The Tomorrow Girls Troop critically and creatively engage with pop culture, making use of magazines, internet memes, commercial advertisements, and comics in a way that opens up the topic of feminism to a wide audience. By adopting the forms of popular culture, the Tomorrow Girls Troop work in the space between parody, critique, and suggestion. They aim to provoke discussion and a questioning of norms, heightening awareness of invisible social pressures at work in Japanese and Korean societies and inviting people to look beyond the oppressive framework that is given by the heteronormative, male-dominated society.
The Tomorrow Girls Troop formed in 2015 in Japan, and have globally active members based in Japan, South Korea, and the US. Members remain anonymous and have diverse education backgrounds including visual arts, media, gender studies, performance, and dance. Their socially engaged practice entails video, performances, graphic design, petitions and protests, lectures and workshops.
In 2015, Tomorrow Girls Troop launched the successful petition to remove the sexualised city mascot for Shima, Japan. In 2016, this grew to address to a petition against the Japanese penal code for sex crimes to promote safety for victims, coinciding with the ‘Believe—we know it’ campaign. The most recent petition in 2017 saw new definitions for feminist and feminism written in the 2018 edition of the kojien dictionary, and this remains an ongoing project.
