In the United States today, it is no longer radical to suggest that the next president could be a woman. In Nordic countries, no husband would rail at a pregnant wife who expected him to share child-raising duties. And female heads of state are now found the world over.
But in Japan, despite significant advances in gender equality in recent decades, such terms as "women's lib" and "feminism" are still almost as taboo among women as men.
Unless, that is, the woman in question is Chizuko Ueno, a University of Tokyo professor and one of Japan's most celebrated women's studies scholars who, thanks to her very un-Japanese passion for bluntness and public debate, is also easily the most controversial. Or, as 57-year-old Ueno says of herself: "I'm critical. I'm assertive. I'm disobedient.''
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