Bringing together two voices, practice and theory, in a collaboration that emerges from lived experience and structured reflection upon that experience, O'Mochain and Ueno show how entrenched discursive forces exert immense influence in Japanese society and how they might be most effectively challenged. With a psychosocial framework that draws insights from feminism, sociology, international studies, and political psychology, the authors pinpoint the motivations of the nativist right and reflect on the change of conditions that is necessary to end cultures of impunity for perpetrators of sexual abuse in Japan. Evaluating the value of the #MeToo model of activism, the authors offer insights that will encourage victims to come out of the shadows, pursue justice, and help transform Japan's sense of identity both at home and abroad. Ueno, a female Japanese educator and O'Mochain, a non-Japanese male academic, examine the nature of sexual abuse problems both in educational contexts and in society at large through the use of surveys, interviews, and engagement with an eclectic range of academic literature. They identify the groups within society who offer the least support for women who pursue justice against perpetrators of sexual abuse. They also ask if far-right ideological extremists are fixated with proving that so called "comfort women" are higaisha-buru or "fake victims." Japan would have much to gain on the international stage were it to fully acknowledge historical crimes of sexual violence, yet it continues to refuse to do so. O'Mochain and Ueno shed light on this puzzling refusal through recourse to the concepts of 'international status anxiety' and 'male hysteria.' An insightful read for scholars of Japanese society, especially those concerned about its treatment of women.

Discursive practices of masculinism can have multiple and complex effects in the lives of participants in education. While hegemonic masculinity seeks to exert totalizing force over the lives of women and of men who resist heteronormative vectors of power, individual social subjects continue to work for self-realization. The creation of coherent narratives of self by subjects who resist masculinism has been achieved in diverse educational contexts. Up until now, however, issues of masculinism in educational contexts in Japan have not received widespread attention in English language publications. This book helps to fill this gap through its engagement with the lives of fifteen stakeholders in education in Japan, and its ethnographic level of detail for three case studies. It contains a clear account of how psychoanalytic feminist theory is employed in the interpretation of life history narratives and an exploration of how masculinism affects people's quality of educational experience. The book will be of interest to critically minded participants in education and to those who explore gender/sexuality studies in east Asia and elsewhere.