In Ebetsu and a handful of other municipalities, women are finding success in races long dominated by men.
(Bloomberg) — A handful of small cities in Japan have managed to do what the rest of the country hasn’t: Elect women.
Among the country’s city councils and assemblies, men held more than 80% of the total seats as of 2021. But in Ebetsu, a small city in northern Hokkaido, more than 40% of the city council members are women; voters in Takarazuka, a suburb outside of Osaka, awarded 14 of 26 seats to women; Nisshin City, about 17 kilometers from Toyota Motor Corp. headquarters, now has a local assembly with an even split.
These areas are a bright spot for a government that in 2018 passed a bill advocating for parties to put an effort into fielding an equal number of male and female candidates. Overall, progress has been slow— women hold just 15% of seats in parliament. At the local level, women make up just 14% of elected officials, according to data from UN Women.
“Local government is a practice ground for democracy,” said Emiri Yamagishi, an associate professor at Ohtsuki City College who specializes in local politics. “Getting more women involved in politics means that the issues they face are reflected in decision-making bodies. At the end of the day, that’s better not just for women but for everybody.”
There’s rarely a single reason that some municipalities succeed in electing women and others don’t. Ebetsu is a bedroom community to the much bigger Sapporo, giving it some of the qualities of a bigger, more liberal city, but with lower barriers to entry in politics. Two of the big political organizations, the Japanese Communist Party and Komeito, have nominated many female candidates, Yamagishi pointed out; prior to the latest election, seven of the 12 women on city council belonged to one or the other.
Ebetsu also benefits from a long history of women in elected positions. The city voted in its first female council member in 1975, and women have been on the council almost ever since. A mother of an 11-year old, Mika Inomata first ran for Ebetsu city assembly in 2019 and was re-elected this month. Her original motivation for joining politics: to make sure voices of those in the child-rearing generation like herself are reflected in policies.
Inomata said that, as a mom, she was particularly attuned to the complaints of Ebetsu parents who couldn’t place siblings together in daycare facilities, creating a hassle for working parents. “The city implemented a measure that would help siblings be placed in the same daycare from this fiscal year,” she said.
Inomata inspired 34-year old Risa Takayanagi, who won her first campaign this month. She describes herself as “an ordinary housewife with a child,” and because of her own struggles in school, she said she’s motivated to create “alternative, free schools” in the community.
Takayanagi tapped her family and friends for help with the campaign, distributing fliers and putting up posters. Wearing a bright, orange puffer coat and a black beret, she drove her car through the city in the last week of the race, stopping in several neighborhoods to give speeches, shake hands with voters and hand out campaign literature.
Critical to her success, she said, was the childcare that her in-laws provided, watching her daughter after school so that Takayanagi could campaign. “If my child was much younger, or if I didn’t have that support from my husband’s family, it would have been much more difficult,” she said.
Research suggests that in fact childcare – and other social support structures – could be critical if the country wants to meet its goals to get more women into politics. “The problem instead appears to be that women are reluctant to run for office because of socially mandated family roles,” a trio of academics wrote in a 2018 paper that tackled the question of low female political representation in Japan. Making childcare cheaper and more widely available could help, they say, but societal expectations also have to change.
The researchers argue for a quota system designed to increase the proportion of women at least in parliament. The recent experience of South Korea suggests it could work. In 2000, the assembly started requiring the major parties to allocate half of their candidate slates to women. Women now occupy 19% of national assembly seats, up from 6% in early 2000s, according to data from the World Bank.
In Ebetsu, residents said they saw value in having more women in government. Hiromi Sasaki, a 62-year old nurse, said having more women in the assembly will ultimately benefit the city’s families. And Kozo Sawaguchi, 87, said that while changing the makeup of the national assembly is important, at the local level, “we should incorporate more of the strengths that women have.” “It’s foolish to think politics is only for men,” he said.
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