Exclusive Liberation and Lesbian Suicide in Interwar Japan.pdf

Illinois Wesleyan University Digital Commons @ IWU Honors Projects History Department 2002 Exclusive Liberation and Lesbian Suicide in Interwar Japan Scott Reynen 02 Illinois Wesleyan University Recommended Citation Reynen 02, Scott, Exclusive Liberation and Lesbian Suicide in Interwar Japan (2002). Honors Projects. Paper 8. /history_honproj/8 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by The Ames Library, the Andrew W. Mellon Center for Curricular and Faculty Development, the Office of the Provost and the Office of the President. It has been accepted for inclusion in Digital Commons @ IWU by the faculty at Illinois Wesleyan University. For more information, please contact digitalcommons@. ©Copyright is owned by the author of this document. Exclusive Liberation and Lesbian Suicide in Interwar Japan Scott Reynen Until we are all able to accept the interlocking, interdependent nature of systems of domination and recognize specific ways each system is maintained, we will continue to act in ways that undermine our individual quest for freedom and collective liberation struggle. - bell hooks, Outlaw Culture. There were 342 cases of female same-sex double (or love) suicide reported in the Japanese daily press between 1925 and 1935 (Komine 1985, 175). Assuming unreported and individual cases, the actual sum of lesbian suicides during this period was probably much higher than twice this number. Still, only these recorded lesbian double suicides constituted about thirty-one percent of all suicides in Ja