ABSTRACT
In April 1986, the Women’s Bureau of the Ministry of Labor managed to enact the first gender equality law formulated mainly by Japanese women. The decision-making process of the Equal Employment Opportunity Law (the 1986 EEOL)1 has been considered one of the most arduous decisionmaking processes in Japanese political history because the bill met with fierce opposition not only from male employers and the political elite but also from conservative and leftist Japanese women. They criticized the law because it lacked any enforcement power and generated a peculiar women’s employment system that made discriminatory treatment of women more invisible, while depriving Japanese women workers of protective measures. It took more than eight years to enact the bill. However, ten years later when the Women’s Bureau amended the 1986 EEOL to strengthen its enforcement provision, the women bureaucrats met less opposition from male employers and female workers as well as activists, who strongly had resisted the legislation in the 1970s and 80s. The change in the processes of decision-making for the EEOL of 1986 and 1999 poses a question of whether the state exerts influence on gender relations in society through its laws and policy. We have already known that modern democratic society impacts state policies through actions such as social movements (McAdam 1979, 1982, 1996, 1999; Tarrow 1983, 1989, 1991; 1994a, 1994b, 1994c, 1995, 1998; Tilly 1978, 1983). However, we do not know well if and how states affect gender relations in society. Does a state have feminist goals such as increase of women’s rights and improvement of their status? Or is a state hiding their intention to increase national income by granting women equal opportunity that mobilizes women to employment? If the state attempted to improve the gender relations in the society, what roles would a state institute have and how would it improve gender relations? This study solves these puzzles by exploring the activities of the state, in particular, the governmental institution for women, in rectifying gender inequality in the post-war Japan.
