Weapons of Choice in Japan: U.S. Women
Japan may battle efforts to bring in more things American--everything from computer chips and automobile parts to beef and fresh fruit. But when it came to dealing with what critics call a crushing social problem here involving this nation’s biggest companies, some Japanese women played a surprising gambit: They turned to a U.S. import.
They pooled their money to pay for a visit by Rosemary Dempsey, a prominent American feminist who was the star attraction as the women picketed Thursday in a media throng outside Mitsubishi Motors Corp.’s annual shareholders meeting.
It was the final act in this oft-insular nation of a weeklong public relations war waged by foreign spokeswomen over charges of sexual harassment against the company’s U.S. subsidiary.
“Multinational corporations have to learn that fairness in their treatment of women is not something that is negotiable, depending on the country,” Dempsey, the vice president of the National Organization for Women, told an army of assembled Japanese journalists, in criticizing Mitsubishi.
The company replied by hiring its own high-profile American spokeswoman.
Mitsubishi Motors suddenly invited Lynn Martin, the former U.S. labor secretary whom it has employed to carry out an independent investigation of its workplace, to Tokyo. She arrived just in time to give a news conference Monday, one hour before Dempsey was scheduled to give one of hers.
A Mitsubishi spokesman called the timing of Martin’s three-day visit, which overlapped Dempsey’s week of speeches, meetings and protests, a coincidence.
But Dempsey disagreed. And her Japanese hosts noted that a gaijin, a foreigner, had to be brought to Tokyo to campaign against sexual harassment because, otherwise, no one here would pay attention.
Seku hara--which activist Hiroshi Kashiwagi said is everything from unwanted touching at the workplace to unfair wages based on gender--is widespread in Japan but is not taken seriously as a social concern, the activists asserted.
“In Japan, sexual harassment is considered a trivial thing,” said Mizuho Fukushima, a well-known feminist lawyer. “Japan’s top business leaders are worried about their image. Now they will have to listen. This will scare them.”
She and others said the only way they could get Japanese media attention was by applying gaiatsu, or foreign pressure.
“We had to grab this chance to use gaiatsu to work on sexual harassment,” Mitsue Nozaki, who is in the midst of a harassment lawsuit herself, observed as she clutched a pink placard in her hands at Thursday’s protest. “If the foreign media take up an issue, then the Japanese media take it up. This number of media would have never turned up for us.”
Indeed, hundreds of Japanese reporters, mostly men, scrambled to get a glimpse of and a sound bite from Dempsey on Thursday.
Meanwhile, blue-suited Mitsubishi shareholders, heads bowed, eyes averted, dashed through the media gantlet to get to the firm’s annual meeting.
Until now, Japanese press reports have downplayed Mitsubishi’s American sexual harassment woes, activists say.
They accuse the media here of dismissing as “Japan bashing” a U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuit, filed in April, asserting that Mitsubishi created a hostile, abusive work environment by tolerating unwanted verbal and physical sexual contact by men against women in its Normal, Ill., plant.
U.S. officials have said that 300 to 500 women may be involved in the class-action suit, which experts have termed the biggest sexual harassment case in EEOC history.
Japanese media, however, also have characterized the American agency as a dying institution seeking a case to give it purpose.
Many journalists argue that the Illinois case is an issue between the sexes in the U.S., not in Japan.
Still, the anti-seku hara actions--including the Dempsey-led picketing by the 25 activists, part of what they said were 60 similar protests that took place from Tokyo to New York--appeared to achieve some results.
Top Mitsubishi officials, who had denied that sexual harassment was a problem, jumped into the fray this week to announce that Martin’s investigation would produce specific steps to improve the environment for women and minorities at U.S. units by the end of July.
Mitsubishi directors Taizo Yokoyama and Fumikazu Yokogawa also met with Dempsey on Wednesday. And everyone from the labor minister to Japanese politicians to lawyers have flocked to hear her expound on seku hara.
Dempsey, who argued that Mitsubishi had originally refused to take responsibility for the allegations at its U.S. subsidiary, said Mitsubishi Motors now is giving critics “a response.”
So, in the end, what did the battling foreigners accomplish? Had they been effective, hired samurai fighting honorably for their respective causes, or had the exercise all been something more akin to bunraku, a Japanese puppet show?
The activists took heart, for example, in one scene in which a male Japanese reporter fought his way to the front to ask protesters sincerely: “What is sexual harassment?”
On the other hand, it was also true, even at Thursday’s protest, that as Dempsey moved, the Japanese media followed--leaving Japanese activists behind and forgotten.
Then too there were the comments of Kazuo Okamura, 48, a Mitsubishi shareholder, who said the protest made no impression on him.
“We probably have it [sexual harassment] here too,” he said. “But the path of women is different in America and Japan.”
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