Jemima Repo
University of Helsinki, 2009
This paper compares gender equality discourse in demographic planning in Japan and the European Union. Since the falling birth rate became a prime political problem in Japan in the early 1990s, the Japanese government has introduced a series of policies and established new institutions with which to tackle it. In the late 1990s, “gender equality” became the centre of Japan’s demographic strategy. One of the first to employ a “gender equality” discourse to tackle demographic decline, however, was the EU in the 1970s, from which Japanese policies appear to draw. The continuing fall in birth rates in EU member states have led to new shifts in gender equality discourse in the 1990s and 2000s. They contrast starkly with the state of gender equality in Japan, where for example, gender mainstreaming remains marginal and issues of diversity are altogether absent. A comparison of current gender equality discourse in demographic context in Japan and the EU sheds light first, on the international mechanisms involved in shaping gender equality discourse; second, on the specificities of its localisation in the Japanese context; and third, on how different discursive approaches to falling birth rates result in different discourses of gender equality.
 Demographic_policy.pdf | [ ] |
