HITACHI: By pledging to revitalise depopulated rural areas, Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba hopes to help his party retain its majority in Sunday’s general election.

Over 40 percent of municipalities risk extinction, according to a recent study, because of an ageing population and an exodus of young people from the countryside — particularly women who wish to escape sexist attitudes.

‘Outdated’ firms

Ren Yamamoto, 25, rejects the idea that women who move away should be held responsible for the situation. “Should individual women be blamed for that?” said the web producer who lives in the mountainous Yamanashi region.

When job-hunting, Yamamoto found companies there “outdated” compared to the capital, with a culture of “asking women to step back” in roles to support their male colleagues.

“Japan is still a society where gender roles for men and women tend to be fixed”, but in places like Tokyo women “suffer less discrimination and enjoy more options”.

Yamamoto launched an online channel to highlight why women leave their hometowns, with one contributor comparing countryside life to the 17th-to-19th century Edo Period. Yamamoto plans to submit testimonies from her online project to decision-makers in local and central governments, which are still heavily male-dominated.

“The image of women discussed by such a parliament is far from the reality,” she said.

Nosy neighbours

The insularity of rural Japan was stifling for 37-year-old Akane Tanaka Schneider, who grew up in Niigata and now runs a small business on the outskirts of Tokyo.

“One thing I felt negative about while living in the countryside was that the community is too watchful of what you do. For example, I was told that at a certain age I should be married and have children,” she said. But she had her own ideas about her career, and about starting a family at the “right time”.

“I was lucky to grow up in an environment where it was natural for me to make my own decisions,” including periods spent abroad or working for an NGO, she said.

“But when you look at the whole of Japan, a majority of women don’t seem to have that,” and instead are pressured by social norms to get married and have children.

One issue, debated by politicians, that interests Tanaka Schneider is that Japanese law requires married couples to share a surname — in practice, almost always the man’s.

Tanaka Schneider said she “hates” the idea of changing her name. “I would feel my life and career was being denied”.

Male-dominated politics

To change, Japan needs more women in politics, says Kaori Ishikawa, 39, an assemblywoman and mother-of-two in Hitachi, a city in rural Ibaraki. Ishikawa was brought up there but attended high school in the more urban next-door region, then college in Tokyo, which had more job opportunities after graduation.

Published in Dawn, October 27th, 2024