Yuriko Koike, a former Japanese defense minister, became the
first woman elected governor of Tokyo. The recent New York Times article “Breaking
Japan’s Glass Ceiling, but Leaving Some Feminists Unconvinced”reported that
voting for her, regardless of one’s political views, would be a revolutionary
act because there are few women at the top in Japan. However, the article also
noted that some Japanese feminists have expressed disagreement with Koike
because of her conservatism.
In the election, some Japanese feminists opposed Koike for
her conservatism and for being a right-wing militarist, and instead explicitly
supported the male candidate, Shintaro Torigoe, who lacked an effective
campaign and ironically struggled with an allegation of sexual assault by a
female college student. Some also believe that Koike
lacks enthusiasm about improving women’s social status. A subset of
feminists in Japan also tend to be more
concerned about issues confronting working-class women than those facing women
in high positions.
Koike is known to be a core member of, or has had deep ties
to, the nationalistic right-wing cult Nippon Kaigi (or Japan Conference), which
has 38,000 members and is said to have, among its aims, the restoration of the
status of the emperor; keeping women in the home; reducing Western notions of
rights and equality; beefing up the military; removing the pacifist section
from the Constitution; rewriting textbooks to follow a right-wing agenda; and
rejecting Japan’s war crimes and sexual slavery comfort women. However, little
is known about the group’s actual activities and degree of political influence.
If many Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) politicians,
including 80 percent of the current cabinet, are also members of the same
group, how is Koike’s conservatism more alarming than that of others? Koike
has said that she has distanced herself from the group, while agreeing
with its basic ideas.
Koike might have been perceived by some female voters as a
self-serving opportunist or performer rather than as a leader for their fellow
women. She was a former defense minister who started her career as a TV
anchorwoman. Koike has been seen by many as willing to change her party
affiliation to take advantage of better opportunities, and she has had a
reputation for being ambitious and having great diplomatic skills. The former
prime minister, Morihiro Hosokawa, once called her “jiji
goroshi,” or old-men killer, for her ability to tame powerful older men.
I would argue that Koike won the election because of her
evocative performance of frustrated and subordinate femininity, which reflected
the reality of Japan’s gender inequality. Tokyo voters were weary of the daily
news about the former governor’s corruption and his denial of any misuse of tax
money. After his resignation, LDP members, including the prime minister, were
entirely preoccupied with their insider-based search for a nominee for governor
with little interest in investigating the corruption or instituting reforms to
make better use of taxpayers’ money. Koike turned the public negativity toward
the LDP to her advantage, presenting herself as the opposite of the former
governor, who had abused the public trust by spending taxpayer funds on
everything from luxurious family vacations to his son’s haircuts. Koike
promised to be trustworthy and honest, insisting that she would use tax
revenues wisely and frugally. She emphasized her determination to make the 2020
Olympics successful and to reduce waiting lists for daycare in Tokyo. Many
voters found her to be a dedicated and empathetic candidate. Her campaign
evoked the postwar Japanese archetype of the housewife who manages the home
wisely; this performance as a devoted “wife” was further intensified when LDP
members rejected the party endorsement of Koike, and when both the prime
minister, Abe, and the LDP secretary general explicitly ignored her in public
(a moment that was caught by the media). They even threatened to remove Koike
from the party for disobeying the senior men. This dismissive attitude toward
Koike made the LDP look bad, while evoking the image of the alienated and lone
Japanese woman (either a wife or a mother) who has been constrained by, and
struggled with, the nation’s male-dominated institutions.
While Koike may have been good at impression management
during critical moments in her own political career, some of her gendered
self-presentation might be the result of her own struggles in a highly
male-dominated workplace. Japan is known to be governed by the Iron Triangle,
which is defined as the unique institutional ties among the LDP, bureaucrats,
and large businesses. The Japanese workplace is centered on such values as
conformity, age-based hierarchy, and consensus-based decision making, and also
on the exclusion of women from the boy’s club. My recent book, Too Few
Women at the Top: The Persistence of Inequality in Japan, argues
that the absence of women leaders in Japan relates to the institutional
barriers resulting from Japanese business management and the nation’s
employment structure, which is characterized by little labor mobility in which
one’s career ascension is still shaped more by one’s age and one’s loyalty to
their employer than one’s skills. Women’s competence in many workplaces is
often questioned and delegitimized because there are few females who have been
able to break the glass ceiling.
Recently, Koike, now governor of Tokyo, expressed enthusiasm
about pushing
the idea of increasing the number of women leaders in Tokyo to boost
the economy. Because of her own experiences as a female leader, Koike just
might be effective in accelerating Japan’s slow move toward gender equality
which might ultimately outweigh any harm caused by her conservatism.
Cross-posted with permission from Gender & Society. The original post can be accessed at
the following address: https://gendersociety.wordpress.com/2016/10/26/tokyos-first-female-governor-and-japans-glass-ceiling/
Posted by
Kumiko Nemoto
Professor
Department of Global Affairs
Kyoto University of Foreign Studies
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