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Change Your Life! |
Women get the upper hand in Japanese election |
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Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, right, and former Foreign Minister Yukihiko Ikeda react as updated turnout of the lower house elections is announced at the ruling Liberal Democratic Party headquarters in Tokyo Sunday, June 25, 2000. The three-party ruling coalition held onto power, winning majority of the 480-seat chamber. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara) |
June 27, 2000
TOKYO
(AP) - The victorious candidates leading the traditional
"banzai" cheer following Japan's national election included more
women than at any time in the last 44 years. But after the applause died down, some seemed pessimistic about the obstacles they still face in the country's male-dominated political system. "Women are handicapped as candidates and remain at a disadvantage even after getting into office," said Tomoko Nakagawa, a second-term lawmaker from the opposition Social Democratic Party. |
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Nakagawa was one of 35 women who won seats in the powerful lower house of Parliament on Sunday in an election that returned the three-party conservative coalition to power. That's
the largest female contingent to be voted into the lower house
since 1946, when 39 women were victorious in the nation's first election
under the postwar democratic constitution drafted by the U.S. occupiers.
And the 202 women who stood for office set an all-time record, up 32 percent from 153 in the previous election four years ago. The trend is an encouraging one for women in Japan, where politics remains a bastion of male domination even as opportunities in the workplace are increasing.
But the election results represent only a small breach in that bastion - which is why some Japanese women say it's too early to be optimistic.
Women still only occupy 7 percent of the country's 480 lower-house seats, among the lowest representation of any industrialized country.
Nakagawa says it all starts in the family, where many Japanese men remain reluctant to support their wives' career aspirations, political or otherwise.
"If you're a male politician, your wife attends supporters' funerals and weddings for you," she said in an interview. "But it doesn't work the other way around."
Though Japan passed a landmark law guaranteeing equal employment opportunities for women in 1985, male attitudes and workplace realities have been slow to change.
The idea that a woman's place is in the home remains especially pervasive among the sixtysomethings and seventysomethings who dominate the country's seniority-based political system. That has a lot to do with why parties don't take women seriously as candidates or voters, analysts say.
"The
attitude persists in Japanese politics that even if women get
angry it's okay because they'll just go back to the kitchen," said
Yasunobu Iwai, a professor of political science at Tokiwa University.
Few female politicians reach senior positions in their parties, and Cabinets typically include just one or two women who are given token portfolios with little influence.
The Cabinet that current Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori inherited from his late predecessor included a single woman - Kayoko Shimizu, a member of Mori's Liberal Democratic Party who was given the job of running the Environment Ministry. Japan has never had active or powerful environmental groups in an economy with powerful smokestack industries.
That's why some women in Japan are cynical about this year's jump in the number of their sisters running and winning national office.
They say political parties are recruiting more women than ever simply because having them on the ticket can be a vote-winner.
But nobody's offering them admittance into the old-boy club of Japanese politics.
"More
women are being asked to run as an electoral strategy," said
Teiko Kihira, president of the League of Women Voters of Japan and a
former upper-house parliamentarian. "That's not the same thing as asking them to participate in politics on the same terms as men."
One of the few influential women in Japanese politics is Takako Doi, the longtime leader of the small Social Democratic Party. Sunday's election increased its seats from 14 to 19, and 10 of the winning candidates were women.
Still, those and other electoral achievements by women were given little attention by the Japanese media.
The
woman who got the most coverage was Yuko Obuchi, the 26-year-old
daughter of former Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, who died of stroke last
month after spending more than a month in a coma. Pledging to carry out her father's unfinished business, she ran a winning campaign in his old constituency, despite her self-avowed lack of political experience.
Obuchi's success story, though common enough in a country known for its political dynasties, was one that some Japanese women would have preferred to hear less about.
"I didn't like the way she took advantage of the sympathy vote," said Yuko Hirana, a 25-year-old woman who works for a dot-com startup.
"We
need more women in politics who seem to know what they're doing." |
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