New Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba Prime Minister yesterday appointed only two women to his 20-strong Cabinet, down from five previously, in what a rights group said represented a “backslide” in Tokyo’s push for greater female representation in politics.
Ishiba, who held off a challenge from a female rival to lead Japan’s ruling party last week, picked Junko Mihara to take charge of children’s policies and Toshiko Abe to oversee education.
A quarter of the previous Cabinet of outgoing prime minister Fumio Kishida, who resigned in August partly due to a series of party scandals, were women, including the key post of foreign minister. That matched a record also reached in 2001 and 2014.
Photo: Reuters
However, that was well below female representation seen in other G7 advanced economies amid questions about a commitment by Japan’s ruling party to raise the number of its female lawmakers from about 10 percent to 30 percent over the next decade.
“Going from five women Cabinet members, which was already extremely low, to two, is a reflection of just how far Japan has to go in terms of women empowerment and equality,” said Teppei Kasai, Asia program officer at Human Rights Watch.
“In terms of the representation of women in the political arena, it’s a clear backslide,” Kasai said.
It remains to be seen how many female candidates the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) would field in a snap election due on Oct. 27.
The main opposition, Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, yesterday announced a record eight women in its 20-strong shadow Cabinet.
Despite the lack of women in Ishiba’s Cabinet, Kasai said he hoped the new prime minister would push ahead with more socially progressive policies, such as a campaign pledge to introduce a law that would allow married women to keep their maiden names.
Sanae Takaichi — who became the first woman to make the run-off in Friday’s leadership contest — is a hardline conservative who opposed changes to the surname rules and was relatively unpopular among women voters, according to polls.
Yet her achievement in nearly reaching the top in Japan’s male-dominated, traditional society should not be underestimated.
Japan ranked 118 out of 146 countries in the World Economic Forum’s 2024 gender gap report, up seven spots from the previous year, but still the lowest among G7 countries.
The contrast with its G7 peers was on show last year, when Tokyo sent a male representative to an otherwise all-female meeting on women’s empowerment in the Japanese city of Nikko.
Japan has had three women as foreign ministers, but never a female finance minister or prime minister. Tokyo elected its first female governor in 2016.
Women make up about 10 percent of lawmakers in Japan’s lower house, well below the average 30 percent across G7 economies, a 2024 report showed.
The LDP hopes to nearly triple its proportion of female lawmakers to 30 percent in the next decade through steps such as offering babysitting arrangements and a fund to support female candidates.
Asked at a press conference on Monday how the LDP planned to implement this in the upcoming election, its newly appointed election chief, Shinjiro Koizumi, said the party would “resolutely push on,” without elaborating.
The new Cabinet also shows less diversity in age. While Kishida’s Cabinet had two ministers in their 40s, Ishiba’s team is predominantly older.
The average age of Cabinet members, including Ishiba, remains at 63.5, making it one of the oldest among nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Additional reporting by Bloomberg
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS