Family, Nation, and the Politics of Abduction in Contemporary Japan
Lecture by Allison Alexy, Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan
This is a hybrid event, it will be held in person and streamed online.
Free and open to the public.
The USF Center for Asia Pacific Studies is excited to host Allison Alexy for a lecture based on her latest research on custody and family law activism in Japan.
In 2010s Japan, new energy and attention began to coalesce around calls for changes to the custody and family law system. At the time, child custody after divorce could only be held by one person, and more than 80% of custody was held by mothers. Various activist groups began to appeal for changes to the law, including Japanese fathers, grandparents, non-custodial mothers, and foreign parents who had lost custody and contact with their children. Within these diverse coalitions, some activists waged extremely public campaigns to “name and shame” Japan for harmful custody laws, emphasizing their belief that the Japanese legal system discriminates against men, non-citizens, and fathers.
This presentation explores the rhetoric of the most public demonstrations by non-Japanese fathers, especially their pointed use of the word “abduction” (rachi 拉致). In the Japanese context, this term immediately connotes the myriad of Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Koreans from the western coast of Japan. A national tragedy for more than 20 years, the abductees have become a potent political symbol embodying innocent victimhood, state-sponsored terror, and enduring family bonds. Alexy argues that when foreign fathers identify themselves with the term rachi they are simultaneously doing two contradictory things: pretending that the common definition of rachi is expansive enough to include their cases of parental abduction, while also leveraging the innocence and moral authority connoted by the North Korean abductees. She concludes that such semiotic indeterminacy reflects broader structures of racial and gendered power, entitlement, and expectations.
Speaker Bio:
Allison Alexy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. She is a cultural anthropologist focused on contemporary Japan. Through the lens of family life, her ethnographic research investigates changing norms for romantic relationships and legal constructions of intimacy contextualized within the rapid societal changes in recent decades. Her first monograph, Intimate Disconnections: Divorce and the Romance of Independence in Contemporary Japan, was published through open access and has been released in Japanese and Chinese translations. She has co-edited Home and Family in Japan and Intimate Japan, and is the editor for the Asia Pop! series from the University of Hawai’i Press. More information is available at www.allisonalexy.com.
Community Partners: Asian Studies, Japanese Studies, Critical Diversity Studies, MA & BA in Global Studies, Department of Sociology, and Department of History
Photo Attribution: By David Shankbone - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11944240