Just in time for Davos

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>  >>Sunday, January 28 9:09 AM SGT
>>>
>>>The debt time bomb that could explode in Japan's face
>>>
>>>TOKYO, Jan 28 (AFP) -
>><snip>
>>>The pension system represents another time bomb ticking as Japan's
>>>population ages more rapidly than any other in the world.
>>
>>Japan has a huge under-used pool of labor -- women.  Were Japanese
>>feminists & leftists alive & kicking (rather than stagnant & bereft
>>of imagination as they are), they would make use of the current
>>economic crisis to create a new capital-labor settlement on the basis
>>of gender equality, by reviving women's movement, though doing so
>>would make them part of the neoliberal Third Way, more likely than
>>not.
>
>Which would suit them right now, I expect.  Mebbe to get from here to there
>they gotta take any apparent improvement on offer, eh?  Proletarian status
>is better status than they currently have, I'd imagine.  And equal pay
>(plus access to whatever's left of that 'career structure' thingy) is,
>perhaps, a necessity for equal status.
>
>Liberal feminism looks like shite only if the liberal feminists have
>already done the hard yards for you.  It'd look pretty good from where most
>Japanese women are watching, I reckon.  I don't say we're all bound down
>the same trajectory, mind, but I am betting that's the way to go in Japan
>right now.
>
>Cheers,
>Rob.

Well, I was not making a summary negative judgment on liberal 
feminism in my post above.

*****   Financial Times (London)
January 8, 2001, Monday USA Edition 2
SECTION: COMMENT & ANALYSIS; Pg. 17
LENGTH: 963 words
HEADLINE: COMMENT & ANALYSIS: Time for office flowers to learn girl 
power: Japan's old-fashioned attitude to women at work must change if 
its economy is to override its demographic problems

BYLINE: By GILLIAN TETT

...Robert Feldman, Japan economist at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, 
suggests that if the female participation rate rose to 60 per cent by 
2010, it would offset the projected impact of ageing on the female 
labour force.  At 70 per cent, the US average, it could even offset 
some of the impact of male ageing....

This shift could not happen without a huge change in both attitude 
and policy in Japan.  Better systems of childcare would be needed. 
Companies would need to abandon the rigid salaryman concept of work 
and career.  Millions of women might need to be retrained.  But such 
changes are not impossible.  After all, the Japanese have tremendous 
capacity to shift direction in response to government policy.  And 
the government could do much to make it easier for housewives to work.

Mr Feldman suggests, for example, that the government could create 
crammer schools to teach housewives work skills such as computing. 
This would not be culturally alien, since self-improvement classes 
are already popular.

And if Japan's economy continues to flag, the economic incentive for 
households to have two wages coming in will grow....   *****

Liberal feminist reforms would be good for many women (& prospects 
for socialism, too) in the long run, not to mention economically 
rational in the short run.  When the government moves into the 
liberal feminist direction, though, it uses the feminist rhetoric as 
a wedge to make the labor market "flexible," eroding seniority 
rights, increasing temporary work & other irregular employment, etc.

On one hand, it appears that there objectively exist social 
conditions for a growth of liberal feminism in Japan: _relative 
deprivation_ of a large number of highly educated women, whose 
aspirations have not been accommodated by capital.  Shortly before 
the burst of the bubble, a few new reforms for women's rights were 
enacted: most importantly, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act 
(which became effective in April of 1986).  However, the subsequent 
deterioration of economy cancelled out whatever positive impacts the 
EEOA might have had.  Last hired, first fired.

*****   The New York Times
January 1, 2001, Monday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section A; Page 4; Column 1; Foreign Desk
HEADLINE: Diploma at Hand, Japanese Women Find Glass Ceiling 
Reinforced With Iron
BYLINE:  By HOWARD W. FRENCH
DATELINE: TOKYO, Dec. 31

When Yoko Hayakawa, a student at one of Japan's elite universities, 
began a round of job interviews with technology companies here 
recently, it was not long before she noticed a pattern that struck 
her as very strange.

Although she had been getting excellent grades, spoke English 
fluently and was bursting with professional ambition, all the 
recruiters were asking trivial questions about her social life or how 
she would feel about accepting a clerical position.

"One company asked if I would work as a secretary, instead of in a 
technical job," said the 23-year-old Keio University senior. 
"Another company asked if I was going to see a concert that was being 
held near my campus.  One recruiter even asked me if I knew how many 
convenience stores there are in Japan.

"When I asked around among my male friends, they had not heard any 
questions like these at all.  They were asked the normal sorts of 
things, like what they had studied in school, and what their 
ambitions were if they were hired."...

...[A]s Ms. Hayakawa discovered, an unspoken part of the ritual is 
the shunting of female students onto the secretarial track or other 
dead-end jobs.

For generations, this two-track recruitment process, one for men and 
the other for women, operated on the assumption that the proper thing 
for a young woman was to get married and have children in her 20's, 
leaving career building to her husband.

But as Japan contemplates a huge labor shortage in the very near 
future, the society has shown greater readiness to contemplate even 
large-scale immigration -- long one of the country's biggest taboos 
-- rather than moving quickly to provide equal opportunities for 
Japanese women.

The population of Japanese in their 20's will shrink by nearly a 
third -- to 12.4 million -- by 2015, according to official 
projections.  In a nod to this problem, a national equal opportunity 
law was updated last year, mandating punishments for the first time 
for discriminating against women in the workplace.

But in interviews with recent job seekers, labor lawyers, economists 
and women's rights advocates, most said the new law had had little 
real impact, and the old patterns of consignment of women to 
noncareer positions continued unabated.

In practice, the burden of enforcing the law falls on the individual 
woman, and demonstrating systematic bias has proved difficult despite 
some successes, like a recent ruling upholding the award of $1.6 
million to 12 women who charged that their company discriminated 
against them in pay and promotions.

"I didn't go into the interviews expecting any discrimination in 
particular," said Ms. Hayakawa, who eventually landed a job at Canon 
Corporation.  "Of course, I had heard some stories," she said, "but I 
wasn't especially worried.  Afterward, though, I was just shocked. 
Truly shocked."

Labor market experts say the rationale used by most companies for 
excluding women from professional jobs is the fear that they will 
quit to get married after only a few years.

"There are undoubtedly brilliant and able female students out there, 
but employers know that quit rates and absentee rates are higher for 
female employees," said Atsushi Seike, a professor of labor economics 
at Keio University.  "Companies know that there are higher risks 
associated with female workers and they want to ensure they get a 
return on their investment in human capital."

But the notion that women want to quit their jobs after only a few 
years of work in order to get married is firmly rejected by others, 
and was not borne out by interviews with many young women who are 
college job applicants.

"Our poll shows that between 70 and 80 percent of women want to 
continue to work until retirement age," said Hiromi Harada, a leader 
of the Association of Female Students Against Job Discrimination. 
"Moreover, very few women say they want to quit when they have a 
child.  The fact is that many women quit when they have children 
because of the cost of day care.  And if we want to change this, we 
should take measures to make day care more common and more 
affordable."

Others say that women who do take advantage of company maternity 
policies often return from leave to find someone else sitting at 
their desks, and never recover their career momentum.

With her spark plug personality, Rie Taniguchi, a senior at Waseda 
University, another top Japanese college, tried to make it clear to 
interviewers right from the start that she put career ahead of 
motherhood.  She said she hoped that it would convince middle-aged 
male interviewers to offer her a professional position.

"I said that I don't just want a job, that I dream of climbing up the 
corporate ladder," Ms. Taniguchi said. "I told them that I know there 
are women who quit their jobs after a while to get married, and 
assured them that I had gotten a good education to be able to work 
even after I get married."

What happened next -- an experience related by several other 
students, as well -- was a kind of adversarial interrogation using 
what she called appaku mensetsu, or high-pressure interview tactics 
aimed at breaking her down.

"One interviewer told me, 'You know nothing of these things because 
you are inexperienced,"' Ms. Taniguchi said.  "He said that men and 
women don't have the same abilities, and you may speak this way 
today, but when you are married, things will change."

Ms. Taniguchi said she had heard stories about that kind of treatment 
of women before her interviews began, but nothing had fully prepared 
her for the experience.  In the end, of about 50 job applications, 
she was offered employment by three companies.  "What I've learned," 
she said, "is that if a company has a choice between a man and a 
woman, they will choose the man, even if he is of lesser ability."

According to official statistics, 64 percent of Japanese companies 
hired no women among graduates this year for engineering-related 
jobs, and 39 percent hired no women among graduates for 
nonengineering-related jobs.

Mutsuko Asakura, a professor of labor law at Tokyo Metropolitan 
University, said the growing refusal of women to tolerate this kind 
of treatment after years of acceptance is leading to increasing 
numbers of lawsuits.

"The problem is, it is very difficult to prove that companies have 
excluded women just because they are women," Ms. Asakura said. 
"Companies use all sorts of reasons to justify their decisions. 
They'll say the person lacked inspiration, or that she lacked the 
determination to succeed."

Yukayo Hirano, a 22-year-old senior at Keio University, said it was 
her dream to work in the financial sector. Her mother, who once did 
clerical work in a bank, was the source of her inspiration.  "I told 
the interviewers that I wanted to do creative work, like creating new 
insurance products," Ms. Hirano said.  "One interviewer asked me, 
'How would you feel if you were stuck all your life in sales-type 
work?' " a typically male but low-level category.

Labor experts say the professional and managerial tracks in Japan's 
banks are among the most tightly closed areas to women.  And bearing 
this out, everywhere Ms. Hirano applied, she said, she was turned 
down....   *****

Such women as mentioned in the article above are the constituency for 
liberal feminism.

On the other hand, though, liberal feminism has not been the 
strongest current among Japanese feminists, unlike in America.  Many 
Japanese feminists, it seems to me, have been either "difference 
feminists" or "socialist feminists."  A good number of feminists 
fought against the removal of all protection clauses which the EEOA 
made possible:

*****   The most significant change under the new law was the removal 
of all protection clauses.  Under the previous Labor Standards Act 
women were not allowed to work night shifts or carry excessive 
weights, and they were entitled to menstruation and maternity leave. 
The protective measures were all related to the concept of _bosei 
hogo_ (the protection of motherhood).  The government took the 
strategy of challenging feminists with the American example, arguing 
that if Japanese women wanted equality they should be prepared to 
forfeit protective clauses, as had American women.  Many feminists 
fought against the new law....It was argued that the reforms would 
lead to a worsening of conditions for factory and part-time workers. 
It was apparent from early in the government push to approve the new 
law that it was strongly supported by industry.  This support in 
itself was enough to raise suspicion in the Japanese case.  One 
feminist wrote: "The semi-conductor producing companies are 
attempting to have the ban on women working the night shift removed. 
No matter what, these companies intend to be able to use the women -- 
the cheaper labour -- on the night shifts too."[72]

That there was a need for reform to the existing Labor Standards Act 
was accepted by the majority of feminist groups....

The document that was finally brought to the Diet and passed in April 
1986 was considered a major compromise by many feminists.  The 
elimination of all protection clauses was not rejected out of hand by 
the feminist critics of the act.  Rather, they argued that in the 
absence of any protection and given the existing levels of 
discriminatory practices in Japan, it was essential that the act 
include stringent punitive clauses.  The version of the act that was 
finally passed in 1986 included no significant punitive measures. 
The new act depended on the goodwill of employers, something which 
feminists argued could not be assumed on the basis of the past 
history of discrimination.  Almost as soon as the act was passed, 
employment procedures were being modified to fit the letter of the 
law without introducing any real change to discriminatory 
practices.[74]  A continued escalation of the part-time employment 
trend and the rapid insertion of low-wage, part-time female labor 
into night shifts have validated the initial reservations of those 
feminists who opposed the act.

[72] Sandra Buckley and Vera Mackie, "Women in the New Japanese 
State," _Democracy in Contemporary Japan_, ed. Gavan McCormack and 
Yoshio Sugimoto, Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1986, 177.
[74] My thanks to Charles Horioka for his helpful comments on the 
topic of the continued practice of two-stream employment within the 
structures of _sogoshoku_ and _ippanshoku_ since the introduction of 
the new legislation.

(Sandra Buckley, "Altered States: The Body Politics of 
'Being-Woman,'" _Postwar Japan as History_, ed. Andrew Gordon, 
Berkeley: U of California P, 1993, pp. 369-371)   *****

In short, liberal feminist discourse has already been selectively 
coopted within the Japanese state rhetoric.  Without a strong 
socialist movement, liberal feminism mainly helps the state & capital 
to restructure the labor market, incorporating more women into labor 
force at the same time as making the labor market more "flexible." 
In fact, it may worsen the working conditions of low-wage female 
workers without improving them for better-paid female workers with 
ambitions for careers in corporate management.  Hence the prevailing 
skepticism about liberal feminism amongst many Japanese feminists, 
though the further incorporation of women in wage labor, in _any_ 
capacity, can be said to be a ground for new struggles & hence a 
cause for optimism in the long run.

Yoshie