Going only by her first name, Renho has been a member of the upper house of the Diet for the last 12 years, before which she was a newsreader. She has captured the attention of the Japanese public with her charismatic personality, charming good looks and powerful oratory skills. She has also sparked intrigue by becoming not only the first female leader of the DP but also the first political leader with dual nationality.
Renho was born in Japan to a Taiwanese father and a Japanese mother and held dual nationality until very recently. Due to pressure from the right-wing press she was compelled to renounce her dual citizenship. Despite hundreds of thousands of Japanese estimated to also hold dual citizenship and there being no penalties for this, holding a second passport is illegal in Japan.
Her rise to power is significant for women, who currently hold only 12 per cent of seats in Japan’s legislature and 9 per cent in the lower house. But while having a female leader is a first for the DP it is not a first for the Japanese opposition as a whole.
Takako Doi headed the Japan Socialist Party (JSP) when it was previously the main political opposition. Doi served as party leader from 1986 to 1991 and again from 1996 to 2003, and was also the first female speaker of the lower house. In 2000 another woman, Fukushima Mizuho, replaced Doi and led the socialists until 2013.
The JSP (now called the Social Democratic Party) began to lose popularity in the late 1990s and became a minority party. The predecessor of the DP, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), became the primary opposition party and eventually won control of the government in 2009, and was the ruling party when the triple disaster occurred in Fukushima in 2011.
The party was generally perceived as being ineffective in the crisis and voters made their disappointment known in the 2012 election, when the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) regained control of the government. This result was widely understood as a vote against the DPJ rather than strong support for the LDP, which means Renho has her work cut out for her to restore the public’s faith in her party.
Nominating women to positions of power, or simply running them in certain seats, has long been a strategy to improve a political party’s image in times of crisis. But such a move can been interpreted as largely tokenistic.
In 1989, when the Japan Socialist Party nominated a large cohort of women — quickly labelled the ‘Madonna boom’ by the media — there were certainly elements of tokenism. This was evidenced by the fact that many of the women were wives of unionists or daughters of former ministers and had minimal experience in electoral politics outside support roles. And in 2005 and 2009 the LDP and the DPJ saw a record number of women elected to the lower house as a result of strategies to inject new blood into the party to project an image of ‘change’.
Many of the women elected did not survive past their first term because they lacked experience and political support. The recent visibility of women in power in contemporary Japanese politics suggests that the appointment of Renho is much more than a token gesture by the DP to appeal to voters. Now that there is a cohort of experienced women within the system, women can reach positions of power and avoid being labelled tokenistic.
Renho’s rise to the top is the third instance this year of women reaching top positions in Japanese politics. The other two are Tomomi Inada who was appointed by Prime Minister Abe to the position of Defence Minister and Yuriko Koike who was elected the new governor of Tokyo.
More women in positions of power is certainly symbolically important for females who are confronted with a sea of men in suits when tuning in to political news. But whether women in power implement policies that benefit women is an equally important question.
Renho campaigned on a platform of greater investment in people and education — this included promises of free preschool education and increasing the salaries of childcare workers. But unless the DP has the reins of power, Renho might find it difficult to prove her worth in the eyes of women. Her greatest challenge will be restoring the DP so that it becomes a serious and electable alternative to the LDP by the next general election due before 2018.
Emma Dalton is a lecturer in Japanese at the Department of Languages and Linguistics, La Trobe University.
Thanks for a well written analysis of the significance of Renho’s election to become the head of the DP.
I believe that one of the ways she can boost the DP’s prospects for the coming national election would be if she led her party to offer viable and more comprehensive elements to Abe’s so called Womenomics. His commission on equal pay for equal work, for example, needs to formulate specific and realistic incentives for corporations to increase more than just the pay of women in the workforce. Changes in tax laws could be used to motivate companies to hire and promote more women into supervisory and executive positions. Some kind of affirmative action program should also be considered, especially in government jobs where more control can be had over such policy making.
Will Renho appoint more women to the decision making bodies of the DP itself? Doing that would send a clear message that the party is offering an encouraging agenda to women in Japan. So would efforts on her part, and that of her colleagues, to find and elect more women to the Diet in the next election. The 12% representation in the national legislature is still embarrassingly low.
There are two statements in this essay which could be misleading.
The first is:
“Due to pressure from the right-wing press [Renho) was compelled to renounce her dual citizenship.”
An innocent reading of the sentence would conclude that Renho knew she had both Japanese and Taiwanese citizenship, that she wanted to retain her Taiwanese citizenship and that pressure from the right-wing press forced her to give up her Taiwanese citizenship against her will.
Such an innocent reading is wrong, however. Renho was ignorant of her continuing Taiwanese citizenship, believing that her Taiwanese father had renounced it on her behalf when she was a teenager. Renho applied for and received the status of a Japanese citizen by birth ex post facto (it’s complicated) when Japanese citizenship became available for children of Japanese women married to non-Japanese men).
When it became clear this summer Renho was the leading candidate to become the new leader of the Democratic Party right wing ideologues and social media critics began to ask whether or not she had ever actually renounced her Taiwanese citizenship. Renho had to ask Taiwan authorities for a formal inquiry as to her status. To dispel any suspicions she desired dual citizenship, she preemptively filed renunciation papers prior to receiving the results of this summer’s inquiry, which found that her Taiwanese citizenship was indeed still active.
The second statement with a potential to confuse is:
“Many of the women elected did not survive past their first term because they lacked experience and political support.”
Again, an innocent reading of this sentence would leave a reader believing that successful women candidates in the elections of 1989, 2005 and 2009 lost their seats later due to a pair of attributes of strongly associated with women in Japanese politics. This is close to true but not quite right. Narrow support bases and brief resumes did play parts in later losses of seats by women first timers…but because the PARTY of these women candidates lost the seats, not because of differing sexes. Men first time legislators of the beaten party lost their seats at the same or higher rates than women first timers.