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