She was on her way to the first summer camp of Japan¡¯s women¡¯s liberation movement, ¨±man ribu. On the train to Nagano she handed flyers to fellow passengers. At Nagano station she got off, marched through the city centre for two hours, then continued to the camp. Yonezu was 23 years old. Over the next decade, her insistence on making her disabled body visible within feminist spaces would push the movement towards a reckoning with questions it had barely begun to ask.

Barricades and blind spots

Three years earlier, Yonezu had enrolled at Tama Arts University to study design, a profession she could pursue without physical limitations. She arrived at a campus about to explode. In January 1969, students barricaded all entrances to protest a planned relocation, and the occupation lasted nine months.

For Yonezu, the barricades were a revelation. She had grown up in 1950s Japan, where a disabled child was treated as a mark of ancestral karma or familial shame. She had never spoken about her disability with anyone. Behind the barricades, students talked openly about what angered them. ¡®It was the first time that I realised that although I have a bad leg and people stare at me and all kinds of things, it was not my fault.¡¯

But these revolutionary spaces also reproduced the hierarchies they claimed to oppose. Male activists divided women into workers and love interests. One incident crystallised the contradiction. When male students tried to use toilets that women had cleaned (the men having destroyed others as a ¡®demonstration of strength¡¯), Yonezu¡¯s classmate Mori Setsuko furiously declared the space women-only. Yonezu¡¯s own response troubled her more. Her body had begun to gesture the male students through, a reflexive »å¨­³ú´Ç (¡®here you go¡¯), before her mind could intervene. Years of socialised femininity had inscribed a deference that operated below conscious thought. Liberation, she realised, meant working on the body as well as the mind.

When riot police cleared the barricades in October 1969, male students returned to mainstream careers. Women had no such path prepared. Yonezu and other female activists formed their own groups, eventually joining the growing ribu movement, which aimed to dismantle the family system and gendered division of labour that underpinned Japanese capitalism.

Cropped at the waist

At the 1971 summer camp, Yonezu¡¯s visibility strategy was deliberate. Disabled people in Japan were stared at as spectacle while remaining invisible as political subjects. She inverted this, demanding attention on her own terms as a disabled activist. During the camp she undressed alongside other women, an experience she later wrote about. But a weekly magazine published a nude photograph of her from the camp, cropped at the waist to remove her disabled leg. Her disability had been amputated from the frame.

Her published response went beyond personal anger. She drew a sharp distinction between indifference and liberation. ¡®Liberation is not the same as becoming indifferent,¡¯ she wrote. Ceasing to feel pain at the gaze of others was not freedom. It was the numbing of internalised oppression. If the ¡®ugliness¡¯ attributed to her body derived from aesthetic norms shared by both viewer and viewed, then challenging those norms required confronting the value system itself.

Three years later, Yonezu turned this logic outward. She sprayed red paint on the security glass protecting the Mona Lisa during its Tokyo exhibition, shouting ‘You are excluding the disabled!’ The exhibition had restricted disabled visitors to a single day to reduce costs. She was arrested, detained for a month, and fined 3,000 yen. The National Museum subsequently designated specific days for disabled visitors.

Feminists and disability activists talked past each other

The confrontation that reshaped °ù¾±²ú³Ü¡¯²õ politics came over Japan¡¯s Eugenic Protection Law (EPL). Enacted in 1948 and drawing on wartime eugenic legislation, the EPL did two things at once. It permitted abortion under specified conditions, most significantly for ¡®economic reasons¡¯, providing the legal basis for most abortions in post-war Japan. At the same time, it authorised the sterilisation of people diagnosed with hereditary disabilities or mental illness, often without consent. Approximately 16,500 people were subjected to eugenic sterilisations between 1949 and 1996.

When conservatives moved to revise the EPL in 1972, proposing to remove the economic reasons clause while adding a ¡®foetal clause¡¯ enabling abortion based on detected disability, ribu campaigned under the slogan ¡®A woman decides whether to have a baby or not.¡¯

Disability activists, led by the radical cerebral palsy group Aoi shiba no kai, were furious. If women claimed the right to decide while the foetal clause allowed selecting against disabled foetuses, then ¡®women¡¯s freedom¡¯ amounted to freedom to eliminate disabled lives. Yonezu understood both sides. She later reflected: ¡®What the women¡¯s movement meant ¡­ is that the state should not control women. However, I think now that we should have been a little more aware that ¡­ it sounded as if it was a woman¡¯s decision to choose whether or not to have children with disabilities.¡¯

Through painful, sustained dialogue, ribu revised its slogan to ¡®For a society where we can give birth! Where we want to give birth!¡¯ (Umeru shakai wo! Umitai shakai wo!). Yonezu¡¯s position at the intersection of both movements let her see what each missed on its own. The economic reasons clause and the foetal clause were joint mechanisms of the same logic: the state regulating bodies according to their perceived productive value. A gender-only analysis could not explain why the state simultaneously enabled abortion for some women and sterilised others. Only by holding gender and disability in view at the same time did the underlying structure become visible.

What one body made inseparable

When conservative forces again moved to revise the EPL in 1982, Yonezu co-founded the ¡®82 Liaison Group to Block the Revision of the Eugenic Protection Law¡¯, later renamed SOSHIREN. Its founding principles articulated what a decade of coalition-building had produced: the abolition of the EPL and the decriminalisation of abortion as a single, inseparable demand.

The arc of Yonezu¡¯s activism, from the barricades to the T-shirt to the Mona Lisa to SOSHIREN, traces how one person¡¯s embodied experience of overlapping oppressions generated political insights that reshaped entire movements. Her body, marked by both gendered subordination and disability stigma, was the ground from which she articulated connections that neither feminism nor the disability movement could see alone. Wherever reproductive policy operates through interlocking logics of gender and disability, that perspective remains indispensable.

This post is based on A. V. Vittinghoff, ¡®”Look at me!”: Yonezu Tomoko and the politics of intersectionality in post-war Japan¡¯, Japan Forum, ahead of print. .

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The answer that came back most often was a familiar phrase: sh¨­shi k¨­reika (ÉÙ×Ó¸ßýh»¯)¡ª low birth rate, aging population. It topped the list, ahead of economic concerns, pension anxieties, poverty, and even constitutional reform. On its face, this is unsurprising. Japan’s demographic trajectory has been for decades. Fewer babies, more elderly, a shrinking workforce ¡ª the math is grim and well known.

But here’s what’s interesting. When you dig into how people talked about sh¨­shi k¨­reika ¡ª what they folded into it, what they connected it to, what frustrations they packed inside those five characters ¡ª the phrase starts to look less like a demographic concern and more like a shorthand for a much wider set of anxieties. Anxieties that are, at their core, about .

Gender (in)equality didn’t appear

The survey was open-ended and over 30,000 people throughout Japan participated. But across all responses, phrases directly naming gender inequality barely registered. Terms like?danjo by¨­d¨­?(gender equality) or?jendaa gyappu?(gender gap) appeared only a handful of times.

This is, on the face of it, extraordinary. Few countries have thrown more at . The Equal Employment Opportunity Law arrived in 1986. The Basic Act for Gender Equal Society followed in 1999. Womenomics became a headline policy brand under the Abe administration. have been published, targets set, slogans coined. For nearly four decades, “gender equality” has been an explicit item on the national agenda.

And yet, when 30,000 ordinary people were asked what keeps them up at night, almost none of them reached for the phrase. Gender inequality wasn’t rejected. It was simply absent, as though the entire policy vocabulary had failed to take root in everyday conversation.

This absence is telling. Not because Japanese people don’t care about gender ¡ª the survey responses make clear that many do ¡ª but because the way they express that concern is indirect, bundled into the more socially legible language of demographic crisis.

What people actually said

The word gender (danjo) in Japanese is made up of two words: male/man (dan or otoko) and female/woman (jo or ´Ç²Ô¡¯²Ô²¹). A keyword search for on’na (womanÅ®) and otoko (manÄÐ) across the responses revealed 185 and 96 instances respectively. When those responses were examined closely, three clusters emerged: discrimination, gender inequality, and women’s participation in society. The concerns were real and specific ¡ª but they were almost always attached to sh¨­shi k¨­reika.

A woman in her fifties from the Kanto area wrote that “measures to counter the declining birthrate” were the most pressing issue, then linked this to “pension issues, gender equality, work style reform, the implementation of optional separate surnames for married couples, and economic revitalization.” She concluded that efforts were now “too late” ¡ª nothing had been done for thirty years.

A man in his thirties from Kyushu recognized that while Japan advocates for “correction of the gender gap,” women still find it nearly impossible to take maternity leave without consequence, and men face no real solution for the increased burden that falls on them. His conclusion: the employment system itself needs to change.

A woman in her twenties from Kanto was blunter. Her most pressing issue was the “gender gap.” She added: “This country is finished. I don’t want to have children in a country like this.”

Blaming women

Some responses revealed a more troubling logic. A man in his sixties from the Chugoku/Shikoku region wrote: “I believe that the root of the low birthrate and aging population problem lies in women’s advancement in society. As women have become financially independent with jobs, they are marrying later and remaining unmarried, and the birth rate is declining.”

He was not alone. Multiple respondents ¡ª men and women ¡ª framed women’s entry into the workforce as a direct cause of demographic decline. A woman in her twenties from the Chugoku/Shikoku region said she was “against the movement to encourage women to play an active role in society.” Women working, in this framing, means women not bearing children. The blame lands squarely on women’s shoulders, while the structural conditions that make combining work and family nearly impossible ¡ª long hours, absent fathers, inadequate childcare ¡ª go unmentioned.

Other respondents pushed back. One young woman from Kanto asked pointedly: “What has the government, which is asking women to have children, done for pregnant women? Does it mean that if you want to work, you don’t want to have children? If you want to have children, do you have to give up your career?” She described a society that demands women contribute to reversing demographic decline while offering them little structural kindness in return.

An idiom of distress

What emerges from these responses is a picture of sh¨­shi k¨­reika functioning as something more than a demographic descriptor. It operates as what anthropologists call an “idiom of distress” ¡ª a culturally resonant shorthand that gives voice to to articulate directly. The phrase captures not just the literal reality of fewer children and an aging population, but a tangle of frustrations about stagnant gender roles, impossible work-life trade-offs, inadequate policy responses, and a social contract that no longer holds.

Japan offers the most generous paid paternity leave in the OECD nations ¡ª 52 weeks. Yet in 2021, who took any leave at all took less than a month. Company managers, often described as “Sh¨­wa era type men supported by full-time housewives,” simply cannot comprehend why a working man would step away. The policy exists. The culture hasn’t caught up.

This gap ¡ª between policy and practice, between aspiration and reality ¡ª is precisely what sh¨­shi k¨­reika encodes. Gender inequality isn’t absent from public consciousness. It’s hiding in plain sight, folded into the most voiced concern in the country. Until policymakers recognize that the links between demographic crisis and the gender crisis, very little will likely change.

This post is based on Charles D. Crabtree, Paul Christensen, Tom Phuong Le, Charles T. McClean, Lauren McKee, and Cindi SturtzSreetharan, ‘Demographic decline as an idiom of distress: Rethinking gender (In)equality in Japan,’ Japan Forum (2026). Read the full article .

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