Greetings!

 

On behalf of the International Japanese Studies Group at Kanagawa University's Minatomirai Campus, in Yokohama, Japan, I am pleased to announce the following lecture:

 

Beauvoir in Japan: Japanese Women and The Second Sex  

 

Julia Bullock 

Professor

Department of Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures, Emory University

 

Wednesday, 23 July 2025 (in person and online)
15:30-17:00
Room 8015
Kanagawa University, Minatomirai Campus
Yokohama

 

Abstract

Simone de Beauvoir's monumental work of feminist philosophy, The Second Sex, was translated into Japanese in 1953, just four short years after its first appearance in French. The timing of this translation, Daini no sei, was fortuitous--Japan had just emerged from the shadow of the Allied Occupation and was struggling with the legacy of its postwar reforms. These reforms offered Japanese women an unprecedented array of rights and opportunities, but those who sought to exercise such rights still had to confront conservative norms that expected them to channel their ambitions into "careers" as wives and mothers. To many who sought an unconventional life-course, Beauvoir's vision of "freedom" through financial independence and professional projects offered an enticing alternative to the prewar "good wife, wise mother" model of femininity--even if, or perhaps because, this vision was difficult to attain in actuality.

In this presentation, I explore the way Japanese women in the 1950s and 1960s understood the value of Beauvoir's theories for their own life and work, responses that ranged from homage and appropriation to parody and critique. We'll see Beauvoir's Japanese readers "write back" to her, in fictional and non-fictional form, on marriage and motherhood, career and family obligations, romantic relationships, and the struggle to reconcile cultural constructions of femininity with their own personal philosophies and inclinations. We'll see Asabuki Tomiko, the beleaguered interpreter who served as Beauvoir and Sartre's tour guide and primary handler while in Japan, take the French philosophers at their word when they suggested her own life would make as good a story as anything they had written. We'll see fiction writer Kurahashi Yumiko, a college student whose debut story upended the Japanese literary establishment, take inspiration from Beauvoir's advocacy of career over marriage and motherhood, only to find herself a victim of her own success. A young wife named Okabe Itsuko will read The Second Sex and promptly divorce her abusive husband, reinventing herself as a successful and beloved essayist. Setouchi Harumi, another controversial female fiction writer, will swoon at Beauvoir's fashionable persona and intellectual swagger, yet still wonder aloud whether she regretted not having Sartre's babies.

These women and many others will complicate and critique Beauvoir's philosophy, even as they admire it and try to implement it in their own lives. Their stories not only offer us a valuable window onto that historic encounter between Beauvoir and her Japanese public in 1966. They also presage the many ways that the lives of women in Japan, and elsewhere, would change over subsequent decades, as norms of gender and sexuality shifted following the "women's lib" activism of the 1970s.

To Attend Online (Zoom)

 

Access the Zoom Meeting via the following Meeting ID and Passcode. Preregistration is NOT required to attend via Zoom.

 

Meeting ID: 981 0011 0125 Passcode: KUMMC 

 

To Attend in Person

 

Preregistration via the link below at least a day in advance for those coming in person from outside the KU community is greatly appreciated. If you are coming from off campus, please also register as a Guest at the Information counter near the entrance before coming up to the room.

ご来場の⽅： 神奈川⼤学関係者は事前登録不要です。学外の⽅は前⽇までに下記のリンクにて事前登録をお願いします。当⽇は1FのInformationカウンターでGuest登録を済ませてから、部屋までお越しください。Zoom でのご参加は事前登録不要です。当⽇は上記の Zoom ミーティング ID とパスコードでログインしてください。

 

https://forms.gle/AdJFgEA5zCjoNKbw6

 

Inquiries・お問い合わせ: James Welker jrwelker@kanagawa-u.ac.jp

 

Future Lectures

The International Japanese Studies Group at Kanagawa University also plans the following future lecture the remainder of the Japanese academic year. All lectures will be from 3:30 to 5:00 pm at our Minatomirai Campus. Lectures will be hybrid when possible. (Which second semester lectures will be hybrid will be announced later.) Please mark your calendars. 

 

For details, please also refer to the flier here: http://human.kanagawa-u.ac.jp/kenkyu/symposium/pdf/spring_2025.pdf

 

Wednesday, 24 September 2025
Chen Yen-yi, Sophia University
Bodies Performed: Images and Worship of Shaka in Medieval Japan.

 

Wednesday, 22 October 2025
Alejandro Morales, Kanagawa University
Monstrous Obsessions: The Undercurrents of Desire in the Aesthetics of Izumi Kyoka

 

Wednesday, 19 November 2025
P.A. George, Kanagawa University
Difficulties of Translating Japanese Literature into Foreign Languages: With Special Reference to Malayalam Translation of Ishikawa Takuboku's Ichiaku no suna (A handful of sand)

 

Wednesday, 17 December 2025
Elise Voyau, Kanagawa University
Japan in Tension After 1968: The Workshop School of Photography in Focus

 

Wednesday, 21 January 2026
Quintana Scherer, Kanagawa University
Yokohama-e and the Imagined Foreigner

 

Details on upcoming lectures will be announced one to two weeks in advance. If you would like to be on our direct email list to be sure you do not miss an announcement, please contact James Welker (jrwelker@kanagawa-u.ac.jp). 

 

Best regards,

 

James Welker

Kanagawa University

===================================================================
|| James Welker  |  ジェームズ・ウェルカー  (he/him)
|| Professor  |  教授 

|| Department of Cross-Cultural Studies, Faculty of Cross-Cultural & Japanese Studies

|| Kanagawa University--Minatomirai Campus

|| 神奈川大学 みなとみらいキャンパス 国際日本学部 国際文化交流学科

|| jrwelker@kanagawa-u.ac.jp  |  jrwelker@me.com

|| Linktree (Professional profiles & social media)

===================================================================

Co-editor of the Global Queer Asias book series (University of Michigan Press)

Kanagawa University International Japanese Studies Talk Series, Spring-Summer 2025

Selected Publications:

--James Welker, Transfiguring Women in Late Twentieth Century Japan: Feminists, Lesbians, and Girls' Comics Artists and Fans (University of Hawai'i Press, 2024)
--James Welker, ed. Queer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media in Asia (University of Hawai'i Press, 2022)
--James Welker, ed. "Queer(ing)," special issue of Mechademia: Second Arc 13, no. 1 (2020)
--ジェームズ・ウェルカー 編著『BLが開く扉　変容するアジアのセクシュアリティとジェンダー』(青土社  2019)  [James Welker, ed., BL Opening Doors: Transfiguring Sexuality and Gender in Asia (Seidosha, 2019)]