JUN TAKAGI FOR TIME

IN THE PINK: Lingerie entrepreneur and mother of four Mika Noguchi

The Wasted Asset
	Japanese women are smart and entrepreneurial, so why is so little effort made to harness their talents?
	By Hannah Beech

Posted Monday, August 22, 2005; 20:00 HKT
Yuka Tanimoto knows how to serve tea. She can do far more than that, of course, but the 33-year-old newscaster says her Japanese male bosses—and they were all male—weren't overly interested in her non-tea-pouring skills. At the Yamaichi Securities firm, which Tanimoto joined in 1997 as an in-house newscaster, she was chided for daring to voice her opinions on news content—and for cropping her uniform skirt from mid-calf to a scandalous length just below the knee. "The company was looking for cute, non-ambitious girls," says Tanimoto. "We were supposed to make copies quietly, not think." In 2000, Tanimoto moved to the electronics giant Matsushita, but things weren't much different. Only 2% of the women she worked with were on a career track; the rest were so-called office ladies who rarely graduated from tea and copy duty, even after years of service. After getting her M.B.A. in the U.S. last year, Tanimoto couldn't face working for another Japanese company. So in March, she took a job with CNBC as their Tokyo markets reporter. "As a woman, I can rise much higher at a foreign company than at a Japanese one," says Tanimoto. "The Japanese business culture is not changing quickly enough for people like me."

As Japan prepares for an election widely thought likely to define its future, it might contemplate why half of its population is still preserved in the amber of a tradition-bound past. During the country's bubble years, when jobs were plentiful and hopes were high, women began to expect both a greater role in the workplace and a lesser role in the home. In 1985, Japan's parliament passed a law ensuring gender equality at work, and men's magazines ran serious articles on the joys of cleaning a toilet. But then the golden apple was snatched away. Once the bubble economy burst in 1992, women were the first to be laid off. Although more women work now than a decade ago, they are still the last to be rehired to full-time jobs and must often eke out a living on part-time work. In May, a gender-gap survey by the World Economic Forum found that, in terms of economic opportunity and political empowerment, Japanese women ranked 52nd and 54th respectively out of 58 developed and emerging economies. And even though women were named as heads of two major Japanese companies earlier this year—at supermarket chain Daiei and electronics maker Sanyo—only 7.7% of departmental and section managers in the world's second-largest economy are female. Of those women who do manage to cultivate careers, just 30% continue working after childbirth because the rest cannot juggle both home and a job, according to the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare. "This is a critical period in Japanese history," says Hiroko Hara, a member of the Advisory Committee for the Prime Minister's Office on Gender Equality. "We have to figure out whether to keep fighting for our dream of equality or just give up on having it all."

In one way, there's nothing special about Japan. Women in the developed world have played out variations on the work vs. home theme for decades. But the stark career-or-kids choice in Japan has created a demographic nightmare. Because Japanese women are expected to quit their jobs when they have children, a record number are foregoing marriage altogether. Today, one in four Japanese women in their early 30s is single, up from 14% a decade ago. As a consequence, Japan's fertility rate fell to a record low of 1.29 in 2004 compared to 2.13 in the U.S., giving it one of the lowest birth rates in the world. Demographers predict that the country's population will actually start declining in 2007. If present trends continue, Japan will shrink from a nation of 127 million today to 64 million by the end of this century—and from 2010 onward, the declining population will adversely affect the economy. Yet compared to other developed economies, Japan, under the leadership of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has been notoriously slow in implementing policies like flexible hours for working mothers, enhanced day-care options and financial incentives for bearing more children.

That means that Japan is not getting anything like the most out of its workforce. Indeed, even though Japan will soon face a shortage of workers, a Cabinet Office survey released in July found that 63% of Japanese companies had no plans to try to hire more women. Tomoyo Nonaka, who took over as chairman of Sanyo in June, remembers her first attempts to get a job as a photojournalist. Nonaka had an advanced degree in the field but was told she was unqualified because she wasn't male. "That was my start in Japan," she says. "A very clear 'No thank you.'" And those who get "Yes" for an answer know they are fortunate. Yukari Yamashita-Yui, who develops satellites for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, works for an open-minded government agency, so her hours are regular. "I'm very lucky, because I couldn't do this at a private company," she says. "Half of my female friends from university have quit their jobs as astronomers. They wanted to continue working, but they had no choice. The working environment is almost impossible for mothers." Only 11.6% of Japan's scientific researchers are women, compared to one-third in the U.S.

You'd think the government might want to do something about that. On the contrary, allege critics: "There is no sense of crisis within the LDP, and no interest either," says former House of Representatives member Seiko Noda, who is often mentioned as a future leader of the party. "Why? Because the main opinion is that [the falling birthrate] is the women's fault and the men do not need to do anything." If anything, many LDP politicians would prefer to see women return to the role of okusan—which means "person in the back of the house"—as wives are commonly called in Japan. Last year, an LDP panel on constitutional reform issued a report recommending that Article 24 of the constitution, which guarantees equality between the sexes, should be revised because it has promoted "egoism in postwar Japan, leading to the collapse of family and community." Similarly, former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori has argued that childless women should not receive pension benefits: "It is truly strange to say that we have to use tax money to take care of women who don't even give birth once, who grow old living their lives selfishly."

In the run-up to next month's lower house elections, Japan's tabloids have sensationalized the fact that Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has approached several prominent women to stand for office against the 37 LDP party members who voted against his postal reform bill. So far, however, only four women have committed to run as so-called LDP "assassins." While postal reform is the election's key issue, the party has included a few family-friendly planks in its latest manifesto, including tax breaks for households with kids and proposals to improve childcare at smaller companies. But critics like Noda have charged that the party leadership panders to women only in times of crisis. And, according to the latest tally, the LDP still has the lowest number of female election candidates—just 17, compared to 23 for the Democratic Party of Japan and 68 for the Japanese Communist Party.

Certainly, less-than-progressive attitudes remain surprisingly common among the LDP élite. This summer, a faction of ruling-party members, including acting LDP secretary-general Shinzo Abe, often tipped as a likely future Prime Minister, publicly criticized a governmental draft report on how to achieve gender equality. "A [gender-free] concept which ignores the value of marriage and the family is linked to the destruction of culture," said Abe during a party conference. Minoru Nakamura, a popular assemblyman from the Tokyo suburb of Funabashi, was even more blunt about those who advocate equality between the sexes. "Pitiable women who direct their dissatisfaction at being ignored by men toward society ... are truly laughable," Nakamura said. He then added: "It's also strange how these women, compared to their peers, are uglier. "In theory, younger Japanese men are far more open to equality than their fathers. They have to be: two incomes are often the only way that a family can maintain a comfortable lifestyle in Japan's big cities. Still, the pressures of a workaholic culture dissuade men from cutting out early and doing a little dusting. Work in Japan can extend to late-night drinking sessions with the bosses, and men who don't guzzle beer with their peers may find career prospects stunted. Only 0.4% of men take paternity leave, while 73% of women take maternity leave. Wives also shoulder most of the burden of caring for the country's rapidly aging population. "Women must work twice as hard as men to advance their careers because of prejudices within Japanese companies," says women's rights activist Hara. "And then they have to go home and work three times as hard there." Hara's housework estimate, in fact, may be too low: a survey by the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation found that women spend a daily average of 3 hours and 49 minutes on household duties. Men? They spent just 32 minutes a day on the chores.

Continued...

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