"Minority women will change the world!": Perspectives on multiple discrimination in Japan

At the 1995 Beijing Conference and the 2000 'Beijing plus five' meeting, NGOs from Japan were well-represented. These NGOs published English-language books for dissemination at the conferences, and Japanese-language reports and books for the purpose of raising consciousness within Japan. Participation in these conferences and the production of English-language books had the effect of strengthening the transnational connections between feminists in Japan and in other countries. The production of Japanese-language publications and the dissemination of reports on the international conferences within Japan had the function of providing a transnational context for the issues being faced by feminists within Japan. In this article we use one publication stimulated by these international activities, Minority Women will Change the World: Multiple Discrimination Against Minority Women (Mainoriti Josei ga Sekai o Kaeru: Mainoriti Josei ni taisuru Fukugō Sabetsu), [Hansabetsu Kokusai Undō Nihon Iinkai (Eds.) (2001). Mainoriti Josei ga Sekai o Kaeru! Mainoriti Josei ni taisuru Fukugō Sabetsu. Ōsaka: Kaihō Shuppansha.] as a case study in exploring how activists within Japan understand multiple discrimination experienced in Japan on the basis of gender, class and ethnicity. Additionally, we investigate how the contributors to this book challenge the notion of racialised and gendered difference as separate and unconnected categories. The book also reveals parallel and divergent experiences of marginalisation and suggests strategies for collaboration among minority women within and outside Japan. Our analysis therefore is situated in the context of recent discussions of transnational feminism, and theorisations of the mutual constitution of structures of inequality based on gender, class and ethnicised difference. Crown Copyrigh