All posts by Richard

Junko FUKAZAWA, 1951-2025

We deny the authority of the Fascists

Laurie says:

Hiroko HAGIWARA recently told me that Junko FUKAZAWA died on March 3, 2025, of the long-term effects of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Junko was one of my collaborators on the Women of Japan project. She and Hiro have been best friends since they were 12. Both of her Women of Japan photographs have been exhibited in Japan, Europe and the US.

Junko was a brilliant feminist scholar, and contributed the essay below to the project, which is available here online in both Japanese and English.

Junko dancing. Her image is off center and her arms are moving so fast they are out of focus.
Junko FUKAZAWA, from Women of Japan

As far as I know, Junko is the first of my Japanese collaborators to pass away. I will miss her.

Junko’s essay

Laurie asked me, “By the way, what should I say you do?”

Here it comes.

What is your specialty? What do you do?

I can never give a good answer.

Even though I am over 50 years old, I hesitate as to how I should answer these questions.

The I who has been rejected by existing specialties, and the I who has refused to enter such specialties. Stuck between those two spaces I have continued to engage in my daily work and activities. I thought that by doing so I would eventually find my natural place. But I must soon accept the conclusion that this seems not to be the case.

I feel a disconnect and an incompatibility between myself as a woman and the system that blankets Japanese society.

I went to an arts college and majored in oil painting. What controlled that arena was a male-dominant sense of values centered on sexuality and an atmosphere that extolled expressions of sexual violence against women. I could hardly stay in a place like that, even though to leave meant I was branded with the labels of failure, defeat, and dropping out.

As the years passed since I left my “specialty,” I have come to realize that the space that I have entered is much wider and deeper, and that the people I have met are far more enriching.

A friend I met a few years ago asked me to go with her as “just a woman” when she went to seek her just conclusion by going to confront the person who had assaulted her in the past.

“Just a woman.” I thought that was wonderful and an honor.

I still need to pursue much discipline before I can become a tried and true “just a woman.”

Junko FUKAZAWA lying on a tree branch so she's at a 45-degree angle from the ground. Hiro HAGIWARA stands on the ground, one foot on a tree root, her head below Junko's torso.
Junko FUKAZAWA and Hiroko HAGIWARA, from Women of Japan

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The Heart of the Stories – Jean Marie Ward

We support a ceasefire in Palestine.

Jean Marie Ward says:

..

Before I get to the meat of this blog, I’d like to express my gratitude to Laurie and Deb for giving me the opportunity to post on Body Impolitic. It’s a privilege and an honor to be featured among so much important art and social commentary. Thank you so much.

It’s a truism that readers often deduce more about an author’s hopes, fears, and obsessions from reading their work than the author ever imagines, much less applies to themself. For me, that’s certainly been the case. I’ve been surprised, even shocked, by reader insights into issues I thought were cunningly slipped in subtext or which I never considered at all. But that changes when you assemble a collection of your work. Reading so much of yourself at once forces you to examine your writing a lot more closely.

I’m an entertainer. I write stories to make people laugh and gasp in surprise. I don’t craft my plots around a message. I just follow where the characters lead. They’re a pretty empty-headed lot. They seldom look beyond what they want or need. I just wind them up and let them loose in situations I’d personally find thrilling, amusing, or resonant.

I let a shapeshifting Asian dragon loose in a government conference in 1420s Nanjing, because I was trapped in so many stultifying professional events, I longed for mayhem to explode in the middle of the banquet chairs. I wrote about a cat who imprinted on The X-Files to upend perceptions of genre tropes and because it was ridiculous. I like ridiculous. I’m the one who wrote about a refrigerator time machine, after all. But I also wrote about a young woman in Kublai Khan’s Mongolia who became dragon bait as the result of a crooked lottery. I wanted her to do more than survive. I wanted her to triumph.

All these plots and characters relate to something in my life–my years working for the government, my amusement at people taking their mysteries or science fiction a little too seriously, my recollections of myself and others at the mercy of authority figures who have only their own interests at heart.

But looking at the short stories in my first collection, Dragons, Cats, and Formidable Femmes, as a unit, I think there’s something more going on. Nothing heavy-handed, I hope. But there, nonetheless.

Award-winning North Carolina writer Michael G. Williams once told me in an interview that every word a writer puts in pixels or on paper helps create the world in which they want to live. Reading over my own work, even the never-before-published pieces and the old fictions in dire need of proper editing, I hope that’s true. My chosen world is a place where people grow, laugh, and have adventures. Where people of all cultures and conditions are worthy of respect—and get it before their story’s final line. Where there is hope in the direst of circumstances and individuals work together to create a better future for themselves and others.

At least, that’s what I see there. I hope my readers see it too.

Jean Marie Ward

Dragons, Cats, and Formidable Femmes
Ginger Blue Publishing, July 15, 2024

Buy links: Amazon,
 Barnes & Noble
,
 Kobo, and
 Apple Books.

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