Interrogating Womenomics: The Uncomfortable Marriage of Feminism and Neoliberal State Policy in Contemporary Japan

In 2012, Shinzo Abe returned to power as prime minister of Japan. In his previous term a few years earlier, he had spearheaded a conservative backlash against feminism, but this time Abe strategically promoted a neoliberal feminist agenda. This was called “womenomics,” and comprised part of Abe's campaign to boost the economy, strengthen the nation, and improve its international image. Building on work by feminist scholars inside and outside Japan, this paper examines the background of Abe’s strategic neoliberal feminist performance, and situates its emergence in the context of several trends that interacted with each other in the last several decades in Japan. These trends include: 1) the contested meanings of ‘gender equality’ always present in the debates over labor, leading up to the 1985 Equal Employment Opportunity Law; 2) the rise of what might be called state feminist initiatives encapsulated by the 1999 Basic Law for Gender Equal Society; 3) the international context in which Abe found it expedient to foreground gender politics, including the controversy over the so-called “military comfort women” issue, as well as Japan’s dismal rankings in global indices of gender equality. That a Japanese political leader who is staunchly nationalist and pro-capitalist would find it both necessary and convenient to promote a variant of feminism—one that promises to “let women shine” but that is likely to lead to greater disparity between elite and non-elite women—reveals the uncomfortable bind in which feminism finds itself at this historical junctur