Abstract
Forty-seven women were elected in the general election of 2017, increasing the ratio of women in the House of Representatives (HR) to 10.1% from 9.1%. As a result, according to the Inter-parliamentary Union (IPU), Japan’s international ranking in Women in National Parliaments moved only slightly upward, from 164th (as of September 2017) to 157th (as of December 2017). Why does women’s under-representation persist in Japan? This chapter summarizes the structural factors that answer this question. It then investigates the characteristics of women candidates and winners, probing the degree to which women parliamentarians represent women in civil society. Lastly, it sheds light on the prospect of a quota law, or more precisely, the gender parity law, which was submitted to the Diet but not voted on in 2017.
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Notes
- 1.
This work is supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 15K03287. IPU renews the world rankings every month. When the previous general election was held in December 2014, the ratio of women in the House of Representatives was 9.5%, but it went down to 9.3% when Yuriko Koike resigned to run for the Tokyo gubernatorial election in June 2016, then 9.1% when Kazuko Koori relinquished her seat to run for the Sendai mayoral election in July 2017. As of September 2017, however, IPU did not reflect Koori’s resignation and used 9.3% to calculate Japan’s raking. See IPU’s ranking (http://archive.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif-arc.htm).
- 2.
Compared with 2014, only two more women got elected in 2017. Nonetheless, the ratio increased by 0.6% because the total number of seats had been reduced by ten (see Pekkanen and Reed, this volume, p. 15).
- 3.
- 4.
Civil Alliance is a network of civic groups that stood against the passage of the security bills in 2015, including former SEALDs (student group), Mothers Against War, and Save Constitutional Democracy Japan (a group of constitutional scholars and political scientists). Right after the controversial passage of the bills, they demanded the electoral cooperation of opposition parties and provided a foundation on which four opposition parties (DP , JCP, SDP, and Liberal) unified their candidates. Civil Alliance concluded policy agreements with each of the four parties, but not with Ishin or Hope as these parties did not commit themselves to revoke the security laws. Local networks of Civil Alliance also played a significant role in serving as a bridge between DP , and later the CDP, and the JCP.
- 5.
See the UTAS site on the Asahi web page (http://www.asahi.com/senkyo/senkyo2017/asahitodai/).
- 6.
For more on Kōmeitō, see Klein and McLaughlin (this volume, p. 53).
- 7.
Descriptive representation of women concerns the number of women in representative bodies, whereas substantive representation is realized only when women actually act for women. Among studies that explore what “women’s interests” are, see Chappell and Hill (2006), and among those that theorize the relationship between women’s descriptive and substantive representation, see Childs (2006).
- 8.
See also Strausz (this volume, p. 203).
- 9.
Interview with Shiori Yamao, December 20, 2017, Nagatacho, Tokyo.
- 10.
Mainichi Shinbun, October 25, 2017. (https://mainichi.jp/senkyo/articles/20171025/dde/012/010/002000c).
- 11.
The birth of the parliamentary group coincided with the publication of my edited volume, Gender Quotas: Why Women’s Representatives Increased in the World, which was the first academic book in Japanese on the topic. I then became an academic advisor to the working team of the parliamentary group and got heavily involved in lawmaking.
- 12.
Toshihiro Nikai, the secretary-general of the LDP, commented that “we should let nature decide” when he was asked by a journalist why the women’s ratio of the LDP candidates was only 7.5% (Nikkei Shinbun, October 11, 2017).
- 13.
The most extensive reporting of Shiori Itō’s case has been undertaken not by the Japanese media, but by the New York Times: (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/world/asia/japan-rape.html).
- 14.
NHK broadcast a two-day talk program on the revival of feminism in the USA and its implications for Japan in April 2017, and I was one of the guest speakers. Asahi published a series of articles related to women’s issues under the title “Dear Girls” around International Women’s Day, March 8, 2017, and its spin-off event to talk about “feminism for everybody” was organized in July: I was invited, together with the translator of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s bestselling essay “We Should be All Feminist.” By this time “feminism” had become a buzzword among the media and my online interview article about Japanese feminism went viral in the fall (https://imidas.jp/jijikaitai/f-40-152-17-09-g644). This inspired the publication of Feminism in Japan ([Nihon no Feminizumu], Minori Kitahara, ed. Kawade Shobō Shinsha) in December, with my chapter on a brief history of Japanese feminism. Young Japanese women were targeted as the main readership.
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Miura, M. (2018). Persistence of Women’s Under-Representation. In: Pekkanen, R., Reed, S., Scheiner, E., Smith, D. (eds) Japan Decides 2017. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76475-7_11
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