Women Will Save Japan

Ever since Japan's asset price bubble popped in the early 1990s, the country has struggled to recapture the dynamism that defined its swift post-war economic ascent. Japanese executives once hubristically aspired for their country to overtake the United States as the world's largest economy. Those dreams died as what was initially somewhat optimistically described as a single “lost decade” became two. In December 2012, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his conservative Liberal Democratic Party came to power after the country had gone through three Democratic Party of Japan prime ministers in three years. Abe, unlike his predecessors, has enjoyed political longevity in Japan; he sought to use that stability to implement his eponymous set of fiscal, monetary, and structural policies, known together as “Abenomics.”

Abenomics, per the prime minister, has never been a purely technocratic agenda, agnostic to Japan's socio-cultural circumstances. According to Abe, recalibrating Japanese gender dynamics, both inside and outside the workplace, is central to his economic plans. “Abenomics is Womenomics,” Abe declared, speaking at the 2015 World Assembly for Women in Tokyo. Since returning to office in 2012 after a sclerotic one-year prime ministerial term from 2006 to 2007, Abe's administration has focused heavily on the circumstances of Japanese women.

Almost four years on, however, much work remains to be done in Japan on gender equality. The World Economic Forum's annual gender equality rankings are one telling measure of the extent to which the Abe administration's top-down efforts at reform in Japan have failed. In 2015, Japan's ranking rose slightly to 101 out of 145 countries, placing it below several emerging and developing countries. In the 2016 rankings,though, Japan's ranking declined to 111. The drop was mostly attributed to the gender gap among professional and technical workers in Japan, the Forum noted.

Making matters more urgent, while Japan's population is in decline nationally, urbanization continues apace, with major cities like Tokyo and Osaka still experiencing population growth. With demographic concentration in the cities, where technical and professional jobs are more plentiful, the government's efforts to use the instruments of public policy to improve work-life balance will be increasingly important. Meanwhile, the demographic hollowing out of Japan's rural areas means that corporate sector cultural reform has grown even more central to Japan defying its demographic destiny.

One misconception is particularly persistent: the popular perception that women's labor force participation affects the total fertility rate, not only in Japan, but more broadly across the world. In Japan, specifically, total fertility rates have never been particularly promising in the post-war era. For instance, according to the World Bank, there were just seven years between 1960 and 2014 where Japan's fertility rate exceeded or matched the so-called replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman; a fertility rate below this number portends a shrinking population. The last year where Japan's fertility rate exceeded the replacement rate was 1971, when, according to the World Bank, it stood at 2.14 births per woman.

By 2014, this number had fallen to 1.42, one of the lowest rates in the developed world. However, the 2014 figure represented a modest improvement over numbers earlier in the 2000s. The absolute nadir of Japan’s fertility rate came in 2005, with just 1.26 births per woman. Based on the 2014 data, Japan is outperforming Germany (1.39 births per woman), South Korea (1.2 births per woman), and Singapore (1.25 births per woman). Given the modest increase and Japan's seemingly “normal” fertility rate compared to countries at a similar level of per capita income and overall development, some analysts and economists have stressed that the country may be just fine.

By the same token, Japan's total female labor force participation rates are far from anomalous. According to 2015 data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Japan's labor force participation rate for women between the ages of 15 and 64, at 66.7 percent, nearly matches that of the United States at 66.9 percent. Japan, meanwhile, outdoes the OECD average of 63 percent, and significantly outperforms its closest OECD counterpart in Asia, South Korea, which has a much lower women’s labor force participation rate of 57.9 percent. Looking at the period between 2005, the year Japan's total fertility rate reached its lowest-ever level, and 2014, we observed a 6 percentage point rise in women's labor force participation, corresponding with the rise in Japan's total fertility rate.

Despite Japan's respectable performance among countries at a similar level of development on both female labor force participation and total fertility rate as of 2014-2015, the country cannot grow complacent – and it indeed hasn't, with the Abe administration clearly recognizing the need for the government to take the lead on encouraging women's empowerment to slow population decline and restore economic growth. As noted above, nearly half a century of birth rates below replacement have already started the process of population contraction. Critically, according to the Statistics Bureau of the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication, as of 2014, one-third of all Japanese are above the age of 60, with 25.9 percent of all Japanese above the age of 65.

Meanwhile, with outdated and obsolete business practices rife in Japan, where a sclerotic corporate culture has prevented rapid change and adaption, economic productivity has remained largely stagnant. What this has meant is that Japan has seen its productivity remain flat while the size of its total labor force has declined, due to low birth rates and moderate labor force participation by the country's women. Japan's total labor force size peaked at 68 million in 1998 and has since declined to 65 million, with that trend expected to continue given the broader demographic picture. With unemployment rates hovering around 3 percent in recent quarters, Japan effectively meets the conditions for full employment for its existing labor force.

Policymakers in Japan – certainly within the Abe administration since 2012 – have responded to what the numbers have long suggested about Japan's demographic trajectory and recognized the need for the country to fully empower its women as part of a shrinking labor force. However, culture, many Japanese note, is often impervious to top-down change. Like elsewhere, cultural change is slow to come in Japan, where a strongly patriarchal culture continues to dominate corporate work culture, shaping societal expectations of men and women in ways that complicate the government's policy initiatives.

One recent illustration of the institutionally embedded cultural barriers to women's equality pulled headlines around the world. In October, the Tokyo District Court dismissed a case filed by a married female schoolteacher seeking to use her maiden name at work. Making matters worse and reflecting poorly on institutionalized cultural barriers to women's equality in Japan, the decision was made by a panel of three male judges, whose jurisprudence evoked the idea that the practice of women using maiden names in Japan was “not deeply rooted in society” and thus preventing the teacher from using her name “cannot be called a violation of her rights.” The teacher's school, meanwhile, argued that the issue was a matter of convenience, saying that “the legal name is the best way to identify an individual,” and permitting the use of a maiden name “would make management [of staff] cumbersome and could lead to a mix-up.”

Incidents like the above take place in Japan despite Article 24 of the Japanese constitution enshrining the “essential equality of the sexes” in these matters. Part of the reason institutional sexism continues to persist in Japan is due to the dominance of decision-making bodies, both in the public and private sectors, by men. As a result, improving women's representation in these bodies – everywhere from the kantei (prime minister's cabinet) to the Diet to the boards of directors of private companies – will be critical.

Here, Abe has come under fire for not exactly walking the walk while talking the talk on Womenomics. His newest cabinet, launched in August 2016, features just three women among 19 fixed ministerial positions. Among them is Tomomi Inada, an ultra-conservative with a revisionist view of Japanese history, who became Japan's second female defense minister since the position was established in 2007. Previously, in 2014, Yuko Obuchi and Midori Matsushima, two prominent women among five on the cabinet at the time, resigned after separate political scandals.

Outside the cabinet, political representation for women is exceptionally low in the Diet. Japan not only trails many developed democracies with regard to its number of female lawmakers, but even falls behind culturally conservative, less developed states that use quotas to ensure representation. According to the International Parliamentary Union, Japan ranks 157th out of 191 countries for women's political participation. Out of 475 available seats in the lower house of the Japanese Diet, 45 are occupied by women as of the 2014 elections. In the upper house, after the July 2016 elections, 50 seats out of 242 are occupied by women. Moreover, in a sign of some progress, 28 women gained upper house seats in the July elections, compared to 22 in the 2013 elections and 26 in the 2007 elections.

The cause of Japan's continued lack of progress is attributable primarily to cultural factors, according to certain Japanese lawmakers. Masaharu Nakagawa, a member of the opposition Democratic Party who was minister of state for gender equality in the DPJ government that preceded Abe, told The Diplomat that one fundamental problem within the Diet is the continued self-interest of male politicians, who want to avoid implementing a quota system. “If women gain, then men will have to lose,” Nakagawa noted. Similarly, Seiko Noda,  the second woman to chair the general council of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and a promising candidate to become the first female prime minister of Japan, told The Diplomat that the primary inhibitor was cultural. It's “traditional culture and traditional thinking,” Noda remarked, adding that the idea that “men are higher than women and women are not supposed to be higher” is powerful in Japan, particularly among the politically dominant LDP's electorate.

As of 2016, the Tokyo metropolitan area is poised to emerge as the frontier to watch for a more active top-down approach to enabling women's economic participation. Yuriko Koike's spectacular victory in the governor's race for the world's largest metropolitan area, which also represents Japan's largest prefecture, was partly enabled by her decision to campaign on promises to implement family and women-friendly policies. Koike, the first woman to become the governor of Tokyo, encountered a sexist backlash during her campaign, particularly from the more conservative wing of the Liberal Democratic Party. For instance, Shintaro Ishihara, the ultra-nationalist former governor of Tokyo from 1999 to 2012, infamously warned Tokyo voters: “We cannot leave Tokyo to a woman with too much make-up.”

Koike's political story in itself is telling of a range of issues that continue to shape women's political representation in Japan. Once an LDP member, Koike stood out for becoming the country's first female defense minister and the first women to lead the general council of the LDP (preceding both Inada and Noda, respectively, in these roles). When she failed to gain her party's approval and support to run for the governorship of Tokyo, she ended up having to run as an independent. Despite considerable overlap in their political views, Abe, who could have thrown his support behind Koike, chose to back the LDP’s chosen candidate, Hiroya Matsuda.

Moreover, it's striking that women like Koike and Inada, who have succeeded in Japanese politics recently (one within the LDP's party framework and the other outside), happen to espouse hyper-nationalist views that comport with the revisionist wing of the LDP. It is suggestive of a phenomenon where if women are to ascend to the highest rungs of Japanese politics under the LDP, they must at least acquiesce to the party's shibboleths on Japan's wartime legacy, leaving less room for disruptive independence. (Koike's independent candidacy focused primarily on reining in spiraling costs for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, after her predecessor Yoichi Masuzoe resigned after a fiscal scandal, and family-friendly policies.)

The hallowed halls of the Japanese Diet and the seats of the kantei really don't appear to be at the forefront of the cultural change necessary to improve political representation for women. The private sector, where things aren't much better, has at least been on the receiving end of top-down policy nudges from the Abe administration. At the onset of Womenomics, Abe famously picked up on the idea first pitched by his LDP predecessor as prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, that women should occupy at least 30 percent of leadership positions. Discouragingly, in an acknowledgement of structural realities, the government revised this sharply downwards to just 7 percent in December 2015.

Japanese companies have done some of the legwork in implementing change – at least on paper. For instance, companies report diversity data, women are encouraged to take paid maternity leave, and the Japanese government provides excellent, though scarce, daycare facilities. (More than 20,000 Japanese children are on the waiting list for daycare at any given time.) According to the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, both the number of Japanese daycare facilities and enrollments within those facilities have risen sharply since 2011. Though female representation in the C-suite and on boards continues to disappoint – not a single Nikkei 225 corporation has a female CEO – the policy legwork necessary to encourage women's labor force participation and the concomitant increase in birth rates appears to have been put in place.

As a result of these developments, the once-canonical “M curve” that used to describe Japanese women's lifetime work patterns – named for the trend of women entering the labor force in large numbers, dropping out to have children, and the re-entering later in life in part-time or secretarial roles – has been somewhat abated. Working mothers are increasingly remaining within the workforce. Despite this, with regard to Womenomics, many women's rights activists and leaders are starting to take the view that the extent to which change can be effected in Japan through reforms to laws and institutions, at least in the private sector, has been largely exhausted.

Here, cultural understandings of work-life balancing and men's gender roles in Japanese society come to bear on gender equality outcomes. The term karoshi, or death by overwork, encapsulates the work-life balance problems that persist across Japan – especially in the country's large and concentrated urban centers, like Tokyo and Osaka. Though similar terms exist in South Korea and even China, the Japanese government has treated the issue as a serious matter of public health, tracking statistics since the late-1980s. In the 1990s, Japan introduced a five-year statute to reduce working hours, which was extended until 2006. Today, Japanese working mothers can avail themselves of early departure and late arrival policies in many workplaces to enable simultaneous full-time work and childrearing. However, the phenomenon of matahara – a portmanteau of the words “maternity” and  “harassment,” describing illegal retaliation by employers against mothers – affects women's careers and their ability to and interest in having children. For Japanese men, expectations of long work hours remain culturally ingrained as well.

One striking statistic that underlines the ongoing cultural challenges, despite all the public policy attention to these issues, is the rate at which working mothers and working fathers take childcare leave. Per the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare's 2014 longitudinal survey, 93.5 percent of working mothers availed of child care leave policies while just 2 percent of Japanese working fathers did the same. Among those working fathers, 45.2 percent said that they knew a system of taking leave existed at their companies, but chose not to use the benefit. Expectations that men work and work hard continue to persist.

There are some signs of limited change on the horizon in shifting what's expected of Japanese men, but once again from the top down. One of these is the ikumen phenomenon, which represents a new masculine archetype. Originally coined by an advertising agency and since supported by the government, the term is a clever portmanteau of the Japanese term iku-ji (or child-rearing) and "men," but also a homophone to ikemen (roughly meaning “cool guy” or “handsome guy”). A Japanese ikumen may be a young urban professional who drops his child off at work, carries his newborn on his chest in a baby carrier, and heads home after work to play with and read to his child instead of going out drinking with his colleagues. The term has been widely co-opted by Japanese print and television media and even foreign celebrities from Brad Pitt to Prince William have been described as adopting the ikumen archetype. One moderately successful campaign, however, has brought the rate of paternal leave benefit use up to its current record-high number of just 2 percent. Clearly, more remains to be done in this regard.

A common theme with the above efforts to improve outcomes for Japan's working women is that they continue to be imposed from the top down, with limited buy in on the societal level. In this context, are ambitious Japanese women optimistic about the future of gender equality in their country?

Akane Yamamoto, a college student involved in political activism at Sophia University currently embarking on her job hunt in Tokyo, told The Diplomat that she was optimistic that change can come to Japan, slowly but surely. “I am Japanese and I love Japan,” she said. “I want to stay here and make things better. I'm confident that we can do it,” she added, expressing confidence in the younger generation of Japanese women. She isn't alone; Japanese women are increasingly speaking out against matahara and related gender discrimination phenomena in the country. That Koike successfully won the Tokyo governorship while emphasizing these issues speaks to a latent democratic undercurrent in the city in favor of change.

Japan won't return to the high-flying days of the late-1980s, when many expected it to overtake the United States. In 2011, Japan was surpassed by China as the world's second largest economy; between 2011 and 2012, the country's population reached its peak of just under 127.5 million. If the country is to maintain its status as an Asian economic and geopolitical heavyweight, it will need to empower and fully leverage its women. Doing so will not only help the country out of more than two decades of economic malaise, but soften the impact of the incoming population contraction. Japanese policymakers and leaders recognize this. What they have been less successful in accomplishing to date is the more complex sociological project of re-engineering gender roles to fully energize the reforms that have been put in place.

Either way, Japan's clock is ticking. And it's far beyond time for Japan to let its women save it from decline.