Translation's (Limited) Influence on Discourse of Women's Liberation in 1970s Japan

The year 1970 saw a new wave of feminist activism in Japan that quickly came be known as ûman ribu (women’s lib). While outside the movement ribu was widely assumed to be an American import, local conditions were the initial impetus for ribu activism, which first began to take shape among women with scant knowledge of or connections to nascent American second wave feminism.

Translations of second wave feminist writing from the US and elsewhere would, however, quickly come to play a significant, though largely indirect, role in ribu discourse. Perhaps the first such translation, a mid-1970 pamphlet of essays by American feminists informed early media reporting on the Japanese movement. Ironically, the producers of this pamphlet created it to offer more accurate information on the American movement than was available in the Japanese media, not to provide a model to women in Japan. A similar proviso was attached to the commercially published 1971 Japanese translation of the groundbreaking second wave collection Notes from the Second Year (1969). As suggested by these early translations, within the ribu movement there was significant interest in women’s activism abroad and techniques such as “consciousness raising” were borrowed, but most ribu discourse and activism was local in focus. While language and ideas from translations of texts such as Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973/1974) and The Hite Report (1976/1977) would be echoed in ribu—and popular—discourse, reverberations from 1970s translations of books by Kate Millet, Shulamyth Firestone, and other second wave thinkers were less obvious.

This paper will examine the production, reception, and influence of translated second wave feminist writing within and beyond the ribu movement in 1970s Japan. Attention will be given to decisions made by translators, including their choice of texts to translate, as well as their framing, annotations, and omissions.