Abstract
Castellini investigates how the Japanese women’s liberation movement (ūman ribu) critically engaged with the growing visibility of child-killing mothers that characterized media coverage in late postwar Japan. Extending the account of ribu’s critical stance on the maternal initiated in the previous chapter, Castellini delves here into the movement’s expressions of solidarity with mothers who kill their children and unpacks ribu’s complex rhetoric around the image of the kogoroshi no onna (“child-killing” onna). He foregrounds the extent to which the movement’s solidarity and support for these criminalized mothers acquired the status of counter-hegemonic acts of dissent that challenged widespread understandings of filicidal mothers as either “bad” or “mad,” and called into question idealized notions of motherhood, maternal love and the sanctity of the mother–child bond.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The excerpt was part of a much larger article that reviewed the first year of activism of the movement (the founding issue of Ribu nyūsu was circulated in October 1972). Brief descriptions of major landmark events were followed by significant quotes from pamphlets or bills produced for each occasion or by excerpts from personal letters of women who might or might not have been ribu members. This editorial style was consequential in furthering a sense of community: not only did it communicate the lively, activist spirit that had become the trademark of the movement, but it also included multiple voices which confirmed the extent to which ribu’s struggles for social transformation resonated with a wider audience.
- 2.
Due to the paucity of academic investigations of this specific dimension of ribu’s activism, this chapter draws largely on primary sources in Japanese such as pamphlets, bills and booklets that the movement produced and circulated in the 1970s. Unless otherwise stated, all the translations are mine.
- 3.
The notion of “encounter” (deai) became a buzz-word of ribu’s activism and rhetoric. It spoke directly to a critique of modern society that was said to plunge individuals into a state of deep alienation and to establish a system rooted in incommunicability which, in turn, denied the possibility of sincere human relationships between man and woman, woman and woman, woman and child (Shigematsu 2012: 61). See also the section “Deai e no mosaku” [literally “blind search for an encounter”] in Tanaka Mitsu’s Inochi no onnatachi e–Torimidashi ūman ribu ron ([1972] 2010: 147–172).
- 4.
Just to provide an example: in 1975 a case of maternal filicide occurred in Iwatsuki (Saitama prefecture) on which occasion the mother was committed to a period of enforced hospitalization. In a pamphlet that was distributed at that time, ribu activists informed their readers that they had been at the hospital, that they had been able to meet the doctor in charge and retrieve important information about her. The authors also refer to a rich correspondence they allegedly exchanged with the mother and that they had eventually been able to see her. The pamphlet ends with reference to a phone call she made to inform them of the date of her discharge from the hospital (Urawa et al. 1975).
- 5.
In this respect, my work owes a particular debt to feminist theorist Ehara Yumiko and her invaluable insights into the relationship between ribu’s preoccupation with maternal filicide and its broader challenge to cultural idealizations of the maternal role (see Ehara 2012: 131–7, 158–63).
- 6.
See the chapter “Ribu’s Response to the United Red Army: Feminist Ethics and the Politics of Violence” in Shigematsu (2012: 139–70).
- 7.
For a detailed discussion about the semantic historicity of the word onna and its later reappraisal by ribu activists, see Chap. 3.
- 8.
It goes without saying that “child-killing onna” is only a partial translation of the expression kogoroshi no onna that purposefully calls attention to the assumed untranslatability that marks the semantic texture of the word onna. Whereas “woman who kills her child” or “child-killing woman” could be considered viable translations, they still would not convey the vibrant connotations that exude from the term onna. The specific way in which Shigematsu emphasizes the resistant materiality of this word is fuelled by a belief in the “militant semiotic intransigence [often] attached to the untranslatable” (Apter 2008: 587).
- 9.
To realize the revolutionary impact of ribu’s stance vis-à-vis women’s potential for violence, we just need to remind ourselves of the emphasis that the Mother’s Convention (Hahaoya taikai) placed upon the notion of the pacific and protective nature of women’s maternal role.
- 10.
Having here addressed the rhetorical dimension of ribu’s use of the category kogoroshi no onna, I will hereafter translate onna as “woman” for stylistic reasons, emphasizing its distinctive connotations only when the context requires me to do so.
- 11.
The Ribu Gasshuku Jikkō I’inkai (Executive Committee for a Ribu Camp) comprised ribu cells such as Gurūpu Tatakau Onna (Group Fighting Onna) and Shisō Shūdan Esuīekkusu (Thought Group S.E.X), and was founded in order to organize the first ribu summer camp (gasshuku) on August 21–24, 1971 (Mizoguchi et al. 1992: 315).
- 12.
There are two versions of the pamphlet “Ondoro ondoro onna ga kodomo wo koroshiteku” from which this quotation is taken: one appears in Ribu Shinjuku Sentā Hozonkai, ed. (2008a) and is collectively attributed to Gurūpu Tatakau Onna, while the other is reprinted in Tanaka (2010) and is attributed to Tanaka herself, who was also one of the founders of the group. Although the content of the two versions is identical, this difference in authorial attribution suggests the extent to which Tanaka’s vocabulary and ideas might have profoundly informed the output of an entire ribu cell (see Shigematsu 2012). Here I will be referring to the former version.
- 13.
In the context of the debates around the proposed amendments to the Eugenic Protection Law, Tanaka vigorously urged to recognize the contiguity of abortion and child killing (kogoroshi) along the same continuum of violence that resulted from the unbearable circumstances in which women found themselves to live. While it is not my intention to delve into the nuances of these debates, I want to take the opportunity to flag here, with Shigematsu’s help, Tanaka’s discourse about the distinctive relationship between abortion and filicide. According to Tanaka’s logic, child-killing onna were those unfortunate enough to have missed the opportunity to kill an unwanted child before it was born (Shigematsu 2012: 27). Tanaka denounced both child killing and abortion as the infelicitous outcome of the same structural conditions and gender regime. However, she sidestepped issues of morality and argued that “women should recognize their own inherent capacity for violence in their act of aborting their children” while they strove to change society (ibid.). This point is vigorously made in the following excerpt:
When I choose to have an abortion with my own subjectivity, in the objective situation where I “am made” to have an abortion, I want myself to become aware that I am a murderer. The child dies in reality, and if somebody calls the woman a murderer, then, I dare to declare that a woman who had an abortion is a murderer, and while doing so, I would still choose to have an abortion. Declaring that I am a murderer and staring at a foetus cut into pieces, now, I want to argue against a society that makes women do so, giving society no way to avoid the argument. (Tanaka 1972: 63; tr. in Kato 2009: 266)
- 14.
Such a claim exposes an important tension between ribu’s desire to make the tragic experience of these mothers heard and the risk of co-optation of that experience for the movement’s political purposes. I will return to this point at the end of the chapter.
- 15.
Whether or not this psychic defence mechanism is a significant contributory factor to society’s attempts at containing manifestations of a maternal potential for violence in public discourse remains an intriguing question, albeit not one that I am able to pursue in the context of my current analysis.
- 16.
For a detailed account of the history of the Hannya mask, see Marvin (2010).
- 17.
The title juxtaposes the characters 息 (iki, breath) and 生き (iki, to live) to render the expression ikigurushii (choking, which makes breathing difficult) thus suggesting the extent to which these men flounder in circumstances that make life unliveable.
- 18.
Ōgawara, at that time in his late 20s and a reporter for a press agency, circulated the pamphlet “Guide to the ‘Meeting of Men who Find it Hard to Live’” at a ribu meeting. About ten other members answered his call. Yamakado’s text appeared, instead, in the first issue of Otoko no tomo (Man’s Friend), a minikomi produced by Tokyo Otoko Idobata Kaigi (“The Well Conference of Tokyo Men” or “Tokyo Men’s Gossip”). The expression “idobata kaigi” originally indicated women’s informal gatherings at the local well and had been later used to signify a gender-specific understanding of (women’s) gossip. Shufu no tomo (The Housewife’s Friend), of which Otoko no tomo is likely to have been a “male” adaptation, had been established in 1917 and in the 1970s constituted the most popular monthly women’s magazines in Japan (Sakamoto 1999: 178; Mackie 2003: 49).
- 19.
For an informative discussion of how publics come into being in relation to texts and their circulation, see Michael Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics (2005).
- 20.
Sapporo is the largest city on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. For an explanation of the name komu-unu, see Chap. 3.
- 21.
Once again, we may recognize in this pamphlet produced by Gurūpu Tatakau Onna a rhetorical style à la Tanaka: “the history of woman’s darkness” recalls the darkness of the womb that I have already elaborated upon and which was deemed to harbour woman’s history of discrimination and frustration.
- 22.
Iwatsuki was a city located in Saitama prefecture until it merged in 2005 into the city of Saitama.
- 23.
As for Iwatsuki, Urawa was a city in Saitama prefecture. It merged into the city of Saitama in 2001.
- 24.
The cursory outline I provide here of the attitude of the Asahi in relation to this case of filicide does not emerge from an analysis of the original newspaper articles in the Urawa edition, but is a reconstruction based upon the accounts embedded in ribu’s archival documentation.
- 25.
The exception is represented by the transcripts of a trial against a mother who killed her three-year-old daughter and which the Ribu Shinjuku Centre published as a booklet in June 1973 (Sayama et al. 1973). It seems reasonable to argue, however, that the legal setting that framed the trial is likely to have imposed numerous restrictions on the defendant’s liberty of expression, and we may feel legitimated to wonder whether it is unambiguously her voice that we hear as we read through the records of the trial.
- 26.
See Chap. 3, note nr. 1.
- 27.
Take (Takeda Miyuki) was a member of the collective Tokyo Komu-unu. The fact that she assisted to the hearing and then wrote this letter is another demonstration of ribu’s ambivalent stance towards motherhood, which made it possible even for those women striving to conceive new forms of relationality between women and children to harbour a desire to connect with mothers who killed.
Bibliography
Apter, E. (2008) “Untranslatables: A World System.” New Literary History 39(3), 581–98.
“Asu wa wagami! ‘Kogoroshi onna wa seishin shōgaisha’ naru asahi shinbun no hōdō ni kōgi suru!” (1974). In Mizoguchi A., Saeki Y., and Miki S., eds. (1994), 379.
Ayres, S. (2004) “‘[N]ot a Story to Pass On’: Constructing Mothers Who Kill.” Hastings Women’s Law Journal 15(1), 39–110.
Braidotti, R. (1997) “Mothers, Monsters, and Machines.” In Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, eds. K. Conboy, N. Medina, and S. Stanbury, 59–79. New York: Columbia University Press.
Castellini, A. (2014) “Silent Voices: Mothers Who Kill Their Children and the Women’s Liberation Movement in 1970s Japan.” Feminist Review 106, 9–26.
Chūpiren (1972) “‘Kogoroshi’ ni tsuite.” In Mizoguchi A., Saeki Y., and Miki S., eds. (1994), 246–7.
Covino, D.C. (2004) Amending the Abject Body: Aesthetic Makeovers in Medicine and Culture. New York: The State University of New York Press.
Ehara, Y. ([1985] 2012) Josei kaihō to iu shisō. Tokyo: Keisō Shobō.
Gurūpu Tatakau Onna (1971a) “Haha e no rabu retā.” In Mizoguchi A., Saeki Y. and Miki S., eds. (1992), 240–46.
Gurūpu Tatakau Onna (1971b) “Ondoro ondoro onna ga kodomo wo koroshiteku ondoro ondoro onna ga kodomo wo koroshiteku.” In Ribu Shinjuku Sentā Shiryō Hozon Kai, ed. (2008a), 186–7. Also in Tanaka, M. (2010), 314–19.
Gurūpu Tatakau Onna (1971c) “Shiryō: onna no kogoroshi wo kangaeru kai” In Ribu Shinjuku Sentā Shiryō Hozon Kai, ed. (2008a), 188–95.
Gurūpu Tatakau Onna (1971d) “10-21 onna no shūkai” In Mizoguchi A., Saeki Y. and Miki S., eds. (1992), 250–1.
K., K. (1973) “Kogoroshi no oya to shōgaisha to no deai.” In Mizoguchi A., Saeki Y. and Miki S., eds. (1994), 363–4.
Kato, M. (2009) Women’s Rights? The Politics of Eugenic Abortion in Modern Japan. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press.
Loftus, R.P. (2013) Changing Lives: The “Postwar” in Japanese Women’s Autobiographies and Memoirs. Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, Inc.
Mackie, V. (2003) Feminism in Modern Japan. Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marvin, S.E. (2010) Heaven Has a Face, So Does Hell: The Art of the Noh Mask, 2 Vol. Warren, CT: Floating World Editions.
Metropolitan (1971) “8-1 wansaka tōron shūkai ni atsumare!” In Mizoguchi A., Saeki Y. and Miki S. eds. (1992), 165.
Mizoguchi, A. et al. (1971) “Ūman ribu wo arainaosu.” Asahi Jānaru, June 25, 1971: 4–28.
Mizoguchi, A., Y. Saeki, and S. Miki, eds. (1992) Shiryō nihon ūman ribu shi, Vol. 1. Kyoto: Shōkadō.
Niimi, M. (1974) “Kono sakebi wo ba kike! Kogoroshi onna wa watashi deari, anata da.” In Ribu Shinjuku Sentā Shiryō Hozon Kai, ed. (2008c), 139.
Nori (1972) “Koumi kikai = kyōsei boteki jōkyō wo toppa seyo!” In Mizoguchi A., Saeki Y. and Miki S., eds. (1994), 16–17.
Ōgawara, M. (1973) “‘Ikigurushii otoko no atsumari’ annai.” In Mizoguchi A., Saeki Y. and Miki S., eds. (1994), 381.
Oliver, K. (1993) Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-bind. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Ribu Gasshuku Jikkō I’inkai (1971) “Ribu gasshuku wa naze gasshuku ka.” In Mizoguchi A., Saeki Y. and Miki S., eds. (1992), 319–23.
Ribu Shinjuku Sentā (1973) “Kogoroshi onna wa anata da… Asahi shinbun ni kōgi shiyō!” In Mizoguchi A., Saeki Y. and Miki S., eds. (1994), 68–9.
Ribu Shinjuku Sentā (1974) “Kogoroshi onna wa sochi nyūin?! Hoan shobun no sakidori wo yurusu na.” In Ribu Shinjuku Sentā Shiryō Hozon Kai, ed. (2008c), 139.
Sakamoto, K. (1999) “Reading Japanese Women’s Magazines: The Construction of New Identities in the 1970s and 1980s.” Media, Culture and Society 21(2), 173–93.
Sapporo Komu-unu (1974) “Kogoroshi no shakai haikei wo mushi shite hōdō suru―Otoko to masukomi no konsensu ni wa hara ga tatsu no desu.” In Mizoguchi A., Saeki Y. and Miki S., eds. (1994), 24–5.
Sasaki-Uemura, W. (2001) Organizing the Spontaneous: Citizens Protest in Postwar Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.
Sayama S., and F. Aida (1972) “Tegami to bira de tsudzuru ribu―kono ni nen.” In Ribu Shinjuku Sentā Shiryō Hozon Kai, ed. (2008c), 4–5.
Sayama, S. et al., (1973) “Kogoroshi shiryō-shū 1: kogoroshi kōhan kiroku.” In Ribu Shinjuku Sentā Shiryō Hozon Kai, ed. (2008b), 190–222.
Shisō Shūdan Esuīekkusu (1971) “3-11 shūkai tōron shiryō.” In Mizoguchi A., Saeki Y. and Miki S., eds. (1992), 176–7.
Shisō Shūdan Esuīekkusu and Tora (1972) “Appīru.” In Mizoguchi A., Saeki Y. and Miki S., eds. (1992), 185–6.
Suga (1971) “Onna no kogoroshi was nani wo tou ka.” In Ribu Shinjuku Sentā Shiryō Hozon Kai, ed. (2008a), 310–11.
Take (1971) “Kogoroshi: Shiryō. …san e tayori shita watashi kara.” In Ribu Shinjuku Sentā Shiryō Hozon Kai, ed. (2008a), 307–9.
Tanaka, M. ([1972] 2010) Inochi no onnatachi e―Torimidashi ūman ribu-ron. Tokyo: Pandora Gendai Shokan.
Tanaka, M. (1973) “Kogoroshi no saiban wo bōchō shite.” In Ribu Shinjuku Sentā Shiryō Hozon Kai, ed. (2008c), 31.
Tyler, I. (2009) “Against Abjection.” Feminist Theory 10(1), 77–98.
Urawa, K. et al. (1975) ‘Iwatsuki no “kogoroshi no jiken” ni yosete’ in Mizoguchi A., Saeki Y. and Miki S., eds. (1995), 34–36.
Warner, M. (2005) Publics and Counterpublics. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books.
Yamakado, G. (1975) “Otoko wa te wo yogosanai!” In Mizoguchi A., Saeki Y. and Miki S., eds. (1995), 406.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Castellini, A. (2017). Contested Meanings: Mothers Who Kill and the Rhetoric of ūman ribu . In: Translating Maternal Violence. Thinking Gender in Transnational Times. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53882-6_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53882-6_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-53881-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-53882-6
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)