Chizuko Ueno

Chizuko Ueno
Chizuko Ueno giving a talk at the University of Tokyo (2014)
Born	(1948-07-12) July 12, 1948 (age 69) Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan
Nationality	Japanese
Alma mater	University of Kyoto
Occupation	Professor of sociology
Known for	Japanese feminist

Chizuko Ueno (上野 千鶴子, Ueno Chizuko, born July 12, 1948, in Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture) is a Japanese sociologist and Japan's "best-known feminist".

Ueno was raised as a Christian, which she said was "very unusual" because only 1% of the Japanese population is Christian. In an interview with The Japan Times, she describes her father as "a complete sexist" who had extremely high expectations of her two brothers but only considered his daughter as a "pet girl", which allowed her the "freedom to do whatever I wanted to do", and so she decided to study sociology at the University of Kyoto, where she participated in the Zengakuren student protests of the 1960s.

From 1979 to 1989, she was a Lecturer and later Associate Professor at the Heian Women's College. She was an Associate Professor and Professor at the Kyoto Seika University at the Department of Humanities from 1989 to 1994. From 1982 to 1984 she was a visiting scholar in the United States, and from 1996 to 1997 she was a guest faculty member at Columbia University's Barnard College. Out of the blue, in 1993, after being rejected from many other universities as a strident feminist scholar, she received an invitation from the University of Tokyo.

She is a special guest professor at the Graduate School of Core Ethics and Frontier Sciences at Ritsumeikan University and a professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo. She is the Chief Director of the Women’s Action Network (WAN) in Japan.