Popular Democracy in Japan: How Gender and Community Are Changing Modern Electoral Politics

Conclusion: Engendering Knowledge and Political Action

Conclusion Engendering Knowledge and Political Action On the afternoon of February 29, 2008, approximately two hundred people marched by Osaka’s prefectural assembly building to protest the planned closing of the Dawn Center, one of Japan’s leading public institutions devoted to promoting gender equality. The demonstration was organized by the We Love the Dawn Center Association, founded earlier in the month following Governor Tōru Hashimoto’s announcement of the planned closure and sale or privatization of the center and twenty-four other public facilities to rein in the prefecture’s mounting debt.1 A group of predominantly female protesters presented a list of invaluable services that make the center a model for women’s centers across Japan.2 The Dawn 1. Ironically, as a candidate, Hashimoto campaigned on a platform promising improved child care and won the support of a majority of women voters. Child care, one of the many services offered at the Dawn Center, is a cornerstone of national policies to help women to balance work and family responsibilities to bolster Japan’s low birthrate. 2. The group reported that both men and women marched to protest the center’s closing, but the photos that appeared in the newspaper (Terano 2008) and on the We Love the Dawn Center website (www.sukiyanen-dc.com) show that the marchers were predominantly women. 160 Conclusion Center has been an exemplary case that fulfills an evolving national policy agenda, encouraging adult-centered educational programming in local communities and local initiatives to further gender equality through lifelong learning. The Dawn Center, a seven-story structure centrally located in Osaka, contains meeting and conference rooms, a library, an auditorium, a recording studio, a kitchen, and child care facilities. Its library holdings offer a wide range of information related to women and gender, and the center offers training workshops to help visitors to use its resources. Professional counselors are available to help individuals with a range of problems encountered by women in their daily lives, from domestic abuse to assistance in managing work and family responsibilities. A variety of support groups meet regularly to aid women living in Osaka, foreign-born and native, to develop collective solutions to individual problems. The center’s programming is diverse: public screenings of gender-themed movies, training workshops that cover topics ranging from career development for working women to gender sensitivity training for public employees; there is also a lecture series. In addition to the programming, members of the general public can also rent rooms for a fee to conduct independent activities . When these activities are devoted to furthering gender equality, the center reduces its rental fees. There is an annual newsletter and numerous center publications. The center creates and shares information with other women’s centers across Japan as well as with nonprofit organizations and foreign agencies.3 Every year hundreds of thousands of women visit the Dawn Center as participants in seminars, workshops, lectures, hobby groups, and study circles, to empower themselves and transform their lives. Nearly four hundred thousand people visit the Dawn Center each year, giving it an average of fifteen hundred visitors every day. Over eight thousand people made use of the center’s counseling services in 2007. Bracket its gender equality mission , and the Dawn Center is a hub that provides access to a vibrant layer of Japanese civil society that is made up of an expansive range of activities carried out in “communities of practice,” defined as “groups of people who share a concern or passion for something they do and learn how to 3. See the Dawn Center’s website at www.dawncenter.or.jp. Engendering Knowledge and Political Action 161 do it better as they interact regularly” (Wenger n.d.). Study circles are a prevalent feature of the Japanese political landscape, and women make up the majority of participants. Millions of Japanese women study in groups, regularly convening in any available space, from citizen’s public halls and women’s centers to private homes and coffee shops. The shared concerns or passions that bring them together include but are not limited to hobbies, sports, arts and culture, political and current events, voluntarism and community service, travel and foreign language study, and classes one might find listed in the course of study at any liberal arts institution. The Dawn Center’s services provide a sense of the scope of the official lifelong learning programs and the...