Apr 19, 2021
It was the Christmas present nobody needed. On Dec. 25, 2019, Weekly Spa! magazine published a ranking of universities according to whether their female students were “sexually easy.”
“It’s not that I see just this article as a problem,” student Kazuna Yamamoto told The Japan Times at the time. “This caused all the frustrations I had about misogyny in Japan to explode.”
Yamamoto, along with three other women two of them fellow students from International Christian University channeled their frustrations into the formation of Voice Up Japan, a student-run organization that advocates for gender equality.
The group has chapters at ICU and four other universities Aoyama Gakuin, Meiji, Keio and Waseda and currently counts Japanese, Russians, Hongkongers, Americans and Germans among its membership.