Interview with Japanese feminist activist Yuino Nabuchi: “Feminism for me is giving optimal opportunities and choices to all genders.”

Hi everyone! Welcome to Asian Youth blog. Today I will share with you a selected part of the interview with Japanese feminist activist Yuino Nabuchi. 

 

Yuino: “Hi everyone! I am Yuino Nabuchi. I was raised by a family in Japan, consisting of both parents and an older sister. I had the privilege to go to a private female only school in Japan. It gave me a safe space to explore feminism. After entering UWC RCN, an international school in Norway, I became passionate about advocacy for not only feminism, but also queer rights, BIPOC rights and other rights of marginalized groups with certain social identity.” 


--“What I learned from reflecting Gokon culture and feminism in Japan”

In Japan, Gokon is a modern and popular way of finding romantic partners. The name gokon is an abbreviation of godo konpa, which can be directly translated as “joint party” or “get-together”. Instead of one to one dating, equal number of men and women will be meeting in a group for Gokon and hopefully finding someone to pair up with in the end. Often, a Gokon meeting is arranged in a restaurant where everyone can have food and drinks together.

In our interview, Yuino introduced to me some more insights of Gokon, one of them is that women are obliged to serve men salad. “However”, Yuino told me, “recently a lot of women started to refuse to serve the salad. They consider this as an act of feminism and rebel to traditional feminine social roles.”

Yuino recalls one of the women suggesting to others that: “We shouldn’t do it, so that people won’t think that women should always serve food.”

 

(picture source: https://jpbizdirect.wordpress.com/2008/12/22/meet-your-mate-at-a-compa-party/)

It is really touching for me that people are going against the norms in Japan even under the pressure of finding their life partners. Yuino agrees with that, however, her special feminist lens allows her to open up a new perspective.

 “I really appreciate that (the activism)! I actually love it.” Says Yuino: “But then, if you actually think about it: why do you have to categorise food serving as inferior? The act of serving salad does not have any value hierarchy. It’s people putting values on it. The reason it is categorised as inferior is its association with traditional femininity. (Because femininity is considered inferior compare with masculinity.)” 

Yuino chose rather strong phrasing for this: “The reason for rejection salad serving is actually based on internalised misogyny. It shows that we, as women, did not accept feminine acts as valuable acts. We are rather looking down on ourselves.”

Yuino chooses to let her feminism be more open: “I want to define feminism as giving as many opportunities and choices as possible to all genders. Everyone, including women, should have a choice. Women can serve salad, women can choose not to serve salad. And they should be treated equally.

Building on Yuino’s words, I think it is valuable for Japanese feminists, Asian feminists and actually all feminists to consider: are the inferior acts actually inferior? Or did we categorise them as inferior because we associate femininity with inferiority? By simply rejecting the right of one act, we are not only showing our internalised misogyny, but also taking away a choice and an opportunity from women.

This discussion is brought further to our conversation about popular feminists and feminists characteristics in Japan.

 

“Our generation has the responsibility to shift from the masculine feminism.” 

“We have feminists who can publically work with gender equality issues.” Answers Yuino to my question: “what are some social advantages in Japan in terms of feminism movement?”

However, Yuino also admits that the current Japanese feminists in public vision are often angry masculine feminists. “We are still in a masculine feminist stage. People who come on TV all the time are still angry women.”

We reflected that this image is almost the same as the radical feminists in the first wave of feminism in the west. The performative masculinity comes from the insecurity of being feminine, which is resulted by internalised misogyny.

“I think this process is necessary in the development of gender equality. But at some point, we have to reflect on it. We have to ask ourselves: why we are behaving in certain way? Why we are inferiorizing certain actions?

Yuino shared with me her personal stories which made her realize that feminism is not only one dimensional: “In my family, my father and I are the confident ones. My mother and my sister are more traditionally feminine. I had a period of time that I thought feminists should be more like me, more confident and masculine. However, I cannot stop noticing my mother and sister’s ability to listen and compromise. And they are also feminists. Gradually I start to consider feminine traits as equally valuable characteristics for being feminists.”

“Now I think masculine traits, especially confidence, is over glorified.” Yuino said with determination in her eyes. “I thought about Karina(our common friend), who is also a feminist.”

“And what is your reflection?”I asked curiously.

“I realized that even though I have been discussing feminism with Karina a lot, I haven’t thought about her as the most feminist person. And my judgement was not based on her ideology, but rather just the fact that she did not speak about it in public like the popular feminists.”

“ I thought of it as the problem of my mother’s generation.” Yuino says,

“But it’s actually an intergenerational problem.” I added.

“ I agree! I think it’s really valuable to consider intergenerational feminism. Our generation has the responsibility to shift this masculine feminism into inclusive and intersectional feminism. We need to say to everyone: ‘You don’t have to be masculine in order to be a feminist.’”

“And that’s actually an almost comical contradiction here.” I laughed.

Yuino summarized the conversation with a positive note: “I think ultimately it comes back to my definition of feminism about the limitation of choices. I am working on it and I definitely see other Japanese people who are also working on it. One being my father’s company, which just opened the possibility of period break for women with menstruation related symptoms.”

 

Yuino has been working closely with feminist activism. You could follow her work more closely through her instagram account: yuino-ray. If you identify as an Asian youth who would like to join in this movement and share your voice, please contact the interviewer and writer of this blog: Yimin Dong through email: yimin.dym@gmail.com