Flower Demo, the protests battling Japan’s sexual violence against women

A movement that protests sexual violence against women has spread across Japan. It is called Flower Demo (short for Flower Demonstrations) because protestors bring a flower with them as a symbol of empathy toward victims. Its meetings create a place where victims’ voices can be heard – voices that Japan’s ingrained patriarchy has silenced for over a century.

In March 2019, a strange thing happened in the Fukuoka District Court in southern Japan. While acknowledging that the victim of the case before it had been too drunk to either resist or give her consent to the sex attack against her, the court acquitted the defendant because it was unclear to the man that she was not consenting.

More strange things happened. Within that same month, three other similar key cases in various district courts also drew headlines and anger. These acquittals were also based on judgments that flew in the face of public opinion and common sense. It clearly illustrated how Japan’s sexual violence laws are based on principles that rationalize defendants’ actions and disregard victims’ basic rights.

The judgment that drew most public ire was from the Okazaki branch of the Nagoya District Court on March 26. The ruling acknowledged that the defendant had sexually abused his daughter for years, but acquitted him on the basis that when the particular act of nonconsensual sex in question took place, the girl could have resisted but didn’t. As proof of that, it cited her removing her own clothes and getting into her father’s car to be taken to a hotel.

The storm of anger that gripped Japan

Publisher Akiko Matsuo and her friend Minori Kitahara, a feminist author, saw the storm of rage on social media and knew something needed to be done. As well as the four court acquittals, Matsuo says another aspect pushed her and Kitahara to launch the demonstrations that would become Flower Demo. Lawyers for the perpetrator in the Nagoya case were labeling people who argued with the acquittal as “hysterical women who don’t understand the law [and] are just kicking up a fuss.” The contempt she felt from that steeled her resolve.

With Twitter as the primary means, Matsuo and Kitahara organized a protest to take place on April 11 in front of Tokyo Station. More than 500 women gathered. After the organizers’ speeches ended, the participants stayed. And one by one, they took up the microphone themselves and shared their stories of the sexual violence they had also endured. With that, Flower Demo created a community for victims of sexual violence, the vast majority of whom had been suffering in silence.

Just one month later, Flower Demo protests were held in 33 of Japan’s 47 prefectures. Less than a year later, in March 2020, they had spread nationwide. Matsuo seems unsurprised by the pace of the movement’s growth. It has tapped a vein.

“The first impetus for Flower Demo was the anger of women throughout Japan at the acquittals given in those four crimes of sexual abuse and their desire to voice that anger. Sexual harm is happening in the places where we live. [Flower Demo] has spread this far because regular women living in small regional cities, not just in big cities like Tokyo and Osaka, are also holding demonstrations.”

In commemoration of that first gathering, protests are held on the 11th of each month. Until the outbreak of COVID-19, they continued under the same format as that of the original demonstration. Now, they are held online in places where the spread of infection is of particular concern. Others stage silent protests by holding flowers and placards in their hands, like Flower Demo Kyoto on the evening of November 11.

Flower Demo is making a difference

Change is already occurring. In February this year, the Fukuoka High Court overturned the original acquittal in the lower court quasi-rape case and sentenced the man to four years in prison. In March, the Nagoya High Court sentenced the father to 10 years in prison for raping his daughter.

Flower Demo is helping to make that change. In a comment released in June, the minister in charge of gender equality, Seiko Hashimoto, specifically mentioned the group, noting that victims are raising their voices and that Flower Demo had spread nationwide. The “growing public calls for the eradication of sexual crimes and violence,” the minister said, obligated the government to “respond to their compelling voices head-on, and put together concrete policies to eliminate the insanity that is sexual violence.”

Deeply rooted patriarchy and its damage to Japanese society

Matsuo describes the group’s influence. “I think that Flower Demo has made visible women’s anger toward Japanese society’s long years of allowing sexual violence, and created public opinion that will not permit unjust sentences.”

Japan ranks 121 out of the 153 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index 2020. Women’s low social standing is behind the acceptance of sexual violence toward them, Matsuo says.

“Because patriarchal authority is deeply ingrained in Japanese society, sexual violence within households has been overlooked, and sexual harassment and groping has not been treated as sexual violence. I think the reason [for society’s apathy and ignorance toward sexual violence] is that Japanese society had no recognition at all that sexual violence is an intrusion on the human rights of the victim. The reason that has started to change is that women are starting to realize that what they have experienced is harm, violence, and an intrusion of their human rights.”

The sharing of experiences at the Flower Demo protests is helping victims understand that they are not the only ones. The presence of hundreds of participants at demonstrations shows that sexual violence toward women is a systemic problem.

Data from Japan’s Ministry of Justice shows that in 2016, only 18.5% of women subjected to sexual violence reported it to the police. Not-for-profit organization Shiawase-namida, which supports victims of sexual violence, used that figure to recalculate all rapes and indecent assaults that year. It estimated 5,346 rapes of women that year, or 15 a day, and 33,449 cases of indecent assault of women, about 24 times the number for men.

In a comment on Flower Demo’s website, a participant writes about speaking at the movement’s August gathering in Tokyo about her experience as a victim of sexual violence. Since the day of the demo, she says, “the impulse to die that I had carried around with me for so long disappeared. I feel that, then, in that place, crying for the first time with the feeling that ‘really what I wanted was for someone to help me,’ pulled me out of the depths of my suffering toward recovery and helped me take a step forward.”

Creating space for empathy for victims

The space of empathy for victims that Flower Demo creates allows them to speak of the experiences that haunt them every day of their lives. In this space without victim-blaming or shame, they see their experiences without self-hate and recrimination, and as wrongs committed against them. Now, they want those wrongs punished.

“The main aim of Flower Demo is to reform social consciousness, so we are telling society of the necessity of criminal law revision… What we seek is “yes means yes” – that nonconsensual sexual acts be punished.”

Antiquated sex laws, and Japan’s politicians’ reluctance to change

There have been few changes to Japan’s sex crime laws since they came into effect in 1907. Experts say its rape laws were intended to protect a wife’s chastity. It required wives to fulfill their duty of loyalty to their husbands by fighting off other sexual advances. Consequently, rape laws here still require evidence of violence or intimidation and that victims do what they can to resist the attack. That thinking no longer serves modern society, particularly since it is now understood that a victim’s common response to an attack is to freeze.

In June, the government unveiled a three-year plan to strengthen measures against sex crimes and sexual violence, including better support for victims and the reconsideration of current criminal law. Among proposed legal changes is to make all nonconsensual sex a crime. Considering the praise from gender equality minister Hashimoto and the groundswell of support for Flower Demo, one would think that such changes will be implemented smoothly. In the world of politics, however, there are always opposing views.

Flower Demo organizers are currently locked in a dispute with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which refuses to accept the 136,000 signatures calling for the resignation of one of their female members of parliament. The MP, Mio Sugita, has admitted saying in a closed party meeting in September that “women can lie as much as they want (about sexual violence).”

After pressure from a senior LDP official, Sugita apologized, but not to victims of sexual violence, only to those who “got the impression from my comment that only women lie.”

Flower Demo will continue to force change

“If society listens to the voices of victims of sexual violence, it will change,” Matsuo says. Flower Demo has helped change Japan into a society in which those voices are beginning to be heard. With no guarantee that sex crime laws will be amended, over the next two years [*1], it will be crucial to raise those voices even higher to force those amendments to be made. Japan and its women need new rape laws. Achieving them will likely require a further potent balance of anger and empathy.