 Democracy means justice, it means equality, it means liberty, it means dignity, the liberty to pursue their own happiness. So democracy is essential component in order for everyone to have meaningful and happy life. We need to have democracy. My name is Mary Mira. I'm teaching political science at Sofia University in Tokyo, Japan. My major interest in gender and politics and also actually welfare states. I have been working on welfare states and also actually labor regulations whenever PhD student at UC Berkeley in the United States. And I wrote the citation about Japanese way of establishing welfare states and in order to understand that, I realized that I need to understand the gender relations in order to understand the labor relations, gender is really part of it. So employment and also family is a two basic components of welfare states. And in terms of gender equality, Japan lags so much behind. And then I realized that in order to improve gender equality, we need to have more women representatives in politics. So that's why I sort of moving from working on policy issues and gender equality issues to women's representation in politics. I'm working on gender quota and comparative work of gender quota. And Japan doesn't have such legal quota system. And then when I published edited volume on gender quota, it was a comparative book, comparative study of gender quota. So we heavily used the database of quota project database. And then when I look at the database, India's name is always appear on the top. So that's, I think, the first moment that I realized that India has also involved in democratic accountability and also assistance in democracy in the world, including gender quota. Gender parity law was just passed in Japan in May 2018. And it was a private member bill. And then it took almost three years to pass this law. And I was an academic advisor to the parliamentary group which prepared for this legislation. And originally the parliamentary group wanted to introduce legal quota in Japan because women's ratio in the lower house is only 10% in Japan and the upper house that's there only 20%. So in order to improve women's representation, it's very vital to have some measures including quota and it's established understanding that gender quota is the most effective way to increase women's representation. So parliamentary group wanted to introduce quota, but that was quite difficult to legislate quota because there was a question of constitutionality. So in order to avoid the question of constitutionality, the parliamentary group ended up having just a principle law which doesn't have any sanction in it. So that's about gender parity law. But the good thing is that it's about gender parity. It's not gender quota. So quota can take any number or any allocation toward women. It can take from 10% to 60%. But gender parity is basically 50 or if you have a more loose interpretation, it could be 40, 60. So gender quota, it can be, well, some people in Japan argue that quota is a reverse discrimination against men because that's special measurement to lift up women. But parity is more like a democratic principle and it's very hard to argue against the parity principle because the population is made up 50% men and 50% women. So that was easier compared to quota to convince conservative politicians to accept the gender parity principle. So gender parity law includes and incorporated the idea and also principle or gender parity. So that was about the law and unfortunately it doesn't have any sanction in it. So now political parties has to, should, aim at fielding the same number of male and female candidates. But I'm sure that they fail to meet this target but there is no sanction in it. So important thing is monitoring system and the law doesn't speculate specific monitoring process. So what is important is more the pressure coming from civil society organizations toward a party and also including media to institute some sort of monitoring process. And I'm quite eager and keen on establishing, instituting a new monitoring process to make this gender parity law more effective. Of course we are looking at always the best practices of other countries and neighboring countries. So India's database and also publication was extremely helpful for us as academia also civil society groups to understand what sort of measures might work in Japan as well. So now we have a basic principle of gender parity. So that's a shared agreement or consensus in the Japanese society and the politics to achieve as a target gender parity. So next step is that we have to find some other ways to achieve this goal. So we look around other countries' cases and actually I came to Stockholm here to learn from India about other countries' cases and what sort of tips or good measures can be introduced in Japan. And Cabinet Office of Japan Commission study about other countries' good practices and they decided to study UK and France this year they might include more other countries next year but that's why I came to London and also Stockholm to study other countries' best practices. And one thing that we need to do is to change the public election law. There is a gender parity principle that was about gender parity law. So in order to make it more effective we need to change some other laws including public funding and also public elected laws. That's the next step and we are learning other countries' good measures and how to change the law. So democracy is an essential component in order for everyone to have meaningful and happy life we need to have democracy.