Japan’s powerful patriarchy often sidelines women

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Japan’s powerful patriarchy often sidelines women




There was the Tokyo 2020 official who floated the idea of an “Olympig” creative campaign with plus-sized model Naomi Watanabe. An Olympic chief who resigned after making sexist remarks about women.To get more news about 国产成人aa在线观看网站站, you can visit our official website.

And a Japanese governor who recommended men go grocery shopping during the pandemic because women take too long.

Just last week, a Japanese city manager sparked outrage when he gave a speech telling new employees to “play around” to remedy the country’s plunging birth rate.

For decades, gaffe-prone men in positions of power have caused embarrassment and sparked outrage among younger generations and women in patriarchal Japan, which is ranked 120 out of 156 countries in the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Gender Gap Index – between Angola and Sierra Leone.

As of 2020, only 15% of senior and leadership posts were held by women, according to the Global Gender Report. And with only 14% of seats in Japan’s parliament occupied by women, and most lawmakers aged between 50 to 70, male boomers dominate political and business life in the country.

Experts say some men of that generation carry beliefs that women are best left at home, or should attend meetings but remain silent.But Momoko Nojo, a Tokyo-based economics student, says those views have driven a generational wedge between the political gerontocracy and young people born in the 1990s, an era of economic stagnation dubbed the “lost decade.”

As a 23-year-old woman prepared to agitate for change, Nojo runs “No Youth, No Japan,” a student-led social media initiative founded in 2019 with more than 60,000 followers on Instagram, which promotes political literacy and aims to persuade a largely disenchanted youth to use their votes to influence the future.

“We are sharing information on online platforms such as Instagram because we want young people to make their voices heard and their votes count,” said Nojo.From the late 1940s to the late 1980s, Japan turned its economy around. Powered by male white-collar workers, the country became the world’s second-largest economy after the United States.

Born in the late 1930s, older leaders, such as former Tokyo 2020 head Yoshiro Mori and an official from Japan’s ruling party Toshihiro Nikai, who recently sparked international condemnation for their sexist remarks on women, are from a generation who brought Japan to the global stage after its defeat in World War II, according to Kukhee Choo, an independent Japan-based media scholar.