Takeuchi’s meditation on dissident women is at the center of I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now, which references these three historical examples, though is ...

In her 2002 autobiography, Infinity Net, the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama describes going to extraordinary lengths to leave Japan in the 1950s, including sewing banknotes into her clothes and shoes.

“The saddest thing in life,” runs an old Japanese proverb, “is to be born a woman.” In the feudal days before MacArthur, it contained more than a grain of truth; Japanese women then were the merest ...