Women, social change and realising political ideals - Religion and Politics in Contemporary Japan - page 167

However, the national political representatives may increasingly be able to
take a di erent route, as indicated by the young femaleMPs who have sprung up,

who have not first completed their childcare responsibilities before becoming

politicians, or have followed a high-powered career track while also being a
mother, as discussed in Chapter 5 with the example of Takeya Toshiko.
As I watched the young women engage in discussions about politics and
the nature of the good society with their friends in their electoral campaign
for Komeito, a real sense of political participation and in shaping attitudes in
society was emerging. Here young people were discussing, debating, some-
times pleading with their friends to at least go and vote to have a say. Would
their e

and new trends of emphasis on a humanistic and equal
society emerge? Helping to put more women into o

orts pay o

ce, as well as to support

Komeito as a party that has long championed issues such as social

welfare, education and culture, may have helped to challenge the traditional
patriarchal values and social structures that are found re

' feminine '

ected in their own
organisation and among them as well as in wider society. It was supporters
with feminist awareness who more strongly felt the discrepancy between the
katamaru practices in Soka Gakkai and Ikeda s praise of women, more so

than their less feminist peers or older female members. However, the constant
messages from Ikeda about the greatness of women made women feel proud,
self-empowered and active in their commitment to a more subtle, inner
transformation, which may be part of more fundamentally transforming wider
societal concepts of what constitutes human success. What was important for
these young women was their own sense of dedication to the value of forming
and ful

'

lling obligations to other human beings based on bonds of solidarity
and humanistic values. This outlook on life they derived from Ikeda s teach-

ings about Buddhism; however, often unwittingly for those without a more feminist
awareness, it also overshadowed their concerns about gender inequality
around them.
LeBlanc (1999) argues that the low status of the housewife identity says as
much about the hierarchies of values in larger society as it reveals women

'

s
oppression within. Although women in Soka Gakkai are bound in many ways
and their position as housewives is not the result of an admirable democratic
process, their citizenship has many attractive aspects that while not directly
challenging most interest-based political struggles, provides a model from
which to critique them. Komeito is an outlet for their political action that
may help to change the political, economic and cultural rationale that posits
men in the role as corporate warriors and females as sengy - shufu. Moore
(2005) discusses how ideal constructions of gender never correspond to the
exact experience of body and gender, and how the theory of performativity
(Butler 1990) may of

'

er the possibility of reworking the normative structures
of the debate about gender and sex. She also discusses how ambiguity may be
the basis of gender di

erence, such as that demonstrated by Herdt (1992) or
Jackson (1996), who show how sexed bodies, sexual practices and gender
identities do not necessarily go together. While we cannot easily generalise