Let me begin with a story I used to hear a lot when I was growing up. A great grandmother of mine got married at the age of 13. Being a teenage girl, she hadn’t got her period started. Not just yet. Her husband was very young as well. And totally unaware about menstruation. He demanded of her to get pregnant right away. As you can imagine this didn’t happen. So to punish his girl - wife for not giving him a child, he made her cook huge meals and invited his male friends over to eat. She was forced to serve them while she was starving. The torture came to an end as she started getting her period and got pregant to her first child. Then she was allowed to her fundamental right of …you know..EATING.

That story dates back to Greece of early 1900’s. It hit my memory while I was searching for information about a woman’s role in Japan these days. I had just come accros this statement of Minister of Health, Labor and Welfare Hakuo Yanagisawa in 2007 -women are childbearing machines. Under existing gender norms you see, giving birth and raising children is still considered a woman’s main contribution to Japanese society.

Few months ago, while in preparative state for the Tokyo Olympics, Momoko Nojo run a petition campaign that gathered 150,000 signatures in just two weeks. The #DontBeSilent campaign helped oust Tokyo’s Olympic chief Yoshiro Mori for his sexist remarks. He appeard to have claimed that women talk too much and that meetings with many female board directors would "take a lot of time". Nojo used her hashtag on social media platforms and the response was so huge that Mori was forced to resign and be replaced by Seiko Hashimoto, a woman who has competed in seven Olympic Games.

I decided to search a little further. You see I couldn’t put my mind to the fact that the world’s third largest economy remained chauvinistically oriented. But it did. Another campaign had taken place in 2019. Yumi Ishikawa a young actress, writer and temp worker, created #KuToo movement. It was a campaign calling for an end to female workers having to wear heels. And of course it evolved from a shoe thing to a wider debate around Japan’s culture. Meaning of things we wear proves to be far more deep than we imagine, as always…

The fact that those succesful campaigns were both led by young women is really subversive for Japan’s reality. A reality that consists of teaching the young to keep quiet and defer to their elders. As a result the most powerful political and business leaders are unsurprisingly men in their 70s, 80s or even 90s. And just like that Japan’s gender gap is the largest among advanced economies.

A woman’s role in Japan is being obediend and in the service of others. They lack representation and are discouraged into going after leadership posititions, both in state and business. They are expected to become stay - at - home mothers after giving birth. So women who decide to have a family are becoming fewer and fewer and birth rates are dropping. Even fewer choose to define the norm and claim their rights. In a country where it remained legal for husbands to murder wives for infidelity until 1908, being a feminist seems like a bad joke to a significant part of Japanese society.

But things are heating up. The above examples of young women expressing anger and being respected for that has given the push to all young women to consider a change in attitude. As all flash lights will be gathered in Japan for the Tokyo Olympics this summer, activists and human rights advocates could have a chance to enhance their movement. Would love to watch them turn this into their advantage. And Japanese goverment respond consensually.

My thoughts go back to great grandmother’s story. After spending few days crying over her pilow with an empty stomach she took a decision. To survive. So she carefully removed some food from the pot before her husband’s favorite stew became covered in thin crust. And ate it just as he was around the corner coming back from work…

I am always terrified to think what women have gone through, the oppressed feelings, the violence. Things like that can’t still be happening but they do. It’s the patriarchy infused in every aspect of our lives. We need to grab every chance we got and change it. Everywhere. Even at the world’s third largest economy…

Credits:

Opening photo is artwork “Women speak out” by Franziska Barczyk.

For more information about sexism in Japan you can click here, here, here and here(in Greek only).