Women, social change and realising political ideals - Religion and Politics in Contemporary Japan - page 141

also that the extension of such citizenship does not overcome structural

inequalities. Rather it appears that the social and economic inequality of
women is often further enhanced by the neutral package of the

' universal '

' homogeneous

citizen , which in reality represents an individual male with free agency (few

or no domestic responsibilities) in the economic system (Young 1990: 117

'

41).
Is this epitomised in the middle-class representation of ideal gender relations
in Japan, i.e. that of the male corporate warrior and the female professional
housewife (sengy - shufu)? Elshtain (1993) notes that the experience of maternity
tends to be dismissed from the public sphere and the concept of citizenship. In
Japan, women

-

is citizenship often explicitly is linked to motherhood. For
instance, as recently as 2001, the then Prime Minister Mori Yoshir - com-
mented that women have no rights to a pension unless they had done their
duty to the country or served the nation through giving birth to children.
While such a reactionary conception of female citizenship comes across as
anachronistic for many groups in Japanese society, as the mass-media rebuke
also indicated,

'

there have been many debates about whether including

women s experience of motherhood and childrearing would expand rather

than restrict women as political actors. The danger lies in potentially relocat-
ing women to the role of mothers and nurturers, limiting their voices in the
public realm to areas within the socially de

'

ned feminine sphere (Dietz 1985;

Plumwood 1990). Scott argues how ction

about a universal subject whose universality was achieved through implicit
processes of di

' history as a uni ed story was a

'

erentiation, marginalisation, and exclusion (Scott 1988: 197)

'

of women and their life experience. Promoting fathers participation in child-

rearing is arguably important for their children is development and for women

to be able to continue their career after getting married, but it is still a novelty
in Japan (as elsewhere). The work culture of extremely long working hours
makes it di

'

l domestic responsibilities after work. Moeran (1996)
found in his study of a Tokyo advertising agency that men were in virtually all
the important positions in the company. Mathews (2003) optimistically sug-
gests that what has been widely portrayed as the special Japanese (male) vir-
tues of

cult to ful

firm by the various
Nihonjinron genres are increasingly questioned by the younger generation. The
younger generation of male workers are potentially more concerned about
being part of family life and a better quality of life overall (cf. Dasgupta 2000;
Roberson and Suzuki 2003). Yet women in Japan still lag far behind men in
the workplace in terms of job status and pay.
This is despite the removal of most legal and political restrictions on
women

loyalty, self-sacri ce and obedience to the

cation of the UN Convention for the
Eradication of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in
1986, and the enactment of various legislation in the late 1980s and 1990s 2
aimed at improving women

' s employment, including the rati

s position in society. On the other hand, as of
2003 more than 60% of families had two incomes. In reality, over 10% of
married women work full time, while 80% of part-time or temporary workers
are women, jobs for which they are often overquali

'

ed and receive minimised