Japan’s women empowerment smothers families

Having a family is still much coveted but younger generation either has lower tolerance or simply lacks forbearance

Women’s sense of self-worth, their rights to access opportunity and resources, namely “women empowerment,” has been a buzz term in recent years. And common sense would dictate that if there is a country that actually needs to put this mindset into practice, it is Japan.

We often hear that what keeps women down, and therefore society as a whole, is the difficulty they face standing up for themselves against the old values that see them relegated to a household as a sengyoshufu (housewife), taking care not only of the husband but the husband’s parents and children.

Here, the social structure is such that especially in the working environment the gender difference is often used as an instrument of control and attains power over “weaker” gender subordinates.

But this is all true for the older generation. Already those born in the 70s and 80s have different convictions. No longer do women see themselves as housewives for life, but they feel they have a choice in the matter.

So much so that magazines like Woman Nikkei, mostly read by female office workers, are riding the new trend of empowerment.

It is hard to encapsulate what the general thinking of women in their 30s is, but by peeking into a random copy of the magazine we are likely to discover what modern women like to see themselves portrayed as.

In one of the magazine’s main articles, we discover a 37-year-old lady who works as a counselor. Here she is being asked this very question (and I will translate almost literally): “Concerning the traditional values or conservative ideas which do you feel is ‘weird’ or ‘should be stopped?’”

The woman replies: “The value that is most taken for granted, which is to get married and have children” and adds “although these values are disappearing with time, they still persist in rural areas.”

So we learn that this 37-year-old woman is not only not going to have a family of her own or children but that she thinks that whoever chooses to do so is someone coming from a backward culture.

It would have been interesting if the journalist interviewing her had asked who she thinks is going to pay her future pension. Who is going to serve her latte at Starbucks (the favorite café for office ladies) or a quick meal at a combini store (minimarket)?

Maybe it will be the offspring of those backward people attached to disappearing values, who took the risk and chose to have 2, 3 or 4 children in a country that is in a downward spiral in terms of demographic and economic growth. And if so, as any elementary economic calculation would demonstrate, would she still consider having a family and children a somewhat primitive aspiration?  

Another 37-year-old CEO of a company is shown by the magazine as supporting women to become engineers and programmers. The title of the piece is “Sentakyteki single mother” meaning “single mother by choice.” What that means, the magazine doesn’t say. So we have to suppose she looked for a donor and decided that her child was better off without a father.

The magazine features a chart of her “life satisfaction” levels. And we discover that she had the highest fulfillment not when her child was born but when she became CEO. So this is clearly a career-driven woman.

But if we read between the lines we see that this woman’s façade is totally inconsistent with her story. In fact, she would have been much better off if only she had chosen a good husband and stayed married instead. She herself tells us that, even if only indirectly.

In the “satisfaction chart,” we see that her lowest point was touched when she was 27 years old. What happened then? She got divorced. That’s right. This “single mother by choice” wanted to have a traditional family once.

After the divorce, she tells us she became sick physically and psychologically, so much so that she had to quit her job for two years. And then she had to wait until she was 34 to get a baby on her own (we suppose via artificial insemination).

It is interesting to notice how this woman is involuntarily giving us clues that make her appear exactly the opposite of what she wants to be portrayed as. She has never been opposed to having a family by principle. She either found a bad partner or she found a good man but drove him away. Either way, it seems to us that her new-found “single motherhood by choice” philosophy has been driven more by resentment and frustration (no longer will a man get a second chance) than by a rational, well-thought judgment.

Also what this story tells us is that it appears that the “old values” of having a family, which the piece is actually ideologically constructed to disparage, are still much coveted even by the younger generations. It only appears that they either have a lower tolerance for short-lived failures or simply lack forbearance.

*The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.

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