Comment And you thought British glass ceilings were tough
in the upper reaches of British politics, then Italy and even more so Japan are in leagues of their own.
In post-war Japan, electorally anyway, things started promisingly. In 1946, the first time Japanese women were able to vote or stand for political office, they took 39 of the 466 seats (8.5 per cent) in the House of Representatives, the lower house of the national parliament.
It may not sound great, but the previous year we’d elected just 24 MPs (3.8 per cent) to our 640-member House of Commons, and we took until 1992 to reach Japan’s 1946 proportion.
By then, though, Japanese ceiling glaziers had been hard at work repairing. In 1986 women MPs were down to seven, and, although partial proportional representation helped reverse this trend, the present 45 (9.5 per cent) puts Japan 155th in the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s ranking of women in national parliaments – embarrassing even compared to the UK’s pretty paltry 48th place with 29.4 per cent women.
Moreover, in contrast to Britain, Japanese women’s representation is far worse in local than in national government. In last year’s elections women won only four of the 222 city, town and village mayoralties up for re-election, giving a national total of 24 or 1.3 per cent.
As for the governors of the 47 prefectures – the upper tier of Japan’s two-tier sub-central structure – the first woman was elected only in 2000, though she was quickly followed by three more, the 8.5 per cent total described by some Japanese Pollyanna as “a political miracle”. It wasn’t – the glaziers were rehired, another glass ceiling largely restored, and until last Sunday there were just two women governors. True, one of the prefectures is Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost and easily largest island, so arguably nearly a quarter of the country by area was governed by women. A 20th of the population, though, would be more meaningful, which, with last Sunday’s addition of Tokyo’s 13.6 million, is now one-fifth. That itself is some measure of Yuriko Koike’s achievement, but what does she bring to a job that’s a combination of American mayor and state governor?
Unlike Italy’s Raggi and Appendino, both in their 30s and until their mayoral election comparative political outsiders, Koike has been a national politician since the early 1990s with ministerial responsibilities including the environment and, very briefly, defence. So she ticked the name recognition and experience boxes, but was nonetheless able to run almost an outsider’s antimale establishment campaign – wearing green to emphasise her freshness – having announced her own nomination literally while her party, the conservative (and masculist) Liberal Democrats, were
If you sense a certain male chauvinism in British politics, then Italy and Japan are in leagues of their own
preparing to nominate another elderly male.
The election itself was a cakewalk. On a 60 per cent turnout, 14 per cent up on the previous election, she comfortably defeated her Social Democratic opponent, the official Liberal Democratic candidate, the Happiness Realisation Party hopeful, and 15 other independents.
So far Koike’s policies sound distinctly motherhood and apple pie-ish, especially from a careerlong Conservative – “new policies that no one else has seen” and suchlike. Her campaign emphasised more day care centres, elderly care, work-life balance and ‘women’s issues’ generally, but was short on both specifics and funding.
Which brings us inevitably to Tokyo’s hosting of the 2020 Summer Olympics. Back in 2012/13 the successful bid – against Istanbul and Madrid – was supported overwhelmingly by the Japanese nationally and strongly by Tokyo residents.
Today’s support, with the proposed budget reportedly already having tripled, has surely dropped, if not plummeted, and part of Koike’s outsider appeal was that she was the best bet to keep costs from escalating further.
Interesting – my guess is that her imminent trip to Rio as representative of the 2020 host city won’t be that much easier than parts of Theresa May’s recent tour of European capitals. Chris Game is a lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies, at the University of
Birmingham