Japanese Government Approaches to Gender Equality Since the Mid-1990s

The mid-1990s saw some important developments in the Japanese government’s approach to gender issues, as conservative politicians started to realize that greater gender equality could help to revive a moribund economy and a steadily falling birth rate. The Vision of Gender Equality, which the Council for Gender Equality (an advisory body to the prime minister) submitted to then-Prime Minister Hashimoto Ryutaro in 1996, bore fruit in the 1999 Basic Law for a Gender-Equal Society. But while the government has shown genuine concern over gender issues, there has always been a struggle against competing discourses of traditional values and fiscal rectitude. So far the new receptiveness to feminist arguments has yet to be matched by, on the one hand, funding for gender-equality promoting reforms in important areas like employment opportunity, nursing care, and child-rearing that are needed if women are to participate fully in society, and on the other hand, rectifying gender bias embedded in the social institutions and practices such as tax paying, social insurance, and pay systems in corporations. An additional fundamental need is to push back criticism from the right wing.