the 1980s, and they attempted to follow this example. The example of feminist anti-pornography activism we described here, therefore, is a case of unlikely political success achieved in an unexpected place (e.g., Japan currently ranks 110th-place in global gender equality league tables), and it is offered in real-world example of MacKinnon's "butterfly" model of radical social change.