Say it like you mean it.
Source: The Asahi
Shimbun via Getty Images
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.
To a naïve Western observer, this scene might look like
just another day in the byzantine, hidebound world of Japanese politics.
But I’ve been watching Japanese politics and civil society for more
than a decade now, and when I saw Akihiro Suzuki bow to Ayaka Shiomura, I
caught my breath. I knew what I was seeing was big. Epochal, even.
The background: On June 18, Assemblywoman Shiomura, who belongs to a
small minority party, was speaking to the Tokyo city assembly about the
need for programs to support working women -- a point that has been a
main theme of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s administration. While she was
speaking, someone from Abe's dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)
yelled: “You should get married!” and “Can’t you even bear a child?”
Shiomura, visibly disturbed, finished her speech, after which she
returned to her seat and began to cry. After the incident, Shiomura and
other opposition politicians requested that the LDP find and punish the
heckler, but party officials responded that they didn’t know the
identity of the heckler, and hence could do nothing.
In the Japan
of the 1990s or early 2000s, that probably would have been the end of
the issue. But not this time. Soon, the story was all over the Japanese
news, and complaints began
pouring in.
Petitions appeared and circulated, demanding that the offenders be
found and forced to apologize (about 100,000 people signed). A network
of feminist groups, using the petition-gathering platform
Change.org,
made the issue a rallying point. A few days later, the LDP caved,
identifying Akihiro Suzuki as the man responsible for (at least some of)
the heckling. The historic apology followed soon after. But that didn’t
stop an angry man from
egging Suzuki’s house!
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 U.S. 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
U. S.). 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 Council
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.
Stilwell Road (Photo Courtesy: gokumming.com)
