Japan: From Iron Maiden to Iron Lady
A country of ‘feminisms’. And its bestselling crime novelist looks at the gender underbelly
Anime version of Japan’s first female leader, Sanae Takaichi
This Week Those Books newsletter is chock-full of crucial context — from fiction and non-fiction — to the shouty, doomscroll news cycle.
Go to this link for a quick read.
The Big Story:
Japan has its first female leader and surely this matters in a country shaped by tradition and precedent? Surely, her rise sets a good example for the future?
Sanae Takaichi’s debut on the world stage this week alongside Donald Trump is notable for its half-hearted reception.
She is like him, they say. Nationalist, traditionalist, revisionist, hawkish on China, in favour of defence spending and not keen on immigrants nor gender equality.
Takaichi is a longtime fan of the heavy metal band Iron Maiden, as well as of Britain’s Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher.
If anything, Japan’s first female prime minister illustrates the situation of Japanese women, which is marked by contradictions and paradoxes.
Our first book pick points out:
…rich premodern veins of discourse empowering women have existed in Japan since the earliest times in the fields of literature, religion, and the arts. Many of the masterpieces of classical Japanese literature — Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji (ca. 1000 CE) being perhaps the best known among many others — were written by women.
We have two books. Read on
