This chapter critically analyzes the gendering of work in postwar Japan, through the lens of understanding work as a broad experience of both paid and unpaid labor. It explores the creation of postwar gendered ideology and roles through the rhetoric of separate spheres—the male breadwinner and the stay-at-home wife. The chapter analyzes to what extent this template continues to influence legislation, employment and gender relations in contemporary Japan. We reflect on why it appears difficult to move away from economic and social gender norms for men and women in Japan, thereby limiting progress in gender equality by international standards.

Introduction: The durability of gender roles in postwar Japan

In Japan today, 79 percent of women aged 25–54 are in some form of paid employment. This labor force participation rate is now higher than the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average and that of the USA. Back in 2000, Japan's prime age female labor force participation rate was just 66 percent, below the OECD average and a full 10 percentage points below the USA level. This would appear to signal progress. However, Japan's gender gap remains, in the words of the World Economic Forum (WEF), “by far the largest among all advanced economies.” This verdict posits an expectation that an advanced nation such as Japan should be operating differently when it comes to gender and work. So, what is it that continues to hold Japan back from satisfying the gradations of the WEF, but also meeting the needs of its men and women to better their personal and professional lives?

In Japan as elsewhere, women's participation in the workforce is not a byword for opportunity or progression. Instead, the mechanics of a woman navigating her professional life are mired in spatial hangovers from the interwar and postwar periods during which work and home were not only cleaved apart but assigned genders. There is, of course a “great unsaid” in the discussion of working and not working in Japan and elsewhere in that not all work is paid. The unequal division of care work between men and women—often done alongside paid work—is subsumed into the identity category of woman rather than given its own accounting. Unpaid care work remains statistically and spatially silent but sits at the heart of gender equality globally.