How this female lawyer beat the odds to upend a male political dynasty in northern Japan

HIROSAKI, Japan – Last summer, Ms Hanako Okada, a Tokyo lawyer and mother of two young children, started to plan a campaign for Parliament from the northern rural district in Japan where she spent her childhood.

Nearly everyone she consulted gave the same odds on her chances of winning – close to zero.

As a candidate for a party in the opposition, she was facing an incumbent from a party that has ruled Japan for all but four years since 1955.

The incumbent’s grandfather, father and brother had all held seats in the prefecture before him. Ms Okada, 44, was a political novice and a virtual stranger to locals in Hirosaki, the city in Aomori prefecture on the northern coast of Japan’s main island that she had left more than a quarter-century earlier to attend college.

Among democratic nations, Japan has one of the most abysmal records of giving women political power.

Before a general election in late October, women held just over 10 per cent of seats in the Lower House of Parliament, putting the nation at 163rd out of 183 countries in the proportion of women in its national legislature, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, a Swiss-based organisation.

“I think everyone was thinking somewhere in their hearts that it would be impossible,” Ms Okada said during an interview last week in a conference room at the telecommunications business in Hirosaki owned by her mother.

But in the general election, Ms Okada, a candidate from the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP), the largest opposition group, ousted the incumbent from the governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Mr Jiro Kimura, whose family had not lost the Lower House seat in that district for almost 40 years.

Ms Okada became the first woman to win in a single-seat district in Aomori, a rapidly ageing, depopulating prefecture that produces 60 per cent of the apples grown in Japan.

A record number of women – 73 – were voted into the Lower and more powerful House of Parliament, raising their proportion to about 16 per cent of the 465 seats and potentially presaging a future where women have a greater role in Japanese politics.

Ms Okada’s upset win gives her the chance to try to alter the culture of parliamentary life, which, like so much of the working world in Japan, is unfriendly to women, particularly mothers.

“I would like to be a politician who can be comfortable saying things like, ‘I have children, so I want to go home at around 8 o’clock’,” she said. “Or, ‘I don’t want to play golf on Sundays, I want to play with my children’.”

The increase in women in the Diet, as Japan’s Parliament is known, was not so much a vote for gender equality as a rebuke of the governing LDP.

Voters were dissatisfied over a long-simmering political finance scandal as well as flat wages, inflation and labour shortages.

The Liberal Democrats, who are dominated by men and hereditary lawmakers, lost their majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in 15 years, while the opposition parties, which fielded more women, gained seats.

Electing women is “a way to say we need a new generation of politicians”, said Ms Zeina Hilal, gender and youth programmes manager at the Inter-Parliamentary Union.

Disgruntled Japanese voters have delivered political gains to women in the past.

In the late 1980s, Ms Takako Doi, head of the Japan Socialist Party and the first female Speaker of the Lower House, became enormously popular among voters fed up with bribery scandals in the LDP.

And in 2009, when voters blamed the Liberal Democrats for the decline of the economy and handed them a landslide defeat, women set their previous record of 54 seats in Parliament. After that peak, the number of women in the Diet had fallen until the general election in October.

To sustain momentum, political experts say, women must establish themselves as more than fresh contrasts to old men and prove they can be re-elected.

Dr Shin Ki-young, professor of gender studies at Ochanomizu University in Tokyo, said: “Unless there are women who continue to be elected many times, they will just be replaced by new women forever.”

Women have already gained some traction in politics, particularly at the local level.

Ms Yuriko Koike, the first woman to be elected governor in Tokyo, won a third term in July. An increasing number of women have captured seats in local assemblies.

Still, few women run for office in Japan because of persistently high hurdles. Many politicians inherit their seats, with fathers generally passing them on to sons.

Women bear the disproportionate burden of childcare and housework, making it difficult to juggle long parliamentary sessions or constituent meetings.

Unwritten social pressure means “it is considered not very positive for a woman to want to stand out”, said Ms Harumi Yoshida, acting chief of gender equality promotion at the CDP.

Elected women can face sexual harassment, social media abuse and criticism of their appearance.

Young women, in particular, are deterred by such factors, said Ms Momoko Nojo, founder of No Youth No Japan, a youth advocacy group. “We see situations all over the place where women are unable to demonstrate their innate abilities or motivation,” she added.

Ms Eri Igarashi, 40, another Constitutional Democrat who was elected in October to a parliamentary seat in suburban west Tokyo, said some men told her she would win because she was “cute”.

But she credited the women volunteers who supported her campaign. “When I speak to female voters, I always tell them that women’s voices are absolutely necessary,” she said.

Ms Okada said she believes that anger against the entrenched LDP was a big part of her victory in Aomori.

Both Mr Kimura, the incumbent she defeated, and a representative for the LDP in Hirosaki declined to comment.

But some voters in the prefecture say they chose Ms Okada not simply to reject the incumbent but because she understood their daily concerns.

“Ms Okada is raising her own children so I believe that she understands the reality,” said Ms Yumi Tanaka, 39, and a mother of two sons, aged six and three, who had to take a day off from her job at a call centre because her older son’s school was closed on a weekday.

On an afternoon last week, Ms Okada visited a local museum of brightly coloured parade floats, known as Neputa, that feature in an annual festival.

In a private meeting with Mr Motohiko Nakamura, 80, chair of the Neputa Village museum, Ms Okada leaned forward and took notes on a clipboard as he spoke for nearly an hour.

Mr Nakamura described the shortage of tourism workers and aired his frustrations about the lack of protection from bears attacking locals.

When he called a staff member to come into his office for a moment, another associate told him she was picking up her child from daycare. “I often have to do that, too,” Ms Okada said.

Until recently, Ms Okada, who worked as an in-house lawyer in Tokyo for a glass manufacturer, could not run for office because she was effectively the sole caregiver for her two children.

Her husband worked at a foreign consulting company, leaving the house at 8am and regularly not returning until 2am the following morning.

Her frustration grew as she listened to promises from the Liberal Democrats. “The government has always said that it supports working women,” she said. “But nothing has changed.”

Her husband left the consulting company for an artificial intelligence start-up, allowing him to work more flexible hours.

Last summer, Ms Okada relocated to Hirosaki with her younger son, now three, and moved in with her mother. Her husband remained in Tokyo with the couple’s eldest son, now seven.

Ms Okada commutes between the district and Tokyo for parliamentary sessions.

Any politician in Aomori faces numerous challenges.

More than a third of the population in the prefecture is aged 65 or older, and the population has dropped by more than 10 per cent over the past decade.

In Ms Okada’s district, dilapidated storefronts are flanked by those that are shuttered permanently. Shoppers emerging from a local grocery store complained about rising food prices.

Along Apple Road, a string of orchards growing apples the size of softballs are owned by ageing farmers, where even the seasonal fruit pickers are in their 70s. Some farmers worried about the impact of rising temperatures on their crops.

Ms Okada said she wants to encourage start-up businesses in agricultural technology, sustainability and managing population decline, as well as to promote better childcare services for families.

“People have really lost hope in this region, in the future,” she said. “I thought, why don’t we make it so that people in this region have more hope.” NYTIMES