3 - Fighting Hate Speech and Microaggression: Ethnic Minority Women and Intersectional Recognition.

Presentation Abstract
Currently "ethnic minority women" are elucidating socio-political relations and trends within the mainstream Japanese society occurring in conjunction with international collective movements as they chart the course of action in discovering their public voice. Recognizing a collective consciousness of activism against discrimination within Japan, ethnic minority women are seeking recognition of their difference and presence within a "homogeneous" "mono-culture" Japan. Although facing opposition and retaliation from the socially and politically powerful through strategies formed in interethnic collaboration of women across ethnicities, hate speech, hate crime, and microaggression are contested by ethnic minority women who have been historically ignored and unrecognized. In this presentation, I argue that though the international political movements of #Me Too, Black Lives Matter, and the Corvid 19 Anti-Discrimination Campaign, ethnic minority women in Japan are employing a growing awareness of intersectional discrimination to demand social justice. By examining the collaborative efforts of zainichi Korean women with a legacy of a colonial past, Buraku "outcast" women activist, indigenous Ainu women, Okinawan women, along with a growing population of foreign women and their vast inequities, I argue that equal and open access to the public sphere can be achieved through a joint movement that demands a social-structural recognition of the intersectional and interconnected realities of multiple dimensions of discrimination and exclusion.