Dear members, 

Please allow me to share this workshop on Feminism in Japan, hosted by Sophia ICC on March 25. 

Feminism in Japan: Resistance, Complicity, and Gendered Power

 

https://www.icc-sophia.com/post/feminism-in-japan-resistance-complicity-and-gendered-power

 

March 25,  2026

Sophia University, Building 10, 301

16:00-18:30

 

Feminism in Japan has developed over more than a century, yet persistent gender inequalities continue to shape social, cultural, and political life. This workshop brings together early-career researchers working on gender and feminism in Japan across literature, history, media, and contemporary social contexts. Through an interdisciplinary lens, ranging from postwar women's poetry and interwar feminist movements to wartime sexual violence, contemporary literature, and digital sexual harm, we examine how gendered power, responsibility, and consent have been produced, contested, and reconfigured over time. Rather than treating feminism in Japan as a linear or unified project, the workshop highlights tensions between resistance and complicity, agency and structural constraint, memory and erasure. By placing historical inquiries alongside analyses of present-day sexual violence and digital mediation, the workshop aims to foster dialogue across temporal, methodological, and disciplinary boundaries and to rethink feminism in Japan as an ongoing negotiation shaped by national projects, cultural representation, and rapidly changing technological environments.

16:00-16:05 Opening remarks 

16:05-17:05 Panel 1: Feminism, History, and National Projects 

• Rewriting Tradition: Gendered Lyric Community in Nyonin Tanka (1949-1997) by Damiana De Gennaro, PhD Candidate, Stockholm University
• Rereading gender and nation in 1920s Japanese women's magazines by Mariam Talibi, PhD candidate, Waseda University
• Sacrifice Without Honour: Military Sexual Slavery and the Gendered Logics of Empire by Agnese Dionisio, JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow, Sophia University

Discussant: Maiko Kodaka

 

17:10-18:10 Panel 2: Sexual Violence, Representation, and Contemporary Negotiations

• Rape as a topic within contemporary Japanese literature written by women by Marija Tomic, PhD candidate, the University of Vienna
• Clicks for Consent: Using a dating simulator to investigate the sexual consent negotiation process among Japanese youth by Misha Cade, PhD candidate, the University of Tokyo
• Digital sexual violence in Japan and the amplification of gendered norms by Maiko Kodaka, Assistant Professor, Sophia University

Discussant Agnese Dionisio

 

18:10-18:30 Final Discussion 

 

This workshop is organised by Maiko Kodaka (Assistant Professor, FLA, Sophia University) and Dr Agnese Dionisio (JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow, ICC Sophia University)

 

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Dr Maiko Kodaka 

Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Sophia University