key: cord-0057641-3x4wsd0f
authors: Steele, Jackie F.; Miyake, Eriko
title: Patriarchal Leadership and Women’s Exclusion from Democratic Institutions
date: 2020-10-28
journal: Japanese Women in Leadership
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-36304-8_9
sha: 43ff1d956a2e47dab7c93635915290339325c6a5
doc_id: 57641
cord_uid: 3x4wsd0f

In this chapter, we focus on the status of women’s representation in Japan at national and local levels of government, notably by tracing women’s numerical presence or descriptive representation (Pitkin in The concept of representation. Atherton Press, New York, NY, 1967) in the postwar period. We discuss how gender bias against women manifests through micro and macro, socio-cultural and institutional, contexts of local and national politics, and, notably, the pervasive impact and hegemony of elite men’s social and political capital within electoral political and political party recruitment strategies. In particular, we explore the key gatekeeping mechanisms restricting women’s baseline access to political leadership and the absence of an equal playing field in Japanese politics. We discuss recent feminist activism in favor of diversifying decision-making within Japan and propose next steps for expanding the windows of opportunity for women’s political leadership.

foundational typology: symbolic representation, descriptive representation, and substantive representation. While symbolic representation speaks to the role of flags, symbols, statues or other objects imbued with official status functions, the remaining two are applied to the active functions performed within democratic institutions. While descriptive representation refers to the idea of standing for others (physical presence), substantive representation refers to the idea of acting for others (speech-act content).

In the following pages, we briefly situate Japan's performance among other advanced democracies and industrialized economies. We trace women's descriptive representation in national and local politics, in light of Norris and Lovenduski's (1995) approach to the four barriers to electoral office: eligibility, recruitment, selection, and election. Following our analysis of the failure of Womenomics to empower women in politics, we discuss the limitations of the 2019 gender parity law the failures of statecraft that do not include meaningful compliance mechanisms and transparent reporting to taxpayers. We close with proposals for law reform that would drive system-wide diversification of the faces of political leadership, and close with remaining research avenues in this exciting field of social science inquiry.

Many factors come into play and work to affect the proportion of women in legislative assemblies. To fully understand the nuances of men's dominance in national and local politics, we trace the post-World War II history of gender imbalanced descriptive representation, in light of Norris and Lovenduski's (1995) approach to the four (4) barriers to electoral office: eligibility, recruitment, selection, and election. In fact, beginning with 'eligibility', we must recall the historical choices of past parliaments to deny women's access to self-governance. This was the conscious choice of elected men in 1890 to adopt the Law on Assembly and Political Association to legally use the powers of the state to prohibit women from joining parties or attending political meetings. The Japanese Women's Suffrage League was formed to contest women's exclusion from political rights. Their efforts to democratize their country were interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War. Laws adopted within the all-male parliament consciously placed women under the paternalistic tutelage of men within both public and private spheres. Japanese family law explicitly deprived women of independent civil status and the culturally elevated fathers as the symbol of household leadership, filial continuity, and breadwinning responsibility (Mackie 2014; Ochiai, 1996; Ueno, 2004) .

Over time, the legacy of women's exclusion from political meetings, party elites, and political deliberations within all levels of democratic self-government and family leadership would translate into the over-representation of men's worldviews, interests, and policy priorities throughout society. The legal limitations were first removed by the new post-World War II constitution in 1947 affirming women's right to suffrage and to stand for election. Figure 9 .1 shows women lining up to vote for the first time in 1947. 

Changes in laws are a first step to changing practices and attitudes, but laws require practical implementation and proactive dissemination to take root in the hearts and minds of a population. This was acknowledged at the international level during the UN Decade for Women (1975) (1976) (1977) (1978) (1979) (1980) (1981) (1982) (1983) (1984) (1985) when countries worldwide agreed upon key language in the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) committing to the full respect of women's human rights (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan (MOFA), 2016). Since ratification, the Japanese government has passed a variety of laws aimed at advancing gender equality and although the Equal Employment Opportunity Law (1985) has been amended four times (1997, 2006, 2013, 2016) to better protect women's rights, and yet many loopholes continue to allow discrimination (Dalton, 2017; Gordon, 2017; Starich, 2007; Weathers, 2005) .

The subsequent landmark legislation grounding all laws and regulations has been the Basic Act for Gender-Equal Society. Effective from 2000, the Basic Act has foreseen the more detailed mapping of a Basic Plan for a Gender-Equal Society, with the 2015 Plan being the 4th iteration. The Abe Administration's Womenomics Strategy has pushed for women's access to paid workforce participation through adoption of the Act for the Promotion of Women's Empowerment (2015) , which was to create 'a society in which all women shine' (MOFA, 2015) . The Act for the Promotion of Women's Participation and Advancement in the Workplace (2016) now requires that large-scale enterprises make action plans and report on the rates of newly hired women employees, existing gender gaps in the years of service, working hours, and numbers of women managers and executives (Gender Equality Bureau Cabinet Office, 2016a). This law was expected to lead to promotion of more women into managerial positions in an attempt to finally result in some basic progress toward the longstanding (2003) goal of 30% women in managerial positions by 2020. Despite the past two decades of legislation to promote gender equality, Japan's international ranking in the 2019 Global Gender Gap Index (WEF, 2020) dropped significantly to a historic low of 121st place among 153 countries (see Table 9 .1; Japan Times, 2019). (2020) The government has now pushed back, at least another decade, any expectations of achieving their target for 30% women in leadership, and the revised proposal in fact "aims for a society where men and women alike are in leadership positions 'by 2050'" (Mainichi Shinbun, 2020, para 7), in 30 years from now. The gender gap is most extreme for Japan in the area of political empowerment. Women's ratio in the Upper House is 22.8%. As a reference point, the 2019 world average of the ratio of women in Lower Houses is 25%, with the Asian average being 20.5% (Inter-Parliamentary Union, 2020). For local assemblies, the overall average of Japanese women politicians is a mere 14.0% (Ichikawa Fusae Center for Women and Governance, 2020).

In the following section, we take a closer look at the disparities in men's and women's post-war descriptive representation within the Japanese Diet and the political context of women's exclusion from recruitment, selection, and election.

The literature on women and politics confirms the chronic failure of representative democracy in Japan (Eto, 2016; Miura, 2015; Miura & Eto, 2014; Shin, 2014; Steele, 2011 Steele, , 2014 . To understand the biggest area of blockage in progress on women's descriptive representation, we look to the second step in Norris and Lovenduski's (1995) four stages of electoral office. Recruitment is the means by which individuals who are interested in politics can be identified from within the population at large, resulting in their selection by political parties for electoral competition, and ultimately their potential election by the population. Figures 9.2 and 9.3 for the Lower and Upper Houses, respectively, reflect the difficult trajectory of women's journey from legal eligibility to effective selection and election in postwar Japan. Japanese women were elected in decent numbers to the Japanese Lower House in the first elections, with 39 of 466 seats (8.4%) going to women. However, women's representation plummeted in subsequent elections, hovering at 2% until as late as 1986 (Iwamoto, 2001) . It was not until 2005 that women's descriptive representation would reach a mere 8% of seats.

The electoral system shapes the rules of the game and is touted as heavily influencing, negatively or positively, the incentives to parties to recruit diverse candidates, including women. The electoral system shapes the patterns of political recruitment, and where party organizations are weak, recruitment is in turn supported by pre-existing social capital, 1946 1947 1949 1952 1953 1955 1958 1960 1963 1967 1969 1972 1976 1979 1980 1983 1986 1990 1993 1996 2000 2003 2005 2009 2012 2014 2017 1947 1950 1953 1956 1959 1962 1965 1968 1971 1974 1977 1980 1983 1986 1989 1992 1995 1998 kinship, and professional ties that form clientelist networks grounded upon male homo social capital (Bjarnegard, 2015) . During the medium-sized constituency system used for the bulk of the postwar period of Japanese history, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) ran 2-3 members per district making koenkai or personal support networks of candidates central in determining the success of individuals campaigning under the same party label. The mobilization of successful personal networks remains crucial to elections, and Japan holds down the more extreme end of candidate-based personalistic politics given this pre-1994 spillover effect (Miura, Shin, & Steele, 2018) . Within singlemember districts in Japan, Ogai (2001) showed that successful national candidates have one of four political backgrounds: former local or prefectural politicians, former high-level national bureaucrats, former secretaries to politicians, and have a family inheritance. One-quarter of the seats in the outgoing parliament in 2000 was held by a family dynasty through second and third generation descendants of incumbents and fully onethird of LDP candidates in the 2000 election had a father, father-in-law, or grandfather who had served in the Diet (Taniguchi, 2008) .

Majoritarian systems are considered less favorable to women, given the winner-take-all competition that informally favors the median man's candidate profile and his informal networks. Conversely, proportional representation systems incentivize parties to diversify their electoral teams to include women and other social groups (Kawato, 2013; Miura & Eto, 2014) . Not surprisingly, the use of proportional representation in the Japanese Upper House has offered opportunities for greater diversification of candidates, as compared to the single districts for the Lower House. The 1989 Upper House elections saw the election of many women by Japan Socialist Party leaders Takako Doi, resulting in an impressive 18% elected women, coined the Madonna Boom (Iwamoto 2001 ; Japan Times, 2019). The 1990 Lower House, however, only saw the election of a mere 2.34% women.

The majority of the seats on the Japanese electoral system require a strong personal support network. The ability to mobilize spouses, relatives, schoolmates, industry, regional or neighborhood associations, and a range of business and professional ties to both local and central government bureaucrats, the koenkai supported by local to national male homo social capital and related networks are the key to electoral success and they demonstrate the potential to channel resources and national government funds back into the community. These clientelist relations among men require endless performance of what have coined with the concept of constituency facetime; constituency facetime relies on copious public appearances and long working hours of constituency outreach and vote mobilization predicated upon the outsourcing of all family and caregiving (child-rearing, eldercare) responsibilities to a housewife (Kage, Rosenbluth, & Tanaka, 2019) . In addition to the expectations as to what (gender) constitutes a winning profile, other related cultural or socio-economic factors intervene to dissuade parties from selecting women as potential candidates.

One exception was in the strategy of former Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro in 2005, who saw an opportunity to use women's descriptive representation as a cover for eliminating internal factions within his own party. Koizumi recruited a team of younger, predominantly high profile women candidates, dubbed assassin candidates by the media, as the face of anti-establishment LDP change and modernization (Steele, 2011) . The 2005 General Elections saw the election of 44 women, with the 45th woman being elected in a subsequent by-election, marking an all-time numerical high for women's representation in the House of Representatives (Steele, 2011) . All-be-it an important gain for women's political representation, after the departure of Koizumi from LDP leadership, Koizumi's efforts did not establish sustainability for women's representation (Darhour & Dalherup, 2013; Shin, 2014) , and many lost in the subsequent election.

In light of the above analysis of women's hurdles for national election due to the impact of gender bias, notably at the phases of recruitment and selection, let us now turn to the local level to see if these hurdles play the same role within local politics.

Despite stagnant representation in postwar national politics, elected women in the 47 prefectural assemblies, 792 city assemblies, 183 town and village assemblies, and 23 special ward assemblies between 1980 and 2018 have gradually increased over the last 40 years. Figure 9 .4 and Table 9 .2 show the details. While all prefectural assemblies have women (2018) members, 3.4% of city and ward assemblies and 29.6% of town and village assemblies still had zero elected women as of the 2019 reported data (Ichikawa Fusae Center for Women and Governance, 2020). Women's under-representation in local governments has various explanations. Fewer women are motivated run for office and offer their support to certain political parties (Masuyama, 2007) , and not surprisingly, aspiring women are less likely to receive the support of their spouse and family, due to persistence of patriarchal expectations about the gendered division of labor in the home (Kaneko, 2010; Ooki, 2019) . Women have less access to the economic resources and social capital necessary to run and win in an election, due to gender gaps in income, social status, and network-forming skills (Masuyama, 2007; Takeda, 2010; Yamada, 2007) .

By examining the relationship between women's description representation and the size of municipalities, Matsubayashi and Ueda (2012) argued that the number of women politicians is likely to increase as the population of municipalities increases. As with national politics where koenkai or personal support networks are key, in small municipalities, the election results depend largely on the individual candidate's own resources and political connections, whereas the role of political parties offers a potentially more equal playing field to candidates in large municipalities, if political parties are open to the recruitment of women. In such cases, women candidates with political party support have a greater chance of winning elections.

In light of the amalgamation of local municipalities, Takeyasu (2015) tracks the changes in the profiles of elected women since 2002. Women received greater organizational support, especially from political parties, women's organizations, and community associations, and the percent of housewives and freelance professionals increased to approximately 50%. Given the national importance of issues relating to declining birthrates, eldercare, daycare access, education, and child-rearing (Takeyasu, 2015) , women council members were often seen as bringing expertise and concrete experience with these policy areas relative to competitors (Tsuji, 2017) . This has opened up new pathways to political leadership for women from housewife to civil society leader, and ultimately to city mayor. Research on women mayors reveals how gender norms can work positively for aspiring women candidates. Certain women were elected mayor following corruption scandals of outgoing men mayors. The clean image of the women, combined with past track records of horizontal relationship-building and open communication with community to offer an alternative praxis of political leadership by women that stood out positively against the nepotistic, corrupt power politics associated with the immediate predecessors (Tsuji, 2017) . Nonetheless, the number of women mayor and governors has only increased at a glacial rate as Table 9 .3 shows, with a mere 2 out of 47 women governors (4.3%), 25 of 792 (3.2%) women mayors, 8 out of 743 (1.1%) town mayors, and 1 out of 23 (4.3%) special wards headed by a women. Despite local politics being perceived as more accessible to women than national politics, a mere 7 women have served as governor of the 47 prefectures (Josei Shucho no Ichiran, 2020; Zenkoku Shi-gikai Gichokai, 2020; Zenkoku Choson-gikai Gichokai, 2020).

Though women who head up local governments are scarce, it is important to note the significant accomplishments paved by women mayors and governors. Incumbent mayor of Yokohama, Fumiko Hayashi (2009 Hayashi ( -2021 , championed the plight of working parents and showed empathetic leadership; this led her to commit to eliminating daycare waiting lists within three years so all parents with small children could regain access to the paid workforce (Hayashi, 2013) . Former Otsu Mayor Naomi Koshi (2012 Koshi ( -2020 was a pioneer in taking on the toxic challenge of school bullying and so created an independent committee and action plan to prevent bullying (Koshi, 2014) . Former Mitaka Mayor Keiko Kiyohara (2003 Kiyohara ( -2019 , created an effective administrative service structure by actively promoting citizens' participation in policymaking (Kiyohara & Awaji, 2010) . In addition, the former governor of Shiga Prefecture, Yukiko Kada (2006 Kada ( -2014 , who is also an environmental sociologist, actively implemented a series of policies to protect the natural environment of Shiga Prefecture (Kada, 2013) .

For both national and local politics, a primary hurdle for women remains the informal gendered norms guiding men in decision-makers positions within political parties. Women are often playing with both arms tied behind their backs, penalized by both lack of support within their families and lack of support within historically male-dominated political elites. Where there is gatekeeping by men to keep women out of the selection of candidates, progress can only occur when gender balance is given positive public attention. Moreover, voters must be encouraged to evaluate political party performance of fielding gender-balanced teams and constant scrutiny by the media, women's groups and other types of prodemocratization pressures over time is critical (Dahlerup & Leyenaar, 2013) . Within Japan, the tides shifted since 2014, when the Association for the Promotion of Quotas (QnoKai) began its tireless efforts to pressure the Diet for adoption of a new gender parity law. A Multi-partisan Parliamentary Group for the Promotion of Women in Politics (hereafter Multi-partisan Group) was also launched in 2015 and after numerous study groups led by QnoKai, the Multi-partisan Group drafted a bill (Act on Promotion of Gender Equality in the Political Field, May 23, 2018) that would require political parties to recruit equal numbers of men and women. While the proposed bills were supported by opposition parties in 2016, the governing LDP denied their pivotal support. The bill that the LDP eventually supported on May 23, 2018 diluted the obligations upon party elites, and it completely failed to include any accountability mechanism.

The international literature on women's representation and gender quotas used worldwide demonstrates the necessity of (1) clear, transparent metrics (targets), and (2) a rigorous compliance mechanism that will ensure public accountability by party elites. The new Japanese law does neither of these two critical pieces. The lead political scientist offering guidance to the Multi-partisan Group, Mari Miura, in a recent interview (Institute for Gender Studies, 2018) suggested that the coalition of actors could only agree on wording that created a new principle or democratic norm of gender equality in politics, and that the new law would, at a minimum, put an end to political party elites who tried to suggest that gender quotas were unconstitutional. With the new law asserting this basic principle, political parties would have a legal obligation to make efforts to field more gender-balanced teams. The law applies to both national and local elections, and paves the way for government research tracking the hurdles to women's equal participation in electoral politics. As the academic advisor to the parliamentary group, Miura played a pivotal role as a critical actor (Childs & Krook, 2009 ) working in support of the parliamentary group's legislative efforts, and the mobilization of QnoKai constituted a critical mass and coalition of women's organizations that publicly held the parliamentary group members from each party accountable for delivering on their promise of adopting a new bill.

Despite eight years of Womenomics hype led by Prime Minister Abe, Japan still dropped from 114th to 121st place in the most recent Gender Gap Index (World Economic Forum, 2020). Moreover, the LDP continues to be the worst offender in keeping women out of its recruitment pipelines, with a 83.6% monopoly by LDP men over seats in the Upper House in 2016 prior to the new law, and a whopping 85.4% monopoly by LDP men over seats in the 2019 Upper House elections, even though they were held after the gender parity law was adopted. Tables 9.3 and 9.4 show the details. The LDP's coalition partner, the Komeito, likewise fielded men to the tune of 90.6% of all candidates in the 2017 Lower House elections and maintained 91.7% men in the 2019 Upper House elections held after the new law. Neither of these governing coalition parties took the new legal obligation very seriously, nor was the law effective in nudging parties to establish better gender balance in their political recruitment efforts (Table 9 .5).

In national Japanese politics, successful candidates are supposed to have the three ban: jiban (constituency support), kanban (name recognition or renown) and kaban (financial support) (Smith, 2018 ). Yet, similar numbers of women were elected in practice in 1947 and 2006, despite tremendous strides in women's economic access to paid labor and women's significant social capital within local community organizations and networks. The biggest hurdle then remains the recruitment and selection stages controlled by the elite party men and male homo social capital from local to national levels. In fact, the author, Steele and her Sources Tokyo Shinbun Web (2017) , Chunichi Shinbun Web (2017) colleagues, Miura and Shin surveyed Japanese parliamentarians in 2016. They found that, more strongly influential than financial resources or reputation, was the pivotal role of political party support. In local politics, the diversity of partisan and non-partisan interests, the size of the city, the existence or absence of political party support organizations, strong economic resources and local reputation, notably for mayoral elections, are the biggest factors of success.

To carve out room for women's political leadership, there must be a systemic effort to diversify the faces and bodies deemed appropriate for political leadership. This shift in informal assumptions and cultural norms about who can share in political power must be supported by effective laws that democratize Japanese political parties. While there are numerous ways to invoke more equal playing fields for electoral recruitment, based on the international research insights, we propose a few key accountability mechanisms.

While many political candidacy schools exist within political parties, or are tied to political notables, there are only a few training schools that are non-partisan. Few offer broad-based literacy about democracy and support to women who are not yet affiliated to a party. The Ryoko Akamatsu Political School, created in September 2014 by Ryoko Akamatsu, a pioneering leader of WIN and the Association for the Promotion of Quotas (QnoKai), is one such excellent example. A second recent example is the Parity Academy, created by political scientists, Mari Miura (Sophia University) and Ki-young Shin (Ochanomizu Women's University), that emerged following their 2018 tour of 14 women's political leadership programs in the United States, funded by the Sasagawa Foundation .

While raising women's political confidence, leadership skills, and ability to compete in elections is a valuable strategy, ultimately, individual-level strategies will not bring system-wide changes that can neutralize the influence of men's unconscious bias and preference for male homo social capital . To ensure that highly talented women are equally supported in their aspirations to run for election with party support, institutional reform of political parties is key. To incentivize more egalitarian behavior among elite political party decision-makers, we suggest two modest changes to the current mixed electoral system to foster broader acceptance of diverse faces of political leadership.

First and foremost, the Gender Parity Law must be further strengthened to genuinely regulate and publicly foster accountability by political party recruitment of men and women in equal numbers. The next law reform would ideally set targets of equal representation that are rewarded with different levels of public funding. Parties must finally feel accountable to the law and feel beholden to achieving good performance on gender-equal recruitment, and as such, taxpayer dollars should not be given to political parties headed by anti-democratic leaders who think they are above the law. If they wish to ignore the law and continue genderbiased recruitment of predominantly men onto their electoral teams, then those parties would be expected to self-fund their nepotistic operations and campaigns without public funds. For example, parties that achieve a minimum floor of 25% women candidates would receive 50% of public funding because they are violating the equality principle established in law, and also robbing taxpayers of the full leadership talent of the population. Parties achieving 35% gender balance would receive 70% of the public funding, and those achieving 45% or more gender balance would receive full public funding to reward them for complying with the principle of gender-balanced recruitment.

The new law reform must require that parties report publicly on their efforts to secure gender balance in advance of each election. This would generate transparency and accountability to the law, to the media, to the population and to women's organizations, on this key performance indicator of gender equality and democratic culture within the political parties. Revealing their efforts would allow more intense comparisons, media reporting, women's movement advocacy, and literacy building for voters to include this criterion when casting their votes in the elections. Voters would be encouraged to reward or punish parties that continue to stand above the constitutional guarantees to equality and the gender parity compliance mechanisms.

Changing the electoral system used for the House of Representatives from a mixed parallel system to a mixed proportional compensatory system would allow for the ideological views of voters to influence all 465 seats allocated to parties. This would offset the hegemonic influence generating the one-party predominant system in Japan, and would encourage parties to think nationally about their team to further diversify the candidates place on nation-wide PR lists. This would generate additional support for smaller parties to have more ideological impact upon policy-driven debates, and would create a more robust competition of ideas across the Japanese democratic system. The combination of these impacts may be greater possibility for more than one viable multi-partisan coalition, and thus more reliable occurrence of policy-driven competition of ideas, and power alternation over time to end the one-party hegemony that has plagued the post-WWII period. This in turn would add to the stability and legitimacy of the quality of the democratic system, in terms of generating timely alternation of government that is essential to a healthy, responsive, and innovative representative democracy.

Finally, it is worth noting the pervasive gender discrimination at work within the Japanese print and televised media. Manels or panels comprised only of men talking heads are rife across Japanese society in all fields, but notably in electoral politics. At a minimum, additional law reform should include a compliance mechanism that regulates publicly-funded media to ensure gender-balanced representation in programming. This could significantly work to diversify the image of who is considered to be an expert and political authority, and who the population ought to view as knowledgeable and offering experienced views about democracy, public policy, and electoral politics. Having media partners be formally accountable for correcting for the systemic bias currently generating a partial, androcentric view of political issues would ensure delivery of a more legitimate range of political ideas and analyses for the population to consider. It would also diversify the kinds of politically knowledgeable leaders and role models apt to inspire and educate the next generation of girls and boys to take a greater interest in Japanese democracy.

Although male-dominated parliaments may no longer deny women suffrage or the right to stand for election in Japan, there are infinite strategies of exclusion, silencing, marginalizing, and harassment of women candidates and elected women who are working against significantly high odds to simply run for election. Women who wish to contribute their talents, expertise, and political leadership for the benefit of all members of Japanese society must be welcomed by all parties so that Japan can experience the most robust quality of democracy, of public debate, and the caliber of deliberation within the Diet about what constitutes the public good.

Among the more competitive political parties, the Japan Socialist Party under Takako Doi, and its current iteration as the Social Democratic Party of Japan (SDP) led by Mizuho Fukushima, are the one consistent exception to this rule. The LDP has had a hegemony over office and although it has announced with great pomp its new laws, they remain devoid of any meaningful teeth that has mostly squandered the opportunity to benchmark real leadership and measurable results in this critical facet of democracy and global economy. Rather than double down to add compliance mechanisms into its purely rhetorical laws, the LDP have preferred to protect male dominance for another 3 decades, and pushed back its targets for 30% women in decision-making to the vague target of sometime between 2020 and 2050 (Mainichi, 2020).

In terms of national level political research, in order to gain access to reliable information on political party organizations and which ones ought to benefit from taxpayer dollars, we foremost need reliable, longitudinal data on the ways that political parties recruit candidates and how they allocate prestigious party roles and function internally. As the intermediaries of democratic self-government, political parties play an extremely privileged role within contemporary self-government. This remains a black box, and yet, to talk credibly about meritocracy, researchers need access to standardized data on both the formal qualifications parties say they follow, as well as the informal qualities or loyalties that are being rewarded in practice. Parties are not above the law. Their electoral practices, internal by-laws and political party practices must be scrutinized and reformed in light of their democratic obligations under the constitution and Basic Law standards of equality promised to all women, men, girls, and boys. Notably, this would require greater transparency by political parties as to the specific criteria used to justify who is selected to become a party-backed candidate. This will make possible more detailed analyses of the structural barriers and overt forms of resistance to women by male homo social capital dominating the power politics within parties.

Second, we need increased political science research and attention paid to the actual quality of democracy achieved (or rather not achieved) inside political party organizations and the degree to which democratic rights and freedoms outlined in the constitution are being honored by political parties in practice. As the intermediaries of democratic self-government, political parties play an extremely privileged role within contemporary governance and thus not only electoral practices, but also the internal by-laws and political party practices must be made public and held up to the scrutiny of constitutional compliance, including those outlining gender equality. Too often it is the international press that has brought gender equality violations to the forefront of news in Japan. Social media, informal news outlets, and citizen-or community-based digital news sources working for further democratization are likewise bringing these issues to the forefront to inform public debates that are often covered superficially by traditional Japanese media. Domestic media linked to political establishments are also impacted by the bias of male homo social capital and must be challenged to perform better. The media stands to play a central role in leading positive recoding of women's political leadership, in changing popular attitudes about the dire necessity of a greater gender balance in democratic institutions, and of the value added of having diverse models of political leadership enrich local to national parliamentary debates and local to national public policy outputs. Further research on the role of media in celebrating diverse political leadership and of fostering inclusive citizenship would be a great contribution.

Third, research on the cultural attitudes of men and women incumbents and the extent to which their attitudes are pro-diversity or antiegalitarian is another key area of evidence that requires further research exposure and debate among society at large. Steele is involved in a research grant led by Mari Miura (co-investigators: Ki-young Shin, Jackie Steele, Reiko Oyama, Kenneth McElwain, Greg Noble) that involved two elite surveys on attitudes of parliamentarians on women's representation and policy impacts, and one public survey on related topics. Pending the impacts of the novel coronavirus, we will hold an international conference to share our 6 years of research findings in 2021. Steele's analysis of the elite MP survey will shed light on the clear gender gap with respect to Japanese parliamentarians' propensity to take up and then represent minority views or politically marginalized social group interests in their interventions in the Diet. This is an area that requires increased domestic qualitative research on the correlation between the descriptive representation of MPs of all social group affinities and their propensity to substantively represent issues and social group views that fall outside of their own lived experiences and affinities.

Within the local level, studies on the advancement, typology, and profiles of women politicians have been compiled, but case studies of women political leaders from the perspective of leadership studies are scarce. For example, preliminary research on women mayors by Miyake (2017) illustrated a variety of leadership styles exercised by women mayors in 14 cities that can serve to diversify our understanding and definitions of leadership. Further in-depth case studies on these mayors, and of diverse elected men who manifest non-traditional leadership styles, would help us understand how they women and men are currently forced to adapt to toxic masculinity and the values of male homo social capital that still dominate the highest levels of the national and local bureaucracies and elites. This could help other aspiring political leaders to learn how to successfully harness their own individual style and personal strengths and be competitive in challenging the dominant stereotypes and overly narrow cultural boundaries of 'political leadership' in Japan that exclude many non-traditional men and women candidates from gaining legitimacy and being given the opportunity to contribute to their society.

Finally, within the education sector, research and development of effective pedagogies for teaching inclusive leadership, respect for diversity, and citizenship education would be desirable. Pertinent for elementary school through to college and high educational degrees, we need renewed commitments to public education on civic responsibilities, as well as democratic rights and freedoms. This would increase awareness and greater openness to the sociological diversity comprising Reiwa Japan among both young and old. Ideally, this would strengthen the democratic literacy and values of Japanese society to play a leadership role in terms of the democratic responsibilities of all countries in an era of intense interdependence, collective risks of pandemic or other crises, and that will continue to require global forms of solidarity and effective risk governance through more inclusive representative democratic decision-making for the foreseeable future.

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Annuals of Japanese Political Science Association

小選挙区比例代表における政党間競争 [Political Party competition within an FPTP-Mixed Member System

Picture of women lining up to vote for the first time in 1947

Japan's household registration system and citizenship: Koseki, identification and documentation

女性候補割合、過去最高も「男女均等」ほど遠く 与党は消極的 参院選 [Upper House Election, the ratio of women candidates, record highest but far from gender quota

Japan gov't to push back 30% target for women in leadership positions by up to 10 years

Should Blacks represent Blacks and women represent women? A contingent 'Yes'

女性の政界進出:国際比較と意識調査 [Women's political participation: International comparison and attitude survey

市町村議会における女性の参入 [Women's participation in municipal councils

Japan's foreign policy to promote national and worldwide interests

Watashitachi no koe o gikai e: Daihyosei minshushugi no saisei [Making our voices heard: The revival of representative democracy

Jenda kuota: Sekai no josei giin wa naze fuetanoka

Sasagawa Foundation

Proceedings from the International Political Science Association Conference: Does 'constituency facetime' reproduce male dominance? Insights from Japan's mixed-member majoritarian electoral system

同志社女 子大学総合文化研究所紀要 [Bulletin of Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture, Doshisha Women's College of Liberal Arts

國會議員要覧 [Directory of the members of parliament

Political recruitment: Gender, race and class in the British Parliament

The Japanese family system in transition: A sociological analysis of family change in post-war Japan

Japanese women and political institutions: Why are women politically unrepresented

統一地方選で女性の議会進出はどこまで進んだか [How far women advanced to local assemblies in the unified local elections

The concept of representation

Women's sustainable representation and the spillover effect of electoral gender quotas in South Korea

Dynasties and democracy: The inherited incumbency advantage in Japan

The 2006 revisions to Japan's Equal Opportunity Employment Law: A narrow approach to a pervasive problem. Pacific Rim Law and Policy

Women's representation in the Japanese lower house: 'Temporary' measures and the windows of opportunity in a mixed electoral system

「多様な政治的アイデンティティとクオータ制の広がりー 日本の事例から」[Diverse political identities and quotas: Lessons from the Japanese electoral system

政治参加におけるジェンダー・ギャップ:JGSS-2003によ る資源・政治的関与要因の検討 [The gender gap in political participation: A JGSS-2003 data-based analysis of political resources and political involvement

京都女子大学現代社会学研究 [Kyoto Women's University Bulletin of Contemporary Social Studies

Diet members and seat inheritance: Keeping it the family

参院選2016 党派別の立候補者数

Explaining the increase in female mayors: Gender-segregated employment and pathways to local political leadership

Nationalism and gender

Equal opportunity for Japanese women, what progress?

Voice, trust, and memory: Marginalized groups and the failings of Liberal Representation

日本人の政治参加におけるジェンダー・ギャップ [Gender gap

Justice and the politics of difference

全国町村議会議長会 [National Association of Chairpersons of Town and Village Assemblies

全国市議会議長会 [National Association of Chairpersons of City Councils