ASAA Women in Asia Series. Abingdon, England; New York: Routledge, 2015. xiv, 157 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$155.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-415-82738-6.
The chronic under-representation of women in Japanese politics is a fascinating area of inquiry for political scientists, democratic theorists, and gender scholars interested in how supposedly “neutral” democratic institutions get coopted by vested interests. As Emma Dalton’s research shows, male-dominated political parties such as Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) often explicitly reproduce legacies of political exclusion long after the formal laws excluding women from electoral participation are overturned. Combining institutionalism, discourse analysis, and experiential accounts of women parliamentarians, Dalton’s book should be required reading for students interested in democratic institutions and citizenship in contemporary Japan.
The author first outlines the gendered exclusion generated by the institutions and ideologies of the “1955 system” of LDP dominance. The multi-member electoral system privileged personalistic politics channelled through candidate support networks (koenkai), incestuous relationships of power-brokering, and status-based politics. Expected to serve the nation as mothers and housewives, women were largely perceived as “outsiders” to this kind of self-interested game. Dalton writes that “support for the post-war salaryman/housewife family model was on the political agenda for the LPD at least until the 1990s” (27). Public policies channelled the masculinized values of the governing LDP and were part of its economic strategy to ensure the rapid development of Japan by relying on informal and uncompensated female labour rather than raising taxes to support a welfare state.
Chapter 2 then turns the reader’s attention to the evolution of gendered political structures following the electoral reform of 1994. The LDP lost control of the House of Representatives to a governing coalition that created a mixed electoral system combining a majority of single-member district (SMD) seats with a modicum of proportional representation (PR). While the PR tier was heralded as a window of opportunity for women, parliamentary representation by women barely increased, rising from 2.7 percent in 1993 to 7.3 percent in 2000, and then quickly plateauing. A provision allowing dual candidacies across the two electoral segments (the “zombie” clause) further weakened the impact of the proportional tier and thus limited opportunities for women. Campaign financing reform curtailed the impact of money politics and introduced a system of public funding to parties, but failed to contribute to significant increases in female parliamentarians. While “gender equality” policy, or at least, the appearance of supporting equality, came to be seen by the LDP as “good business” in terms of Japan’s international reputation, Dalton argues that few of the public policies have transformed traditional gendered norms in practice.
Dalton then takes a step back from the way state-level institutional structures and policies construct gender norms in contemporary Japan, to examine individual female politicians. Using qualitative interviews, she explores the views of elected women, and how they articulate their political ambitions within the boundaries of gender-acceptable frames and terms. In chapter 3, we learn that most of the interviewees avoid asserting any evidence of political ambition. Women run, they say, because they are asked to and because they feel a sense of civic duty. Many join the LDP so as to be on the governing side, and often explain their political career choices in relation to a significant man, such as a father or husband.
In chapter 4, Dalton brings her qualitative interview material into productive dialogue with a leading theory of women’s representation, “The Politics of Presence,” articulated by Anne Philips. This theory asserts the need for gender balance as a matter of democratic justice and efficiency. Against this backdrop, Dalton traces the dominant discourses in Japan used to explain the importance of having women in politics. Traditionally, female participation is seen as derived from women’s roles as mothers, housewives, and household consumers. An alternative interpretation observes that women often strategically deploy their gender and mothering roles to discredit their male opponents in an era where corruption scandals are prevalent and childcare policy is of increasing public salience. Conveying the author’s main message, chapter 4 exposes the highly masculinized culture and norms of the LDP. Most LDP women, she suggests, internalize these pervasive norms and convey them in their own accounts, downplaying the prevalence and meaning of sexism, and denying that it might be a systemic effect of a patriarchal party culture.
The text alternates between the narratives that the women choose to put on the public record, softening their gendered transgressions, and Dalton’s interpretation of their discourses. From experiences in Canada and Japan, I would suggest that elite qualitative interviewing is a two-way street of posturing and expectation management. When trying to measure misogyny (and racism), it is exceptionally hard to delineate the personal beliefs (honne) from the “traditionally gendered” personae that may strategically be adopted by interviewees, particularly those from conservative parties. Dalton does a fine job of exploring nuances and admitting of alternative interpretations of the interviews that differ from her own proposed readings. A systematic methodological antidote might be to conduct interviews with elected men. For the discussion of ambition in particular, by documenting how both groups may tactically hide ambition and modestly justify why they run, a dataset covering both groups of politicians would allow robust assessments of the “gendering” discourses at play and the degree to which they disproportionately manifest among female politicians.
Dalton’s conclusion offers a timely discussion of ways to increase women’s representation by introducing a gender quota. After reviewing the dominant discourses about equality, feminist activism, and party responses to the demand for quotas, Dalton closes with a rather depressing assessment that little progress can be expected of Japan in the near future. In fact, since the book’s publication, the LDP has repeatedly watered down, and then thwarted adoption of a multi-partisan bill that would have merely “encouraged” parties to “aim for” equal numbers of men and women candidates, without providing any actual sanctions for non-compliance. In short, Dalton’s assessment of the pernicious influence of LDP hegemony upon the election of women remains damningly accurate in 2017.
Jackie F. Steele
The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
pp. 160-162