The main issue at stake in last Sunday’s election of the upper house of Parliament was whether the ruling coalition and its allies would win the super majority they needed to amend Japan’s pacifist Constitution. They didn’t. Less noted was another failure of the prime minister’s camp: The small number of female candidates it presented.
An old-guard male-dominant culture continues to drive the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (L.D.P.) and its partners even as a new generation of female politicians emerges.
Women won 28 of the 124 seats in contest on Sunday (the upper house has 245 seats in all), matching the record set three years ago. The total ratio of women in the chamber now reaches nearly 23 percent, a historic high — and close to the world average for women’s representation in parliamentary assemblies, 24.4 percent.
This is a commendable result, but it belies huge differences between political parties. The governing coalition led by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is bringing down the average.
Mr. Abe was lauded for appointing five women to his cabinet in 2014; by late 2018, there was only one left. He is a cheerleader for “womenomics” and argues that the empowerment of women will boost the economy. Yet his ruling coalition is obstructing the advancement of women in politics — and that not only entrenches inequality; it also has economic costs.
The ratio of women among candidates in Sunday’s race was a mere 14.6 percent for Mr. Abe’s L.D.P. and 8.3 percent for its partner, Komeito. Among the four main opposition parties, however, the figure ranged from close to 36 percent (for the Democratic Party for the People) to more than 71 percent (for the Social Democratic Party). Those parties, combined with independent candidates supported by the opposition (known collectively as “the unified opposition”), achieved near-parity with 49.6 percent of female candidates, far outperforming the ruling coalition, which averaged just over 13 percent.
Women now account for 17.5 percent of the L.D.P.’s members-elect to the upper house, compared with, say, more than 35 percent for members-elect from the Constitutional Democratic Party and 50 percent for the unified opposition.
Sunday’s was the first national election since the enactment of the Gender Parity Law, which promotes gender equality in politics and urges “making the numbers of male and female candidates as even as possible”. (I helped advise the nonpartisan parliamentary group that prepared the bill.) It took three years to enact, largely because of resistance from the L.D.P. The only reason the law eventually was passed by Parliament, known as the Diet, and unanimously, in 2018 is because it is nonbinding.
Still, the idea of gender parity has rapidly caught on among legislators. This spring, I headed a research team of six investigators that conducted a survey of Diet members in collaboration with the newspaper Mainichi. (We received 140 answers, a response rate of approximately 20 percent.) We asked respondents to say what they thought an appropriate ratio of women in the Diet would be. The mean of all their answers was 43 percent — much higher than the actual rates, namely 10 percent of the lower house and 20 percent of the (pre-election) upper house. Even among L.D.P. respondents, the answer was close to 38 percent.
We also asked respondents to choose one of six possible explanations for why there were so few female representatives in Japan: the options included that few women are interested in politics, the difficulty of striking a work-life balance and that voters consider men to be more appropriate as politicians. Only 11 percent of respondents from the L.D.P. answered that it was because the parties aren’t seriously committed to recruiting women. But some 41 percent said that women were underrepresented because they don’t consider politics to be an attractive career choice.
That argument doesn’t hold. In Japan, it is the political parties that nominate candidates — there are no open primaries, as in the United States — and the selection process is opaque, not publicly disclosed. The L.D.P. and other major parties usually endorse incumbents.
In keeping with the Gender Parity Law, which urges political parties to take measures to increase the number of female candidates, the Democratic Party for the People and the Constitutional Democratic Party set specific targets: 30 percent and 40 percent, respectively. Both parties surpassed these goals ahead of Sunday’s election — a result that shows that these parties’ commitment to parity attracted female candidates and disproves the claim that it’s women’s choice to stay away from politics.
The opposition parties’ proactive efforts at inclusiveness are, in fact, helping usher in a new generation of female politicians.
Many of these women promote policies drawing on their personal experiences — for example, of gender-based discrimination or harassment. Some have called for allowing married women to keep their maiden name, penalizing workplace harassment (which the law says should be prevented but does not punish), further criminalizing nonconsensual sex crimes, prohibiting discrimination against L.G.B.T.s — and reforming the labor market to improve working conditions for so-called nonregular workers.
During the recent election campaign, Mr. Abe was the sole party leader to oppose allowing separate family names. (Japan is the only country in the world requiring married couples to use the same family name, and surveys suggest that in 96 percent of cases, wives take their husbands’ names.) Although the current rule has costs — if only of changing legal documents — and these are disproportionately borne by women, Mr. Abe has said that the issue “has nothing to do with economic growth”. Yet this is but one of the many hurdles that Japanese women face and that undermine their full participation in the country’s public and economic life.
Women are still too few and far between in Japanese politics, but a new generation of them is rising, bringing with them new concerns and new perspectives to policymaking. If womenomics comes to Japan, it won’t be thanks to Mr. Abe.
Mari Miura is a professor of political science at Sophia University in Tokyo.