Japan apologizes to its women

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Japan apologizes to its women


Noah Smith

On June 23, a middle-aged male Japanese politician, dressed in the traditional dark suit and ‘80s-retro haircut, walked in front of a waiting line of news cameras, to where a younger female politician waited. As the cameras flashed, he apologized to the woman, and bowed deeply; she looked on gravely.




This incident is only a symbol, but it points to a larger underlying trend - the metamorphosis of Japanese women from a subservient caste, valued only for their delicate beauty and homemaking skills, to full-fledged equal members of society. Prime Minister Abe, of course, is making a name as the chief booster of women’s economic equality, but it turns out that he’s jumping on a trend that’s been building for a while. Working-age women’s employment has been climbing steadily since the early 2000s, and is now higher than in the United States. Slowly, Japanese companies are hiring more female managers and executives, and Japanese voters are electing more female politicians.

Meanwhile, social change is happening as well. Popular TV shows now depict women as tough, smart lawyers. Child pornography - which exploits large numbers of teenage girls - was finally banned this month. The man who egged the sexist politician’s house is an example of a growing trend of “white knighting” (men standing up for women who are being bullied in public) in a country more traditionally known for train groping.

Of course, all change is generational; some older, conservative Japanese men still view women as inferiors, to be bullied and humiliated at will (much like in the United States). Just a couple of weeks after the Shiomura incident, a female politician in Osaka was heckled in a similar incident. And Japan still lags far behind most other rich nations in gender equality.

But there are two forces driving social change in Japan. The first is the changing of the guard. As Devin Stewart of the Carnegie Foundation has noted, the 76er generation - Japan’s equivalent of America’s Generation X - is far more liberal in its outlook than the older baby boomers. Feminists such as Mariko Bando, Chizuko Ueno and Akie Abe (yes, the prime minister’s wife!) have gained national celebrity, and a new generation, such as writer Renge Jibu and activists Asako Osaki and Emmy Suzuki-Harris, are gaining in prominence as well. Meanwhile, younger male executives, politicians and academics are also talking much more openly about the need for women’s equality.

The second force is economic, and here Abe becomes the central figure. Abe’s reforms include moves toward shareholder capitalism, free trade, lower corporate taxes and deregulation - a sort of delayed Reagan-Thatcher revolution. Those measures, even if partly successful, will put pressure on Japanese companies to hire women (who offer more productivity per dollar than men), to reform the rigid labor systems that are biased against working mothers and to ditch the expensive drinking sessions that preserve the “boys’ club” mentality.

Many Westerners and Japanese people alike tend to view Japan as an ancient, unchanging samurai culture, bound eternally in traditional feudal values. But Japan is turning out to be much more like Europe and America - a place capable of social as well as economic progress, a place capable of reinventing itself through both evolution and revolution.

*The author is an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University and a freelance writer for a number of finance and business publications.

BY Noah Smith

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