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*. This study was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (FY2011-2014) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. I would like to give special thanks to Cecilia Milwertz, John Perkins, Yoshiko Higurashi, Drude Dahlerup, and Monique Leyenaar for their valuable comments and encouragements.
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Introduction
The current Prime Minister Shinzo Abe introduced the term 'womenomics' ('uimenomikusu' in Japanese) into the vocabulary of Japanese politics in 2013. He has been employing this term to encourage Japanese women to participate in the labour market and to promote the more able working women to higher positions, thereby allowing them to contribute to the country's economic growth.1'Womenomics' is the latest term in a line of lexical items that have shaped the socio-cultural and political perspectives of the concept of gender in Japan since the 1980s, when the term 'gender' came to Japan.
The most influential Japanese language dictionary, kojien, recorded 'gender (jenda)' as a Japanese loanword in its fourth edition in 1991. Western words that have been adopted by the Japanese language are defined as loanwords, which are transcribed into katakana.2Since the 1950s, the number of English-origin loanwords has increased remarkably (Okamoto, 2004: 54). In the 1990s, the government, concerned about the overflow of loanwords, proposed a policy of paraphrasing loanwords into understandable Japanese words. Despite this policy, the Japanese public has favoured loanwords over their paraphrased Japanese equivalents (Okamoto, 2004: 55). 'Gender (jenda)' is one of such loanwords of English origin, and among the large number of loanwords, no word has been as controversial as 'gender' because it holds the potential for socio-cultural change. The term was first welcomed by feminists and other egalitarians who wish to transform Japan into a more equal and diverse society, which has threatened the raison d'être of those who want to retain the Japanese socio-cultural status quo, or, even worse, to revert women's status back to that of pre-war Japan. This term has become a target of the backlash from Japanese reactionaries.
Japanese feminists, inspired by Susan Faludi's (1991) book on the backlash against American women, have named the newly emerged Japanese attack on the term 'gender' as a 'backlash' or 'bakkurasshu' in Japanese (Mitsui and...