Beyond Consent: Structural Violence & Myth of Safety in Contemporary Japan

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Full Talk Title: Beyond Consent: Structural Violence and the Myth of Safety in Contemporary Japan

Speakers:

Asato Ikeda, Associate Professor of Art History, Fordham University

Akiko Takeyama, Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Center for East Asian Studies, University of Kansas

David H. Slater, Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Sophia University, Tokyo

Moderator:

Sarah Kovner, Senior Research Scholar, Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace, Columbia University

Following Japan’s 2023 Penal Code revision, this panel examines how legal recognition of nonconsensual intercourse often fails to capture the relational, affective, and spatial conditions through which compliance and harm are produced. Drawing on the first academic analysis of NHK’s 2022 nationwide sexual violence survey (38,000+ responses with narratives), the papers show that consent in contemporary Japan is not a discrete act but a structurally mediated process shaped by gendered norms, emotional labor, and institutionalized endurance.

Speakers' Bios:

Asato Ikeda is Associate Professor of Art History at Fordham University, New York. She is the co-editor of Art and War in Japan and its Empire (2012), the co-author of A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Prints (2016), and the author of The Politics of Painting: Fascism and Japanese Art during the Second World War (2018). She has also published in Transgender Studies Quarterly and modernism/modernity.

Akiko Takeyama is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Kansas. She is the author of Staged Seduction: Selling Dreams in a Tokyo Host Club (2016) and Involuntary Consent: The Illusion of Choice in Japan’s Adult Video Industry (2023), the latter receiving an Honorable Mention for the John Whitney Hall Book Prize.

David H. Slater is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Sophia University, Tokyo. He has worked on social class and youth labor, disaster and recovery, and, in addition to this project on sexual violence, he is currently working on refugees and migrants in Tokyo. He manages Refugee Voices Japan.

This event is hosted by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

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