Globalisation and Women in the Japanese Workforce

Beverley Bishop

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415655002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134292912
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

Globalisation and Women in the Japanese Workforce contributes to the debate about the impact of globalisation upon women. It examines the effect of restructuring upon women's employment in Japan and describes the actions women are taking individually and collectively to campaign for change in their working environment and the laws and practices regulating it.

1 Introduction

Aims, methodology and structure of the book

This book argues that globalization is a real, but not an immutable, force which is producing profound changes in national models of capitalism and national socio-economic institutions, and is affecting men and women within these national models in different ways. I shall put forward an analysis of the relationship between gender and globalization using women workers in Japan as a case study. Japan was chosen because its distinctive model of capitalism is being transformed by the processes associated with globalization. As men and women have had very different positions within that model, this transformation is having different impacts upon male and female workers.

The last few decades have seen growing cultural, economic and political interconnections and interdependencies between countries. Globalization results from flows of people, flows of images and information through the mass media, flows of central ideas, terms and images, flows of ideologies, flows of technology and increasingly rapid flows of international capital between national economies (Appadurai, 1990). While these flows influence all countries to a greater or lesser extent, this book will argue that the way in which globalization impacts upon nations, and on groups within nations, depends upon cultural or institutional factors. The impact of globalization on a nation will depend on its previous economic, political and social structure, and the effect of globalization on any individual will be mediated by, among other things, gender, age, ethnicity and social class.

Japan was chosen as a case study because of its distinctive national model of capitalism, which is characterized by a clearly gendered division of labour, and by a government which long resisted adopting the neoliberal model associated with globalization. This chapter defines the Japanese national model of capitalism and sets out the relationship of the institutions of the Japanese national model of capitalism to globalization. It shows how Japanese government and business reactions to globalization are interacting with changes in the roles and expectations of women in the Japanese labour force. Specifically, it shows that, faced with the pressures of globalization, the Japanese state and other key economic actors are attempting to deregulate the Japanese labour market. At the same time the development of the ideal of equality of opportunity and of a nascent global legal standard of sex equality within the workplace has resulted in the Japanese government increasing the regulation of women’s labour rights.

This chapter will put the research into its academic context and explain its central aims. It will then describe the methods that have been used, before setting out the structure of the book and outlining the contribution made by each chapter to the overall argument of the book, and to meeting the book’s central aims.

Context

The rate of economic growth of Japan in the 1950s and 1960s,¹ its consequent increased importance in the world economy and its apparently low level of industrial strife have attracted considerable attention from Western theorists since the late 1950s. The focus of much industrial relations literature in English about the Japanese model has been the organization of work for core workers within large companies. Abegglen and Stalk (1985) wrote of the way workers traded a guarantee of lifetime employment for loyalty to the firm. Dore (1986) attributed the success of the Japanese model to ‘flexible rigidities’: the tendency towards oligopoly, tenured job security for core workers and state underwriting of capital actually made the Japanese system more flexible in that they engendered co-operativeness, functional flexibility, the ability to negotiate sensible compromises between capital and labour, and thoroughness of planning. Political economists examined the idea that we were witnessing a ‘global Japanization’ of the labour process ( Jessop et al., 1987; Elger and Smith, 1994). Japan’s recent economic decline has again focused business and academic opinion on Japan. The focus now, however, is on how the Japanese model is changing to respond to the exigencies of globalization (Boyer and Drache, 1996; Hasegawa and Hook, 1998; Dore, 2000; Hook and Hasegawa, 2001).

Theorists such as Abegglen (1958) and Dore (1973, 1986) largely neglected the role of women in the Japanese workforce. The classical Japanese ‘model’ that they described was one that was mainly relevant to male workers (Wakisaka, 1997: 31), despite the fact that female workers have constituted a significant part of the workforce. In 1945, the proportion of working women in the total population was arguably the highest of all developed nations (Iwao, 1993: 154). However, Japan was the only industrialized country in which a decline in the number of women working outside the home was observed for the years following the Second World War. Today, Japanese women participate in the workforce in numbers comparable to those of women in other modern industrial societies.² This reversal in participation trends can be attributed to a number of factors including an increase in longevity, a decline in the fertility rate,³ an increase in housing and education costs, the return of ‘baby boom’ wives to the labour market, and changing social attitudes to women’s place in society (Whittaker, 1990). Furthermore, the Equal Employment Opportunities Law (EEOL), which came into effect in 1986 and was revised in 1997 (with the revisions coming into effect in April 1999), has been enacted with the ostensible aim of giving women equal opportunities in the workplace. These social and legal changes, which are, as this book will show, also partially attributable to globalization, are interacting with government and company attempts to restructure the Japanese model of employment in the face of economic globalization.

In Japan, as in other countries, women earn less, on average, than men and tend to be vertically and horizontally segregated from men in the workforce (Gelb and Palley, 1994: 9). This trend is becoming even more marked as the labour shortage resulting from demographic change, i.e. a shortage of young people entering the labour market, draws more women into the paid workforce, particularly into poorly rewarded ‘non-core’ jobs, as I shall demonstrate. This process is being facilitated by legal change (Sugeno and Suwa, 1997) and the planned and actual reorganization of the Japanese labour force, which intensified in the wake of the East Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s (Economist, 1998). The changing regional political economy of East Asia has had particular consequences for Japan. The intense competitiveness of other East Asian economies, the international reaction to the high value of the yen, and the relocation of a substantial proportion of Japanese manufacturing to other countries have led to predictions that Japan’s distinctive labour practice will be radically restructured (Ministry of Labour, 1999). Despite obvious similarities with trends in Western industrialized economies, there is a tendency for the deeply gendered division of labour in Japan to be seen as either rooted in national culture (Stockman et al., 1995) or as an epiphenomenon resulting from Japan’s relatively late industrialization (Brinton, 1993). I shall show that, although affected by the Japanese family model, a gendered division of labour was established in the specific conditions of the post-war international political economy. This division of labour is changing in response to a changing global political economy.

The structural transformation of other developed economies has had particularly far-reaching effects for women in all ‘core’ areas of the world economy. The growth of the service sector, the leisure industry and the use of information technology have affected several aspects of the organization of work, including the proportions of men and women in the workforce, the types of employment available, the number of temporary and parttime jobs, work and leisure-related aspirations, and the place of work in women’s life course (Dex, 1988: 1). Globalization is accelerating structural change in developed and developing countries. However, most mainstream theoretical work about globalization does not emphasize the particular effects that such structural change has for women. As Chapter 3 will show, feminist researchers working within gendered political economy have added gendered perspectives to mainstream theories of globalization. However, these perspectives have been of limited applicability to Japan. The characteristics of Japan’s national model of capitalism have influenced the patterns of women’s participation in the workforce throughout the post-war period. Furthermore, unlike other First World countries, Japan has maintained the tradition of the three-generation household.⁴ This family structure impacts on demand for migrant domestic workers; it means that highly educated women tend to leave the workforce upon becoming mothers, then re-enter the workforce at rather lower levels than they left; and it informs government assumptions about welfare provision and the appropriate legal framework for non-regular work. The patterns of resistance to neo-liberal globalization and activism in support of equal labour rights for women are also informed by Japan’s normative homosocial order.

Central aims of this book

The central aims of this book are as follows:

• to contribute to the debate about the impact of globalization upon women by bringing in insights from the case of Japan into the wider academic discourse;
• to examine the impact of restructuring upon women’s employment in Japan;
• to describe the actions women are taking individually and collectively to resist or campaign for change in their working environment and the laws and practices regulating it.

Methodology

The book draws on both quantitative and qualitative data. Most statistical information in this book comes from the wealth of data published by Japanese government agencies, trade unions and research organizations, as well as that produced by activists. These data are complemented by material from semi-structured interviews with working women, in-depth interviews with trade union representatives, plaintiffs in court cases about gender and employment, and Japanese academics, as well as primary data from reports and surveys. This mixture of research methods is often recommended as a way to achieve triangulation, i.e. when the same explanation can be obtained from different sources then the explanation is more plausible. Mason’s (1994) rationale for combining quantitative and qualitative methods is also persuasive. This was not so much to permit triangulation but to allow the quantitative component to map general patterns and the qualitative stage of the research to reveal the processes and perspectives of those actually involved in the situation under investigation. This is particularly important in conducting cross-cultural research, where it is necessary to search for ‘meanings within a social context where people act according to the rules of the social setting’ (May, 1997: 190).

To examine the extent to which women’s experience of work is changing as the Japanese national model of capitalism adapts to the exigencies of globalization, it was first necessary to gain an understanding of the experiences of women within that model. For this purpose, I conducted a pilot study in 1996 and 1997, using semi-structured interviews and written questionnaires. This provided useful background material and informed some of the research questions which I later composed. More information about this, the demographic and employment status of respondents and the text of questionnaires can be found in Appendix A, while Appendix B lists the types of employment carried out by the face-to-face interviewees.

I returned to Japan to conduct more focused fieldwork at the International Research Centre for Japanese Studies in Kyoto from October 1999 to March 2000. This fieldwork was focused on the specific effects of globalization upon women’s employment and on women’s agency in using some of the trends induced by globalization to improve their position. I consulted Japanese academics who were working in the field of gender studies and labour studies. I was also an active participant in two grassroots campaigning groups, Working Women’s Network (WWN) and Women Helping Women, taking part in meetings and attending protest actions and court hearings in support of women bringing cases of sexual discrimination against different branches of the Sumitomo Corporation. These interviewees are listed in Appendix C. Through taking part in protest actions, I was able not only to gain an understanding of the range of methods employed by Japanese women activists but also to build relationships with some of the plaintiffs. Being involved in activism did, however, raise some ethical questions.⁵

Feminist researchers, particularly, have raised the question of the ethics of power imbalance in the relationship between researcher and researched in the research process. Wolf (1996) notes three areas of potential power imbalance:

• power differences stemming from the different positions of the researcher and researched (race, class, nationality, life chances);
• power exerted during the research process – defining the research process, unequal exchange and exploitation;
• power exerted during the post-fieldwork process – writing and representing.

I do not believe that there were significant intrinsic power differences between my informants and myself. To the best of my knowledge all were from the majority Japanese community,⁶ and few were of a significantly different economic or educational status from myself.

This work does not address in any depth how globalization has resulted in an increased flow of female migrant workers into Japan. Increasing migration is an important effect of globalization, and takes very gendered forms, as I shall discuss in Chapter 3. Furthermore, non-Japanese women are recruited to Japan to fill very specific niches in the labour market, which have arisen because of globalization. These niches include carrying out sex work and being recruited to be wives of Japanese male farmers. However, conducting primary research about female migrants such as these would have raised significant ethical problems. It would have involved using a group of people with comparatively fewer life chances than I have had, in order to further my career, without being able to offer them any reciprocal benefits of participating in research. It would also have raised issues of ‘race’, sexuality and colonialism that are not core to my central argument. I therefore address female immigration to Japan only in so far as it affects or does not affect the productive and reproductive work of Japanese women.

As far as power exerted in the research process was concerned, although I was genuinely supportive of the cause of WWN and Working Women’s International Network (WWIN), my primary goal in coming to Japan, and in joining these groups was to conduct research, the parameters of which I had defined in advance. Many of the activists were also experienced researchers and were therefore well aware of the research process, advising me on useful seminars and court hearings to attend, and on Japanese texts to consult. These women agreed to be interviewed and loaned me materials that they had used in support of their case. The organizations in question were keen to attract foreign members. They used strategies such as hosting websites in English, advertising their meetings in an English language magazine and sending out regular updates of their activities to an international mailing list. This was an overt attempt to employ a ‘boomerang’ strategy such as that described by Keck and Sikkink (1998).⁷ Nonetheless, I am acutely aware that the exchange was not equal, and their contribution to my work was far greater than my contribution to theirs.

During the fieldwork process, and afterwards, I took steps to avoid falsely representing the groups with whom I was working. I showed draft papers to activists, gave talks to women’s groups and asked questions of WWIN and Shosha ni Hataraku Josei to check whether they believed I was accurately representing their actions and opinions.⁸ I also conducted a focus group meeting with an organization of women who had worked together to produce an English-language book about the situation of women in Japan, and exchanged ideas with members of Japan Women’s Messages, and provided them with a copy of the resulting research.

Initially, the majority of questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were carried out with the aid of interpreters and translators. When my Japanese language proficiency improved after auditing MA Japanese language classes at the University of Sheffield, I began to carry out interviews without an interpreter present, but using a translator to help me transcribe interviews. Some respondents wished to carry out interviews in English, because they had lived in English-speaking countries, they met to discuss women’s issues in English, or they produced a bilingual magazine. In these cases, I have used verbatim transcripts of the interviews (with omissions or additions for clarification in square brackets) when quoting these respondents in this book. While I believe the meaning of the quotations to be sufficiently clear, the wording of some quotations may seem unconventional.

During my fieldwork, I frequently attended lectures and seminars organized at the Dawn Centre (Osaka women’s centre). These events were not only extremely informative in their own right but also enabled me to gain contact with, and subsequently interview, representatives of both trade unions and organizations for professional women. The Dawn Centre has an extensive collection of journals and press cuttings about the situation of women in Japan. This material, and material supplied by the Tokyo Josei Union and two other unions (which remain anonymous in this book), provided concrete examples of recent case studies of legal changes as well as changes in company employment practice. The Japan Institute of Labour, the Ministry of Labour, the Gender Equality Bureau of the Prime Minister’s Office and Japanese think tanks and business organizations also provide a considerable amount of statistical data about the gender composition of different parts of the labour force and detailed information about changes in laws and policies in the face of globalization.

As the diversification of employment resulting from restructuring is often presented by proponents of restructuring as enabling diverse women to fulfil their potential in different ways (Koike, 1995), it is important to gauge whether women feel this to be the case. Using the snowball technique used in the 1996–7 survey, I carried out further semi-structured interviews with female agency workers, part-time and full-time employees and women who had chosen or attempted to enter the management track of firms. Initial contacts were made through my membership of the grassroots organization, Women Helping Women.

Structure of the book

The book is divided into three sections. Chapters 2 and 3 review the theoretical insights which have informed my research. Chapter 2 summarizes insights from theories of globalization, and Chapter 3 critically reviews the attempts that have been made to ‘gender’ globalization. Chapters 4 and 5 are an essential background to the analysis by setting out conditions specific to Japan, namely the position women have traditionally held in the Japanese labour force since 1945 and the pressures of globalization on the Japanese economy. Chapters 6 and 7 present empirical evidence to show the changes that are occurring for women working in the regular and non-regular workforces in Japan. The final substantive chapter, Chapter 8, examines women’s activism, describing both the struggle against the effects of globalization that these women perceive as negative as well as the use feminist campaigners are making of transnational networking and transnational organization to change their work situations.

Chapter 2 provides the theoretical background to my aim of showing how the secondary effects of globalization on the Japanese workforce are mutable and are shaped by the responses of the Japanese state and other actors and institutions. It does so by providing a synthesis of insights from mainstream debate about globalization and the state. The chapter begins by summarizing the main theoretical perspectives surrounding globalization, defining globalization and discussing whether it is a real phenomenon. It examines the work of hyperglobalizers, who argue that globalization is a real condition which has rendered the nation state irrelevant. However, as the chapter illustrates, closer analysis shows that the nation state is still a salient feature of an increasingly globalized international political economy. The chapter then examines the work of sceptics and shows that, while some of their reservations about the triumph of globalization are valid, globalization is a phenomenon that is qualitatively different from international trade and is a process that has been increasing in momentum in recent decades. The transformationalist thesis is found to be the most convincing in that it recognizes that globalization is a progressive phenomenon, and that its effects are mutable, because they are refracted through the institutions of different states. As evidence will be presented about how the Japanese state has been implicated in facilitating the reorganization of employment in Japan as a response to globalization, the next part of this chapter will examine the role of the state in an increasingly globalized political economy. Examples are provided to show that, while the state remains highly relevant in an age of globalization, and indeed is a necessary enabler of the project of globalization, the role ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Glossary of Japanese Terms
• Notes on Style
• 1 Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Conclusion
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Notes
• Bibliography