Spaces for Feminist Action: National Centers for Women in Japan and South Korea

Abstract

This article introduces two national women's centers in East Asia: the National Women's Education Centre in Saitama Prefecture, Japan, and the Korean Women's Development Institute in Seoul, South Korea. It describes these centers in terms of their facilities, their histories, their objectives and activities, and their English-language publications. This is intended to draw readers' attention to how we, too, may use these centers as resources for locating information on Japanese and Korean women and as avenues for international feminist exchange. The article concludes with a brief bibliography of suggested English-language books about feminism, women's history, and women writers in these countries. The U.N. International Decade of the Woman (1975-85) provided a unique opportunity for Japanese and South Korean women to demand changes in their countries' legal, political, and educational systems. Though doubt exists about the actual effectiveness of all the laws and policies instituted during this decade, many women remain actively engaged in working for change and enjoy the support of the two national centers inspired by the Decade's initiatives: The Korean Women's Development Institute (KWDI) and the National Women's Education Centre (NWEC). This essay will share what I learned about these centers in brief visits to both in the spring of 1997 by introducing readers to their facilities, history, objectives, and current projects. I will also describe what kinds of resources these centers offer and how we, as readers of the NWSA Journal, too, may make use of them. My information on these centers draws from admittedly biased sources, namely, conversations with enthusiastic center officers who also gave me tours of these sites and the newsletters and promotional brochures published by the centers. Nevertheless, I remain impressed with how focused the goals of KWDI and NWEC are, with the wide-ranging nature of their activities and with how much the two centers have in common. Both centers aim to give Japanese and Korean women more power-personal, political, and economic-and both see access to information as a key element in gaining this power, an objective defined as an international women's priority at the Nairobi World Conference in 1985. Thus, KWDI and NWEC activities revolve around: (1) gathering information relevant to women's lives, especially by funding studies of gender issues and by