Yayoi Aoki

Aoki Yayoi (June 13, 1927 – November 25, 2009) was a Japanese scholar and eco-feminist critic. She wrote extensively on sexuality, abortion rights, reproductive technologies, and women in the workplace. While she accepted short-term positions at various universities and community colleges, Aoki maintained a non-institutional status.

Personal Aoki was from Shizuoka Prefecture and graduated from what is now known as Tokyo University of Pharmacy and Life Sciences (東京薬科大学). She advised Japanese young women to question femininity or onnarashisa and masculinity or otokorashisa in her work The Myth of Femaleness. She was also particularly interested in how Japanese honorifics influence power politics. The ultimate women's liberation that Aoki Yayoi aimed for was none other than a fundamental revolution from the most basic levels of society focused on changing the distorted masculine principle, and society as a whole having been founded upon it, and realizing a feminine principle underlying society and an equality of the sexes predicated on a masculine principle that derives from that feminine principle.

Controversy with Chizuko Ueno In the mid 1980s, Aoki was involved in a public debate with Chizuko Ueno, where Aoki's feminist principles were accused of being essentialist for romanticizing the problematic construct of the "feminine". Ueno eventually wrote Can Women Save the Earth?, critiquing Aoki's analyses, but this criticism was based on an oversimplification of terms taken out of context. This debate became the last in the Japanese ecofeminist sphere.

Women and technology Aoki's analyses regarding technologies were situated within the global geopolitical context. Aoki was particularly concerned about the impact of new technologies (especially reproductive technologies) on third world women, and argued that one must consider a variety of contexts within which women develop a relationship to technology. For example, Aoki cited that a Japanese woman may have a liberating or empowering experience with reproductive technologies while a South Indian woman's experience with the same technology might be involuntary.

Women and the future While Aoki recognized that the economic independence of woman is crucial to the feminist movement, she argued that "if all it achieves is the right of passage of woman into existing male social structures and practices, I don't know that we have achieved very much". She cited alternative value systems like the ecological feminism of Denmark or the Green Party in West Germany as other routes that feminism should explore.