Organizer: Karen Shire, International Christian University
Chair: Glenda Roberts, University of Tokyo
Discussant: Yumiko Mikanagi, International Christian University
Part Two of the "back-to-back panel" assesses equal employment opportunities for Japanese women from the "top-down" in the social policy context of the Japanese state. The Equal Employment Opportunities Law is one among many laws and policy instruments which affect Japanese women's employment choices and experiences. In this panel the EEOL is contextualized in the broader social policy landscape, from the time of the occupation when American policies impacted on women's employment opportunities, to the most recent government policy initiatives. The American occupation of Japan may have liberated middle class women, but movements of working class women were suppressed through occupation policies. Throughout the post-war period, social policies in Japan have been based on identifying men as primary breadwinners and women as only occasionally active in the mainstream economy. Do recent social and employment policy initiatives signal a break from the male-centered policy regime or a continuation of it? Further, the lowest birth rate since 1920 when statistics were first gathered has spurred policy initiatives across ministerial domains for encouraging reproduction, summarized as the Angel Plan. To what extent do social policies aimed at encouraging reproduction promise support for working parents?
This panel attempts to situate the EEOL and recent initiatives to revise it into the broader and historical context of social policy in Japan, and assesses the same issues highlighted in Part One-working parents, women's advancement in the workplace and choices about where and how much to work-from a social policy perspective.
Japan's Corporate-Centered Society and Gender Biases in Social Policy
Mari Osawa, University of Tokyo, Japan
During the 1980s, the Japanese government carried out a reform of social policy under the slogan of "overhauling welfare programs" (fukushi minaoshi), or establishing a "Japanese-type Welfare Society" (Nihon-gata Fukushi Shakai). During the same period, the government passed the Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEOL) of 1985, allowing it to ratify the UN Convention Eliminating All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Through analysis of the welfare program reforms, including changes in family policy, that were introduced to "solidify the base of the home," I demonstrate that social welfare changes increasingly favored married couples with the husband a regular employee breadwinner and the wife a part-time employee, supplementary-earner homemaker. The limited, sometimes perverse impact of the EEOL on women employees led to its current revision and the controversies which rage around it. There are a number of indigenous alternatives, explored here, that can supplement the EEOL in changing the corporate-centered society.
Pinning Hopes on Angels: Encouraging Reproduction in a Low Birth-Rate Society
Glenda S. Roberts, University of Tokyo, Japan
Faced with a steady decline in Japan's post-war birthrate coupled with the rapid aging of society, four government ministries initiated the 'Angel Plan' (enzeru puran) (1995-2004). This plan aims at the "comprehensive and systematic development of measures to support child-rearing." This paper focuses on the portion of the plan managed by the Ministry of Labor, aimed at making child rearing compatible with work through the implementation of the Childcare Leave Law, through diversification and expansion of the kinds of public childcare available, by lowering costs, and through the opening of public seminars which address the strategies of handling both work and childrearing effectively. I focus on how the measures proposed by the Plan to make childcare and work compatible relate to Japan's long-held gender patterns, which view men as 'corporate warriors' and women as homemakers and supplemental workers. Does the Angel Plan subvert this view or uphold it? Does it carry the potential to enable working women and men to 'give birth and raise children with peace of mind,' as is its ostensible intent? How is the Angel Plan situated in historical perspective with regard to government policy on women as childbearers and workers? I will address these questions through analysis of the literature, interviews with Ministry officials and observations from seminars over the course of seven month's stay in Japan.
United States Occupation of Japan and Its Class and Gender Dynamics
Mire Koikari, University of Wisconsin, Madison
In this paper, I analyze three seemingly disparate phenomena of the US occupation of Japan: the growth of middle-class women's movements; the suppression of women's sections in the union movements by the GHQ/SCAP; and the regulation and surveillance of Japanese women's sexuality. I argue that these three phenomena were very much interrelated in reality, and that observations of these facts of the occupation would: (a) challenge a historically well-accepted argument that the occupation "liberated" or "emancipated" Japanese women in the process of democratization; (b) delineate class-specific effects of the US gender interventions in Japanese women's lives, and therefore; (c) help us understand class as well as gender interests of the GHQ/SCAP and the Japanese state. By drawing on SCAP records and Japanese primary and secondary sources, I try to show that intersections of gender and class dynamics produced far more complex and multi-faceted effects of the US interventions than an all-too-naive picture of "emancipation" and "democratization" of Japanese women's lives. In my presentation, I especially focus on Japanese prostitutes called "Pan-pan" who bore the brunt of these complex class and gender dynamics during the occupation. The past scholarly evaluations of the occupation have hardly paid analytical attention to the sexual dimension of the occupation, but my paper will show that analyses of sexuality throw multi-faceted, and often contradictory, class and gender dynamics of the occupation into sharp relief.