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Paper short abstract

Focusing on the activities of Josei Sakkyokuka Kaigi (JWCM), a composer-led collective founded in 2019 in Japan, this paper analyses how feminist collaboration and dialogic writing function as modes of knowledge production within the field of contemporary music composition in Japan.

Paper long abstract

Founded in 2019, Josei Sakkyokuka Kaigi (Japanese Women Composers Meeting, JWCM) is a composer-led collective formed by Ushijima Akiko, Morishita Chikako, Watanabe Ai, and Watanabe Yukiko, active within the field of contemporary classical music in Japan. The group established itself as a platform to seek dialogue and mutual support within a professional environment long shaped by male-centred narratives and career models that assume uninterrupted creative labour.

This presentation examines how JWCM addresses structural conditions that shape contemporary composition in Japan but remain largely unarticulated within its professional discourse. Through their editorial and online activities, the group addresses gendered expectations of artistic labour, freelance precarity intensified by Japan’s project-based cultural economy, questions of nationality and ethnicity within a nationally framed canon, and the unresolved tensions between marriage, caregiving, and sustaining a career as a composer. Importantly, JWCM reframes these concerns not as personal obstacles faced by women, but as systemic contradictions embedded in music education, funding structures, and historiography.

The analysis focuses on two self-published journals, “The Dialogue: Arts and Women” (2021) and “This is (not) my lullaby” (2025), alongside the online blog Onna Sakkyokuka no Heya (Women Composers’ Room). Drawing on feminist care ethics (Tronto) and theories of collaborative and situated learning (hooks; Lave and Wenger), it examines how dialogic writing and autobiographical reflection are mobilised to demystify composition as a profession and to question male-centred frameworks of historical and professional legitimacy.

The presentation argues that JWCM’s activities exemplify a collaborative feminist approach to knowledge production that makes visible the social conditions under which music is created. By framing composition as a socially embedded practice shaped by labour relations, care responsibilities, and institutional constraints, JWCM contributes to a broader rethinking of artistic work and cultural production in contemporary Japan.