抄録
Kyoko Michishita (1942-) is a pioneering Japanese feminist known for introduced
the American women’s liberation movement to Japan, as well as an artist who created
numerous video artworks. Her early work, Being Women in Japan: Living with the
Ocean (1974), is a 50-minute video that first embodied her feminist ideas. It documents
a woman involved in kelp fishing in eastern Hokkaido through interviews and on-site
footage. Utilizing video’s synchronous sound and long-duration recording, Michishita
portrays the woman as a professional and independent individual. This video also
captures shifts in the relationship between women and the fishing industry, aligning
it with the contemporaneous rise of oral history practices among women. Created
during the 1970s, when female travel was often linked to consumer culture, this work
represents an attempt by an urban woman to engage with a rural woman in a non
consumptive, relational manner. For Michishita, video creation can be regarded as a
feminist practice oriented toward consciousness-raising, and this work serves as an
exhortation for other women to engage in creative forms of encounter.
