Women in Black Uk

I'd been invited to Japan to give a number of lectures, mainly on "gender in war and peace processes". One was to the Working Women's International Network, in Osaka. They are an energetic group of women whose main activity is pursuing employers through the courts on pay inequalities and discrimination against women in promotion.

In Kyoto I'd been invited by a Professor Ituro Anzai (the only man I met in Japan!) of Ritsumeikan University, who founded and directs an amazing Peace Museum. It made me think about how in London what we we have is an Imperial War Museum which doesn't even mention the existence of conscientious objectors or a peace movement!. I was asked to give the "keynote lecture" at the opening session of the World Student Peace Forum 2002, also in Rits. I had real luck in sharing a platform with Antonia Juhasz, a really well-informed woman from the International Forum on Globalization in San Francisco who talked very outspokenly about US aims in the "war on terror".

I had also to give a talk at a seminar next day to researchers on peace issues. Again, I was lucky because the other speaker was a US lesbian activist and professor who's worked for 20 years at Kobe University, who spoke really clearly and powerfully on sexual diversity and the acceptance of sexual and other "differences" in Japan (e.g. prejudice against Koreans) as a factor for peace.

But the visit also gave me a chance to talk about Women in Black and meet the local WIB group in Tokyo. The Asia Japan Women's Resource Centre set up an open meeting on "women's peace activism" and gave me the chance to have a talk first in their office with the Tokyo group of Women in Black, and then to share a platform with them at the meeting.

Women in Black in Tokyo started after September 11. They were shocked into action by the bombing of Afghanistan. The idea of taking the name Women in Black came from one member, Hisako Motoyama, who'd been to Israel and had been specially impressed by the Yugoslav women, whose feminist antimilitarism they specially admired. There are other (maybe three or four) Women in Black groups in other Japanese cities but they are, like us, a very loose network without a structure. They see this as flexible and positive.

As in Europe, there was a big surge of activity among various factions of the Left in Japan against the US response to 9.11. The women had joined in mixed demonstrations but they'd felt uncomfortable because they were so noisy and combative. They disliked it that the leaders felt they could "speak for" everyone. They weren't the only ones to dislike the militancy - a youth group also broke away and now uses music. But these women felt the need for a women's perspective. They felt that women's oppression in Afghanistan was being exploited by the US to justify its war. Their March 8 demonstration had the message "The Taliban is Everywhere".

The women who formed WIB come from different parts of the women's movement, but some entirely fresh women have come into it, because they were shocked by current events. They are very mixed in age. The group I met (which included Miho Tsujii, Miho Takeshita and Hikaru Kasahara) were quite young). There's a strong "arts" element among them. They specially wanted to be expressive and creative, because of the contrary in the male dominated movement they had split from. So they've really given serious thought to various means of self-presentation but still aren't satisfied they've found the right form. They've tried "wearing war" on T-shirts with "war" in a basket of strawberries. They've tried "looking strange", wearing black costumes. And they've tried walking as an alternative to standing, moving slowly or weirdly, e.g.stopping every seven paces. They took part in an exhibition of 'coasters' (those round mats you put under glasses). Their coaster had a photo of WIB and the words "listen to the voice of the silenced". It was widely used after, in cafes and bars.

Their vigils in Tokyo started weekly, became less frequent when they ran out of energy, but are now every two weeks. The most they've ever been is 30 women, the least is three. At first they stood in a pedestrian shopping space near the Ginza crossroads, by which you have to imagine Oxford Circus magnified by a hundred. But they didn't like the place and have now moved to Shinkjuku, another central site. But they still don't feel they've found the right "politically symbolic" site to demonstrate. If they go near the Parliament building the police get edgy.

But they feel the vigil form is strong - they get a lot of media attention, and people come up and ask who they are and what they're doing. They don't do much leafletting (they wanted to be very still and let their presence speak for itself - in contrast to the male dominated demonstrations). They feel "just standing there is an act". They want to "break the chain of violence" by standing silently. But they have flyers saying who they are which they give on request.

We showed each other photos. I really wished you could have been there too. But I told them as much as I could about the London group and what I understand of the international network. They seemed specially impressed with the very explicit political messages on our comparatively bold placards (they seem mainly just to have one placard saying "Women in Black") and were interested by our lobbying and informative approach with much more intensive leafletting.

I'll try and describe what the issues for them seem to be. First and foremost they see themselves as protesting against "a world system that creates violence at every level from everyday life to war". Their focus has been on global militarism, the Israel/Palestine issue, Afghanistan and the "war on terror" - now Iraq. They see sexual violence and militarism as intimately connected.

In these things they are quite different from the traditional "peace movement" in Japan, viz. the Peace Museum in Kyoto, which has been retrospective, with a lot of self-criticism about Japanese colonialist expansion and aggression in the Pacific from 1931 to 1945, and of course "anti-nuclear" because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This "peace" analysis is clear-sighted about US political intentions (viz. stalling the Soviet Union) in using the Bomb to end the Pacific war.

They oppose military bases in the Pacific region, particularly Okinawa, a Japanese island. There's a strong women's movement on Okinawa, that mobilized particularly around the 1995 rape of a girl child by a US soldier. They've done a lot of research on the history of sexual abuse by US personnel in Okinawa.

There's an overlap inevitably between Women in Black and the movement in support of the "comfort women", from many countries in the Pacific theatre of World War II, forced into sexual servitude for the Japanese military. The judgment of the women's "tribunal" of December 2000 established the guilt of the Japanese state. But, though the women were subsequently given token compensation from a charitable fund, it was as "from the people" - not the state. So the women are still pressing for an acknowledgment of responsibility and reparations from the Japanese government. Groups in several countries have filed cases in the courts and lost.

The postwar constitution of 1945 provided that Japan should be a demilitarized state with only a token Self-Defence Force. Now the USA is pressing for changes to the Constitution in order to re-militarize Japan which it wishes to use as an ally in its global project. The women feel Japan is still totally in thrall to the US. There is popular opposition to constitutional change in the country, so Koizumi's Right-leaning government are trying to get round it by introducing new Emergency bills, legislation aimed at preparing for an unnamed "predictable war". The new laws will allow the Self-Defence Forces to assist the USA - they already have military ships in the Indian Ocean. There is provision for drafting civilian nurses and doctors into military service. Municipal authorities will lose their autonomy to central government in the event of crisis, to prevent local resistance.

The thing that could bring the "war on terror" to Japan's doorstep is North Korea. Japan and South Korea had recently begun a tentative move towards peace with North Korea. North Korea had come clean about the abduction of various Japanese nationals and negotiations were going on for their return, or the return of their relatives. The USA pointing the finger at N.Korea as one of the "axis of evil" and the exposure of its nuclear programme have interrupted this autonomous move in the region and put "peace" on hold.

Koreans living in Japan are an invisibilized minority, like other "foreigners" like Filipinas (many are prostitutes) and immigrant workers from the Japanese minority in Brazil who are called "Brazilians". So the women say "we are slowly unearthing Japanese multiculturalism. We are not as homogeneous as we think we are". They are alert to the disappearing indigenous people, the Ainu and others.

It seems as if the women's movement is very flourishing in Japan. A thousand women went to Beijing in 1995, and there are many projects flowing from the Platform for Action - especially around domestic violence, shelters, rape crisis "hotlines", counselling women, work with perpetrators, etc. There has been a long and so far unsuccessful struggle to get a law change to enable women to keep their own name on marriage. The women's movement is very internationalist, with a strong set of links in the Asia Pacific region. There's a concern around Japanese sex tourists in Thailand, etc. My meetings in Osaka and Tokyo were both in big and splendid "Women's Plaza" buildings furnished for women by the municipalities - but the women noted that there's a rightwing backlash against this municipal expenditure on women, especially from the extremely rightwing mayor of Tokyo.

Another woman who attended my meeting with WIB Tokyo was Kozue Akibyashi who is on the board of the local WILPF (which she says is not very visible in Japan) but also active in a network called the "East Asia, US and Puerto Rica Women's Peace Network", which campaigns for the removal of US military bases in these countries. It's a coalition of NGOs without any particular centre, but they've organized international conferences in Okinawa in 1992, Washington DC 1998 and Okinawa again in 2000. Kozue said "US militarism has created a wall between us and other women, for instance Filipinas here in Japan. We ask ourselves: how can I make their issue my issue?"

After this small meeting for an exchange of information and ideas between us, we went on to the open meeting that had been advertised by the Asian Japan Women's Resource Centre, in central Tokyo. They were surprised that around 40 participants turned up. Three or four were lesbian activists, friends of Camilla and Angie (and their friend Miki in Kyoto), some of whom also knew Rebecca (Johnson). Also in the audience were three or four men, some of them from a "pro-feminist men's group against sexism".

At this open meeting I talked about Women in Black as an international network, and the nature and strategy of the London group. I raised particularly the difficulty we'd found of making space within the anti-war Left for a politics of "neither / nor". That is to say - resisting the war-plans of the USA, UK and other countries, while at the same time refusing alliance with supporters of the nationalisms and fundamentalisms. And I talked about the effect of September 11 in the multicultural environment of the UK, and the need we'd found to oppose not only militarist responses by the government, but also racism against "Muslims" and curtailment of rights of immigrants etc. WIB Tokyo gave a talk about themselves (on the lines of the report above) and Kozue spoke about her Network.

WIB Tokyo website is: http://www1.jca.apc.org/fem/wib