"White Banana" in Nested Imperialism: The Relational Construction of Complicity and Victimhood in Japanese Feminisms at the 1975 International Women's Conference

This paper examines how feminists from Japan positioned themselves in relation to imperialism at the 1975 United Nations World Conference on Women held in Mexico City. Existing frameworks of intersectionality and postcolonial feminism have made significant contributions to the analysis of interlocking power structures, yet both have tended to treat positionality along each axis as relatively fixed. Against this backdrop, the paper develops a conceptual framework for analyzing subjects who cannot be reduced to either side of a dominator/dominated binary, namely those who are simultaneously subordinated within a higher-order imperial structure while exercising imperial dominance over others below. The central research questions are as follows: when confronted with the question of imperialism at the 1975 conference, did feminists from Japan position themselves as complicit or perpetrating subjects, or as victims? And what structural conditions shaped these varying positionalities? The analysis focuses on five actors who participated in the conference: two members of the official government delegation, chief delegate Fujita Taki and Japanese Communist Party representative Tanaka Michiko, and three grassroots actors, the publishing collective Agora, the newly formed Women's Action Group, and independent journalist Matsui Yayori. Archival research was conducted at four institutions, the National Diet Library, the Women's Action Network minikomi library, the National Women's Education Center of Japan Repository, and the University of Chicago Library, drawing on government speeches, official reports, autobiographies, minikomi publications, internal organizational documents, and United Nations records. These materials were analyzed through close reading and iterative memo writing. The analysis reveals that the five actors produced markedly divergent responses. These ranged from rendering imperialism invisible by treating it as a political issue separate from women's concerns, to repositioning Japan as a victim of U.S. hegemony, to momentarily acknowledging complicity only to retreat into a victimhood framework, and finally to a small number of attempts to hold the tension between victimhood and complicity together and translate it into anti-colonial feminist practice. To account for these divergences, the paper introduces the concept of nested imperialism, a hierarchical and multi-layered power structure in which a subject is subordinated within a higher-order imperial order while simultaneously exercising imperial dominance over those below. Within such a structure, the same subject can be positioned as either victim or perpetrator depending on which relational field is foregrounded. The paper's theoretical contribution lies in demonstrating that positionality is not a stable, given category from which analysis can begin, but is itself relationally and contextually constituted. This relational approach offers an analytical framework capable of capturing the experiences of subjects located in intermediate and unstable positions within hierarchical structures of power, a contribution that extends beyond the Japanese case to comparable configurations in other geopolitical contexts.