is a Japanese feminist and writer, who became well known as a radical activist during the early 1970s.
Early life
Tanaka was born in 1943 as the third daughter of a fishmonger called Uogiku in front of
Kisshō-ji
Kisshō-ji, also Kichijō-ji (吉祥寺) is a Buddhist Temple located in Bunkyo, Tokyo, Japan. It was founded in 1458, during the Muromachi period.
In 1592, the "Sendan-Rin" School for Buddhist monks was founded in the precincts of the temple ...
,
Tokyo
Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and List of cities in Japan, largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, ...
. At birth, she suffered from
oxygen deprivation
Asphyxia or asphyxiation is a condition of deficient supply of oxygen to the body which arises from abnormal breathing. Asphyxia causes generalized hypoxia, which affects primarily the tissues and organs. There are many circumstances that can ...
, leading to her becoming a frail child with whooping cough who often missed school. She was raised by her parents, who had no academic background and had never graduated from an ordinary high school. As a second grader still in elementary school, she was subjected to child sexual abuse at the hands of an employee from the family business. Spurred into action by this from an early age,
''discrimination against women
'' and the
''frailness of the body
'' would become the touchstone of her later writings. After her parents decided to rearrange their business and open a japanese restaurant, their family fortunes started to increase, and Tanaka finally graduated from high school while deciding to search for her own way of life instead of going to college. After a young Vietnamese man living in the neighborhood came to pick up a donation, she decided to participate in a relief activity for orphans stricken by the Vietnam War, which led to the formation of a civic group called "Anti-war Akanbe". She also participated in the Latin Quarter struggle, related to the
Zenkyōtō
The All-Campus Joint Struggle Committees (Japanese: 全学共闘会議; ''Zengaku kyōtō kaigi''), commonly known as the Zenkyōtō ( ja, 全共闘), were Japanese student organizations consisting of anti-government, anti-Japanese Communist Pa ...
student protests
Campus protest or student protest is a form of student activism that takes the form of protest at university campuses. Such protests encompass a wide range of activities that indicate student dissatisfaction with a given political or acad ...
and other civic movements of the time. At that time Tanaka was first impressed by
Wilhelm Reich's ''