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When a 22-year-old Japanese student launched an online campaign against the powerful Tokyo Olympics chief and the sexist remarks he made, she wasn’t sure it would go very far.
But in less than two weeks, Momoko Nojo’s #DontBeSilent campaign with other activists garnered more than 150,000 signatures, galvanizing global outrage against Yoshiro Mori, the president of Tokyo 2020.
He resigned last week and was replaced by Seiko Hashimoto, a woman who has competed in seven Olympics.
The hashtag was coined in response to remarks by Mori, a former prime minister in his eighties, that women talk too much. Nojo has used him on Twitter and other social media platforms to garner support for a petition calling for action against him.
“Few petitions have gotten 150,000 signatures before. I thought it was really great. People take this personally too, not seeing this as Mori’s only problem,” a smiling Nojo said in an interview with Zoom.
Her activism, born out of a year of study in Denmark, is the latest example of women outside mainstream politics in Japan taking up keyboards to bring about social change in the world’s third largest economy, where gender discrimination, pay gaps and stereotypes are rampant.
“It made me realize this was a good opportunity to lobby for gender equality in Japan,” said Nojo, a fourth-year economics student at Keio University in Tokyo.
She said her activism was motivated by questions she often heard from her male peers like, “You’re a girl, so you have to go to a high school that has nice school uniforms, don’t it not? or “Even if you don’t have a job after you graduate from college, you can be a housewife, right?”
Nojo started her non-profit organization “NO YOUTH NO JAPAN” in 2019, while in Denmark, where she saw how the country chose Mette Frederiksen, a woman in her 40s, as Premier minister.
The stay in Denmark, she says, made her realize how dominated Japanese politics were by older men.
Keiko Ikeda, professor of education at Hokkaido University, said it is important for the young people of the world to make their voices heard in Japan, where decisions tend to be made by a uniform group of people sharing the same ideas. But the change will come terribly slowly, she said.
“If you have a homogeneous group, it’s incredibly difficult to move the compass because people don’t realize it when their decision is off-center,” Ikeda said.
Nojo this week rejected a proposal by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in Japan to allow more women to attend meetings, but only as silent observers, as a poorly executed press stunt.
“I don’t know 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.
In reality, Nojo’s victory is just one small step in a long fight.
Japan is ranked 121st out of 153 countries according to the World Economic Forum’s 2020 Global Gender Gap Index – the worst ranking among advanced countries – with a poor score in terms of women’s economic participation and political empowerment .
Activists and many ordinary women say radical change is needed in the workplace and in politics.
“In Japan, when there is a problem related to gender equality, few voices are heard, and even if there are voices to improve the situation, they run out of steam and nothing changes,” said declared Nojo.
“I don’t want our next generation to spend their time on this issue.”
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