Japan Official Gets Lesson on Women’s Role

Prime Minister Sosuke Uno’s agriculture minister apologized Saturday for saying that a woman’s place is in the home and that Socialist Party Chairwoman Takako Doi is unfit to serve as Japan’s prime minister because she is unmarried.

The minister, Hisao Horinouchi, offered the apology and asked that his remarks be withdrawn during a news conference that he gave in Tokyo on orders from Uno, whose own sex scandals have become an issue in a campaign for a crucial election July 23 for the upper house of Parliament.

No Reporters Present

Horinouchi made the offending statements in a campaign speech on behalf of a ruling Liberal Democratic Party candidate Friday night in Mie prefecture (state). No reporters were present, but women in the audience informed Japanese reporters.

Fragmentary accounts of the speech published Saturday reported that Horinouchi said stability and “control” in families has been maintained in Japan “because wives have been in the home.”

“In the end, a woman’s task is to stay home and take care of her family,” he said.

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, he said at another point, is fit to serve in politics “because she has a husband and children and has acted as a housewife, but Chairwoman Doi doesn’t understand that feeling . . . because she is single.”

“We must not allow such a person who has never had a family to be a head of the state,” he added.

At another point, Horinouchi asked rhetorically, “Can women be of any use in politics?”

The 64-year-old minister made the remarks in the process of criticizing the Socialist Party, whose female candidates won surprising victories in a June by-election in a traditionally conservative upper house district, and in a Tokyo assembly election last Sunday.

Women Voters’ Key Role

Women voters, angered by the ruling party’s imposition of a 3% consumption tax, a massive influence-buying scandal, and charges that Uno paid for sex with a geisha and a number of bar hostesses, played a key role in both Socialist victories.

“I don’t want to believe he said it,” commented Ryutaro Hashimoto, secretary general of the ruling party, whose majority in the upper house is endangered.

Doi herself said she was “dumbfounded” by the comments. Horinouchi, she said, “still doesn’t seem to realize that Liberal Democratic Party politics is so corrupt that women can’t keep quiet any more.”

She also offered the ruling party a suggestion.

“The Liberal Democratic Party,” she said, “should remember that women are everywhere in Japan.”