Women’s Role Changing in Japan : Families: More females enter the workplace as living costs rise, but their salaries lag behind those of men.

Japan’s quiet battle of the sexes has at long last emerged from behind its sliding screens as the nation debates how to save its shrinking families.

The first ripple in the deceptively calm waters of Japanese domesticity came in June during a Cabinet debate over reports that the birthrate dropped last year to its lowest level since the harsh years of World War II.

Reports that Finance Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto blamed higher education for women for the slide--a claim he later denied--incensed women’s rights advocates. They said male-dominated government and business are responsible for policies and work habits that discourage women from having children.

The trend toward ever smaller families is a sign that Japan must begin to help the family in its struggle for survival, said Keiko Higuchi, a noted critic and author on family issues.

“Most women are given only two cards to choose from--childbearing without a real career or a career without children,” Higuchi said. “Women are having fewer babies for a number of reasons, but the main reason is that society penalizes them for having children.”

Early this century Japanese women were encouraged to have babies to strengthen the expanding Japanese empire. Fifty years ago, mothers had an average of five children.

As of 1989, the rate was 1.57 children per woman, and the debate was not over building an empire but over how a diminished work force can support a growing elderly population, and how women can combine careers and children.

There always have been a few daring and usually privileged Japanese women who manage to rear families while making careers in medicine, law and business.

Until suffrage and property rights were granted to women by U.S. Occupation reforms in 1947, however, most Japanese women followed Confucian traditions of obedience to men all their lives--first to their fathers, then husbands and later sons.

Many still do. Feminism remains a foreign concept for many older women who accept the traditional limitations of the kanai or okusan . Both terms meaning “wife” involve the concept of being “inside the house.”

After a short dose of stress in the male-dominated business world, many younger women also say they prefer homemaking.

Numerous surveys show that most Japanese women believe that two or three children would be ideal. But they aren’t having that many.

The biggest reasons for having fewer children are high living, education costs and overcrowded housing.

The high cost of living eventually forces most women back into the labor force, to help pay for their children’s education and to make ends meet after their husbands retire.

Roughly 40% of Japan’s workers are female. A severe labor shortage is bringing growing numbers of women into previously male-dominated fields such as construction and trucking.

Women recruited by Japanese companies are usually given two options: the traditional “mommy track” or the same professional track taken by male employees. Fearing the overtime and transfers that men endure for a business career, about 95% choose the traditional track.

When those women return to work after having children, they find only “part-time” jobs, positions that are really full-time work without the benefits of lifetime employment.

Many firms rely on non-permanent female employees, who earn one-half to two-thirds what their male colleagues earn for similar work, to cut personnel costs.

Eiko Shinotsuka, a labor economist at Ochanomizu Women’s University in Tokyo, said the system is efficient, but it means that most women work as clerks or in other dead-end jobs.

And remaining single or childless is no guarantee of career opportunity, Shinotsuka said.

Surveys show that just over 1% of all managers in major Japanese corporations are women, mostly at lower levels of management. Only 3.8% of all Japanese companies, in most cases tiny entrepreneurships or family businesses, are headed by women, according to Tokyo Shoko Research, a private research institute.

Sexual equality is guaranteed by the Japanese constitution. Since 1986, an equal employment opportunity law has required companies to let women apply for positions previously open only to men.

Unlike the United States, the law does not specify penalties or require that women be hired or receive equal training or promotion opportunities.

In July, a Japanese court made the first ruling in favor of women who complained they had been denied promotions on the basis of their sex, but the court did not order any mechanism for promoting the complainants. The 18 women, however, were awarded $640,000 in compensation.

“Women can’t go to the courts with a law that only says firms should ‘try’ to provide equal treatment. The law has helped, but it’s still no good. It needs penalties for enforcement,” Shinotsuka said. “It would be better to eliminate discrimination altogether.”

The absence of a popular women’s movement and customs prevailing outside the office have inevitably slowed progress in overcoming discrimination.

Most Japanese men still expect their mothers and sisters, their wives and even their female colleagues to wait on them. After working hours, many men entertain clients in bars where beautifully clad women light their cigarettes, flatter and serve them.

Attitudes are beginning to change slowly.

Some women also have begun to protest against Japan’s immense sex industry, against violence and pornography in comics read openly by Japanese men on subways and elsewhere, and other images that they say dehumanize women.

The nation’s first sexual harassment case ever was filed last year and since then complaints of such problems have ballooned.

Some analysts credit the rising awareness of women’s problems to Takako Doi, a sharp-witted former law professor who has led Japan’s top opposition party since 1986.

As chairwoman of the Japan Socialist Party, Doi, 61, helped draw many women into politics last year after veteran politicians came under fire for money and sex scandals, including the alleged keeping of paid mistresses.

The new female politicians made some inroads in their campaign against money policies and against a sales tax that squeezed the purses of Japan’s traditional family spenders, the housewives.

A record 22 women won seats in Parliament’s upper house in the July, 1989, elections, and 12 were elected to the lower house in February. Before the two elections, about half that number were in Parliament.

Seeking to placate angry female voters, Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu, who succeeded two scandal-tainted leaders, named two women to his first Cabinet last August.

But Kaifu’s second Cabinet, named after the February election, was all male.

Females still account for less than 5% of Parliament’s 764 members. And most women legislators belong to the opposition, which has little chance of passing laws on women’s issues in the face of the big majority held by the Liberal Democratic Party. The conservative governing party did not run a single woman candidate in last February’s election for the more powerful lower house of Parliament.

Economic trends have done more to create opportunities for women than politics.

Enterprising female entrepreneurs are finding niches in new businesses, ranging from computer software engineering to household and catering services that have emerged to meet the demands of working mothers.

The growing influence of women as consumers--both professionals and traditional holders of the purse strings--is leading companies to listen more to women employees and generating new opportunities for career-oriented women.

A growing labor shortage also is opening doors, especially in computer-related industries, said Tomoko Shibata, executive director of the Japan Institute of Women’s Employment.

“Even if companies don’t really want to employ women in mainstream jobs, they simply have no choice,” Shibata said. “They’re so desperate for good people they feel it’s worthwhile to hire women even if they’re likely to quit when they have families.”

Japan’s major electronics companies are energetically recruiting female college graduates for specialized technical jobs, and some are developing child-care programs so that those women can return to work as soon as possible.

In a groundbreaking decision, the managements of those companies agreed this spring to labor unions’ demands for a one-year unpaid leave for childbearing, up from the current eight weeks’ leave required by law.

Higuchi, a frequent participant in committees on women’s issues, said she believes such a policy will spread throughout Japan in the next few years.

But merely providing lengthier maternity leaves will not solve the real problems facing the Japanese family, she said.

“Japanese companies treat men as if they were bachelors, without any family responsibilities other than a paycheck. They might as well be bachelors, given their lack of real involvement in their families,” Higuchi said.

Most Japanese men spend their waking hours outside the home--working overtime, socializing with business associates and commuting two to four hours a day. They leave decisions on education, child rearing and household spending to their wives.

“It’s unnatural for a society to leave no room for families. We have to make it possible for men to share the responsibility for bringing up children,” Higuchi said. “The way things are now, many married women are virtually running single-parent households.”