Chong Eun Ahn, Central Washington State University

“Crisis” Across Time: Questioning “Women’s Problem” in Manchukuo’s Korean Communities

Blaming women for social decline has been a recurring theme in modern East Asian history. This paper examines critiques of women in colonial Manchuria, focusing on ethnically Korean women’s roles in birth and family care. Using interviews with working women from Manseon Ilbo(“Manchuria-Korea Daily”), it explores how the imperial system portrayed women’s roles. It also analyzes memoirs and interviews from the 1990s, when Korean Chinese minorities began sharing their colonial experiences. By comparing public representations with women’s lived realities, the paper highlights their struggles to navigate and resist colonial ideals. It connects past struggles to ongoing issues, linking imperialism, neoliberalism, and women’s search for diverse forms of power.

Chong Eun Ahn is an Associate Professor of History at Central Washington University. Her research focuses on Modern East Asian history, exploring themes of modernity, ethnicity, migration, gender, and empire.

 

Andrea Gevurtz Arai, University of Washington (Conference Organizer)

Who Cares? After 3.11 and Covid in Japan

Tzu-Lu (Lulu) Hung, Graduate Student, University of Washington

The Radical Imaginary of Reproduction in Murata Sayaka’s “Life Ceremony”

This paper examines Murata Sayaka’s short story “Life Ceremony,” exploring state policy’s intervention in shaping perceptions of normalcy and reproduction. It highlights how societal norms are disrupted through queer kinship, achieved via Murata’s juxtaposition and de/sexualization of food and sex.

Tzu-Lu (Lulu) Hung is a second-year Master’s student in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington. Her research interests include modern and contemporary Japanese literature, postcolonial studies, and gender and women’s studies. She is currently working on her master’s thesis on Sakaguchi Ango, incorporating perspectives from disability studies into literary criticism.

 

Lake Lui, National Taiwan University

Re-institutionalization of Marriage Among Young People in Taiwan

Grounded in the literature on the deinstitutionalization of marriage, this presentation explores why, despite holding diverse ideologies about marriage, people in Taiwan have not widely practiced alternatives such as long-term cohabitation or singlehood. The analysis is framed within the cultural-cognitive approach of neo-institutionalism, examining how individuals and couples renegotiate their relationship with the institution of marriage.

Lake Lui is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at National Taiwan University. Her research examines how global forces such as economic restructuring, migration, and sociocultural changes interact with national policies in affecting gender relations and the family in Asia. Her research uses both qualitative and quantitative methods to examine marriage formation process, household dynamics, and fertility decisions. Her most recent works probed the relationship among im/mobilities, political contestations, and political repression, and the family’s role in weathering changes.

 

Sue Bin Park, Graduate Student, University of Washington

Low Birth Rates and Abortion Rights in South Korea

Throughout South Korean modern history, women have been thought of as reproductive instruments of the state. Starting in the 1960s through the end of the twentieth century, the government carried out aggressive “family planning” and contraceptive campaigns, including coercive sterilizations. This instrumentalization of women’s bodies continues with current pronatalist policies, such as the push to enforce criminalization of abortion in the 2005 Framework Act on Low Birth Rate in an Aging Society. In response, a movement focused on decriminalizing abortion developed, culminating in the broad coalition of feminist groups, disability rights groups, religious groups, doctors’ organizations, and other progressive interest groups called The Joint Action for Reproductive Justice in 2017.

My paper explores the 2019 decriminalization of abortion movement. I discuss the activists’ arguments and the South Korean Constitutional Court’s 2019 ruling. I hope to demonstrate how the push for women’s reproductive autonomy not only challenges the pronatalist basis of government policy, but offers an alternative understanding and approach to the low birth phenomena in South Korea.

Sue Bin Park is a master’s student in Korea Studies at the University of Washington’s Jackson School of International Studies. Her research interests include transnational media cultures, women’s issues, and social minority issues in South Korea. She is particularly interested in how transnational media and ideologies are interpreted and reconfigured within new cultural, national, and societal contexts. Outside of her studies, she enjoys listening to music and exploring Seattle’s diverse cafe culture.

 

 Yukiko Shigeto, Whitman College

Revaluations of Values and Social Rupture: Kugai Jôdo Trilogy and Another World in this World

Ishimure Michiko’s Kugai Jōdo trilogy (2004) depicts the Minamata disease movement (1969–1973) and has garnered significant critical attention since its publication. This paper examines how the trilogy— in particular Part 2 and 3, which are not included in the English translation— envisions “another world in this world.” It does so by portraying humans—paradoxically written as nonhumans (hinin)—who feel, think, and act beyond the purview of the subject that both upholds and is upheld by social reproduction. In light of the ongoing “crisis” of low birth rates, I explore what forms of collectivity and commons the trilogy offers us today.

Yukiko Shigeto is an Associate Professor of Japanese language and literature in the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies department at Whitman College. Her current research investigates the conceptualization and enactment of humanity, essential obligation, and collectivity as revealed in Ishimure Michiko’s works.

 

 Yoshiko Shimada, Artist, Historian

Feminism and Art Practice in Japan

I will talk briefly about a history of Japanese feminism, then about my art work, focusing on the Mother/Whore dual structure of women in the war-time and post-war Japan. My talk focuses on Chu-pi-ren, a radical feminist group in the early 1970s which advocated for women’s self-determination and reproductive rights. In 1972, the Japanese government proposed an amendment to the Maternal Protection Law that would ban abortion for economic reasons and legalize abortion for fetuses with severe mental or physical handicaps, introduced by a right-wing, religious group endorsed faction of the ruling Jiminto party.

The “Women’s Liberation Coalition Opposing the Abortion Law and Demanding the Lifting of the Ban on the Pill” (commonly known as the “Chupiren”) was formed in opposition to this proposal. The birth control pill was not legalized in Japan until 1999.

Yoshiko Shimada 嶋田美子: Born in 1959, Tokyo, Japan, lives and works in Chiba. Shimada is a visual artist and art historian. She graduated from Scripps College in 1982, and received Ph.D from Kingston University, London in 2015. She explores the themes of cultural memory and the role of women in the Asia-Pacific War, as both aggressors and victims. She uses printmaking, video, performance, research and archiving for her expression. She is also an art historian and archivist. Her research interests include art and politics in the post-war Japan, alternative art education, and feminism.

 www.otafinearts.com

https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/yoshiko-shimada/

 

Xinlei Wang, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Pittsburgh

Transnational Feminism and the Politics of Feminist Knowledge in China

This talk examines how Chinese liberal and radical feminists diverge in their views on transnational feminist works, especially those by scholars like Ueno Chizuko. It also explores how these perspectives reflect broader ideological tensions, individual agency, and state influence amid concerns over declining birth rates.

Xinlei Wang (she/they) is a master’s student in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on feminism and lesbianism in contemporary mainland China with the consideration of transnational feminism. Her other research interests include gender and sexuality, marxism and post-colonialism, and East Asian feminist and queer literature.

Sunyoung Yang, University of Arizona

No Birth as a Feminist Action in South Korea

South Korea’s ultra-low birth rate has long been framed as a national crisis, yet feminist movements such as the 4B movement—rejecting marriage, childbirth, romantic relationships, and sex—have reframed declining birth rates as an intentional and collective form of resistance. While South Korea’s economic success has been celebrated as a “miracle,” it was built on the systematic exploitation of labor, with women doubly burdened as underpaid workers and unpaid caregivers. This structure of gendered labor has not only fueled economic growth but also entrenched deep inequalities, leading to ruptures in the form of online gender conflicts and feminist mobilization. The 4B movement challenges state and societal expectations of reproductive labor, refusing the nationalist imperative that ties women’s bodies to economic and demographic imperatives. This paper examines how feminist resistance in South Korea has transformed declining birth rates from an individual choice into a political act, aligning with broader transnational feminist dialogues on care work, gendered labor, and reproductive justice across East Asia.

Sunyoung Yang is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona. Her research examines the intersections of youth, gender, labor, online cultures, and technologies in South Korea and East Asia.