This book is a record of the symposium held as an event by the Faculty of Letters for the 2020 academic year University of Tokyo Homecoming Day. The Faculty of Letters holds lectures and symposiums on Homecoming Day to present academic research in the Faculty of Letters to students, graduates, and to the wider general public. In the 2020 academic year, a symposium planned by Professor Hiroshi Ando, Chair of the Public Relations Committee of the Faculty of Letters, and Professor Yukiko Muramoto of the Social Psychology Department, titled “Women and Society as Seen by the Faculty of Letters” was held. At the time, Professor Muramoto was also chair of the working group of the Gender Equality Office at UTokyo. As stated in the introduction, the symposium was planned with the aim of achieving a broad grasp of the issues of women and society through various academic frameworks and gaining a new awareness of the problems we now face.
 
Professor of Sociology Manabu Akagawa began by mentioning the congratulatory speech by a sociologist, Chizuko Ueno, at the entrance ceremony of the University of Tokyo in the previous year, which was much talked about at the time, and introduced a number of recent graduation theses in the sociology department. Having done so, Prof. Akagawa presented the viewpoint that not only “freedom from gender,” in which there is no discrimination based on gender or sexual orientation, but also “freedom to (express a) gender,” in which people live out the gender and gender role they wish to, are equally important. Professor of Japanese History Nojima (Kato) depicted the image of women glimpsed in history with the theme of looking back historically on the image of women in the state and state narrative. The depth of the problem of gender-based discrimination was presented while interpreting a wide range of materials, such as, firstly, the “naturalized discrimination” observed in modern society, the episode that Kenzaburo Oe also tailoring his understanding of gender to the narrative of the state, and the primitive view of gender roles observed in Kojiki (A Record of Ancient Matters). Professor of Religion Satoko Fujiwara pointed out that there is a universality in various religions, in which from a man's point of view woman is extra-ordinary, at times considered to be holy and at other times impure, and that this has been used as logic to justify discrimination against women. The symposium then touched on the relationship between scholarship and women, raising the question of whether ideas concerning “natural differences in ability” and their relation to gender relationship are more ingrained at present than in the past. Professor of Psychology Hiroshi Imamizu explained from the viewpoint of brain science, while showing brain image data and the results of large-scale social surveys, that clear-cut gender-based differences in the brain and behavior are not as great as generally considered, and that “masculine tendencies” and “feminine tendencies” intermingle even in the individual.
 
Each topic was followed by an interdisciplinary discussion of women and social issues. It may be said that the Faculty of Letters, in which the diversity of learning is given due respect, is the perfect place for grasping the issues we now face through the frameworks of a wide range of academic fields.
 

(Written by IMAMIZU Hiroshi, Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology / 2022)

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