Keiko Ochiai () is a Japanese author, bookstore owner, radio personality, and feminist.
Biography
She was born in Tokyo
out-of-wedlock
Legitimacy, in traditional Western common law, is the status of a child born to parents who are legally married to each other, and of a child conceived before the parents obtain a legal divorce. Conversely, ''illegitimacy'', also known as '' ...
to parents who encouraged her to develop hobbies considered "unusual" for a girl, including carpentry.
While at
Meiji University, she joined the English Speaking Society and became its first female officer.
She graduated in 1967.
Ochiai was a radio celebrity in the 1970s and often DJ-ed under the name "Lemon-chan."
She gained popularity through her novel advice show, in which listeners could call in and describe their problems in order to receive her advice in real time.
She has also written about jazz.
She published a widely-acclaimed series of essays about women in Japanese cities titled ''A Spoonful of Happiness'' (''Suppun Ippai no Shiawase'') based on her newspaper columns.
In 1982, she wrote ''The Rape'' (''Za reipu''), about the lawsuit of the rape of an independent young career woman (''
kyariaūman
A is a Japanese term for a career woman. The term refers to the type of Japanese woman, married or not, that pursues a career to make a living and for personal advancement rather than being a housewife without occupation outside the home. The te ...
)'' by her ex-boyfriend''.''
In the novel, Ochiai establishes that women have the right to decide with whom they decide to be intimate—a radical idea at the time in Japan.
She also introduces the phrase "penis fascination" to describe male obsession with sexual dominance.
In 1994, she published ''The Second Rape,'' still untranslated into English. A 2017 article stated that she had published over 130 books and essays.
In 1976, she founded a children's bookstore named "Crayonhouse" (or "Crayon House") in Tokyo.
According to the store's website, the store looks at culture through the point of view of children and of women, with a special focus on vegetarianism and organic products. She has stated that it was founded based on "my belief that a society that is kind to children, that thinks about the happiness of future generations, is a society where anyone can live happily."
Since the 1970s, Ochiai has been outspoken about men who grope women on crowded subways (a topic known as "chikan" or "pervert"), stating that the way to stop the problem is to raise awareness.
Inspired by the
Fukushima Daichii nuclear disaster, Ochiai has held monthly workshops on the problems of nuclear power called "Morning Study of Silent Spring," a nod to her blog "Journal of Silent Spring," which is also a reference to Rachel Carson's environmentalist classic
Silent Spring
''Silent Spring'' is an environmental science book by Rachel Carson. Published on September 27, 1962, the book documented the environmental harm caused by the indiscriminate use of pesticides. Carson accused the chemical industry of spreading d ...
.
These workshops started in May 2011 and are held at Crayonhouse.
She remains an advocate of alternative power sources.
Ochiai has never been married and is proud of her single status, seeing it as a key way of keeping her independence.
She is also outspoken about the discrimination she faced as a child born out-of-wedlock.
References
External links
* Ochiai's blog
"Journal of Silent Spring"(in Japanese only)
* Aun-Drey Reynaldo Brown
"Sex and Silence: Ochiai Keiko's The Rape in a historical context,"MA Thesis, University of Kansas, 2012.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ochiai, Keiko
1945 births
Living people
20th-century Japanese writers
20th-century Japanese women writers