Interview with Chizuko Ueno and Li Yinhe

A Dialogue Between Chizuko Ueno and Li Yinhe, “Feminists are those who Pursue Liberty and Justice”[1]

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
The text translated here is a recent interview of Chizuko Ueno (b. 1947), a famous Japanese feminist, Li Yinhe (b. 1952), a famous Chinese sexologist, and Sayoko Shinoda (b. 1946), a somewhat lesser-known Japanese therapist, whose name was omitted from the title, strangely enough.  Shinoda is included because one of the reasons for the interview is that the Chinese edition of a 20 year-old book co-authored by Ueno and Shinoda (Choosing to be a Woman/身为女性的选择) has just come out.  The book publication and the interview are both part of a major “Chizuko Ueno moment” underway in China for some months now, in which nine of her works have been published in Chinese translation and more than a million volumes sold.   Ueno herself has become quite a celebrity in China, particularly well known, among other things, for her online chat with four Peking University female students on February 25 of this year.
 
This translation is thus a natural follow-up to the translation of Lü Pin’s article on feminism and China’s blank paper revolution published last time.  The depth and breadth of the Ueno moment are testimony to the vibrancy and the creativity of China’s feminist movement:  “if China’s own feminist leaders have been silenced or driven into exile,” they seem to have said, “let’s recruit a famous foreign feminist and let her flood the airwaves and the bookshelves.”  I know next to nothing about the politics of this, but something clearly worked.
 
Ueno’s current celebrity in China dates from her 2019 speech at the Tokyo University matriculation ceremony, where she attacked the university in no uncertain terms for its sexism, and warned the women entering the university that “What awaits you in the future is a society where even if you work hard, you may not be fairly rewarded.”  It is hard to imagine a message that would speak more directly to young Chinese women – or in fact, to Chinese young people in general (I have no idea if Ueno’s appeal in China extends beyond women).
 
The text translated here is thus a straightforward, honest, forthright discussion of feminism in Japan and China, by three older scholars who have been active scholars and therapists for many years.  If the overt activism and political message we saw in Lü Pin’s text are largely absent here, even Li Yinhe, who claims not to be an activist at all, notes that feminism has become a bottom-up issue in China and that women expect change. 
 
My intuition tells me that feminism may play an extremely important role in grass roots-level changes underway in Chinese society, changes provoked at least in part, yet again, by the catastrophic end to the zero-covid policy in December 2022 – a “the emperor has no clothes” moment for many.  Chinese feminists are presumably following this closely.  Someone more in the loop than I should help the rest of us gain access to the best and most important writings, or perhaps translate them on a website dedicated to the topic.  Of course, this may be underway already…
 
The interview was organized by Phoenix Live Streaming 凤凰网文化直播间 and took place on June 20, 2023.
 
Translation
 
One. Is there a threshold for becoming a feminist?
 
Phoenix: Let’s start with a question that we are often asked in our daily lives:  what kind of person can be called a feminist?
 
The reason I ask this question is that we often see people on the Internet saying, "so-and-so is not really a feminist," and right before this event, a female colleague who works with me asked me very sincerely if the fact that her commitment to her family and her children makes her happy means that she was not a feminist.  So is she not a feminist? I would like to ask our three guests if there is indeed some kind of threshold, as many people seem to think.

Chizuko Ueno: There is no institution in the world that has the authority to define feminism, so whether someone is a feminist is not up to a third person to decide.   If you think you are a feminist, then you are. To my mind, a feminist is someone who pursues freedom and justice. To say that a person is not a feminist, would mean that the person was a sexist, or someone who engages in gender discrimination. I would also like to hear my colleague’s thoughts on this.

Sayoko Shinoda:  I'm a therapist, so I think if there are people who feel that living as a woman is hard and that life is difficult for that reason, I think those people can be described as feminists.
 
Li Yinhe: I think all people who advocate equality between men and women can be called feminists. There are many schools of feminism, some radical, some moderate, but the biggest common denominator is that they all advocate equality between men and women. In fact, gender equality is considered a national policy in China, and it is also part of mainstream ideology. Anyone who advocates gender equality is a feminist, and this is my definition.
 
Just now you mentioned the "threshold" issue. I think there is a bit of misunderstanding around the idea that feminists cannot get married and cannot have children. In fact, whether you are married or single, whether you have children or not, whether you live an individual-based lifestyle or a family-based lifestyle, whether you enjoy being married and raising children or whether you prefer to live alone, as long as you advocate equality between men and women, you are a feminist. I happen to agree with Professor Ueno’s point that those say that men are strong, and women are weak, that men should lead and women should follow, that men deserve respect and women should be belittled—these people are the ones who are not feminists, and the threshold is there.
 
2.  Why so much controversy and antagonism?
 
Phoenix: Next let’s take up a subject that I really want to discuss, which is:  why is it that gender issues always trigger massive controversies and confrontations on the Internet?

Ueno: The question is really:  who is it that turns it into a controversy? I think it is different for men and women. Women react because of an accumulation of unfairness and dissatisfaction, or perhaps they have been harmed.  For men, it instead that someone has pointed out their fatal flaw, which is that even as men discriminate against women, they also rely on them.  Having this pointed out upsets them, and they react defensively.  This is how I understand it.
 
Shinoda: I don't usually watch a lot of videos online, but my feeling is that the huge reaction such things cause is not necessarily because it’s about gender.  For example, Professor Ueno’s talk at Tokyo University provoked a lot of debate, but it is not clear whether this was because it was about gender or because it was Professor Ueno who made the remarks. 
 
Gender issues have become more complex in Japan, as seen in the recent smear campaign against young women's aid organizations, and there are also transgender issues, which are often hotly debated. But I think gender is a very personal issue, and I think it's about individual freedom, and men in particular hate to have this pointed out to them, which is why they use the so-called privilege of anonymity on social media sites to attack women as weak, which I think is a despicable practice.
 
Li Yinhe: I think that there are three reasons why talking about women always riles up public opinion. The first is that we are now in an era of the rise of women, which actually started in China in the 1950s. In the old days, women did not participate in socially productive labor, but beginning in the 1950s, urban women started to run factories, and in the countryside, they had to put in two hundred days of work a year, which meant working in the fields.   In the past, women in rural China did not work the fields, so beginning in the 1950s, women really entered working life, and that's why things related to women began to influence public opinion.
 
The second reason is that the patriarchy has been in place for thousands of years, and women have always been the disadvantaged group, suffering from the ideology and practice of gender discrimination, as expressed in common expressions such as “the three cardinal guides and the five constant virtues 三纲五常,”[2] and that “in the event of a husband’s death, the woman must follow her son 夫死从子,” which make absolutely no sense at all. Now, however, women should be equal to men in every way, and men can't stand this.
 
The third reason is that women have been largely absent from the public sphere of in terms of politics, economy, and culture, or at best have played a supporting role. Chinese women only exist in the private sphere, that is, in the family, so they have no real power. Even if we have joined the work force, in terms of real power, we really do not compete with men, and men hold the power in no matter what field, with women merely occupying secondary positions. So now that women truly have risen up, and now that competition between men and women is a real thing, men get nervous, so there will be a lot of anxiety and concern over women's issues.
 
3.  When “feminism” more or less means “best-seller”
 
Phoenix: So we should not only look at the debates, but also the different positions and logics behind the debates.
 
The next question is for Professor Ueno. In an interview, you once said that in the 1980s, "feminism and commercialism were promoted in Japan at the same time, which meant that putting the label ‘feminism’ on a book was more or less the same as saying it was a ‘best-seller.’”  Why did this happen?
 
Ueno: The 1980s in Japan was called the “era of women,” because women’s purchasing power grew at that time, more unmarried women started working, so women had the ability to earn money, and although they quit their jobs when they got married, they were still a consumer force that could not be ignored. In addition, some married women also began to join the work force, and women as a group had considerable power as consumers.
 
Another important reason is that the number of women in the publishing industry increased. It once happened that a certain publisher decided books relating to women would be best-sellers, so they sent a male editor to talk to me.  We were able to communicate at a basic level, but he knew nothing about women’s issues, so at a certain point it just didn’t work, and I asked him if his publisher perhaps had a female editor that I could talk to.  He said that there was not a single one, so I said, “well then, I’ll wait until you hire one and send her to see me.” 
 
Those female editors got the books that they themselves really wanted to read onto the market.  Before that, there were only a few types of books related to women, like cookbooks, or books on how to dress and do your make-up, or books on gardening. Women editors began to publish books that women really wanted to read, and they were delighted to read them as consumers.  Unfortunately, in that “era of women,” women were only consumers, not producers or decision makers. In this context, once the concept of feminism emerged, there was an explosion of books on the subject, which actually filled the previously existing gap. However, feminism subsequently encountered a strong wave of resistance and went into a long period of stagnation, only to be relaunched again after 2000.
 
Phoenix: So after this relaunch, does “feminism” still mean “best-seller” in 2023?
 
Ueno:  Sales are good. For a while, readers were afraid to buy books with the words "feminism" or "gender" in the title, so editors would tell people to write about something else, but recently there has been a proliferation of books about feminism and gender, including books written in Japanese as well as translated works.
 
Phoenix: The following question is for Professor Shinoda. We know that therapy has been one of your main concerns all along, and that you have communicated deeply with a great number of women.  Having done this, what would you say are their most common sources of distress?   And have there been obvious collective changes in these over the years?

Shinoda: I started this work in the 1980s, and the women I encountered do not represent all Japanese women, so I can only speak from my limited experience. All along, I have been dealing not so much with women's issues as with women's issues within the family - wives struggling with their relationships with their husbands, daughters struggling with their relationships with their parents – these are the main problems I encountered.
 
The problem of wives’ difficulties with their husbands is still around. Since 2001, the term “dv” (domestic violence) officially exists in Japanese law, but things have not changed very much since the 1980s, although there is an official name for "domestic violence" and there are ways to help these women.  This is far from perfect, but we can still see it as a big change.   That said, I think the situation of women has basically remained the same. 
 
One big change is that the relationship between daughters and parents, and especially mother-daughter problems, has gradually become more serious in the 15 years since 2008.[3] If I could comment on what Professor Ueno just said, some of the women who came on the scene as consumers in the 1980s were housewives. In other words, these highly educated women who wound up being housewives raised their children in the 1980s with a sense of regret about their own lives, and hence had high expectations for their children, and invested these expectations particularly in their daughters. By the 2000s, daughters who were raised in this way began to feel that their relations with their mothers was a source of torment, which I think is a big change.
 
Phoenix: Professors Ueno and Shinoda have told us about the situation in Japan, and next I would like to hear from Professor Li Yinhe.  In the preface of the new edition of your book Feminism, you also mentioned that the term itself has gone from obscurity to controversy in China in the past 20 years, and that now it is a discipline that is talked about a lot. Could you look back at what the overall climate of gender culture was like twenty years ago, at the beginning of the 21st century?
 
Li Yinhe:  When I wrote Feminism 女性主义 twenty years ago, I felt that its influence was limited to academic circles, but the fact that it became a bestseller when it was recently reprinted shows that gender-related matters are now on the national agenda. That people are now paying attention to this gender issue proves that China has reached a new stage of development.
 
I remember when this book was first published, exactly twenty years ago in 2003, it was not a best-seller at all, merely an academic monograph read by a very small number of people.  At the time I remember it won a prize for women's studies, and it was considered “valuable” from an academic point of view, but after all, at the time no one paid attention to gender issues or women’s issues.  One reason for this is that in the past, all efforts to achieve equality between and women, or the improve women’s rights, were all top-down efforts.  This is true of lots of things, such as wages and benefits that women should receive from the companies where they worked, or issues related to having children, all of this was decided by the state.  The reason people are starting to get concerned with such issues now is that there is a lot of bottom-up concern about gender discrimination.  This is how I understand what is happening.

Phoenix: Professor Ueno just mentioned that "feminism" is still a strong selling point in Japan, and Li Yinhe also mentioned that her book on feminism published twenty years ago is now a bestseller. Does the success of feminist books and the fact that feminism has become a prominent field of study mean that East Asian women are desperately looking for a way to explain and understand the situation in which they find themselves? 

Ueno: I think it’s great that Professor Li’s book became a bestseller after 20 years! Every country has its own feminism, and China also needs to cultivate its own brand. We have also read and learned a great deal from foreign books and have worked hard to cultivate Japanese feminism in Japan, so I hope there will be more people like Professor Li in China, and that more young people will read their books.
 
I think an important reason why books that didn't sell 20 years ago are now bestsellers is that the times have changed. When I say the times have changed, one big reason is the emergence of the one-child family.  This has nothing to do with China’s one-child policy, because the same thing is happening throughout East Asia.  There are more families with only daughters and no sons, which means that parents cannot weigh their investments in their daughters against that in their sons and cannot discriminate against their daughters. The result is that there are many highly educated women, and parents will invest in the education of their daughters with the expectation that they will succeed, so we wind up with large numbers of daughters who are loved and cared for by parents who have high expectations for their future. These daughters were raised by the generation of mothers that Professor Shinoda just described, mothers who understood the meaning of equality but were unable to achieve this in their own lives.
 
When faced with discrimination, these daughters began to think, "I don't deserve this," and "there’s no reason I should suffer this discrimination," and now women throughout East Asia are beginning to think this way, and in this sense, the changing times has played a big role. We, the early generation of Japanese feminists, faced extremely strong resistance and lived difficult lives, and when other women saw this, they felt that if they came out as feminists it would be very painful, so they chose to remain silent, and this silence lasted for about twenty years, during which time they accumulated all kinds of resentment and heartaches. The daughters who were raised by mothers with such feelings began to fight for their rights, and naturally became interested in affirmative action. From what I see, such daughters are now found in large numbers across East Asia – in Japan, China, South Korea and other countries.
 
Shinoda: I don’t know much about the macro side of things, but as I just said, the results of the child-raising style of the women who lived as housewives or full-time mothers in the 1980s began to be seen in various ways in the 2000s. I wrote a book called The Heavy Burden of Motherhood 母亲的重负, because what is very sad is that there is a tendency in Japanese society to blame mothers, to say that mothers are the cause of problems, and even to talk about “toxic parents 毒父母,” which is very common.  My goal was not to denounce these mothers, but rather to describe the situation faced by women who had been forced to become such mothers. In a patriarchal environment, despite the fact that they have the ability to do other things, they can only “assist their husband and educate their children 相夫教子.”[4] I wanted the reader to read the book from the perspective of how their frustration manifested itself in this situation. I still think so now.
 
Li Yinhe: I was just recently reading Professor Ueno's Misogyny 厌女, which I found really, really good. But I also found that although we are all in East Asia, the situation in Japan is quite different from that in China, so we need to find our own discourse, our own observations, our own current situation and our own language to explain the context women fact in China. For example, I once wrote a book called Women of Hou Village 后村的女人们, which was a survey carried out in a small village on the border of Hebei and Shandong.  I looked at the experience of both genders growing up, to see how parents fed boys and girls, whether they ate the same things, what their educational opportunities were, the degree to which they were loved, meaning whether parents expressed the same affection for daughters and sons.  I looked at what percentage of the family income the woman contributed, as well as a few village customs.

I found out that in this small village, there is also a custom that is very surprising for city people, which is that women are not allowed to be at the table when the family eats. I think this is a reflection of the low status of women. That said, the custom probably evolved naturally, for example, when there were guests, the women would all be busy in the kitchen, and then just eat a little something on the side, and when the meal was over, they had to wash the dishes, so the custom slowly evolved that women can’t be at the table.  So now, if there are guests and a woman sits at the table, she’ll be laughed out of the room, and this is just what it is like for the women in the village. 
 
In addition, for example, in places in the south where the clan tradition is particularly strong, they don’t enter women’s names into the genealogy. So I think we need to understand women’s situation and speak up for them, and fight against discrimination. In the city, these things have already changed a lot.
 
Ueno: Can I add something? Professor Li just said that Chinese society is completely different from Japanese society, but I don't think so. I think there are differences as well as similarities, and it is interesting to compare the two countries. What you just said about the situation in the rural areas of Hebei could be seen everywhere in Japan prior to World War II. For example, in order to pay for an older brother or a younger brother’s higher education, the sisters would have been sent to work in the factories at a very early age or could even have been sold into prostitution. But now it is very different, more and more urban women are getting higher education, so that post-1990s Japanese women are highly educated. In this respect, the situation of women in urban areas in China and Japan should be the same.  I think the difficulties these highly educated women in China have faced under reform and opening are very similar to those Japanese women who are dealing with capitalist society in Japan.
 
Phoenix: Thank you, Professor Ueno, and I think that's why we Chinese readers can readily find ourselves in your books.
 
The next question is, when "feminism" becomes attached to online influence and profits, for example, when major brands wake up to the economic value of feminism and compete to use it as a marketing slogan, or when, such as a little while ago in China, movies and TV dramas bragged about their "big female leads" that were particularly popular…. When this happens, is there anything we should be paying attention to as feminists?
 
Ueno: I don't think we need to be wary, but instead should applaud it. As Professor Li just said, it's no longer a top-down era, but a bottom-up era. At the bottom we find the reader and the consumer, so both companies and media have to please the consumer, otherwise they won’t serve them. So if premium brands put "I am a feminist" or "We should all be feminists" on their products and it moves the merchandise, it's not going to promote feminism, but it's still a really good thing that more and more boys and girls will be wearing these t-shirts, and everyone will think it’s cool. I don't think there's anything to be wary of, except that these companies and media are easily influenced by power and popular trends, and when trends change, they will follow suit, so it's important for us as consumers to keep an eye on them.
 
Shinoda: I personally pay a lot of attention to movies and the entertainment industry, and as I said earlier, in the late 1990s and 2000s, Korean movies did have a lot of strong-willed, laid-back female leads who asserted themselves.
 
In Japan, too, from the late 1980s through the 1990s, there were a lot of television series where the heroine had her own point of view even as she pursued a relationship and dominated her boyfriend in the relationship.  Just like Professor Ueno, I thought this was a great thing, but in the 2000s, or especially more recently, when I look again at how these stories ended up, it was all about family, and “family” was a sort of miracle word, so the motto was “finally, the family is what matters.” 
 
Phoenix: Professor Shinoda, do you mean that there is a tendency for Japanese TV dramas to return to conservatism?
 
Shinoda: It’s hard to generalize, but it’s largely true for TV series, although there are of course exceptions.
 
4.  How should feminists respond to slander?
 
Phoenix: We’ve been talking sort of at the macro level, so next I would like to ask our three professors to talk about their insights on feminism from the perspective of their personal experiences.
 
Let me start with Professor Ueno.  Your speech at the University of Tokyo's entrance ceremony in 2019 provoked a great reaction on the Chinese Internet. There you were, alone on the podium, with a sea of male professors behind you, a scene that touched me very much.  It looked like you sort of broke out of a circle of men, and I think that took a lot of strength.   Do you have any stories or experiences from along the way that you can share with us?
 
Ueno: When I became a professor at the University of Tokyo, it was the top institution in Japan, just like Peking University and Tsinghua University in China. The university sought me out, not the other way around.  At that time, there were all sorts of rumors, like "it looks like Ueno really likes power" or "there are many men at her level, so she took advantage of being a woman."
 
But I thought, "I've suffered a lot as a woman, so what's wrong with taking advantage once in a while?” There were even people who said, "She must have slept her way to the top," and a lot of stuff like that. But I firmly believe that to evaluate a scholar, you have to look at their research record over the long term, so I never lost my confidence. Still, wherever I went, I was the only speck of red in a field of green – meaning I was the only woman - which was not always a pleasant experience. Knowledge remained my weapon, and by saying "don't you see all these facts and all this evidence?" I convinced them one by one and pried open the doors.
 
Let me add that I am not saying that all men are the enemy, in fact I once had a male life coach who was my "horse trainer [bole 伯乐]."[5] Both men and women need someone in a higher position to serve as their mentor, otherwise they cannot grow and excel, and there were some excellent male scholars who gave me the opportunity. In my day, the only people in high positions were men, so the mentors for women of my generation could only be men.
 
Although they were all very fair people and I am very grateful to them, once I reached I certain position, I began actively promoting women. I often tell young women that when men take on women students, they will fall in love with their talent as well as with their bodies, and indeed this happens all the time. So I hope that women of a certain status can have this kind of consciousness and go out and actively help other women.

Phoenix: You just mentioned that people would say "she must have slept with someone to get that position," which is something we seem to hear all the time, and it seems to mean the same as “there’s somebody else behind her making this happen.” When someone slanders you like this, how do you prove your innocence?
 
Ueno: There is no way to refute rumors with facts because the rumors are based on nothing at all, so I try to clear my name through my work – what I do year after year, the work I do, the message I send - and hope that everyone will judge me on this basis. Responding to every bit of gossip is a waste of energy, so I choose to ignore it.
 
Phoenix: You have also mentioned something else, which is that some people in Japan say that you have "destroyed a beautiful Japanese tradition, leading to the collapse of the family,” and some even say that you are "the culprit behind declining birth rates 少子化 [literally “sub-replacement fertility”]." How do you respond to accusations like this?
 
Ueno: People say that anything bad comes from abroad, and feminism is the same thing – it came from abroad to destroy Japanese traditions, just like covid.[6] It seems that many people in China also think that feminism is a bad thing that comes from abroad. But I do not have the power to destroy Japanese traditions, nor do I have the power to exacerbate Japan's declining birth rates or to make more people live alone; huge macro trends are what change society. If one or two little people like me could change Japanese society simply through our words, that would really be fantastic.  So if someone says that sort of thing to me, I just smile and say, "that is beyond my ability.”  Just between us, though, I would love to be able to wave my magic wand and change Japanese society.

Phoenix: So saying that feminism is the culprit behind the decreasing birth rate is actually overestimating the influence of feminism, right?
 
Ueno: That’s right.
 
Phoenix: Next, I have a question for Professor Li, because you have always maintained close contact and communication with your readers. Some of your ideas are very popular among young readers, but I know that in the long course of trying to popularize your sociological views, you have also run into some controversies, and we can sort of imagine the resistance and pressure you have encountered.  How did you manage to keep going?
 
Li Yinhe: One of my motivations is to understand society, and the other is to change society.  This is why I do my research.
 
First of all, as a sociologist, we should describe society, and understand what it is like and why.    For example, what is the proportion of celibate people now in the population, and what is the proportion of nuclear families, how has this changed over time, and why? Or to take another example, why has the marriage model changed from domination by the husband to something else?  This is the first thing. 
 
The second thing is, I would like to change society, and just like Professor Ueno said, I wish I had this power, but unfortunately, I don’t. I think that those of us who are engaged in research should spread correct knowledge and ideas, so that people know right from wrong, and then things can develop in the right direction.  For example, we need to show that gender equality is right and gender discrimination is wrong, and once we spread this idea, society can develop in the proper direction.
 
In the course of my research, there was one thing that made a big impression on me, although I can’t say it was really a big blow.  There is an organization that published an article criticizing me for saying that masturbation is harmless.  Then in Xi’an, they blew up my picture alongside a big picture of Alfred Kinsey, and they smeared both of them with excrement.  I didn’t know anything about it until I say the news reports.  To me, this kind of action only shows the stupidity of those who did it, and it did no real harm to me, because I know they are wrong, stupid, conservative, etc. This is exactly the kind of thing we want to change, and maybe the way this organization took action instead alerted everybody to what I was saying, which is why they were spreading the excrement, and ironically wound up spreading our correct ideas. 
 
I remember once reading a comment about me on the Internet, which I rarely do, which said "If killing people in China were not illegal, I would truly like to stab you to death." When I read this, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, because I thought, “how could he be this angry?”  Because there are lots of conflicts out there, but he must really hate my ideas to say something like that.   But these things can’t really hurt me, and just stick in my memory as interesting experiences.
 
Phoenix: Professors Li and Ueno, you really kept your cool in the face of criticism.  Thank you for sharing your personal experiences.
 
I have a personal question for Professor Shinoda. When I read you book Choosing to Be a Woman, I found that you and Prof. Ueno have some quite pointed remarks to make about men, and that you don’t mince words.  At the same time, you are both married, with a husband and children, and when you go back home you have to the things that a wife and mother has to do…So how does your thinking in your professional life mesh with the rest of your life?
 
Shinoda: I got married after the Asama-Sansō incident in the 1970s, which Chinese readers may not know about. This was when the All-Campus Joint Struggle Committees [the largely Communist student movement in Japan in the 1960s which was quite violent at times] had just come to an end. At that time, I knew nothing about the women's liberation movement, and was not looking to find myself, so I entered into marriage with romantic fantasies, and I ran into a lot of trouble and injustice after getting married. How should I put it - a lot of things made me really angry. So I thought, “what am I going to do?  How am I going to live with this?”  I decided that I would become a therapist and help women with addictions.
 
At the same time, I read a lot of Prof. Ueno’s books and decided that through my work, I would try to help women who were victims of violence, including domestic violence. But at the same time, my criticism of men comes out of my love for men. Just as Prof. Ueno said, I have also been helped by many male friends, and it is because of this that I have to criticize men as a way to express my love.
 
Ueno: If I may say something, I've been single for a long time and I don't have children, but, as I said above, women can't escape the patriarchy whether they are married or not or have children or not. If women don’t have children, people think there is something wrong with them, and if they don’t marry, people think that no one wants them, so they are slandered and stigmatized either way.  So whether they are personally part of the institution of marriage or not, women have to fight, no matter where they find themselves. Although it's true that people now have the freedom to choose, and it's also true that more women are choosing not to marry and not to have children, so they are less stigmatized than they used to be. But is the choice you make really a free choice? Not at all – it just looks like there are more choices, but in fact women wind up suffering no matter what, and regardless of her choices a kind of hell awaits her.  This is why we wrote the book The Empire of Marriage 结婚帝国 (translated into Chinese as Choosing to Be a Woman 身为女性的选择), and the central insight of this book is that getting married is tough, while getting divorced makes you into a refugee, neither of which is good.  The first title we thought of for this book was Refugees of Marriage 结婚难民, but the publisher thought “refugee” was a step too far, so we changed it.  But I thought of this while we were talking, the idea that women wind up being refugees whether they marry or not. 
 
Phoenix: As young women, we now have more options, and we can choose the family route or opt to face the world independently on our own. In addition, we also have a greater capacity to assess what these various options really mean, what price we might have to pay for them.  So we also need to understand feminism more deeply and understand ourselves more deeply.
 
Ueno: This is precisely why feminist theory has developed, for example, discovering fantastic concepts like "patriarchy," as well as the ideas of "misogyny" and "same-sex relationships.”  Armed with these concepts, we can understand a lot of things and understand the source of our distress. Of course, understanding the root cause of distress does not make it go away, but knowing what the cause is and where it has come from, we can know what to change and how to fight. Patriarchy is not indestructible, it also has many fatal weaknesses, and it is important to find these weaknesses, to understand the vulnerability of men's same-sex social circles, etc. For things like these, feminist theory and practice are important.
 
In addition, understanding these things will show that women who appear to be opposed to one another - married women and unmarried women, professional women and unemployed women, women who have a proper job and women who work in the informal economy – these groups actually have a common enemy. So we should not only see the immediate confrontation, but also the difficulties women encounter no matter what choices they make. What is the root cause of these situations? I'm not saying that every male is evil incarnate, it's just that the structure and system of society has created the current dilemma, and it's important to understand that this is our common enemy.

Five. "When you get down to it, paying a bride price means the marriage is a matter of commerce"
 
Phoenix: I was just reminded by the staff that our time may be a bit tight, so I will bring up a topic that many people are interested in - the “bride price.” In China, a bride price is a gift from a man to a woman for the purpose of marriage.
 
The topic of "should the new generation of women receive a bride price?" has been widely discussed on the Internet in China, and some young feminists believe that they should receive a bride price, arguing that the marriage system already exploits women greatly, arguing that the bride price could actually be a form of compensation. Have Profs. Ueno and Shinoda ever heard of the "bride price"? What should feminists do about it?
 
Ueno: Japan also has a bride price system; in China, the bride price is given by the husband to the wife; in India, there is a dowry system, in which the wife gives a large amount of money to the husband ...... Strictly speaking, the bride price is not given by the husband to the wife, but by the family of the man to the family of the woman, which means that marriage is an economic contract between the families of both parties, an economic and political alliance, so there is no personal freedom involved. If the marriage contract is a contract between relatives, an economic contract, this holds the marriage together.
 
Now, however, marriage only requires the consent of only two people, and is based solely on love.  Love cannot be bought, no matter what the price, and a couple that is sustained only by love is an individualistic couple, and such a couple will be independent from the family. In this way, both men and women will no longer marry according to the wishes of their parents, which some people may call "anti-family," so how Chinese young men and women break through the obstacles and constraints of the family will become a very important issue in the future, especially in the generation of only children.
 
Li Yinhe: I think the first thing is to define the bride price.  The bride price is not, for example, a little gift that the husband’s father gives to wife, but rather a sum of money paid by the husband’s family to the wife’s family.  In China, the amount is somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 RMB (20,700-27,650 USD), depending on the economic situation in different places, and if you can’t come up the money, the marriage does not happen. 
 
The bride price system has both a long history and a more proximate cause. The long history is just that it is a tradition, the logic for which is that this woman is marrying into the man’s household and becoming part of that family, which adds one person to the man’s family and removes one from the woman’s family.  The bride price is compensation for this. In fact, this no longer fits the situation in the cities now, where both men and women have a salary, but women in traditional families have no income, and when she marries into the man's family it’s like adding labor to that family. In today’s villages, the women’s family loses her labor, and when she marries into the man’s family, that family gains, so this compensation still makes sense and the custom is maintained, which is part of the long history I mentioned.  
 
But it no longer matters in the city, because for city people, it is not a matter of the woman marrying into the man’s family, but instead two people with their own salaries coming together to form a new family.  But there is another proximate cause that explains urban marriages, which is that China's sex ratio at birth has been skewed for a long time, by which I mean “how many boys are born for each 100 girls?”  For a long time, we have been at 116, that is, 116 boys are born for each 100 girls, and the number has reached 120 in particular areas and periods. The result is that there is a surplus of more than 30 million men in this group of people entering the age of marriage. So if you don't come up with this money, the bride price, you can't get a wife, because all the women will be married off and you’ll be left with nothing, so that's a proximate cause.
 
I have a fairly radical view of this bride price, believing that in essence, paying a bride price means the marriage is a matter of commerce.  What I mean is that in fact the husband is buying a woman, the woman is sold for a sum of money that goes to the woman’s family.  So we say that if you want to be a feminist, you should not ask for a bride price when you get married.  Being part of a commercial marriage means that you have been bought by the husband’s family, so what status do you have? 
 
But this is not something that can be changed overnight. If you find yourself in a village environment, then you are still marrying into the man’s family, so if somebody says we have to change this, and sends down an administrative order from on high with the objective of ending the bride price system, is this going to work?  Of course not, so we’ll have to keep working on it for a long time.  I think the most crucial factor here is urbanization. In the process of urbanization, people become city people, and the custom of the bride price will disappear, because now in the city there is no need for a bride price.
 
Phoenix: It seems that Prof. Ueno has just asked Prof. Li Yinhe about the relationship between children and families in the younger generations in China.  Can you please repeat or add to this question, and we’ll ask Prof. Li for her answer.
 
Ueno: It is important for family members to help each other, for example, if a daughter has to continue working after giving birth to a child, then her mother's help is important.  In addition, parents look to their children for care when they get old, and some parents think that the point of having children is to prepare for their old age. Raising children and caring for the elderly are the most time-consuming things in a person's life, and they have to be done by the family even as the number of children is diminishing. In some families with only one child, the parents raise the child, who in turns takes care of them when they are old, so it looks like this pattern is continuing.  However, in recent discussions I’ve had with young Chinese women, I discovered that because they could not set aside their dependence on the family or the conditions imposed by cross-generational coexistence, they suffer from tremendous pressure, and I must say this really struck me.  I wonder how this will develop in the future.  The family remains extremely important in China, but is it a cultural tradition that you want to continue to hand down?  How might feminists view this? 
 
Li Yinhe: First of all, the classical view of Chinese society is that we are a family-based society, not an individual-based society, as in Europe and America. What is the difference between what I have called family-based and individual-based? By “family-based” I mean that family values, the perpetuation of the family, family harmony, and the development of the family come first, and individual happiness is consigned to a lesser spot. This is what I mean by family-based. In an individual-based society I can choose to put the individual first and the family second.
 
China is definitely a very typical family-oriented society, this is something that everyone respects, and it has been practiced for thousands of years. As the saying goes, "when a man grows up he should take a bride, and when a woman grows up she should marry out," and the word “when” here means that if you don't take a wife when you reach the proper age, if you don't marry out, then you won’t have children, you won’t perpetuate the family line, and you will have failed - you are not a successful person.
 
So even today, there is huge pressure on those individuals who do not want to get married and have children.   You can see how worried parents are, as they try by hook or by crook to get their kids to marry.  You can see even see it in the parks, in cases where the children don’t want to look for anyone or get married right away, the parents try to help them find someone, the idea being to get them married a bit sooner.  
 
Where did this idea come from? I think it is because, at the outset, China was a traditional, rural society, and raising children to take care of you when you were old was simply an imperative. When people get old, they have no means by which to live, and must rely on their children, and especially on their sons, because the daughters married out, so the idea is to raise children to take care of you in your old age, and the daughters-in-law were brought into the family for the same reason. In the villages we see a lot of situations where, for example, if someone has three sons, they can take turns taking care of the parents, and indeed the law forbids not providing support for your parents.  So people who do not support their parents can be taken to court and sued.   I feel like the imperatives of this system have created the idea that everyone must get married, and cannot remain single, cannot not have children. 
 
But now the situation has changed, in the sense that in modern society, everyone has a source of livelihood, a pension, a retirement system, and children are no longer as imperative.  So for these people, what I described above is no longer the case. This is why they can choose not to get married and can choose not to have children. I specialize in dealing with DINK families, in which the feelings of the husband and wife are very strong,  but they have no children, because this is their choice.  In the past, when a woman did not have children there was a lot of pressure on her, and people would say things like “why is this hen not laying eggs?”  But now this possibility exists, because the imperative to take care of aging parents no longer exists.  So some people have another choice and can choose to remain single or not to have children.  I think this sort of describes where China is now. 
 
Six.  As a feminist, what choice are you happiest to have made?

Phoenix: I would like to thank our three professors for sharing their rich insights with us. I mentioned earlier my colleague who feels very happy to dedicate her time and energy to her family and children, so maybe for her, this is the best choice. The important thing is that we can choose our own life.
 
Now we have time for only one more question. All three professors are seniors are senior figures have experienced decades of difficulties and hardships.  Over the course of your lives, I wonder which choices you have made that you are happiest about?
 
Ueno: There have been many important turning points in my life, and it's hard to say which one has been decisive. When faced with a choice, there is a Japanese saying that "it's better to regret doing something than to regret not doing something.”  In my case, I always choose what is new and challenging. I got a scholarship when I was in my 30s, and although I was a bit old compared to my fellow students, I nonetheless went abroad to study abroad for two years, which had a great impact on me. I went to the U.S. and developed language skills in the process. Language is a very important resource, and learning a foreign language makes the world a broader and more diverse place. I have made up my mind to learn Chinese several times but dropped it when it got hard.  I have also tried to learn German and Spanish, but not much came of it. If I could learn Chinese, there must be about 3 billion Chinese speakers in the world, right? If I knew Chinese, I could communicate with 3 billion people, not only in China, but also with overseas Chinese around the world. That's why I still think I should have learned Chinese, and I regret very much that I didn’t.
 
Phoenix: Keep studying Chinese, and don’t give up. Prof. Li and I will learn some Japanese and look forward to our next face-to-face meeting. So what is the one life choice that makes Prof. Shinoda and Prof. Li most rejoice? 
 
Shinoda: The way I look it is like the Chinese saying “I would rather be a chicken’s head than a phoenix’s tail [i.e., I would rather be a big fish in a small pond],”so when there is a choice to be made, I try to choose what others have not. Recently, people in the IT industry have been talking about “red oceans” and “blue oceans,”[7] but I feel that I have always chosen the sea that no one has swam in yet.  Given when I got married, I think it can be said that my marriage was quite unusual.  I had a child after I got married.  I had studied philosophy before, and while this may make Prof. Ueda laugh, my thought at the time was “well, if I can’t be Simone de Beauvoir, then I’ll just have a kid.”  Saying it like that is sounds stupid, but at the time I gave it serious thought, and decided that with the path I had taken there was no possibility of becoming de Beauvoir.   Even having had my child, I kept working in the “blue ocean,” and then later I both worked and helped women with alcohol addiction problems. My current choice to be the kind of therapist I am is quite rare in Japan, and I seem to be the only one doing it.  I feel that I always made my choices in this way. 
 
Li Yinhe: I think the most fortunate thing in my life is that I chose sociology. In fact, it was a bit random in the sense that I studied history in college, but then, China had never really had sociology, as it was considered a bourgeois discipline in the 1950s, and was abolished. In 1979, it was decided to restore it, and then two professors came from the United States, and we went to a summer workshop they gave, and once I encountered sociology, I really liked it, much more than I did history. It so happened that the two professors who ran the workshop were from the University of Pittsburgh, so I contacted them and went to study there, and eventually earned my Ph.D. in sociology.
 
I remember a lot of people saying to me at the time “with life in the U.S. being so good, why in the world do you want to go back to China?”  And the answer was that I wanted to come back to do sociology. For example, I was not motivated to do research in the U.S., since I don’t understand American society, nor did I have any particular feelings for it or itch to understand it.  So in coming back to China to do sociology, I feel that I found something that I really like to do.  What I have liked has been the process, and I’m not claiming great, shining results, but I liked doing the work, going somewhere to do a survey, writing this and that. So my feeling is that having been able to devote my life to something I love to do is a great source of happiness, and I feel that it has been both meaningful and joyful. 
 
Phoenix: Thanks! It turns out that important choices can be both bit and small, from learning a new language to choosing a lifetime research direction.
 
I was struck by a line in the afterword of Professor Shinoda’s book, where she says merely looking at your own soul and looking for self-healing is like peeling a cabbage, which can be comforting but has no real purpose.  Then she added that what we need is a change of perspective. I think what feminism really brings us is just that, a perspective.
 
Thanks to the three professors.   Shall we end our talk today with a final word to the readers?
 
Shinoda: Thank you all very much for today, I learned a lot.
 
Ueno: I really enjoy being interviewed by my Chinese media friends. Today I got to know Prof. Shinoda, with whom I have exchanged for many years, in a new way, and I am hopeful that this will continue for a long time. I hope there will be a Japanese version of Prof. Li's book one day, because I would like to read it.
 
Li Yinhe: I am also very happy to have this opportunity to talk with my colleagues today. I think Professor Ueno and I are different in that while she is a scholar and she is also involved in the movement to promote feminism in Japan. I am merely a scholar, not an activist. I like her books very much, and I am very happy to meet and exchange with her, as well as with this doctor of psychology. Thanks to Phoenix media for this opportunity.
 
Phoenix: Thank you, professors, and thank you, readers, for your attention, we will see you next time.
 
Notes

[1]上野千鹤子对话李银河, “女性主义者就是追求自由和正义的人,” published on the Phoenix Reading site/凤凰网读书, on June 20, 2023.
 
[2]Translator’s note:  The three cardinal guides are that:  the ruler guides the subject, the father guides the son, and the husband guides the wife.  The five constant virtues are:  benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and fidelity.  Li actually mentioned several other expressions that mean more or less the same thing, but I omitted them in the interest of easier reading.

[3]Translator’s note:  2008 is, of course, generally associated with the beginning of the worldwide financial crisis, which perhaps impacted mothers and daughters in Japan in some way…

[4]Translator’s note:  This is another phrase used to describe the role of women in Confucian societies.

[5]Translator’s note:  A legendary horse trainer from the Spring and Autumn period, known for his ability to “recognize talent.”

[6]Translator’s note:  The word used here is 感病毒, which means the flu virus, and is not the word generally employed for covid in Chinese, so Ueda may just mean “the flu,” but at this moment and in this context, most people would say “covid.”  Perhaps there was some confusion in the translation from Japanese?.

[7]Translator’s note:  My impression is that this refers to investment strategies, and I’m not sure about the relation to IT, but the “red oceans” are all existing industries, while the “blue oceans” are those that have yet to be invested.