Everyday Perspectives on Security and Insecurity in Japan: A Survey of Three Women’s Organizations

Abstract

The existing research on Japanese security focuses mainly on the nation state and conceives of male elites as the key bearers of relevant knowledge about the phenomenon. This article problematizes these biases by zeroing in on women’s everyday-oriented perspectives, which fall outside the scope of security politics as traditionally conceived. More specifically, it analyzes the rich material provided by a survey of the members of three major Japanese women’s organizations, using a mixed-method approach premised on statistical methods and qualitative content analysis. The results show that the Japanese women in our sample accommodate and reproduce content from dominant elite views about security and insecurity. However, they also challenge and at times ignore these perspectives by identifying a host of other insecurities as more pressing in their daily lives, notably those related to environmental degradation and Japan’s political development.

Female Nationalist Activism in Japan: Truth-Telling Through Everyday Micro-Practices

“…1 Earlier engagements with this topic have focused on either the causes or the consequences of female Japanese nationalist activism (Asahina, 2019;Yamaguchi, 2013Yamaguchi, , 2018. In this article, however, we rather square in on the discourses that mobilize Japanese women to this kind of activism, and investigate how female nationalist agency is articulated and enacted through everyday micro-practices (See Hagström, Ha, & Öberg, 2022).…”