開催報告

開催報告【International IGS Seminar】

Menstrual Education and Lifelong Health of Women● Date/Time:

November 21st, 2020, 10:00–11:30 (JST)/November 20th, 2020, 15:00–16:30 (HST)● Venue:

Online (Zoom Webiner)● Presenter

Maura STEPHENS-CHU (Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology
the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa)Presentation title:“Do Menstrual Learning and Speaking Affect Decisions to Treat Menstrual Abnormalities―
From interviews with Japanese female college students”● Presenter

Akiko MORI (Professor of Shonan Kamakura University of Medical Science)
Presentation title:“Menstruation and Women's Health”●Moderator

Yukari SEMBA (Project Research Fellow, IGS, Ochanomizu University)●LanguageJapanese● Number of Attendatees

97

Abstract
Menstruation is a familiar physiological phenomenon for women and is part of women's health. But
have women in Japan been well educated on menstruation? At this seminar, the first speaker, Maura
Stephens-Chu, a doctoral candidate at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Hawai'i atMānoa, introduced how Japanese female college students had been taught to think and talk about
menstruation from the information she collected during her interview research in Tokyo and presented heranalysis from the standpoint of medical and feminist anthropology. The second speaker, Akiko Mori, aprofessor at Shonan Kamakura University of Medical Science, focused on menstrual education anddiscussed its effect on women's lifelong health from the standpoint of a medical expert.
ReportThe seminar on the theme of menstruation education and women's lifelong health was held online on124

2020 年度 IGS オンライン国際セミナー（生殖領域）
第３回 １１月２１日（土）
月経教育と女性の生涯の健康

From the fall of 2017 to the summer of 2018, Stephens-Chu resided in Tokyo as a research fellow of theInternational Foundation Japan 2017 and an affiliated researcher of the Institute for Gender Studies atOchanomizu University and conducted the research for her dissertation. She interviewed female college
students, a sanitary goods company, and others in Tokyo. In this seminar, she introduced Japanese female
college students' experiences related to menstruation and the survey results of the sanitary napkin industry
from her journal article “From Sacred to Secret: Tracing Changes in Views of Menstruation in Japan” in Silva
Iaponticarum (Summer/Autumn 2019). She mentioned that menstruation was strongly linked to fertility.
In Japan, fertility and motherhood are traditional markers of women's success. Many of the female
college students thought that a “normal” menstrual cycle with a regular pattern was a sign of good
reproductive and general health and that an irregular menstrual cycle could be a bad sign that signaled fertility
problems. Notably, when the female college students had menstrual problems, not all of them visited medical
facilities. Stephens-Chu found that in the women's responses to these issues, their level of concern and thetype of treatment they sought were extremely varied. Next, on the basis of her analysis, she proposed that thedifferences in their responses and decision making when they had problems were related to menstrualeducation. She concluded that a social atmosphere where people cannot talk openly about menstruation might
result in women's hesitation to visit a medical facility even when they are anxious about menstrual problems,delaying treatment. Thus, women's lifelong health is affected.
The second speaker, Akiko Mori, explained the medical aspects of menstruation as a nursing expert in thefield of reproductive health, especially infertility. Next, she introduced many survey results, for example, asurvey on the effects of menstruation and high school athletes on competitive performance, the effects ofmenstruation on nursing college students on academics, and the effects of menstrual symptoms of working
nurses on work. She also introduced how menstrual problems affect women's lives and how women weremanaging them. She also referred to educational needs regarding menstruation in terms of educational
programs by introducing the effects of menstrual education for high school students and education forcontrolling menstrual pain for college students. Finally, she talked about her current research project: aresearch on adult female patients’ experiences with endometriosis by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Researchby the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology. She found that their delay in starting
treatment for endometriosis was related to experiences with menstrual education. In other words,
menstruation is deeply related to human reproduction. In conclusion, she asked two questions: how menstrualeducation should be modified to promote women’s health and how it should be structured and implemented.
November 21, 2020. Maura Stephens-chu and Akiko Mori focused on menstrual education and talked about
how it affects women's lifelong health.
After the presentations, the participants had many comments and questions. Our discussion at theseminar was fruitful.
Report by Yukari SEMBA
Project Research Fellow, IGS, Ochanomizu University125