Chizuko Ueno is a Japanese sociologist and Japan's "best-known feminist".
Her research field includes feminist theory, family sociology, and women's history. She is best known for her contribution to gender studies in Japan. As a public intellectual, she played a central role in creating the field of gender studies in Japanese academia. At the same time, her radical tendency and strong character has invited criticism (she described herself as "critical, assertive, and disobedient").
Ueno is a trenchant critic of postwar revisionism and criticizes the whitewashing of Japanese history, which she claims attempts to justify its colonialism, wartime atrocities, and racism both before and after World War II. In particular, she has defended the compensation of Korean comfort women who were forced into prostitution by the Empire of Japan.
The book took the form of a long conversation between two women, a feminist scholar and a therapist. They both made incisive observations about parenthood, marriage and relationships. While the first 1/3 felt more Japan-specific and took me months to get through, the rest of the book was quite applicable across different societies. Especially about how romantic and carer relationships evolve under economic depression.