FEATURE: Why a Japanese man proudly took his wife s last name
Shu Matsuo Post is a man who calls himself a feminist. But he wasn t born a feminist, and for the first 28 years of his life he never tried to understand what it was like to be a girl and a woman in a patriarchal society.
Then he met his now-wife Tina, who taught him that he has been socially conditioned to see things a certain way. She helped him realize he doesn t need to be macho to be a man or follow the dating script that says he pays. He had his feminist awakening.
Yoshiro Mori, the president of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics organizing committee, has resigned. The 83-year-old former prime minister caused a firestorm for sexist remarks he made at a recent Japanese Olympic committee meeting. The outrage over his comments reflects a changing Japan, one that is reaching even the highest ranks.
Sexist comments from the organizing committee head underline Japan’s deep-seated gender issues.
By
February 09, 2021
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The forthcoming Tokyo Olympics created unwelcome headlines last week when Mori Yoshiro, the 83-year-old former prime minister and head of the Tokyo Olympics organizing committee, said that female participants make meetings too long. Women, in his opinion, have trouble speaking concisely due to their innate competitiveness.
Mori has a prior history of questionable remarks, from mocking AIDS victims to belittling athletes. So extensive is his catalogue of blunders that his entry on Wikipedia has a dedicated “gaffes” heading. Japanese people have long excused such behavior, viewing it as merely encompassing an unpleasant character trait.
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Under Japan’s women’s advancement strategy, dubbed “womenomics,” a record number of women joined the labor force to help fill the country’s chronic labor shortage and resuscitate the sluggish economy. Amid Japan’s rapidly declining fertility rates and an aging population, then Prime Minister Abe Shinzo named women Japan’s hidden asset – an underutilized resource that could alleviate pressure to look for foreign migrants to solve the labor crunch.
Amid Abe’s focus on womenomics, women’s labor force participation in Japan rose from 50 percent in 2015 to 52.7 percent in 2019, with an extra 3.3 million women gaining employment. Traditionally, many women in Japan stopped working after getting married. Nowadays there are many women who continue to work after marriage but leave before the birth of their first child with their husbands becoming the sole breadwinner. After years of raising children, when these women return to the workplace they are often le