This chapter offers a study of the iconoclastic Uchida Shungiku and her series of pregnancy manga, We are Breeding, 1994-. Uchida has become notorious in Japan not only for her willingness to expose the seamy underside of Japanese family life (chronicled in her 1993 autobiographical novel Father Fucker), but also for her own unorthodox attitudes towards marriage and child-rearing. While becoming a mother has given Uchida a platform to assail the unfairness of the patriarchal Japanese family system, she refuses to allow motherhood to define her as a woman. For Uchida, pregnancy has served as a means of self-assertion, transforming her into an avatar of Japanese post-feminism. More recently, Uchida has turned her attention from making children to raising them: her frank and often funny sex-education manga (Sex for Girls), addressed to her own daughters, attempts to provide an honest discussion about sex and the body in contemporary Japan.
