The Problem of Women’s Representation in Japanese Politics

Introduction

Japan is the world’s third-largest economy and one of the world’s most advanced industrialized nations.  However, unlike most advanced urban post-industrial societies the representation of women in its government has historically been disappointing.  In recent years, when one might expect to see more progress in women’s representation, there have actually been setbacks.  This is quite dismaying.  This paper will examine how a global economic dynamo, like Japan, could have such a poor record on women’s participation in its political life and consider some solutions to remedy this problem. 

This paper is organized into several sections. The first section of the paper will discuss some facts related to the general state of women’s representation in the Diet or parliament. Section two will provide a brief summary of how women’s suffrage came to be established in US and Japan.  The different circumstances of women’s suffrage in each country will then be compared and contrasted.  The third section will discuss the evolution of women’s participation in post-war Japan. The fourth section will introduce congruence theory as a means to explain the evolution of women’s political role in post-war Japan. The fifth section will review some additional institutional causes. The final sixth section is the summary and conclusion with some recommendations for change. 

1. Current State of Women’s Representation in Japan

After the results of a general election in December 2012, the proportion of women in the Lower House of the Diet or Japanese parliament declined to 7.9%. According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), The Upper House of the Diet did maintain a higher 18.2% of its women members (“Women in Parliaments”). But the Lower House is the more powerful policy-making body of the Diet and thus a more crucial object of effort to improve women’s representation is focused there. The vote also comes in the wake of a parliamentary goal set down in 2006 to increase women’s representation in the Diet to 30%.  As reported in the Wall Street Journal (Masuda 2013), the record on women’s participation was not exactly great even before the December vote. According to Eto (2010, 177), women’s representation in the lower house was only 11.3% in 2007.  Japan’s international rank on women’s representation in its lower house placed it 113th out of 190 countries. As a point of comparison, among G7 countries Germany attained the best record with an IPU ranking of 24th and nearly one-third of its lower house members were women. The US is ranked 82nd at 17% representation for women.  The world-wide average was nearly 21% for women’s legislative representation. This means Japan’s ranking is not only well below the global average but its rank is actually lower than that of many developing countries (Eto 2010, 177).  The lack of a powerful national female figure, such as Hillary Clinton, is quite stark especially in comparison to South Korea.  That nation elected its first female prime minister in January 2013 and only less than 15 years ago was still very much an authoritarian society.

So how does one account for the virtual dearth of women’s participation in the highest-ranking decision-making apparatus in the country?  According to a relatively small but growing body of research in this area, the culprit is identified to be one or more the following factors working in combination: the electoral system, the nation’s socio-political culture, and the role of women’s own attitudes in their underrepresentation in the institutions of their nation’s governance. However, before moving on to a discussion of the factors we should begin at the beginning with the issue of women’s suffrage in Japan and a comparison with the United States may be instructive in this regard. 

2. Women’s Suffrage in the US and Japan

Women’s suffrage or the right of women to vote and run for political office was one of the great hallmarks of civil rights struggle in the US. The very notion of suffrage was entangled in a larger debate about the role of women in US society.  The central question being were women to forever remain second-class citizens and subordinate to men in all things or full and equal partnerships with men in society.  The attainment of this right was the product of a long struggle waged in the 19th and 20th centuries and was concurrent with other critical struggles for human and civil rights such as the abolitionist movement. Indeed some members of the women’s suffrage movement saw in the freeing of slaves and granting of suffrage to freedmen (but not to women) hopeful signs of progress for their own movement.  Women’s suffrage can be said to have begun with the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848.  After the Civil War, two organizations with somewhat conflicting ideologies, the American Woman Suffrage Association and the National Woman Suffrage Association, of which both were supported by Emma Goldman, emerged and worked to achieve women’s suffrage at either the federal or state and local levels.  The groups merged after 1900 and tremendous support was demonstrated for suffrage with demonstrations in Washington, D.C. and New York City. The result of these efforts was the final passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.  It should be noted that this final passage was not the first attempt to passage a women’s suffrage bill.  

The way women’s suffrage was achieved in Japan is not usually discussed by the sources consulted for this paper.  This is odd since the circumstances are so compellingly different than that of the US, they can fail to be immediately instructive of how the role of women in Japanese political life has developed as it has.  As pointed out by Takao, women’s suffrage was imposed on Japan in December 1945 by US occupation authorities who also wrote the country’s post-war Constitution. Suffrage was granted to Japanese women 20 and over.  The right to hold political office was granted to Japanese women 25 and over. Also articles 14, 24, and 44 of the Constitution of 1947 proclaimed equality for men and women. It may be it was thought mere constitutional provision of a right would automatically make its implementation a reality. But it did not.

The passage of the Nineteenth Amendment was the culmination of several decades of organizing and protest.  The suffrage movement did not function in a social, political or cultural vacuum.  The aims of the US women’s suffrage movement was seen by many activists to overlap with both the abolitionist movement and the right of black Americans to be treated as free and equal citizens after the Civil War.  Success on one was seen by some activists to have a feedback effect on the other.  However, the attainment of women’s suffrage in Japan was not by any means the result of a broad-based social movement.  It was imposed on Japan.  It was done so at a time when it was unclear whether there was any consensus, by either men or women in Japanese society, for this newfound role for women in the nation’s political life.  

3. Women in Post-War Japanese Political Life

During this period women’s representation in the Diet remained modest. Also, representation in sub-national governments varied in quality from the more liberal and highly urbanized Tokyo metropolitan area, which demonstrated particular regard for women’s participation (Eto 2010, 183).  At the same time, there was virtual non-existence of women’s participation in rural areas where traditional gender roles remained in force. In the late 1990s the overall proportion of women in local assemblies was only 6.2% (Takao). 

Women’s participation in post-war Japanese politics does not seem to have become an international issue until the United Nations began to make women rights an issue in the mid-1970s (Takao; Eto 2010, 182). By the mid-1990s, the UN introduced more robust protections for women which were ratified by both Japan and other member states. Of particular note is the 1995 Beijing Women’s Conference.  This conference brought attention to the condition of women’s participation in Japanese politics and encouraged local activists to put pressure on the national government to bring Japan’s record on women’s representation in congruence with the rest of the industrialized world. 

In response, the Diet passed the Basic Law for a Gender-Equal Society in 1999.  This legislation is notable as being the first time the Japanese government explicitly advocated gender equality. As mentioned earlier the Diet also tried introducing a quota system for women parliamentarians.  But implementation of these policies has not been particularly long-lasting or successful. It appears the main culprit is that gender equality was and still is being imposed in Japan from the top-down rather than built up. This is juxtaposed with the US where equality grew from a grassroots movement of long-standing provenance. The introduction of gender equality was done under the aegis of American imperialism.  One should expect there to be some cultural resistance to it. Since then the impetus has come from another external agency, the UN, looking to inculcate “Western” values in Japan and other regions of the globe and often with similar results. 

4. Congruence Theory 

But how to make sense of the consequences of having one’s societal institutions re-shaped by an external, imperialist agency? According to congruence theory, institutional structures reflect, or should reflect, the political culture of a society (Wallace, Haerpfer, and Abbott 2009, 112).  The authors report research that indicates a strong transnational relationship between the proportion of women in a legislature and societal attitudes towards gender equality.  Specifically, congruence theory holds that if societal claims for democracy surpass that provided by the institutions of society, then popular pressure increases until the institutions are reformed to reflect the popular demands of society. The authors do note unusual cases where institutions provide more democracy than the political culture has sought.  In such cases, rebalancing in the reverse direction has been observed (Wallace, Haerpfer, and Abbott 2009, 112). It is the argument of this paper that just such a reverse direction rebalancing has occurred in post-war Japan over gender equality.  

5. Other Issues

As mentioned in the introduction, the electoral system, the nation’s socio-political culture, and the role of women’s own attitudes toward their underrepresentation in the institutions of their nation’s governance are implicated as causes. Each of these structural problems will be discussed below. 

First, the electoral system in Japan is a mixture of proportional representation (PR) and majoritarian electoral systems. In brief, under PR systems, multiple candidates can win seats in an election.  In Japan, the system allows for certain portions of seats to be selected using the PR method and some using the majoritarian.  Candidates stand for election in multimember districts which can include from 3 to 7 members.  This greatly increases the chances for women to both be advanced as candidates and to win elections.  Under the majoritarian or first-pass-the-post (FPTP) system commonly used in the US and the UK, candidates stand for election in single-member districts.  This is particularly problematic for women candidates in Japan because political parties will want to advance only their strongest and most popular candidates.  In rare instances have these candidates been women. Eto (2010, 181) points out that until the 1990s, the Japanese electoral system was actually more heavily weighted to the PR electoral procedure.  But perhaps in response to the growing movement to improve the representation of women, the Japanese government began moving away from the advantageous PR methodology to the more disenfranchising single-member district method. It was only some significant political activism that prevented a switch over to a purely FPTP method in the 1990s (Eto 2010, 180). 

Second, the nation’s socio-political culture is also at issue.  Despite being a highly industrialized nation with a significant liberal culture in urban centers like Tokyo, Japan continues to have a predominantly conservative political culture.  Prescribed gender roles appear to be from the pre-industrial era and remain stubbornly persistent. Eto (2010, 189) mentions a contrast between the European style welfare state and the one that prevails in Japan.  In Europe, social welfare policies target the individual and this is seen as particularly empowering of women. However, in Japan these policies target the family, in which the male is seen as the sole breadwinner. Also, politics in Japan, perhaps also like business, is a full-time occupation consuming most of the personal time of male politicians. This wouldn’t be feasible for married Japanese men unless their wives stayed at home to take care of the household and children. Indeed, Japan maintains a division of labor between the genders that is quite reminiscent of a pre-industrial society: the public sphere is for males, the private sphere is for females. It is also doubtful most women would make the tradeoffs that men do to engage in political or business careers. This was brought to the forefront when a female member of parliament became pregnant and was asked by some of her peers to resign (Eto 2010, 187). One way to mitigate this problem is a family leave policy that allows women to maintain their jobs during pregnancy and to provide alternatives to the “stay at home mom” model such as daycare.  Legislation was passed in 2005 to address some of these issues, but the law as written does not apply to parliament members. 

The third and final issue is that of women’s political attitudes themselves.  Japanese women appear to espouse attitudes towards gender roles that advance the interests of gender discrimination and of a patriarchal state.  Eto (2010, 187-188) reports survey research which shows that many Japanese women agree with men that a woman’s place is in the home.  The survey also reported women agree that politics was for men not women. It may be that the lack of institutional support combined with the prevailing socio-political culture is discouraging many Japanese women from even considering participating in politics. 

6. Summary and Conclusion

In sum, this paper has argued that women’s suffrage arrived by very different means in Japan and the US. Whereas a social movement achieved women’s suffrage in the US, the same was imposed by a hierarchical, external and imperialist authority in Japan. This alone may explain why gender equality was never accepted or internalized into the political culture of Japan.  In order for gender equality to have real cultural meaning in Japan it has to be built up from the grassroots. Other factors are also at play: institutional, socio-cultural and women’s own attitudes toward their role in society are all significant obstacles to realizing North American and European style gender equality. It is suggested here that congruence theory indicates a reverse rebalancing has occurred in Japan where weak demand for woman’s representation has shifted the political culture of institutions in favor of less participation for women. The only way this broad societal condition can be changed is if Japanese women make it change, just as women in other industrialized societies have done: they have to create a social movement.

Works Cited

Eto, Mikiko. Women and Representation in Japan: The Causes of Political Inequality. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 12:2 June 2010, 177–201. Print. 

Masuda, Yoko. “Japan’s Growing Political Gender Gap.” Wsj.com, 20 Dec.2012 .Web. June 2013. Retrieved from http://blogs.wsj.com. 

Takao, Yasuo. “Women in Japanese Local Politics: From Voters to Activists to Politicians.” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, n.d. Web. June 2013. Retrieved from http://www.japanfocus.org/-Yasuo-TAKAO/2647.

Wallace, Claire, Haerpfer, Christian, Abbott, Pamela. Women in Rwandan Politics and Society. International Journal of Sociology, vol. 38, no. 4, winter, 2008-09, pp. 111-125. Print.