20 Facts About Chizuko Ueno

Chizuko Ueno is a Japanese sociologist and Japan's "best-known feminist".

Chizuko Ueno's work covers sociological issues including semiotics, capitalism, and feminism in Japan.

The marriage between Chizuko Ueno's parents was unhappy, and her mother repeatedly fretted about the difficulty that divorce would bring should she pursue it.

Chizuko Ueno studied sociology at Kyoto University, where she participated in the Zengakuren student protests of the 1960s.

Chizuko Ueno has spent her entire career advocating gender equality in Japanese society by researching diverse issues of gender and contributing to the establishment of gender studies as an acknowledged field of research in Japan.

In 1982, Chizuko Ueno authored The Study of the 'Sexy Girl' and Reading the Housewife Debates, texts that would be referred to as "The Flagbearers of 1980's Feminism".

Chizuko Ueno's work investigated the relationship between the "Women's Lib" movement of the 1960s and the Women's Liberation Movement of the 1970s.

Chizuko Ueno was an Associate Professor and Professor at Kyoto Seika University in the Department of Humanities from 1989 to 1994.

Chizuko Ueno is a special guest professor at the Graduate School of Core Ethics and Frontier Sciences at Ritsumeikan University and a professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo.

Chizuko Ueno retired from this position in order to take the role of Chief Director of the Women's Action Network, an organization designed to connect and introduce feminists from different backgrounds.

In 1994, Chizuko Ueno received the Suntory Arts and Sciences award for her work, The Rise and Fall of the Modern Family.

Chizuko Ueno is best known for her contribution to gender studies in Japan.

Chizuko Ueno is a trenchant critic of postwar revisionism and criticizes the whitewashing of Japanese history, which she claims attempts to justify its colonialism, wartime atrocities, and racism both before and after World War II.

Chizuko Ueno is a staunch advocate of global women's reproductive rights, and a critic of monogamous marriage institutions.

Chizuko Ueno often discusses the semiotics and accessibility of feminism, claiming that feminist discussion in Japanese can frequently lack the language needed to make its concepts readily understandable and approachable.

Chizuko Ueno has stressed the need for an accessible legacy of feminist thought.

Chizuko Ueno opposed the criminal punishment of Park Yu-ha, who openly instigated historical revisionism on the issue of Comfort Women in South Korea, citing freedom of expression.

Chizuko Ueno was accused of being a 'colonialist' by many South Korean feminists and Korean nationalists.

In 2016, at a debate at the University of Tokyo in Japan, Chizuko Ueno said "it was the judiciary of Korea that filed a criminal complaint against [Park Yoo-ha]", causing controversy in South Korea.

In 2023, Chizuko Ueno's work gained sudden prominence in China after a video of her 2019 matriculation speech at the University of Tokyo went viral.