On a summer morning in 1971, Yonezu Tomoko left her apartment in Ebisu wearing a hand-painted white T-shirt. Across the chest and back, in large characters, she had written ‘Look at Me!’ (Watashi wo mite!). She paired it with black hot pants that exposed legs she would normally have hidden beneath long trousers. Her right leg, paralysed by polio since childhood, was thinner and shorter than her left. She carried a stack of flyers addressed to strangers: ‘Look at me! Look more carefully. Not from the side, but from the front, from above, from below! I’m different from you, aren’t I. Don’t look away!’
She was on her way to the first summer camp of Japan’s women’s liberation movement, ūman 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 诲ō锄辞 (‘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 谤颈产耻’蝉 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. .
