The Japanese women told when they can have a baby
The recent case of a childcare worker reprimanded by her boss for getting pregnant before it was her ‘turn’ highlighted the country’s bizarre maternity rules
FOR most couples, finding out they are to have a baby is a moment of joy, but for working Japanese women a positive pregnancy test can provoke a very different reaction. A letter to the Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun last week has exposed the culture of “maternity shaming”, whereby female employees are reprimanded, demoted and even sacked for becoming pregnant.
It was written by the husband of a 26-year-old childcare worker in Aichi Prefecture, in the centre of the country, who has chosen to remain anonymous, and describes how company bosses operate a system of “shifts” dictating when female staff are permitted to have children.
“The director at the centre where she works had determined the order in which workers could get married or pregnant,” he wrote, “and apparently there was an unspoken rule that one must not take their ‘turn’ before a senior staff member.”
He also said his wife had been reprimanded for “selfishly breaking the rules” by getting pregnant without permission.
If such a practice sounds bizarre by Western standards, for many Japanese women it is a fact of working life. Although Japan has a law banning discrimination against pregnant women in the workplace, in practice nearly half of women working on short-term contracts have found themselves subject to shocking bias and bullying.
There is even a name for it: “matahara”, from the English words “maternity” and “harassment”. The practice was first described in 2015 after a government survey of 3,500 women aged 24-44 found that 48.7 per cent of women sent to corporate clients by temp agencies encountered victimisation after becoming pregnant, ranging from verbal abuse to demotion and dismissal. It also found that 21.8 per cent of full-time female employees suffered similar mistreatment.
Since then an online campaign group, MataharaNet.org, has documented numerous further examples, including women being rebuked, demoted and encouraged to quit their jobs. One Hiroshima office worker, Aya Kanihara, said she was expected to continue working right up to the day her son was born.
Others have described how “childbirth schedules” would be emailed to all female staff, with anyone becoming pregnant out of turn labelled “selfish”. Another worker at a Tokyo cosmetics company said her supervisor told her she was “not allowed” to have a child until she was at least 35.
According to Lesley Downer, an expert on Japanese culture and the author of the books The Shogun’s Queen and Geisha: The Remarkable Truth Behind The Fiction, matahara is a symptom of a culture struggling to reconcile traditional beliefs with the modern world. “Traditionally, Japanese women didn’t work, their role was to take charge of the household and raise the children,” she says. “The idea of women working, let alone having rights in the workplace, is really very new. There’s a clash between the traditional older men in charge and the younger generation and the older traditionalists don’t know how to cope with it. They’re simply not used to having women around at work.”
WITH the Japanese economy stalling, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been encouraging women to enter the workforce, a policy dubbed “womenomics”.
But old attitudes persist. Last year’s World Economic Forum global gender equality rankings placed Japan 114th out of 144 countries, and figures released this week by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development show Japan has the second-highest gender pay gap in the developed world, with women paid on average 25.7 per cent less than men
According to Downer, the pace of change has been too fast for the old guard. “Things are changing quickly in Japan and it may be society doesn’t know how to deal with it,” she says. “Men used to expect to have a job their whole life, they would belong to the company. In return the company would look after them and their family into old age.
“Now you can’t even be sure of getting a job, let alone keeping one for life. Women in the workplace and then becoming pregnant only complicates matters for those of that mindset.
“What’s weird is women are being told they’re selfish for having children, whereas a decade or two ago they were labelled selfish if they didn’t have children.”
But perhaps the most extraordinary thing is not that matahara exists but that young Japanese women are fighting back against it. For women to stand up and complain about maternity shaming in a culture that has for so long been skewed in favour of men and that places such value on deference, obedience and the importance of tradition is, for some commentators, the real issue.
“It’s remarkable that these women are standing up for themselves and making a fuss about matahara,” says Downer. “We’ve been feminists for decades in the West but Japan hasn’t had that.
“But then you look at the #MeToo and #Time’sUp campaigns – this is the year younger women are making a big noise about the stuff that older women just put up with. It seems a new generation of Japanese women are looking at what’s going on in the West and have decided to make a stand of their own.
“I think, in a strange way, the fact we even know about matahara is a sign of a big change in Japanese society.”