Will Japan “Lean In” to Gender Equality?

Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg briefly met Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo in May 2013 on her tour to bring the “Lean In” movement, based on her women’s empowerment book of the same name, to Japan. The would-be hero of the contemporary American women’s movement met the conservative would-be hero of Japan, and found that they had a common solution to the divergent problems set before them—namely, women’s empowerment in the workplace. Sandberg asserts that women’s success in top professions requires them to renew commitment to their careers and invest in themselves, while Abe argues that breaking out of Japan’s economic doldrums requires a jolt of energy to be obtained by putting more women in corporate boardrooms. If Japan has ever needed a postwar hero, surely the time is now. Abe, serving his second term as prime minister, faces a host of challenges: national debt level over 200 percent of GDP, low economic growth rates in a stubbornly deflationary economy, and an extremely low birthrate that seems to pose an existential threat to the Japanese nation itself—not to mention the challenge of recovery from the devastating “triple disaster” of the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. These challenges seem all the more daunting against the backdrop of a rising China that seems, at least to many of Abe’s associates, to be set on reshaping the regional order and pushing Japan into the background. Across these very different but interrelated debates about Japan’s economic and social challenges, the slow pace of Japanese women’s progress is frequently posited as the central problem of the country’s modernization and development. Women’s social advancement is represented as capable of unlocking all of Japan’s problems, from lack of alignment with international norms to economic development to national renewal of