Ever been in Japan?
Working Women in Japan
Article written by Eiko Shinotsuka for the Asia Society's Video Letter from Japan II: The Early Working Years, pp.19-22, 1989.
The status of the Japanese woman has changed markedly during the years since the end of World War II. Before the war, the Japanese woman was firmly entrenched in a patriarchal system, taught to obey first her father, then her husband, and later her sons. The few women who worked outside the home in the prewar period worked almost exclusively as teachers or nurses, or in other professions considered appropriate for women.
Under the Allied Occupation in the years following the war, the status of women in Japan, at least on the surface, changed dramatically. As part of the new "postwar democracy," the ideal of the equality of the sexes was introduced to Japan and written into the new Constitution in the form of the rights to vote, to receive an education, and to receive equal opportunity employment. This new democracy, however, was imported rather than brought about by an indigenous movement, and the new rights for women were not demanded and won by the recipients themselves but bestowed from above. Largely for these reasons, the concept of sexual equality has not become fully rooted in Japanese society.
This is not to say that all Japanese women are still shackled by the fetters of the prewar family system. For example, in terms of the labor force participation rate for women, the ratio of women working to the total female population 15 years of age and over in Japan in the mid 1980s was comparable to that of other industrialized nations. The factors responsible for the increase in the female work force in Japan are the same as in the other major industrialized nations: an increase in the number of job opportunities for women as a result of urbanization and the growth of the service industries; the fact that women are attaining higher levels of education; a decrease in the number of years occupied by child rearing due to the lower birthrate; a decrease in the time necessary for housework as a result of the development of time-saving household appliances; and a desire for economic affluence, particularly strong in Japan after the relative poverty of the prewar period.
In spite of the increase of women in the labor force, however, a number of obstacles remain to be overcome before Japanese women can be said to have full and equal access to all or even most of the opportunities that exist in the Japanese job market. A look at some of the particularities of working women in Japan may help illuminate those obstacles. Over the more than 40 years since the end of World War II, married women have come to predominate in the female work force. Although this is partly because fewer Japanese women are leaving the work force when they marry and have children than formerly, the bulk of married working women still consists of part-time workers and women who have returned to work after raising a family.
In the late 1980s, nearly one-fourth of working women in Japan are part-time workers. Most of these women work in service industries, such as wholesale, retail, and food service, and in manufacturing industries. Only a very small percentage of part-time working women are involved in specialist, technical, managerial, or other highly skilled areas.
The Japanese woman returning to the work force is similarly restricted: when a Japanese woman possessing a high level of education and several years of employment experience attempts to return to work after raising her children, only relatively unskilled part-time jobs paying the minimum wage are available to her. This situation is rooted in traditional Japanese employment practices -- the lifetime employment system, wages based on seniority, and company-based labor unions -- which make it difficult for experienced workers to find jobs and effectively shut out these older mothers. Thus, although more married women are working than ever before in Japan, they are confined to limited types of jobs.
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