- Convenors:
-
Chiara Fusari
(University of Zurich)
Maiko Kodaka (Sophia University)
Agnese Dionisio (Sophia University, JSPS Fellow)
Misha Cade (The University of Tokyo)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Marta Fanasca
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Anthropology and Sociology
Short Abstract
Tracing sexual violence narratives in Japan from the early 20th century to today, this panel examines how victims, activists, and legal frameworks challenge yet sometimes inadvertently reproduce patriarchal rape myths, revealing persistent mechanisms of silencing, stigma, and victim-blaming.
Long Abstract
This panel examines the evolution and contestation of sexual violence narratives in Japan from the early 20th century to the present, tracing how dominant discourses rooted in patriarchal ideology and rape myths have been both challenged and inadvertently reproduced across different historical moments and social contexts. By analyzing victim testimonies, activist interventions, legislative frameworks, and digital platforms, the panel reveals how narratives of sexual violence shape—and at times obstruct—experiences and awareness of victimhood and survival, while simultaneously being reshaped by those who speak out.
The panel begins by exploring testimonies of former Japanese "comfort women," examining how survivors internalized narratives of moral culpability and expendability even while articulating their trauma. These accounts reveal how patriarchal ideology conditions victims to view their exploitation as “inevitable” and demonstrates how victim-blaming logic can be reproduced within survivors' own narratives—including moments where male perpetrators are absolved while female victims are held responsible.
Moving to the 1980s, the second paper examines the emergence of organized anti-sexual violence activism through the Tokyo Rape Crisis Centre (TRCC). By creating safe spaces for victims and initiating public discourse on rape myths, consent, and structural patriarchy, the TRCC challenged narratives that framed sexual violence as individual rather than societal, laying crucial groundwork for subsequent activism.
The third paper investigates contemporary challenges in implementing Western consent frameworks following recent penal code revisions. Analyzing narratives among Japanese youth, it reveals how cultural emphases on community over individual autonomy create tensions with affirmative consent models, resulting in "deradicalized" narratives where undesired yet consented sexual experiences may not be recognized as violence.
Finally, the panel examines how digital platforms complicate contemporary narratives by simultaneously enabling intimate connection and exposing users to technology-facilitated violence. Through female victims' testimonies, this paper explores how digital spaces reproduce gendered power dynamics while blurring boundaries between agency and vulnerability, empowerment and objectification.
Together, these papers demonstrate that while spaces for challenging dominant narratives have expanded over time, the fundamental mechanisms of silencing, stigma, and victim-blaming remain deeply embedded—constantly evolving yet persistently resilient.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
This paper examines the work of the Tokyo Rape Crisis Centre in the 1980s, analysing how the centre challenged dominant narratives of sexual violence by exposing rape myths, highlighting structural causes, and promoting consent, while supporting victims’ voices and agency.
Paper long abstract
Dominant narratives about sexual violence are rooted in rape myths; they reinforce stigma and victim-blaming attitudes, which silence victims, making sexual violence invisible and hindering social justice and change. Victims’ voices, therefore, by breaking this silence, have the potential to challenge such narratives. While speaking publicly is often a risky choice, in recent years, riding the wave of the #MeToo movement, increasing numbers of sexual violence victims in Japan have been sharing their stories. Central to enabling this shift is the availability of supportive environments and safe spaces in which victims’ voices are taken seriously.
One of the first organisations in Japan that tried to create such a space was the Tokyo Rape Crisis Centre (TRCC), established in 1983 in the capital by a group of women. The TRCC has been active for over forty years, providing phone support for victims of sexual violence and engaging in various educational and awareness-raising activities. Positioning the founding of the TRCC as the beginning of anti-sexual violence activism in Japan, in this paper, I aim to explore how its activities have been pivotal in challenging dominant narratives of sexual violence and reframing it as a societal, rather than individual, issue.
Drawing on TRCC lectures and newsletters from the 1980s, I analyse how the organisation initiated public conversations on rape myths, the structural roots of sexual violence in patriarchy, shortcomings in the legal system, evolving understandings of consent, and the right to sexual self-determination. In the 1980s, when there were no institutional support services specifically targeting victims of sexual abuse, and the taboo and stigma on sexual violence systemically silenced victims, the TRCC offered one of the first platforms where their voices were heard and validated.
The TRCC kickstarted a (slow and still ongoing) process of social and cultural change. Not only did it lay the groundwork for later forms of anti-sexual violence activism, but it also contributed to expanding the narrative possibilities available to survivors, making it incrementally easier for them to speak out and reclaim control over their own stories.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how digital platforms shape gendered selves while enabling sexual violence. Drawing on testimonies from Japan’s 2022 sexual violence survey, it shows how anonymity and mediated intimacy blur consent, reproducing gendered power and shifting encounters from connection to harm.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how digital platforms such as dating apps, social media, and gaming communities facilitate the crafting of new gendered selves while simultaneously exposing users to predatory behaviours. Online encounters have become integral to Japan’s everyday media landscape, and the stigma surrounding digital intimacy has diminished as many individuals seek genuine connection and recognition. However, despite their growing normalisation, digital spaces can also function as sites that enable and legitimise sexual violence.
Drawing on female victims’ testimonies from the 2022 nationwide survey on sexual violence, and informed by the framework of technology-facilitated violence (Powell and Henry 2017), the paper demonstrates how digital spaces are not neutral environments. Rather, they operate as extensions of the “real” world, reproducing gendered power relations through structural features such as anonymity, pseudonymity, and platform design. A further critical dimension is the role of text-based communication, which can intensify illusions of intimacy by allowing users to strategically manipulate emotional tone and self-presentation through curated language and emojis. This technologically mediated disembodiment of intimacy often blurs intentions and expectations, increasing the risk of misunderstanding or harm when interactions move offline. These dynamics are further reinforced by a widespread perception of a new rape myth, shared not only by victims but also by police and, in some cases, perpetrators, that online encounters are secondary, unreliable, or inherently “sketchy” compared to relationships formed through offline social networks. Such assumptions can discourage reporting and weaken legal and institutional intervention.
The central question is: How do digital forms of intimacy, particularly through social media, produce conditions in which ostensibly consensual interactions can shift into predatory behaviour? To address this question, the paper analyses testimonies from women who encountered perpetrators through social media platforms, dating apps, and gaming communities. These accounts reveal the ambivalent intersection of agency and vulnerability in digital spaces, where intimacy and self-presentation are continuously negotiated. Ultimately, the paper argues that digital encounters blur the boundary between empowerment and objectification, shaping a new discourse of gendered subjectivity in which women’s sexual desire and agency are frequently reframed or distorted through technological mediation.
Paper short abstract
This paper analyzes how former Japanese "comfort women" internalized frameworks of self-blame and moral culpability. Drawing on testimonies, I examine how survivors reproduce victim-blaming narratives that absolve male perpetrators while holding women accountable for their own sexual exploitation.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the narratives of former Japanese "comfort women" to explore how systems of gendered exploitation produce deeply internalized frameworks of self-blame and moral hierarchy. Drawing on memoirs and interview testimonies, I analyze how these women articulate their traumatic experiences through a lens that simultaneously acknowledges suffering while reinforcing their own perceived culpability—a paradox rooted in their inability to conform to the idealized "good wife, wise mother" (ryōsai kenbo) model of femininity.
Before their coerced mobilization into military sexual slavery, many of these women had already been marginalized within Japan's domestic civilian prostitution system, positioned outside the boundaries of respectable womanhood. This prior stigmatization created conditions in which they came to internalize narratives of doom and expendability, viewing their exploitation as inevitable/unavoidable and even as a patriotic duty—the only contribution they were conditioned to believe themselves capable of making to the nation. These internalized narratives reveal how gendered violence operates not only through physical coercion but through the ideological conditioning of victims' self-perception.
Focusing particularly on the testimony of Suzumoto Aya, I examine moments where victim-blaming narratives are reproduced even within survivors' own accounts. Suzumoto describes witnessing a soldier's brutal assault on another woman at their "comfort station"—an attack so violent it resulted in the soldier's repatriation for psychiatric treatment in Japan, while the victim received no support. Strikingly, the collective response—including Suzumoto's own interpretation—framed the perpetrator as "too naive" (junsui sugita) and faulted the woman for allegedly giving him romantic illusions.
This case exemplifies how patriarchal logic inverts moral responsibility: the male perpetrator is absolved through narratives of innocence and mental fragility, while the female victim is held accountable for her own violation. By analyzing such testimonies, this paper illuminates how survivors of sexual violence and sexual slavery can become unwitting reproducers of the very ideologies that dehumanized them, demonstrating the profound reach of structural misogyny in shaping not only victimization but also the narratives through which victims make sense of their experiences.
Paper short abstract
This paper analyzes Japanese youths’ consent negotiation process after the 2023 penal code revision that adopted an affirmative consent framework to argue that survivors’ victimhood awareness is obstructed by deradicalized sexual violence narratives. Data is drawn from a self-made dating simulator.
Paper long abstract
This paper investigates the narratives surrounding sexual violence during the sexual consent negotiation process among Japanese youth in the wake of the penal code revision that adopted an affirmative consent framework. While Japanese legislation provides eight instances in which consent would be nullified, it does not specifically define its meaning. Currently, sexual consent education in Japan has been spearheaded by grassroots student movements and organizations, such as Chabudai-Gaeshi Joshi Action– one of the four groups that were involved in a campaign to push for legislative reform in 2016. Approximately 20,000 copies of their original sexual consent handbooks were distributed across university campuses in Tokyo, in which they directly translated educational materials from Western non-profits like Planned Parenthood and Hollaback! into Japanese. The Japanese word for sexual consent, “seiteki-doui”, only started to make headlines in the Japanese mass media from the mid-2010s, meaning this nascent concept is at risk of solidifying its cultural presence as an import of Western thought. Consent, which assumes a Kantian liberal subject and an autonomous, self-deterministic agent, will clash with a Japanese cultural background that favors the will of the community over the individual. This ontological difficulty to assert one’s desires, paired with a linguistic penchant for indirect, context-based communication, can hinder the implementation of sexual consent in Japan. Legally enforcing an unfamiliar Western practice into youth’s private sexual relationships without efficiently adapting to local frameworks can create strain during youth’s consent negotiation process, further disrupting narratives surrounding sexual violence. As interview data demonstrates how prolific undesired yet consented sex can be among Japanese youth across all gender expressions, the definition of sexual violence starts to blur– is it rape if they don’t identify as a victim? This paper will first discuss the structural influences on consent communication, such as patriarchal gender roles, and later explain how the research participants’ narratives of their experiences with involuntary consent are comparatively deradicalized and soft, obstructing survivors’ victimhood awareness. Data will be drawn from interviews that adopted a self-made dating simulator for participants to safely recount instances of undesired yet consented sex.