Women in Japan voted and stood for office for the first time on 10 April 1946. It was the country’s first postwar election and the first election after the Japanese government amended the Electoral Law to include women. Of the 79 female candidates, 39 were elected to Japan’s national parliament, the Diet.
Seventy years on, what is the state of gender relations in Japan? What issues now stimulate feminist campaigns and activism?
The most recent Global Gender Gap Report, which measures the gaps between men and women in each society, ranked Japan 101st out of the 145 countries surveyed. Of the report’s four subindices, Japan ranked 106th in women’s economic participation and opportunity, 84th in educational attainment, 42nd in health and survival and 104th in political empowerment.
Japan has almost closed the gender gap in education and in health, but much more has to be done in terms of economic and political participation.
Japan now ranks equal 157th of 191 countries in women’s political participation according to the International Parliamentary Union. After the 2014 election, 45 out of 475 lower house members were women (9.5 percent) and after the 2013 election, 38 of 242 upper house members were women (15.7 percent). In 2015, 22 percent of ministerial positions in Japan were held by women, but only 25 individual women have served in Cabinet in the whole post-war period. In the latest upper house election in July 2016, where half of the seats came up for re-election, 28 women gained seats, compared to 26 in 2007 and 22 in 2013.
As for work, for much of the post-war period, women’s labour-force participation has been characterised by an M-shaped curve, whereby women leave the workforce on the birth of their children and return, often part-time, when their children reach school age. Although the curve is becoming shallower, there remains a significant gap between the number of women working and the number of women wishing to work.
The female employment rate is 63.6 percent, compared with around 95 percent for men, with women more likely to be found in non-regular employment. Some 43.9 percent of women leave work on childbirth. These figures reflect the continued difficulty in reconciling paid work with domestic work, as has been pointed out by feminist critics since the mid-20th century.
Much progress on gender policy in Japan was made in the 1990s. In line with the recommendations of the Beijing Platform for Action, which came out of the 1995 United Nations World Conference for Women, gender issues became a central policy priority. The late 1990s saw the passing of the Basic Law for a Gender Equal Society, the Plan for a Gender Equal Society and the creation of the Office for Gender Equality, now in the Cabinet Office.
This growing feminist influence on gender policy was met by a conservative backlash, led by current Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), in the early 2000s. As part of the LDP’s project team for ‘Investigating the Status of Radical Sex Education and Gender Free Education’, Abe and his allies attacked various initiatives that they saw as detrimental to what they called ‘traditional’ cultural values. This prompted media panics about such issues as sex education in schools.
Since his return to office in 2012, Abe has sought a more progressive image on gender issues. A range of policies, such as increasing the number of available childcare places, have been proposed under the slogan ‘womenomics’.
International legitimacy, as much as domestic policy, is a guiding objective behind the slogan — as Abe’s 2013 womenomics speech at the United Nations indicated. ‘I have been working to change Japan’s domestic structures’, he announced. ‘However, this is not confined merely to domestic matters … this is also a thread guiding Japan’s diplomacy.’
Contrary to the stated goals of womenomics, Abe’s government recently made it easier for employers in Japan to exploit temporary workers—a group which is disproportionately female — on long-term contracts, removing earlier restrictions.
Another contro