‘That’s really nonsense!’: The gendered ‘common sense’ of knowledge production in postwar Japan

Abstract

In 1971, a young woman attempted to enter graduate school at Kyoto University. Her undergraduate advisor attempted to dissuade her. This ‘incident’ prompted a heated dispute that rallied student activists to support the young woman, dubbed R-ko, and channeled the anger of female students at this elite university toward what they understood to be implicit gendered bias undergirding the university and its definition of who constituted an academic. This article considers this dispute in detail, and attempts to understand this localized campus dispute in the wider context of postwar public debates in Japan on the question of women’s access to higher education. Universities serves as a key sites for the production of new knowledge and for the training of those deemed suitable to become professionalized knowledge producers in modern societies, and the public debates examined here indicate the processes by which gendered logic produced the ‘common sense’ of knowledge production in postwar Japan. To illuminate the gendered implications of these negotiations over who can and should participate in knowledge production in postwar Japan, this article adapts Gramsci’s insights on the power arrangements embedded in ‘common sense’ and employs a feminist analysis to investigate how a gendered logic inflected a more widely accepted ‘common sense’ that could obstruct women from entering educational institutions and participating in producing knowledge. It takes seriously the documents left by a transitory activist movement – a moment – to understand the historical strategies mobilized to counter such ‘common sense’, and also the challenges such critiques have met.