Ai Ishimori was teaching Japanese cookery classes in France when she was gripped by an urge to return to her home country.
“Shinzo Abe was prime minister at the time, and a group of older men were doing a bad job of running the country,” she says. “But I was unable to do anything about it. I was really worried about the direction my country was going in.”
Five years on, the 38-year-old is running in local elections in Tokyo – her first attempt to win political office and, she hopes, to start chipping away at the male domination of a G7 country where women are struggling to shatter one of the toughest glass ceilings in the world.
“I decided I could do better than them,” Ishimori tells the Guardian during a break in her campaign to win a seat on the Nerima local assembly in the capital’s north-west. “There is a gender gap in Japan in every area of life, and especially in politics. But there is a solution – more female politicians.”
Ishimori and other female candidates running in the elections – which cover most of the country this Sunday and the Tokyo region a fortnight later – have their work cut out.
Female participation in politics in Japan is among the lowest in the world. The cabinet of Fumio Kishida contains just two women a decade after Abe, the prime minister’s mentor in the Liberal Democratic party (LDP), promised in a speech to the UN general assembly to “create a society in which women shine”.
A photograph of the lower house steering committee posted on Twitter in January drew derision from users who noted that all 25 of its members were men. There was a similar reaction to a photo tweeted by the LDP’s secretary general, Toshimitsu Motegi, to mark the passage of the budget.
Japan fares poorly in international comparisons of female representation, ranking 165th out of more than 180 countries, with women comprising just 10% of lower house MPs, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union.
Just over 30% of town and village assemblies have no female representatives, according to 2019 figures, and at the last lower house election, in 2021, of the 1,051 candidates, just 186 – or less than 18% – were women.
An alarming number of women who run for office say they are the target of sexual and other forms of harassment, including inappropriate touching and verbal abuse. In a 2021 cabinet office survey of 1,247 women with seats on local assemblies, 57.6% said they had been sexually harassed by voters, supporters or other assembly members. Many said they had been targeted with sexually explicit language or gender-based insults.
But as Japan prepares for greater international scrutiny as host of this year’s round of G7 summits, including a ministerial meeting on women’s empowerment, there are signs of change.
Political parties have attempted to recruit more women to run for office after a 2018 gender equality law required them to “make efforts” to select similar numbers of male and female candidates.
While the more powerful lower house remains a male bastion, a record proportion of female candidates – 33.2% – ran in last summer’s upper house election, taking the country close to the government-set target of 35% by 2025. Of the 125 seats contested – half the chamber – an all-time high of 25 were won by women.
‘The situation is changing, but it will take time’
A fortnight away from her electoral debut, Ishimori says most voters have reacted positively to her focus on childcare provision, young carers and low-paid contract workers.
“I haven’t been harassed, although my husband is always with me when I go out to make speeches and meet voters,” she says. “There are so few women in Japanese politics that people have got used to the idea that it is the preserve of men. If we can show them that there is an alternative, then the situation will improve.”
Kaoru Yamaguchi, a fellow Constitutional Democratic party (CDP) candidate running for an assembly seat in Shinjuku – a diverse Tokyo ward with a large proportion of foreign nationals and low-income households – says it is “almost impossible” for women to run for office in Japan, especially if they have families.
“Most people ignore me, but some come up to me to say they will support me simply because we need more women in local politics,” Yamaguchi, a former assistant to an MP and human rights campaigner, says at the end of a 14-hour day that began with greeting voters outside a railway station at 7 am.
“I think the situation is changing, but it will take time. My seat is an old-fashioned Tokyo neighbourhood … the other candidates grew up here and have always been involved in politics in some way, and the local council is controlled by the LDP.
“But I still hope to use my experience to work on issues affecting children, people with disabilities and Shinjuku’s multicultural community. People tell me I can do it.”
Almost 30% of the centre-left CDP’s local election candidates are women, while the Communist party has made the most progress, with 41%. A record 489 women are among the 3,139 candidates for prefectural assembly seats, according to public broadcaster NHK,
Still, only 43 of Japan’s 1,741 municipalities have female mayors, according to a recent survey, in which half said they had struggled to launch political careers. Some had encountered voters who believed mayors should be men, and experienced abuse and harassment online, even from members of their local assemblies.
Mizuki Ono, who is running for a seat in Setagaya ward in western Tokyo, says little will change as long as children are taught to believe that politics is the preserve of older men.
“Girls can’t imagine themselves getting involved in politics,” she says. “That’s one of the main reasons why I decided to run for election. I want to be a role model for Japanese girls, so they look to people like me and think: ‘I can become a politician, and I can change the world.’”