Mizuta Noriko: Biocritical Essay of a Literary Feminist and Global Scholar

Abstract

Mizuta Noriko:Biocritical Essay of a Literary Feminist and Global Scholar Alisa Freedman (bio) Introduction: Feminist Talk Tokyo, Japan. September 9, 2018: Professors Wachi Yasuko, Kitada Sachie, and I sit around Professor Mizuta Noriko's dining room table, laden with homecooked foods, sandwiches, and snacks.1 After carefully ladling chilled edamame soup and warm beef stew into ceramic bowls, Mizuta takes the seat closest to the kitchen. While enjoying the hospitality of a scholar skilled at entertaining, we talk for more than ten hours. Our conversation traverses time and space—from the 1940s to the future, from Japan to the United States and back again. We discuss the influence of social and political movements on education; life stories are narrated through the context of internationalization and changing notions of home. We debate the power of literature to articulate what is otherwise difficult to express. We gossip about authors, as the group excitedly plans an event to honor poet Yosano Akiko (1878-1942).2 We talk of international exchange, literary depiction, feminist criticism, the formation of academic disciplines and universities, and women's roles in the workplace and family, all topics that demonstrate the intimate intersection of the professional and personal in the lives of female academics. This intersection is especially true for Mizuta—professor, university chancellor, literary critic, translator, essayist, poet, founder of journals, and convener of groups of scholars like the one around today's table, among her many other jobs. This "biocritical" essay—part biography, part academic analysis—explains how Mizuta's life choices, including those to study and teach in the United States and to establish feminist movements and universities in Japan, have indelibly impacted the fields of literature and gender studies. Her work has increased awareness of the diversity of women's lived experiences and the politics underlying women's cultural representation. By voicing her own beliefs, Mizuta has encouraged other women to speak out and be heard. [End Page 11] This "biocritical" essay is based on conversations with Mizuta held in 2017 and 2018 at her home and in cafes in Tokyo and on close reading of her publications in English and Japanese. It is not a comprehensive review of Mizuta's career, but instead an attempt to identity some of her major contributions and some themes common to her work. Her career epitomizes the belief in the power of education to influence worldviews and diplomatic relations. In addition to the remarkable number of publications (monographs, anthologies, edited volumes, poetry collections, articles, essays, and more) and awards (domestic and international) listed on her C.V. and in the bibliography included in this issue, Mizuta raised five children: three of whom became successful professors, one a lawyer, and another a musician3; her twelve grandchildren also have diverse interests and talents. As explained below, many interwoven strands of her work—finding modes of expression to convey the complex negotiation of being both an insider and outsider, amplifying silenced voices, changing expectations for women, providing forums for academic discussions, balancing family and employment outside the home, and forming communities—are part of larger feminist movements that Mizuta assembled. She was on the vanguard of second-wave feminism (dai ni nami feminizumu) and literary criticism that accounted for gender in evaluating an author's contributions. Mizuta's achievements and setbacks teach larger lessons about women's roles in the literary world, academy, household, and nation and demonstrate how individual decisions pay off in unexpected dividends for larger populations. As Mizuta's observations below reveal, for the generation of Japanese female professors born in the 1930s, history and memory intertwined in often unanticipated ways. She came of age during a turning point in U.S.-Japan relations, when American education was particularly effective as a diplomatic tool and Japan was reemerging on the global scene as an American ally against communism and exporter of new ideas and technologies. She was educated in the 1960s and entered the workforce in the 1970s, when marginalized groups, as a means to get mainstream interests to acknowledge their existence and to encourage larger social and political transformations, demanded changes in academic structures; for example, these efforts resulted in the establishment of Women's...