EQUALITY WATCH : Two Women

Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell may have been the only woman at the summit table, but it was Hillary Rodham Clinton and Japan’s Crown Princess Masako who stole the spotlight outside.

The First Lady and princess played spouse and hostess, traditional roles for these rather untraditional women. Each played in their own unique and contrasting ways to a Japanese society unaccustomed to--and uncomfortable with--overtly ambitious women. There was Mrs. Clinton touring a garbage disposal plant, museum and palace gardens with wives of other leaders. There was the princess, who gave up a promising foreign service career for the cloistered palace life, seated between Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, charming the leaders as she conversed in English and Russian.

They left indelible images in a Japan that is at once fascinated and fearful of career women, who are more plentiful in Tokyo these days. The open, assertive style of American career women is typically at odds with the style of Japanese women, who have long been mistakenly stereotyped as demure and submissive by Western standards. In fact, Japanese women hold the power--and purse strings--of households. Many, especially those who have studied abroad as did the princess, are more international and receptive to change than men, who are groomed more narrowly to accommodate rigid corporate and bureaucratic systems. Little wonder about the fascination with the First Lady. To many Japanese she is yet another example of how America is so much less guarded than Japan.