Kyoko Michishita: Being Women in Japan - Liberation Within My Family (1974)
Kyoko Michishita, Being Women in Japan: Liberation Within My Family, 1974, 30min, video, bw, sound
Featuring the digitization projects that were part of the Community of Images exhibition, we are pleased to share with our online members selected works and moving image materials that were on view during the show.
In collaboration with VTape, this December we are thrilled to present Kyoko Michishita’s Being Women in Japan: Liberation Within my Family, one of a pair of documentaries exploring the experiences of Japanese women in the 1970s. A writer, translator and filmmaker who lived between the US and Japan, Michishita produced some of the first translations of American second-wave feminist thought into Japanese. Yet Liberation Within My Family seeks articulations of feminist consciousness and solidarity from within Japan itself, exploring the effects of illness on the distribution of labour and care within the family of her older sister Tazuko.
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Program
Kyoko Michishita, Being Women in Japan: Liberation Within My Family, 1974, 30min, video, bw, sound
“Cinema verite portrait of the artist's 47-year-old sister from the time immediately following brain surgery to her complete recovery. The entire family had gathered at the hospital and Michishita used the opportunity to talk with all of them about women's roles in general and that of her sister in particular in relation to other family members.” – Museum of Modern Art (New York)
“My sister Tazuko [...], married to an architect, and the mother of three children, in November 1973 had two brain surgeries for two aneurysms. Although the doctor asked her husband to contact all of her close relatives after her second attack, she survived. My mother flew in from Hokkaido and stayed with her daughter in the hospital room for four months, taking care of her, determined to save her life even when there was very little chance for her to survive. This tape, which happened to be my first videotape, is the record of how she was recovering, both physically and mentally, after the fear of her death, which all of us had felt during those months, had finally disappeared. While she, like any other housewife, was mainly missed for doing housework for her family, she at the same time was beginning to take her own life more seriously.” – Kyoko Michishita, in Video from Tokyo to Fukui and Kyoto (ed. Barbara J. London, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1979)
Kyoko Michishita
Kyoko Michishita is a Japanese artist, writer, and translator based in Tokyo. With her belief in pacifism, feminism and art, she has been writing and translating books and articles for almost four decades. Born in Kholmsk, Sakhalin, in 1942, she and her family escaped to Hokkaido, Japan the year after the end of World War II. She studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin, graduating in 1967. From 1970 through 1997 she served as the Arts Program Specialist of the Tokyo American Center, where she presented work by Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Jonas Mekas, Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, and many others.
In the 1970s Michishita was an early member of the collective Video Hiroba, and began producing her own films and videos in 1974. Her video Being Women in Japan: Liberation within My Family (1973-74) is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and her other films and videos have been screened at many festivals, galleries, and museums across Japan and internationally. She has published several Japanese translations of work by and about Gloria Steinem, Georgia O’Keeffe and many others. Her own books include the essay collection Sensual Life (1980), the autobiographical nonfiction Farewell to Sakhalin (1995), and the novel The Blue Hour (2008).
Vtape is a vibrant distribution organization that represents an international collection of contemporary and historical video art, documentaries, and installations. We make this collection accessible to curators and programmers, educators, scholars, and public audiences worldwide. In addition to providing a distribution framework for established and emerging artists, Vtape is committed to sharing video art preservation and exhibition standards, and strives to support hybrid practices in an increasingly complex technical milieu.
Related
Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s - 1970s
Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s-1970s is an exhibition of experimental moving images created by Japanese artists in the U.S. during the 1960s and 70s, an area that has fallen in the fissure between American and Japanese archival priorities. Following JASGP's Re:imagining Recovery Project and its mission to support and engage diverse audiences through Japanese arts and culture in collaboration with local organizations, this project aims to discover, preserve, and present film and video works and performance footage by Japanese filmmakers and artists to the wider public.
This exhibition ran at Philadelphia Art Alliance from June 14 - August 9, 2024.
The project and its online programming is generously supported by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage & the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Toshiba International Foundation and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts’ Preserving Diverse Cultures grant.