 Sorry, we're recording this event, so I'm just giving the man up there a thumbs up. Welcome everybody to SOAS and to the Japan Research Centre. I'm Helen McNaughton and I'm Chair of the Japan Research Centre at the moment. I'm not going to say very much except to say thanks for coming along, but I really do need to thank Toshiba International Foundation, who have sponsored this event for us tonight. And also thank everybody for coming a long way. Two of our speakers have come from Japan tonight, so I'm going to speak first. And then we have Machiko Osawa, she's from Japan Women's University in Tokyo. And then Peter, who didn't come quite so far, Peter Matanele from Sheffield University, our friends up north. And then we have Jun Imai, who's come all the way from Sapporo from Hokkaido University. And we've just all been in Lisbon, as you know, as many of you have been in Lisbon at the European Association for Japanese Studies Conference, and gender was a very hot topic in some of the panels that we went to. Actually Jun, Peter and I are working on a book on employment at the moment, and Machiko is our guest speaker because our other co-collaborator can't be here. But also I think it's really important when we talk about gender to not just talk about women, because often when you read about gender, it just means women. So I was very conscious that we need to talk about men. So we've got two males talking about men tonight, which I think is a nice gender balance already. So if only life was always like this. Two women, two men, two Japanese, two non-Japanese talking about women and men in Japan. So that's what we're going to try and deliver for you. We're going to try and keep it short and snappy, 15 minutes each. That will give us lots of time for discussion. We welcome comments as well as questions. And then most importantly, Toshiba has very kindly sponsored drinks as well. So there are drinks and canapes even, I think, after the session, which should be about 7.45. So I'll get underway. So I'm going to give an overview really. As it said, three decades of gender equality legislation in Japan. And I'm asking this question, which I'll explain now. Is there a gender dividend for Japan? And this is a theoretical framework. The idea of a gender dividend is a recent concept in the gender and development theory. And it really focuses on increasing economic opportunities for women and also enabling a country or an economy or even a business or a company to reap that dividend. So for developing nations, it's obviously about empowering women, giving them access to very basic things like education. But for advanced nations, which Japan is, of course, it's about enhancing the fuller integration of women into the workplace, making sure there's no discrimination, encouraging leadership, and importantly, harnessing the benefits of gender equality and diversity for business. So this is very applicable to Japan today, particularly as we know that womenomics is a big, again, it's just womenomics, it should be genderomics perhaps, but womenomics is a big focus in Japan today. So what I'm asking therefore is, is there a gender dividend for Japan taking place? But before I answer that question, I would like to suggest that up until recently, or perhaps throughout the post war decades, Japan has harnessed this very developmentalist gender dividend of difference rather than equality. And that's because I'm sure you're very familiar with the way that the post war employment system has been structured. I'm not going to talk about male employment, the left hand side, because Peter is going to talk about that. But if we think about female employment, we know it's been quite different to men's employment. So often under the assumption that they won't stay as long as men, that they will become non-regular workers later in life, that they may resign at marriage and childbirth, that childcare in the home takes first priority if you like. And this very important issue that if they opt for part-time employment, particularly as working mothers, they have a very predictable working day, very controlled working hours, which is in very sharp contrast to men, which Peter will talk about. And really within the idea that the female is the dependent in the household, so the male is breadwinner and the female is dependent. So what has been the impact of those decades of difference, if you like, or segregation? Well we know that men and women work very differently in Japan in terms of female and male labour participation rate. So women work in the very famous M curve where they drop out for several years during the peak child rearing years, and men stay in employment their whole entire lives. So you can see with the blue line that this M curve was very well established by the year that the Equal Employment Opportunity legislation came in. Equal Employment Opportunity legislation, yeah. So by the time that Equal Employment Opportunity legislation came in, that M curve was very well established by 1985. The other difference is that women work, there are 25-30% not working in the labour market. So if you see that almost 90% or 95% of men are working, you can see that above the red line 25-30% of women are not working in the labour market. So it's referred to as this underutilisation of very, as we know, very well educated women in Japan. So those are the two key difference, the patterns of work and the underutilisation of women. Now the, I won't say it again, the EEOL was enacted in 1986, it's 2017 now. So we now have a good 30 years of a gender equality movement in Japan which is what we are trying to assess. So I think there's a real tension between this dividend that Japan has, it's worked very well for Japan arguably throughout the post-war years to have women primarily responsible for the domestic and men primarily responsible for productive economic labour. But now I think there's this real tension between what the EEOL has been trying to usher in ever since the 80s, a tension between difference, the dividend of difference and the dividend of equality in Japan and I think we're seeing that play out. One of the first ironies of the legislation was that companies were immediately sort of went into enacting separate career tracks for women and men. So as you know men were often put on to Sorgoshoku, what do you call that, professional track, and women on to Ipan Shoku, the clerical track in companies. So that was a real irony of a legislation that was supposed to be bringing inequality but that was allowable under the legislation. So and also within the framework I'll go into it a bit more, there's a real tension because of this preservation of the male bread winner female dependent model in Japan and we'll go into how that's being preserved politically and within companies. The legislation has been strengthened of course since 1985, they strengthened in 1997, again in 2006. We have seen progress in the sense and much more is going to go into progress a bit more in barriers but we have seen higher female labour participation rate. However we do know that there are still very low rates of women in management in fact Japan is the bottom of all the OECD countries in terms of rates of women in management. We also know that 68% of all non-regular workers are women, are female, and also I think one of the most important tensions or criticisms that you can have of the EOL is still allows for discrimination by marital status. So it's perfectly acceptable to put married women into non-regular work to give men higher wages because they're the household head. All these kinds of things play out because the legislation is not as tight as you might think when you think about equal opportunities and marital status is one of the key tensions there I think. So what does it mean? Some people say that there is progress because the M curve is flattening. I would suggest that that doesn't always, you can't always assume that that's progress. For example we know that women are less likely to drop out in those peak reproductive age cohorts which is a good thing so more women are staying in the labour market but we also know that women are having fewer babies so there are fewer women opting out to have babies as well so we have to take that into account. And when we look at whether they stay in continuous employment after having their child or whether they resign things are still a little bit status quo. So the continuous means women who continue in employment after having their first child. So one year after having their first child they're still in the same job with the same employer. That has gone up since 1985 and we would expect that because childcare leave has come in and maternity rights have strengthened so that's good. On the other hand the percentage who resign upon the first child quit their jobs has really not got down that much. So 34% of women still resign 30 years later so there's not a lot of movement there and actually if we take into account those who are not working at all 47% of women are not in the labour market after their first child so it's still almost half women having a child not working after the first year. And we also know that the increased female labour participation rate overall which is seen as progress is really driven by older women working and particularly as non-regular workers so actually the percentage of women overall all Japanese women in regular employment has actually declined over 30 years because there's more women working in non-regular categories. So there's lots of stuff going on that suggests that the M-curve movement is not always a movement towards gender equality. If we break it down by a company I think this is quite interesting that the M-curve is driven by medium and large organisations so the red is medium companies and the large is green companies and you can see there's a definite M there. So medium and large firms employ women at relatively high levels in the 20s but they tend to drop out in the 30s whereas if you look at the blue the small companies there's no evident M-curve probably because they employ a lot of non-regular workers in older life. So we can suggest that women hit some kind of wall in corporate Japan if you think of corporate Japan as big organisations, medium organisations and this seems quite strange if we think about it in other OECD countries where big companies can offer more scope for flexible working, for careers for coming back into different positions so I think in Japan we see something different happening than perhaps is happening elsewhere in the world in terms of the scope for career opportunities in large organisations. And so we still have this very persistent divide this is a breakdown by non-regular workers so this is all non-regular workers by age and sex the pink is women, sorry for gendring it, the blue is men. So we see very large high levels of non-regular employment in the very oldest workers but some of the male workers are shokutaku they've retired out of lifetime employment onto temporary contracts so they're not really non-regular workers. We see very high percentages of non-regular work in young workers which we know that young workers are increasing in non-regular employment but I think what's interesting is that there are very low levels of non-regular work for men in the peak productive years so if you look at the blue on the right say between the ages of 25 to 55 particularly in the 30s, 40s most men are only 10% or less than 10% of men are in non-regular employment which means 90% of men are in regular employment so it's very divided when you compare it with women so I think there is still that significant gender divide taking place but we need to monitor very carefully what's happening with young men because young men regular work is increasing and June is going to talk about men in non-regular work so that's one of our later presentations So what are the barriers? I think we can break it down into the politics and the environment and the institutional models that are around and we can also break it down into what's happening in the workplace so we're all going to delve into this in various ways I'm not going to answer all of these questions right now but I will say that politics does play a role the idea of gender equality is arguably a top-down sort of pressure anyway and the institutional framework is quite top-down still as well so we still have these gender norms for example even when Abe is talking about womenomics last year he said a typical family, husband working full-time, women working part-time he just assumes that women will only work part-time everybody criticised him for getting the wages too high these are very unrealistic wages nobody criticised him for assuming that the women would only be a part-time worker under womenomics so that was quite interesting Also the classic spousal tax debate the spousal tax has been around since 1961 it caps married women's income you're allowed to discriminate by marital status as I said the LDP said they're going to reform it but really they're just adjusting the threshold so this tax really incentivises married women to cap their income but also it puts pressure, nobody talks about this so much it puts pressure on married men to be the breadwinner and so the tax incentive is to keep those male breadwinner dependent roles How does it play out? Well Peter's going to talk about how core lifetime employment practices are still the model of many companies particularly this issue of commitment he's going to go into that, how men have to really commit and women if they have children can't commit in the same way that men can commit in that kind of model they can't do long working hours and when you look at what companies are doing sometimes they just make these new shorter working hours models for mothers only which reinforces gendring so only women with children can work flexibly everybody else has to work in the same sort of model if you like so then they moan about having role models, remote working, not an option lots of uncertainty going on uncertainty for men but uncertainty for women as well and Peter's going to go into that a bit more but what's I think a problem when you look at diversity and what's happening in Japanese companies they're really targeting women how do we get more women into the company but they're not targeting how things can change for men so if you look at that cartoon there the man has given a career ladder and the women's, the joke is the women only gets a stool but actually if you flip it round the man only gets one ladder to climb up and nothing else so you know there's a real sort of gender difference still going on there so I think we're only seeing sort of slow incremental progress for women I think we've still got that dividend playing out of difference if Japan wants the quality it needs to target male work-life balance very much though and it needs to change a lot of the institutions does the Japanese really want to do that? that's a big question I think I don't know if I have the answer to that we could talk about bottom up movements but I think the real push for changing it top down is because they haven't got enough people anymore so they're having to change it so I think there's a lot going on there but I think in terms of allocating time to productive domestic labour strong gender norms of difference are still got a big status quo in Japan so I think that that tension is that the arm wrestle, nobody's winning the arm wrestle at the moment I don't think thank you, 15 minutes was it? okay now we have much to call talking about women again but going into it in a bit more detail hello everybody and thank you for coming and this topic is not new I wrote the PhD thesis 30 years ago about working women in Japan in comparison with the US and so now the 30 years and nothing has been changed this seems to be then today I'm just talking about some changes happening and the three topics I'd like to talk about and first is just the barriers for women to enter and the career progression in workplace and the other second topic examples of the companies trying to change system and empower women and then third is just the small signs of activism and women's changing women's attitudes in university grads so that's the three topic within 15 minutes and I try to talk about it as much as possible so this is the first figure that the university graduate students how many quit the job and you see that the Japanese women quitting the job is quite high and this is one of the reason why that the company can't really invest women with men and this is like investment is waste and then compared to US and Germany so that we looked at the figures sort of why women quit and the company thinks because of the childcare problem or the caregiving problems and then looking at the reasons that this is a US study found that most of the women the university graduate women quit the job due to job dissatisfaction and the feeling that dead and about their career so it seems to be what is going on is that probably when 30 years ago the women quit because they want to get married have a mother, being mother but right now the more women can see the future at the Japanese corporation and quitting and so this is what we call the self-fulfilling prophecy so it's not just this set statistical discrimination actually is working against the company losing the talented women so the another is this is the comparison of the wage distribution of men and women we see the big gap in the lower level and the top level the upper level is because of the grass ceiling that women cannot get to cannot climb up the ladder but the interesting thing is that the lower level that we see the gap which is what we call the wet floor so that the sticky floor doesn't allow women to climb up the career ladder so this is the so what is happening is that initial beginning of the career there is a distinction between men and women to which course and then I think that Helen is talking about Ipan shoku and Sogo shoku managerio and the clerical position so that the women stuck into the clerical position and difficult to get into the managerial position so this is more like the structural problem of the labour market rather than women's intention to want to be mother so it's a demand side problem that's what we were, yes so this is a we were comparing the first one is just a roll gap and the different one is a structural problem so and then the third is just within the same wage controlling by the structural capital so that most of the differences the return of the human capital that is the structure of the labour markets we can talk a little bit more about that anyway so this is a bit detailed study and then so the new changes but I talked to my colleagues do you think some changes going on in co-opolation and my colleagues are like five years ago some changes of the large co-opolation and the what is this so I'm giving you some examples of what is the change and this is one of the large co-opolation large life insurance firms hiring 80,000 employees and up until 1915 as Helen said this is a three tier or two tiers as a managerial but managerial position are divided between the two that's one is the top level is the one you are relocated anywhere and then the second one is that somehow you are confined to the area you are working but still you are able to do this sort of like climb up the career ladder and then the third one is associate so-called associate which is the clerical work and then most of the women are assigned into the clerical position so the career prospects is limited and however year 2017 then changes the system they abolish the associates and so they have only two and the women are mostly into this area confined managerial course and I ask them so why do you change it and this is because the Barbara economy bursted in 1934 and they did not hire enough male university graduates and so now they were about like mid 40s so we don't have enough candidates to be the senior manager so we have to change to sort of increase more candidates pool into this sort of able workers and so the women are the ones we try to integrate into the system so they are changing also the pay scale is changing to same job to same wage principle that's what they say and they showed me the figures so this is only one example but there is some I hear another companies that also try to change the employment system and then saying the same reason because of the imbalance of the age distribution in the co-opolation certain group of the age is not enough to sort of bring them to the top level so somehow they have to do some adjustment or something like that so that was sort of the things and the other studies that has been published recently is showing the greater variation of the company policies towards working mother so it is true overall still the Japanese companies not really figure out how to use women's talent and tapping talent so well but if you look at the differences among the companies those who have two key policies which is the sort of work-life balance policies that the women are able to combine the work and childcare the other one is the gender equality policies and if the two policies are worked well then the company's profit is higher than the others but the generous work-life balance policies is not enough so he is suggesting so the key is just the boss has to be there to increase the productivity and Japan is suffering from low productivity so this is one of the key issues that they want to integrate more women but also want to increase the productivity so this is the real issue and difficult but try to do and this is the way we suggest you should do and the other thing is just the funness that the, oh my goodness she said of Shokan this is the she said or introduced the different system and making beauty consultant work longer hours and then the weekends and so everybody is so upset because she said or is so famous being so nice to working mother and then there is a public discussion and then the sort of general atmosphere is just well this is the time so women should be empowered so that then I wrote I was interviewed and I wrote some article says yeah the equality shouldn't be only at the workplace equality should be also achieved in household sector so that was the only time I got some attention internet forum anyway so that is the thing so there is some sort of the efforts of the co-opilations is changing and then I did some interviews co-opilate managers and then president and some are doing the empowering women and some companies are introducing encouraging male workers to take child care leave which is wonderful but only one week for everybody and this is not enough but my colleague said that changes co-opilate culture a little bit and the PNG is offering free diversity management training course I was sitting in so they try to change the attitudes of managers and reduces the unconscious bias and then the Google is the one now sort of lending their IT tools to do the home based work and then one of the interesting things is the manager has to take this opportunity to stay at home and do the conference at home and then that's also working in progress and then the Iku Boss project which is the new one that's saying that the supervisors who support the subordinates that you work like balance and then also produce the results and so they now the 136 co-opilations are supporting these ideas and then now we see the little bit of change of the retention of the women after giving birth that because of 2010 there is a new registration that the company has to reduce working hours to two hours if the workers request it and this is the control bar shows policy but definitely increase the retention so has some different making some differences and also there is a tragic suicide by young women and the December 25 of 2015 which really shook everybody and that is now that the changing try to change the work culture but minimum policy change so I think that to other speakers will talk more about long working hours so the signs of some activism are very little but two is one my students is involved my former students is involved and they went to the Suginami ward the district ward arguing that they should provide more day care that is your duty to do and then the other one is the that is the which is like I could not send my kids to a public day care and Japan dropped that or something like that and then the first the diet members says like this is a ridiculous what ugly language they use but many women stood up say like I am the one really feel this way and then the then the demonstration in front of diet and so that some changes is taking place about the attitudes and the women are no longer think that they are going to be the housewives either working but dropped when they raise children and then come back or they continue to work so there is some attitude now change so my conclusion is that the change in Japan may seem small and insignificant compared to advances in the US and UK and they may not amount to a quiet revolution but there is something going on and prospects for women's care seems a little bit brighter now than in the past and especially due to the very tight labour market and growing awareness on how Japan is missing out thank you very much can you do good evening everyone and thank you for coming thank you also to Helen for organizing this and for inviting me it's nice to come to SOAS and give a presentation it's something that I've been kind of working on and thinking about for a long time but this is the first time I've ever really been able to talk about this topic so it's a little bit text heavy but that's because I'm just really starting out this is the first time I'm ever going to talk about this in public partly because it's such a controversial subject actually so I'll get straight into it it's really inspired by David Benatar's book the second sexism discrimination against men and boys he's a philosopher from University of Cape Town in South Africa and what the second sexism is is that men experience different life chances and outcomes in specific areas some are obvious and some not so for example men are overwhelming the majority of victims of violence corporal punishment, death in armed conflicts systemic bias in the criminal justice system and so on and although the majority of rich people are men so are the majority of poor people the majority of property owners are men but also the majority of homeless are men and men are much more likely to be substance abusers, smokers encounter mental illness and so on and male health and life expectancy outcomes are systemically lower so all of these are in part based on everyday assumptions about male gender roles in society but his book was very much misunderstood when it was published in 2011 so for example Suzanne Moore's article really excoriating criticism of his book saying that the second sexism is just male victim envy and so on I think she really misunderstood what Benatar was trying to say so what the second sexism is not is male victim envy or me too masculinism it's not more significant than sexism against women and it's not a method to assert that sexism against women is justifiable so the first sexism and the more important sexism is that perpetrated against women but sexism against both women and men is a systemic outcome of everyday assumptions about women's and men's attributes capabilities and it's overwhelmingly perpetrated by men against both women and men and sometimes by women against women and men and is therefore intersectional with class and race and other forms of discrimination and regardless of the gender of the perpetrator and the victim it's still sexism so what feminism is going for is once is genuine equality between women and men and it's not a replacement of one set of privileges with another and we can't expect to achieve gender equality genuine equality by waiting for it to be bestowed from above and it requires both women and men to join together and engage in struggle to protest against the rich and powerful overwhelmingly men to rest equality from structured and gendered inequality okay Simone de Beauvoir said that to carry off this supreme victory in her book the second sex which inspired Benatar's the title of Benatar's book among other things and beyond their natural differentiations unequivocally affirm their brotherhood that men and women together should come together to resist and reject and sexism and establish equality genuine gender equality so I'm going to try and talk about today examples in Japan abound of inequality between men and women and which are based upon implicit assumptions about gender so for example in health outcomes we can see that for example the majority of the issue of smoking is a very interesting one so for example the tobacco industry argues that pressure on women to smoke is discrimination against women and prevents them from exercising their liberty whereas of course the reverse that men are not discouraged from smoking results in much higher mortality amongst men and there's much less much fewer government resources gone into discouraging men from smoking and consequently men die younger and more often from lung cancer and so on what about the employment system particularly lifetime employment the normative assumption Helen mentioned about this already about gender relations in the Japanese workplace is that men are privileged by having unequal gender based access to career track lifetime employment positions women are therefore discriminated against by having less access and it's principally men who are keeping women out of these roles the original EOL of 8687 ostensibly sought to achieve workplace equality but as Helen said it produced structured gender inequality of the workplace by legitimating a division between career track and clerical track regular employment so in the male employment system I want to concentrate on the employment requirements of men once they're in regular employment and these four points actually produce structured gender bias against men within regular employment so here we have a principal question which is what if we start to understand that most men in Japan don't want to work like Japanese men so why would women want to do so and there's quite a lot of evidence to suggest that women actually don't want to work like men so we look at this here part-time workers the white bar to choose their own working hours by far the majority of part-time workers in Japan want to choose non-regular employment because they want to choose their own working hours the next highest is to be afraid education and household expenses but the next highest is to strike a better balance with home life and other activities by far the majority of non-regular workers and even more of a majority of part-time workers of course are women large numbers of women are choosing not to go into regular employment because they don't want to do it because of the requirements of the job so the idea that we can somehow fashion equality in regular employment between men and women by attracting women into regular employment is actually not really a feasible idea because women are actually choosing in very large numbers just to avoid it so we look at regular employment requires workers to give unlimited commitment and flexibility long working hours and unpredictable working days sudden and unlimited overtime demands unpaid overtime, sudden and distant job transfers and all of these things prevent men from taking a full part in family formation and domestic work many men do want to take part in family formation and they're not able to do so because of the requirements of their employment and it's therefore discriminatory against them so for example with long working hours we can see the top three lines there are age bands men in their 20s, 30s and 40s and a portion of men required to work more than 60 hours a week and the bottom three are female workers in regular employment and then we see that for example sudden and unlimited overtime demands and unpaid overtime here mostly required of men in regular employment about half of the overtime that men contribute is paid and about half of it is unpaid and the numbers of hours since 2011 has barely changed we can see for example the numbers of cases where Karoshi compensation was received has ballooned since the late 1990s I mean there are some problems with interpreting the data here but the vast majority of these cases are men who have died the government has accepted the judicial system has accepted that they've died of overwork from unreasonable demands by their employers and we can see unpredictable career patterns with frequent job postings and transfer so this is a career pattern for a major retail company in Japan which requires at least four job transfers during the career service two of them are probably to distant locations away from the family and they're not precisely the time that the employee is would be normally expected to take part in career formation and we see that here the extent of employee consent in company choices of transfer in company choices of transferies the bottom dotted line there is the proportion of employees where the job transfer was made at the employee's consent so here we're seeing that more than 95% of job transfers that are being made in Japanese companies are without the employee's consent and again predominantly men so when we look at these issues to do with working hours overtime hours and job transfers by far the majority of employees that are being requested or actually ordered by their companies to contribute those commitments unlimited commitments to their organisations are men and that takes men away from family formation it takes men away from many other activities in their lives that they'd like to be able to engage in and of course conversely women's working hours are controlled they're often the majority of women are not asked to do not asked to engage in sudden overtime contributions the hours of work and the time that they are required to arrive at work and leave work are much more predictable than for men and of course they're almost never required to be posted to distant locations very suddenly and in fact with a lot of the job transfers employees are not informed officially of their job transfer to a distant location when I talk about distant location in another country at the other side of the world they're not informed officially of that transfer until about a one month before they have to leave and of course that is extremely disruptive for family life and for personal life so implicit assumptions about male and female attributes capabilities produced widely differing working lives neither women nor men in general desire these outcomes entrenched discrimination against men and sexism exacerbates entrenched discrimination against women the first sexism so we see here contributions by men to household chores and childcare Japan is by far the lowest contribution by men to domestic life amongst these countries and I would argue and quite a lot of people are arguing now that one of the main reasons for this is not that men don't necessarily want to do it it's just that they're too exhausted to be able to do so or they're not even in the home because they're working in another country so Benatar's bravery perhaps his foolhardiness because of the criticism that has been levelled against him is in trying to break the deadlock that has slowed the closing of the worldwide gender gap the data I showed you on women not wishing to engage in regular employment is part of this issue of the worldwide gender gap the closure of the worldwide gender gap that was expected when the so-called women's liberation movement really got going in the 1960s has slowed markedly because of these entrenched differences between male and female patterns of work and domestic life what I'm arguing here for the revisited part of the second sexism revisited is for a radical change in perspectives about women and men in the Japanese workplace that places men alongside women as co-workers, colleagues, sisters and brothers because the current situation is so entrenched in law, in institutions and structures, in everyday practices and their underlying assumptions and values or are we at a crossroads by understanding the sexism that men experience by revealing it by talking about it we can make the workplace more attractive for both women and men and equalize female and male contributions in the home too so what I'm calling for is for men to speak out about their own experiences and what they want for themselves and to speak out about the entrenched and men also need to speak out about the entrenched sexism that women experience and to take action to change institutions and practices for all of our benefit thank you these men are very brave coming and talking about men at SOS my name is Jun Imai the title of my talk is this the talk is basically about why young men in non-regular employment cannot have or maintain gender equal values and attitudes trying to understand that is very important I think, I believe it is very important to include men to achieve gender equality in any society this is something we already talked a little bit today non-regular employment consists about about 40% of total employment expanded due to the due regulatory reforms of labour markets since the mid 1990s in the 1980s it was about 18% at the time it was not an issue for men because most of the non-regular workers were married middle-aged women for men it was just about 7% in the mid 1980s literally none at the large firm sector but after the due regulation it has risen to 20% today this figure shows the expansion that happens across all age cohorts among men and it also shows that very clearly that the young cohorts are affected more by the reforms in Japan employers have strong preferences on hiring new graduates directly from schools as core regular workers for lifetime employment so the failure of young people to see such an opportunity can be expected to have important and long lasting effects on their careers and lives this figure attests such concern is not without ground it divides the younger people into several birth cohorts and show the percentage of non-regular workers at some points of their life stages if you took a look at the bottom that those who were born in 1968 they are 49 years old this year just about 5, 6, 7% of the non-regular workers among men but if you take a look at a man born in 1980s more than 20% are in non-regular employment segments one of the problems of Japanese labour market is that once people are located in non-regular segment it is extremely difficult to leave it and become regular workers there is very weak channel to move back and forth between them the problem is not simply the dual structure of the labour market but the life courses are segmented into two tracks privileged one and the deprived one the labour market reforms are expected to trigger cultural and lifestyle change including the change toward gender equality between Japanese men especially in younger generations it is expected to cause such a change as the existing culture was developed in close association with the development of employment and the arrangement of welfare institutions especially from the rapid economic growth all the privileged resources and opportunities were pegged to the status of regular employment particularly to the ones at the larger segment of firms secure employment wage privileged pension system retirement allowance, healthcare saving scheme, support for house acquisition provided by employers as incentive to employees as at the larger companies those things can be provided by states as rights in other societies under such specific arrangement of employment and welfare specific culture of lifestyle and gender was developed and still encouraged and still encourages men to have strong commitment and submissive attitudes to work organization accepting flexible requirements by companies such as flexible overtime and regional transfer that just Peter emphasized and to have strong sense of responsibility as a breadwinner at home we call such culture salaryman masculinity it became dominant and legitimate culture and is monocultural and it is a part of the culture that is attracted or actually forced to internalize this culture I say there is an aspect of enforcement as there were collective efforts to deny and eliminate other cultures to be men during the period of economic growth for instance studies of masculinity provides evidences that independent mobile workers whatever their occupations are were labeled irresponsible or failed and it is reported that employers and labor unions together try to deny those who have such culture and actually encourage them to have salaryman masculinity so I say the combination of employment and welfare under catching up economy strongly mobilized and actually still mobilizes men to this culture but recently scholars expect some changes including one that equalizes gender representing such expectation is the debates over freedom are they really free from something free from the obligation of regular workers or they are just used disposable workers by companies there are also a bit of expectation about the emergence of the second standard of life course that may associate more with gender equality however such standard has not emerged until today rather a number of empirical studies report exactly the contrary that is the rigidity of the male bread winner ideology the very core of the salaryman masculinity is stronger among young non-regular workers today compared to regular workers in the same age cohort it was clear from the start that the reforms only created new dualism in the Japanese labor market and the exclusion of non-regular employment statuses from the system that achieved catching up economy so my talk today is rather about how young men in non-regular employment struggle to obtain recognition and legitimacy about their lives in a society by doing so I would like to give a partial explanation to the gender conservatism that these people show 20 years after the labor market changes the data Frita is the name of the young people especially the young people in the non-regular employment it's a combination of the free arbiter that the German word it's a free arbiter that emerged in the 1980s I think and the first expected to bring a new culture or as I said it's different the data I used are based on my own research done in Sapporo Hokkaido the largest research site was a call center we have done interviews to employers and labor representatives conducted questionnaire survey and interviews to both regular and non-regular employees we have done this comprehensive research because doing questionnaire just to non-regular workers is not enough in order to understand the world of meaning that non-regular workers live it is necessary to know that expectations employers place on them and how regular workers think about the situation of non-regular workers in addition to understand how non-regular workers think about themselves with regard to the situations here first thing we confirmed from the research is that the labor conditions of regular and non-regular workers are really the opposite one third of the young men are in non-regular statuses in our sample job tenure is significantly shorter for non-regular workers that means insecure employment in Japanese context they are significantly less with inferior or no corporate welfare and in order to earn such wages they work actually longer than regular workers in our sample that is probably the only bias of my sample all non-regular workers in my sample work through time this is just a visualization that regular workers have a seniority curve but non-regular workers don't the shocking thing that we learned from the interview was that 20 years of experience of the expansion and the entrenchment of inequality has told people how to be indifferent to people trapped in the lower stratum it is common to hear in interviews of regular workers that the situation non-regular workers situation of non-regular workers is their choice on first sight they say this as if they show a silent respect for non-regular workers but it is just for the surface everybody interviewed knows that non-regular work status is not a choice at all and that their employment status may lead directly to the life of poverty and hopelessness we can observe a social societal divide here the comment it is their choice is the declaration of regular workers to not wanting to talk about the very apparent inequality and exclusion in contemporary Japanese society regular workers think that they are entitled to be on the safe side but in order to claim this they need to emphasize that they are more responsible than non-regular workers with regard to various organizational matters when asked how the different treatment can be rationalized they say we are required to fulfill obligation that non-regular workers are not at the call center they typically pick up the example non-regular workers can choose time slots that they want to work when there are slots no one chose regular workers they need to fulfill the back-and-see this kind of difference was taken for granted before but after the emergence and expansion of non-regular employment together with the increasing necessity to justify the differentiated treatment this sense of responsibility has come to be stressed these days it has become a key rationale for confirming and legitimizing the privileged treatment of regular workers going back to non-regular workers it is interesting that different from the failing man in the past non-regular workers today do not face with direct rejection it's their choice people say but they only face with soft and unclear exclusion this is a social environment that stigmatizes them and puts the masculinity of these young men under pressure so how to be man under the pressure that objectively and subjectively emasculates you is the issue non-regular workers would need to gain or claim recognition and legitimacy by themselves about the situation if there is a strong negation against them they can locate themselves as a kind of anti-hero but facing only soft indication that they are failing they find an open social space in front of them where they need to fulfill with meaning by themselves I found three types of attitudes and reactions characterized as moratorium claiming social independence and gender conservatism it is not to argue that there are three types of people but all three can be found in one person it is rather three dimensions of the reactions by young non-regular men in Japan the first is a moratorium one guy for example works at the call center for long already who is 30 years old but he claims it is temporarily as he wants to work in the film industry when asked about his career he said I am different from others because his main commitment is not the current employer and that immediately put himself outside the mainstream norms but at the same time he said yes I know I am undecided by postponing important decision on my career I always feel that I have to do what I have to do but it is too busy to seriously think about it I know I can't do this much longer so he sees the current situation as a temporary state of life preparation period on the way to achieve the real self in the future if he is younger this attitude can be perfectly fine but it is becoming to sound as an attitude to avoid directly confronting against the mainstream oppressive social norm the second option to deal with the dilemma of masculinity is to present oneself as somebody emphasizing a sound work life balance many non-regular men strongly emphasize the necessity or the advantage for them of being non-regular they highlight the obligations of regular workers with regard to overtime and job transfer both issues perceived to be hurting work life balance unacceptable ways their choice their claims could be legitimate but not rewarded it is interesting that some of them claim in the context that their situation is economically irrational they state considering the wage per an hour that non-regular wage is better than that of regular workers I hear lots of times of this the emphasis on economic rationality serves as a means to present their situation as being clever gainful and potentially manly however given the information on the wages and working hours this view is not accurate then we will then why do they say this one interpretation is that they want to emphasize differences to regular workers they are less obedient to their employers they can claim and earn as much as they need and want to work regular workers do not have this choice all in all it boils down to desire to claim that they are socially if not economically independent man finally I would like to talk about gender conservatism I think the experience of this manifests how desperate these men are in trying to come up with the logics of the moratorium or claiming social independence the survey results show that the young man on the third year of 39 years old agree with statistics of significance more than older men to statements such as what women really want is family and child or it is a shame for men to earn less than their wives young men are also seen as slightly more conservative on the statements such as men should work outside women should take care of family members at home and wives should make their husband look good in front of others no regular workers are even more obsessed with Brett Wienow ideology than the regular in the same age cohort no regular scores higher on the three statements I underlined there at first sight this conservatism of young men especially of the ones in no regular status is astonishing it reveals as they recognize and internalize the official norm of Japanese society the reasons for this may be their intention to overcome the stigma the lack of the recognition and legitimacy of their lives for those no regular status the official norm appear to be oppressing and it is very difficult for them to claim that they are successful as a man in relation to men their inferior position this oppression whether they are conscious about it or not pushes them into negotiations of gender their inferior position in employment welfare regime makes them gender conscious since one of the most effective strategies to highlight their masculinity is to claim it in relation to women so concluding notes being employed as no regular worker is now increasingly common among young men regular employment can only provide inferior resources and opportunity when compared to regular employment and they experience fear and recognize the inferiority in everyday life in relation to their employers and their colleagues with regular status regular workers use a kind of rhetoric that shows superficial respect to the situation of no regular workers by emphasizing that their situation is their free choice a common place form of symbolic violence a common place today no regular workers make sense of their lives and they need to justify themselves also in relation to others I found three ways moratorium, social independence and gender conservatism the existence of these strategies reveals the very fact that young men in no regular employment feel trapped in emasculated life courses that are stigmatizing them embodying breadwinner ideology more strongly than regular men reveals that the oppression makes them follow the key elements of the dominant ideology in order to gain legitimacy in the current contemporary society I will skip the concluding note mostly about the possibility of future change because time is up I think Thank you very much