When I contributed my text to Ogawa’s booklet, there was one source that I chose not to cite, despite its importance. I am grateful for the opportunity to provide it here, together with some additional contextual information. Although several years have passed since the booklet’s publication, I hope these notes will be useful to readers interested in pursuing the subject further.

March 1, 2025
Miyuki Hosoya

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Note

The phrase “Power is the right to define the situation” is presented by the counsellor Sayoko Nobuta in Can Perpetrators Change?¹ as a formulation derived from Michel Foucault.

As far as I have been able to determine, however, it does not appear as a direct quotation in Foucault’s writings. Rather, it seems to be Nobuta’s own paraphrase. The interpretive process is discussed in her essay “DV: How Does One Become a ‘Party Concerned’?”²

The passage she refers to appears in Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, where he writes:

“Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.”³

From this passage, Nobuta derives the phrase:

“Power is the right to define the situation.”

She explains the transition as follows:

“Applied to the family, power is not simply the act of striking someone and subduing them through force. Power lies in prohibiting that act from being called violence and defining it instead as “love” or “discipline.” To name a situation, and to deny alternative definitions—this is power. In other words, power is the right to define the situation.”⁴

In a note appended to the essay, Nobuta acknowledges a significant debt to the Japanese sociologist Chizuko Ueno in formulating the concept of the “right to define the situation.” The precise role of Ueno’s work in the above reformulation, however, I have not been able to determine.

References

1. Sayoko Nobuta, Can Perpetrators Change? (Tokyo: Chikuma Bunko, 2015), p.111.

2. Sayoko Nobuta, “DV: How Does One Become a ‘Party Concerned’?”, Sekai, May 2002 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2002), pp.169–179.

3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Moriaki Watanabe (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1986), pp.120–121.

4. Nobuta, “DV: How Does One Become a ‘Party Concerned’?”, ibid.