Reassessing Japanese radical feminism from the vantage point of dis/ability

Vittinghoff traces the dis/ability rights rhetoric of Japanese party politics in 2019 to ūman ribu, the Japanese women's liberation movement which flourished during the mid-1970s. In 2019, two candidates with disabilities from the Reiwa Shinsengumi, a left-leaning party, won their elections for the Japanese House of Councillors, the first to do so in the postwar years. While Vittinghoff notes that their victory marked a shift in Japanese attitudes about dis/ability, she historicizes a central tenet of the Reiwa Shinsengumi, namely, that the value of human beings resides not in their productivity but in their existence. Vittinghoff credits this idea to ūman ribu, the mid-1970s Japanese women's rights movement that criticized postwar Japanese social relations. Ribu recognized that women and disabled people were similarly devalued by Japan's masculinist valorization of capitalist productivity. Vittinghoff makes her argument by examining the intersectional analysis posed by the disabled ribu activist, Yonezu Tomoko. Over time, her ideas gained currency among dis/ability rights activists, and as a result, Tomoko's argument echoed through to the 2019 election. Vittinghoff's argument reminds us that the lens of dis/ability makes possible an intersectional analysis of Japanese politics and enables us to identify cross-cutting currents of thought that would otherwise elude us.