ABSTRACT

This chapter examines how the Bureau of Women and Minors (BWM) in the Ministry of Labor (MOL), while having limitations on policymaking, set the passage of a gender equality law in employment as a political agenda for the Japanese government under adverse circumstances in which neither the political elites nor the public had little concern for the issue of gender equality in Japan. To gain political agenda status for an issue is a first and a most significant of many difficult steps to enacting a new law. Therefore, in order to examine the agenda-setting activities of the women’ bureau, it is necessary to examine “how the environmental variables of social, economic and political climate enabled women bureaucrats to set the issue of gender equality in society as a significant political agenda” (Lovenduski 1986, 248). As the previous chapter analyzed, social and economic climates were indifferent in gender equality issues. In this chapter, I explore what political climate enabled the women’s bureau of the MOL to set gender equality issue as a political agenda.