Consumerism or Radical Feminism? Women’s Activism in Contemporary Japan

Abstract

In the last couple of decades, the global economy has undergone severe fluctuations. After the global economic and financial crisis of 2009, Asian economies had to recover mainly from indirect effects from the global slump, particularly driven by the overall fall of import demands from Western industrialized economies. As China, the driving economy of the region, could spur development already in the beginning of the 2010s, also other Asian Economies profited from this upswing, while Europe, mainly the European Union, showed asymmetries in recovery. The European South was more strongly hit, and a debt crisis followed by severe fiscal constraints affected Central European economies2 . Germany focused on an inner European export strategy to boost economic growth again. In this time of fragile economic developments in other parts of the world (mainly Western industrialized economies), nevertheless Asian economies showed strong growth rates with an average of more than 7% already in 2010 (OECD 2010). Over the 2010s the dynamics in economic development in terms of growth rates slowed down, but still showed an average of around 7% annual growth rates for example in India, China and Cambodia in the period 2013 to 2017. Another group of Asian countries with more moderate annual GDP growth rates of between approximately 3% and 5% included Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia (OECD 2019). In 2019 the OECD outlook for the region had forecast an average annual growth rate slightly above 6% for India and China for the period of 2020-2024 (OECD 2019), which is approximately one percentage point lower than the averages of the period 2013-2017, but still remarkably high compared to European economies. Challenges for the next period were expected to be driven by developments of digitalization, the related questions of education and human capabilities, as well as transformation processes in production aimed at addressing environmental challenges and demands by civil society.

Keywords: Consumerism, Radical Feminism, Women, Contemporary japan