Mitsu Tanaka

Mitsu Tanaka (田中美津, Tanaka Mitsu^?, born 1945) is a Japanese feminist and writer, who became well known as a radical activist during the early 1970s.

During the early 1970s, Tanaka was a leading activist for feminism in her native Japan, where the women's liberation movement was called uuman ribu. She helped establish a group of activists known as the Garuppu Tatakau Onnatachi (Fighting Women Group), who staged many public protests that gained a great deal of media attention in Japan. The most extensive and thorough analysis of Tanaka and her role in the liberation movement, elaborated in Scream from the Shadows, by Setsu Shigematsu argues that Group of Fighting Women were akin to (but in some ways differed from) radical feminist groups in the US. They forwarded a comprehensive critique of the political, economic, social and cultural systems of modern Japan due to their patriarchal and capitalist nature. A core element of their critique of Japan's male dominated society focused on the need for the liberation of sex (sei no kaihō), with an emphasis on the need for women's liberation (onna no kaihō) from the Japanese male-centered family system. The group engaged in a variety of feminist campaigns and direct actions.

One of the groups largest campaigns was to protect women's access to abortion procedures in Japan. Tanaka's views on abortion became well publicized and controversial:

She believes that an abortion is murder and that women who have gone through an abortion are, therefore, murderers. Starting from this admission of 'evil' in women's own doing, Mitsu Tanaka then shed light on and condemned the societal structure that forced women to become killers. Morioka calls this line of thinking "tracing back from evil."

Other Japanese feminists protested in favour of legalization of the birth control pill during the same era. However, the birth control pill was not legalized in Japan until 1999, and women still frequently rely upon abortion as the alternative in Japan today.

Tanaka led a women's liberation rally (ribu taikai) in 1971, and another in 1972. These protests drew hundreds of women supporters. She worked together with many of feminist activists (such as Tomoko Yonezu, Sachi Sayama, Setsuko Mori) to establish the first women's centre and women's shelter in Japan, the Ribu Sentā, in Shinjuku, Tokyo, in 1972 (it closed in 1977). Yet despite Tanaka's efforts, and the publicity her protests received in Japanese media, the male-dominated media did not take her seriously. As was the case in the United States, some media helped disseminate the message of the movement, but the majority of the male-dominated media mocked the movements transgressive actions. Some may argue that Japan's feminist movement lacked the prominent leaders that the feminist movement in the United States had in the media (such as Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Susan Sontag, and so on), but the most significant difference of the women's liberation movement in Japan, compared with that of liberal feminism (in the U.S. and Japan), is that it did not seek equality with men as their goal. They regarded men as also oppressed by the system, and argued that they also need to be liberated. Feminist activism in Japan remains on the margins of society today, but was more strongly marginalized during the years of Tanaka's activism.

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