It's still a man's world in Japan

It has been a long, hot summer in Japan in the war between the sexes. It all started with a brutal sex crime at one of the country's most prestigious institutions. David McNeill reports.

A female undergraduate at the elite Waseda University told the authorities in June that she had been taken out after a party by a group of fellow students and gang-raped. Police arrested the leaders of what now seems to have been an organised campaign run by sexual predators who competed to assault perhaps dozens of naive newcomers.

The revelation that a university that supplies some of Japan's brightest graduates to elite careers in government and business had also incubated a group of serial rapists stunned the country. But there was more to come when a rogues' gallery of Japan's geriatric political leadership came out with a series of crass bons mots that had women everywhere reaching for the nearest sharp object.

Seiichi Ota, a bigwig in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, fired the opening salvo when he said the young gang rapists at least showed a healthy appetite for sex, in contrast, he implied, to the rest of Japan's flaccid males, who seem content to look on as the country's birth rate plunges.

Yasuo Fukuda, the chief cabinet secretary, followed up with a version of the they-were-asking-for-it defence, criticising women who dressed skimpily because "men are black panthers, so leniency can be thinkable for the rapists". And showing that he hasn't lost his knack for the badly timed gaffe, former prime minister Yoshio Mori condemned the government for paying social security benefits to childless women.

He was backed up this month by Hidetsugu Yagi, an associate professor at Takasaki University of Economics. Writing in the influential Seiron magazine, Prof Yagi identified feminism as the root cause of Japan's low-fertility problem. The country, he said, needs to do away with "the strange idea of equal participation between men and women". The comments briefly threw an uncomfortable spotlight on the sabetsuteki oyaji - sexist old men - who dominate politics and much public commentary here and seem to show that, although Japan looks like a high-tech template for a future society, the world's second-largest economy is still the Model-T Ford of sexual equality.

"Saying that rapists are healthy and vigorous is incredibly ignorant, and as a fellow lawmaker I'm deeply embarrassed," says Mizuho Fukushima, secretary general of the Social Democratic Party, which lodged an official protest about the comments in the diet, Japan's parliament. "Does that mean that people who rob and kill are healthy too? Statements like that, and that fact that two of the three men refused to even meet us" - Ota later apologised - "show that women have a long way to go in Japan." Mariko Bando, a government official, went further. "Japan is still a developing country in the sense of gender equality," she recently told reporters.

Bando and Fukushima are that rarest of things in a country where women participate little in political activities: female members of parliament. Women make up just 7.3 per cent of the main Japanese diet, putting it 98th in the world, some way behind Ireland, at 13.3 per cent (60th), and the UK, at 17.9 per cent (43rd). Things are even worse in the business world. Less than 10 per cent of Japanese women are administrators or managers, compared with about 27 per cent in Ireland and 33 per cent in the UK. At the top of the Japanese corporate food chain female chief executives are as rare as swallows in winter.

"There has been an advancement in status for a certain class of women who are highly educated and motivated and who often have experience overseas," says Yuko Kawanishi, a sociologist. "The enormous leap in education has helped them. But the majority of women graduate into a world where sexist attitudes are still strong. Most get disappointed and compromise, and when they have children they end up slipping back into traditional roles."

It's not that Japanese women are staying at home. More than 40 per cent of all workers in Japan are female, but most have undemanding, poorly paid jobs in the service sector, often to supplement falling family incomes. Once they clock off it's business as usual: Japanese husbands spend just 48 minutes a day doing housework, well below the European and US averages.

Ironically, one of the few areas open for ambitious career women in Japan is the media, which puts many of them a lot closer to the sexist oyaji political fraternity than they might like. One of the best-known members of this fraternity, Takami Eto, leader of one of the Liberal Democratic Party's largest factions, was asked during the summer to comment on the gang-rape scandal and the subsequent controversy sparked by members of his party.

"I arrived at Tokyo Station the other day and I saw women who were practically naked," he said before turning to a female reporter and adding: "You shouldn't dress like that."