But in less than two weeks, Momoko Nojo’s #DontBeSilent campaign organized with other activists garnered more than 150,000 signatures, galvanizing global outrage against Tokyo President Yoshiro Mori 2020.
She left last week and was replaced by Seiko Hashimoto, a woman who has competed in seven Olympics.
The hashtag was coined in response to statements by Mori, an octogenarian former prime minister, that women talk too much. Nojo used him on Twitter and other social media platforms to support a petition calling for action against him.
“Few petitions have received 150,000 signatures before. I thought it was really fantastic. People also take it personally, as they don’t see it just as Mori’s problem,” a smiling Nojo said in an interview with Zoom.
Her activism, born from a year of study in Denmark, is the latest example of women who do not belong to the widespread politics of Japan and who wear keyboards to introduce social change to the world’s third largest economy, where discrimination of gender, wage differences and stereotypes are rampant.
“It made me realize that this is a good opportunity to push for gender equality in Japan,” said Nojo, a fourth-year economics student at Keio University in Tokyo.
He said his activism was motivated by questions he has often heard from male classmates like, “You’re a girl, so you have to go to high school with nice school uniforms, right?” or “Even if you don’t have a job after graduating from college, you can be a housewife, right?”
Nojo started his non-profit organization “NO YOUTH NO JAPAN” in 2019, while in Denmark, where he saw how the country chose Mette Frederiksen, a woman in her forties, as prime minister.
She said time in Denmark made her realize how much Japanese politics was dominated by older men.
Keiko Ikeda, a professor of education at Hokkaido University, said it was important for young and worldly people to raise their voices in Japan, where decisions are usually made by a uniform group of like-minded people. But the change will come agonizingly slowly, he said.
“If you have a homogeneous group, it’s incredibly difficult to move the compass because the people who are part of it don’t realize it when their decision is off-center,” Ikeda said.
Nojo this week rejected a proposal by the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan to allow more women to gather, but only as silent observers, as a poorly executed public relations trick.
“I’m not sure if they have the will to fundamentally improve the gender issue,” she said, adding that the party needed to have more women in key positions, rather than having them as observers.
Actually, Nojo’s victory is just a small step in a long struggle.
Japan ranks 121st out of 153 countries in the World Economic Forum’s 2020 Global Gender Difference Index, the worst ranking among advanced countries, with a poor score on women’s economic participation and political empowerment.
Activists and many ordinary women say a drastic change is needed in the workplace and in politics.
“In Japan, when there is an issue related to gender equality, not many voices are heard and even if there are some voices to improve the situation, they run out of steam and nothing changes,” Nojo said. .
“I don’t want our next generation to spend their time on this issue.”