Japanese Ventures & the Future of the Economy 1Interview with Dr. Hiromi Murakami, Visiting Senior Fellow of the Global Health Innovation Policy
Program at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) & President of the Japan
Institute for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship (JSIE)

Women in Japan Not Yet Fully
Utilized for Economic Growth
By Japan SPOTLIGHT
In spite of the Japanese government’s efforts to raise women’s participation in social and businessactivities as well as public policy in recent years to encourage diversity in society, Japan ranks 110th outof 149 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index 2018. Women earn 25.7% lessin wages than do men and only 3% of women hold senior management positions in central government,
while the OECD average is 32%. The Japanese government believed that encouraging women to get intobusiness would lead to raising productivity, as women, on average, are more intelligent than men on thebasis of academic achievements at school. But, in reality, little progress seems to have been achieved inpromoting women’s roles in society.
Japan SPOTLIGHT interviewed Dr. Hiromi Murakami, visiting senior fellow of the Global Health Innovation
Policy Program at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS), and the founder andpresident of the Japan Institute for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship (JSIE), which is working on
encouraging women in Japan to bridge this gap.
(Interviewed on Feb. 5, 2019)

Introduction

student, and then worked for a German
company. Having lived in France and
JS: First of all, could you please
Germany, and looking at Asia from there, I
briefly introduce yourself and inrealized I wanted to study further about Japan
particular how you founded theand Asia from political, economic, andJSIE?
geopolitical perspectives. Then I moved to
Washington D.C. and there studied
Murakami: After graduating from university
international relations at a graduate school
in Japan, I started working for a Japaneseand found a researcher position at a thinkcompany. At that time I never dreamt abouttank. I loved my job at the think-tank andspending so many years overseas, though I
worked there while pursuing doctorate
had lived abroad for two years while mystudies. Eventually, I ended up staying
father was stationed overseas when I was aoutside Japan for 21 years in total, including
junior high-school student. After working for
my two-year junior high-school days.
the company for a few years, I wanted to go
Having lived and worked in the US andand study an MBA just like my male
Europe for a long time, I found that Japanesecolleagues, by taking advantage of its training
women are not given full chances to
Dr. Hiromi Murakami
program available for employees and asked
maximize their potential, as Japanese women
my boss if I could do so. I was told that the company would not send
are still expected to assume the traditional role of women in a
women to business schools as female employees usually quit after
society. Preoccupations with conservative ideas about the role ofhaving a child or getting married. Even though the Equal
women in a society still heavily prevail in Japan, and women are
Employment Opportunity Law was already put into practice, I
trapped in a marginalized world where they feel they have so many
realized clearly that gender discrimination remained.
limitations. Japanese women simply don’t see that chances exist in
So instead of asking the company to send me over to an American
front of them or dismiss them in the belief that they are not for them.
business school, I decided to go and study there on my own. After
When I moved back to Washington again when my husband wasfinishing business courses in the United States, I was given an
assigned to a post there, I founded the JSIE in 2015 in Washington
opportunity to go to a French business school as an exchangewith a mission to realize Japanese women, young people and otherhttps://www.jef.or.jp/journal/

Japan SPOTLIGHT • May / June 201961

Japanese Ventures & the Future of the Economy 1minority groups’ greatest potential and let them see the true
opportunities they are entitled to. We are bringing inspiration andstimulus to awaken them from their marginalized world and tounlock their full potential as leaders.

JSIE Program
JS: The JSIE is still relatively new. How many people

are working for it? What kind of activities are you
doing?

Murakami: The core members are three Japanese women who haveworked or studied overseas and share a sense of urgency thatsomething needs to be done to change the mindset of Japanesewomen. We have four principal activities.
The first is the “Women’s Initiative for Sustainable Empowerment(WISE) Program in Japan” that was started in the summer of 2015.
The inaugural WISE program was modeled on Washington-style
symposiums or conferences organized by think-tanks, withex-government officials or top business leaders as panelists, where
anybody in the audience can ask them any question. We wanted tocreate such an opportunity which had never existed in Japan where
anybody can directly interact with these opinion leaders, who somein the audience might consider their role model and would like toemulate. Our very special guest was Carmen Lomellin, former US
ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS) during theadministration of President Barack Obama, and Izumi Kobayashi,
former president of Merrill Lynch Japan Securities and deputy
secretary of the Japan Committee for Economic Development, andother distinguished American and Japanese women, including
Margot Carrington, minister at the US Embassy in Japan in charge of
public relations and cultural exchange also joined our panel
discussions. The program attracted many talented female
participants as the conference was organized in English. I was
impressed by their enthusiasm and strong interest in talking withthose leaders. Since then we have been organizing WISE every year.
The second is the “Washington Women’s Dialogue (WWD)”. Our
first speaker was Aiko Shimajiri, then minister of state for Okinawa
and the Northern Territories, as well as for space policy, when she
visited Washington at the end of 2015. Having heard that she wanted
to talk with Japanese women in Washington, we organized adialogue with her and professional Japanese women working in thearea. Since then, we have organized such dialogues 18 times so far,inviting role models to share their experience regardless ofnationality, and each has attracted working women in Washington.
The third is the “First Movers Forum” aimed at encouraging people
to have an entrepreneurial spirit and to think and act on their own.
We invite young entrepreneurs in Japan as speakers to this forum
several times a year. In Japan, working for a large company is still
generally regarded as more prestigious and respectable rather thanstarting up a business of one’s own. But there are nonetheless many
attractive and creative entrepreneurs today in Japan, who are making
an impact on society. This forum series features such “first movers”
62 Japan SPOTLIGHT • May / June 2019and presents the different perspectives and new social values theyenvision, as well as providing an opportunity for the participants totalk with them and be inspired by their experiences.
Finally, we have our “Global Peer Mentoring Network”, an online
program. In the US, there are various mentoring networks forworking women, but such networks rarely exist in Japan forproviding advice or consultations for working women. It is quite
different from Japan that in the US there are many seniorprofessionals, whether entrepreneurs or corporate leaders or highranking government officials, who are willing to offer advice toyounger professionals. Therefore, we thought it would be helpful toorganize an online network with these possible mentors and connect
them with people who express their interest, for example, in working
for an international organization and would like to talk to those
professionals who have gone through similar career paths.
JS: Your programs seem to have gained positive

responses. Are there any specific positive
consequences starting to emerge from among theparticipants?

Murakami: From the second year, we started to focus on supportingsocial entrepreneurs with a relatively small number of participants at
our annual WISE program. Among those participants, two women
have started up their own businesses. We would like to support them
to become success stories. Among our non-Japanese supporters,
there are many interested in supporting Japanese women
entrepreneurs as all of them pointed out that Japanese women are
the most underutilized but have great potential for making an impact,
and so the JSIE is now getting a variety of inquiries.
In the beginning, we were not well known and had difficulty evenfinding venues for events. But as our activities have continued andgained a good reputation we find an increasing number of people
asking us to come and hold an event in different regions. In 2019, we
will have two WISE events, one supported by the Kumamoto
Prefectural government (Kumamoto WISE https://www.jsie.net/en/archives/6424/ on May 18-19, 2019) and the other co-sponsored byJapanese Ventures & the Future of the Economy 1

Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Beppu in Oita Prefecture(Beppu WISE https://www.jsie.net/en/archives/5598/ on Aug. 2-4,2019). So the positive consequences for us are that it is increasingly
easy for us to gain support from partnering institutions and toacquire talented mentors and participants who are willing to join our
WISE program.

Low Profile in Society & Business forJapanese Women
JS: In spite of efforts by the government and businesscorporations in Japan, Japanese women’s
participation in social and business activities
remains insignificant. What do you think are thereasons?

Murakami: I think gender discrimination is still predominant inJapan. After having lived and worked in the US and Europe for somany years, in coming back to Japan I suddenly started to feel ill atease. There are still traditional values prevailing about the role ofwomen in Japan, namely working as a housewife and mother to keep
their home happy and comfortable for their husbands and children.
Those stereotyped values are naturally embedded in a variety ofoutput from the media, and wherever you go you can find people
who talk and behave unconsciously based on those values. For
example, in a spontaneous conversation many would ask, “When are
you going to get married?” or say “You cannot get married if you go
to a graduate school.” In an interview for a job, I hope that a woman
might no longer be asked if she would quit the job if she has a child.
The human resource department managers tend to assume womenquit the company as soon as they have children, even though those
women have no idea if they will ever get married.
Japanese society is such a society dominated by stereotypes andmen and women both seem to be constrained by these thoughts andvalues. Women’s freedom of choice is extremely limited under thesecircumstances whenever they may have to make a crucial decision in
their life, such as choosing a job.
To tell the truth, we were shocked to see in one of our WWD
meetings in Washington a young Japanese lady saying that her firstpriority in life would be to find a good husband and asking us how
this could be done. Even such a young bilingual lady who had
graduated from a top-level university with the aim of working
internationally was not immune to the Japanese stereotype. There
was another woman who said she would like to choose a job that
could respond flexibly to her future husband’s requests, namely she
would prefer a job that she could adjust to easily in order to help herbusy husband concentrate on his job. These women had started
thinking about what Japanese men would not need to think about at
all. We found it quite disappointing, since their thoughts wererestricted by the Japanese stereotype on gender.
We have more than 200 Japanese women registered in the JSIE
mailing list in the Washington area. All are not only bilingual but also
very competent. The reason they are leaving Japan and working inWashington is that they would have more opportunities and fewer
risks of being gender-discriminated against in the US than in Japan.
It is truly unfortunate for Japan that it fails to utilize such invaluable
talented pools of resources.

Changes on the Horizon?
JS: Even among men, until the 1980s those who

devoted themselves to traditional office life, doing
whatever their boss told them to do withoutcomplaint, were highly appreciated in business. But
since the 1990s, we cannot expect to achieve growth
simply by this method, and more innovative people
who do not mind opposing their bosses now seem tobe appreciated. Is this change starting to transform
corporate culture?

Murakami: No, I do not think so. Corporate systems on personnel
issues such as recruitment or an employee’s performanceassessment or incentives for working do not seem to have changed atall, since Japanese business people’s mentality is still dominated bystereotypes of the ideal employee or the role of men and women. For
example, until very recently, in a Japanese classified job section, there
would be mentioned an upper age limit for recruitment, like only 35
years old. Even now, without such age limits, we still find spaces on
CVs to be submitted to a company requiring the applicant’s age andphoto. I believe continuing such a custom is proof that Japanese
corporations still cling to their old preconceived ideas about age andgender, and this can be considered a serious negligence.
During these 30 years since the burst of the bubble economy earlyin the 1990s, although there was a temporary reform by theadministration of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi during that
period, Japanese companies have remained preoccupied by theirmemories of success in the past and their job assessment for
promotion has been kept the same as it was in spite of globalization
and a significant economic structural change in progress since the1980s. When I was working for the US think-tank at the end of the
1990s I had a chance to interview top Japanese business leaders.
One business leader told me that the Japanese economy would berestored when real estate prices rise back to their previous levels andthe good old prosperous days return, so we just have to wait. I
remember thinking there were very few who were aware of theurgent need for the fundamental transformation of the Japanesesystem that consists of seniority-based lifetime employment. This
failure to acknowledge the need for reform imposes significant costs
on our current society, economy, industries, and governance.
On the issue of policies to mitigate deflationary impacts, theJapanese government has chiefly been working on building up public
and private investment while maintaining the system to feed into
overproduction, the same as in the past. It should have started
substantially investing in human resources. It is a great pity that wehave not been sufficiently investing in education since the burst of
the bubble economy, but I believe it is still not too late to do so now.
Japan SPOTLIGHT • May / June 201963

Japanese Ventures & the Future of the Economy 1

CHART 1

Japanese society places less value
on startups

CHART 2

Low entrepreneurial intentions(adults aged 18-64 in 54 nations)
Perceived
opportunities

Cultural and Social
Norms
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0

Physical infrastructure
Entry regulation

Internal market
dynamics

Entrepreneurial finance
Government policy:
support & relevance
Government policy:
tax & bureaucracy
Government
entrepreneurshipprogramCommercial & legal
infrastructure
Japan
US
Israel

R&D transfer

Entrepreneurship as agood career choice

Entrepreneurial
education at school age

Entrepreneurial
education at post school
stage

90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0

High status of
successful
entrepreneurs

Perceived capabilities

Fear of failure
Japan (54/54)
Entrepreneurial
intentions

Israel (10/54)
US (19/54)
Saudi Arabia (1/54)

Source: Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2017/2018

Source: Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2017/2018

JS: But Japanese corporate culture seems to be

is much lower than in other countries among the indicators on
entrepreneurship surveyed in an international comparison publishedin 2018 (Charts 1, 2 & 3). In other words, Japanese society is mostreluctant to acknowledge entrepreneurs’ efforts and achievements,
and individuals neither see perceived opportunities nor
entrepreneurship as a good career choice. This makes a significant
difference from the rest of the world. Even though earlyentrepreneurial education is considered to be important, earlyJapanese education is not working either for encouraging creativity.
A school teacher in Japan would not like a student trying to do
anything that is outside the school rules. Everything is not allowed,
except for a few things, so kids have to ask permission all the time.
With such education, an entrepreneurial spirit would not be easily
developed. The few emerging entrepreneurs you mentioned must be
not the elite mainstream students in Japan but people estranged
from the conventional Japanese school frameworks.
Financial support for ventures will also not be well accommodated
in Japan. Fund raising is extremely difficult for ventures. Theirmanagement will face stumbling blocks unless they can secure funds
to continue their business, and even if they won a million yen in prize
money for their innovative products or services it would not be
sufficient. The JSIE, our organization, is a social entrepreneurshipcompany and we always find it difficult to secure a sufficient budget
for activities, while every year we are asking for grants fromfoundations or the government. This is a big difference from the US
where non-profit sectors often undertake government tasks, as in theform of the third sector over plural fiscal years. In Japan, foundation
grants alone are available though limited, and it is considered typicalthat non-profit social projects suffer a chronic shortage of money,
and therefore their activities are often not sustainable, even though
their projects are helping local communities for public purposes.
I would like the Japanese government and people to think about
new schemes providing a sustainable fund flow from the publicchanging in favor of raising diversity of humanresources. Many large companies generally
preoccupied with conservative ideas in Japan are
now losing confidence in the usual businessmethods and are trying to get more women and nonJapanese among their board members.

Murakami: Unfortunately, such efforts have not yet achieved positive
outcomes. The data show it clearly. In the central government, thepercentage of female senior officials in positions such as directorgeneral and deputy director-general is only 3% and in terms of thenumber of female senior managers Japan ranks as one of the lowest
in the world. This is, I believe, the result of the reality of the Japanesebusiness world where evaluation of the business performance of
employees in line with values made by men and for men. With only
2-3% of women on boards, there is no diversity in businessdecision-making. Merely speaking about diversity and taking noaction – this is our reality.

Entrepreneurship in Japan
JS: I guess today the best and brightest of young

Japanese, regardless of gender, are increasinglyinterested in starting up their own business rather
than getting a job at a large company with a seniority
system. There seem to be in particular naturalscience majors emerging among the IT and biotech
ventures. Will this be a trend in the future?

Murakami: I hope young entrepreneurs will be an engine for theJapanese economy, but I must tell you their business environment isvery severe. Their social acceptance and entrepreneurial spirit index
64 Japan SPOTLIGHT • May / June 2019

Japanese Ventures & the Future of the Economy 1

CHART 3Lowest entrepreneurial spirit index
1

Japan

GreeceItaly

Bosnia and Herzegovina

TaiwanBulgaria

Puerto RicoArgentina

Egypt

FranceSpain

South Africa

India

Qatar

UK

Slovakia

China

IrelandGermany

ROK

Switzerland

LatviaCroatia

Slovenia

Thailand

Uruguay

MexicoMalaysia

Iran

Luxembourg

CyprusMoroccoUS

Australia

Madagascar

Japan

BrazilCanadaVietnam

GuatemalaPanamaChile

EstoniaUS

EcuadorColumbia

Netherlands

UAE

SwedenPeru

PolandLebanonIndonesia

Kazakhstan-0.5

Saudi Arabia0

IsraelIsrael

0.5

-1

-1.5

Source: Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2017/2018

sector to social entrepreneurs to undertake certain projects. By
giving the right incentives, I think Japan can eventually be anentrepreneurship-friendly country.

Other Issues
JS: I think Japan should have more contract-oriented

jobs in which individual values and skills andincentives can be respected in order to enhance thehappiness of each employee. What do you think?

Murakami: Yes, I think so, too. When I was working for a foreignaffiliated company, I found my work contract functioned very well. In
accordance with the contract, every year I talked with the
management about “what capabilities I have and how I cancontribute them to the company’s activities” or “what I would like toachieve this year based on the company’s expectations” or “whatwould be beneficial for both of us given the company’s mission or
activities and personal goals”. We concluded a new contractreflecting this conversation and on the agreed-upon contract we
reviewed them at the end of the year, what was achieved and what
was not, then discuss what can we do better. We could accept even awage decline or additional training based on this review. I think it
would be better for Japanese companies to follow this kind ofconsent-based model.
With this, job descriptions are clearly defined and this will help
both company and employees to fairly evaluate job performance. It is
important for both sides to agree upon the company’s expectations
as well as the employee’s rights and responsibilities. That will help
people with clear understandings about their tasks and make people
work with greater satisfaction.

JS: As the number of non-Japanese employees will

increase in the future, do you think such diversity willchange the Japanese working style?

Murakami: Yes. I think we have a good chance to get the best andbrightest foreign workers in Japan, as the US is now restricting
immigration. Foreign workers will expect a fair and transparent
assessment of their job performance, so their labor contracts willneed to be clear and fair. Collusive agreements, often seen in Japan,
will not work well anymore and instead all the aspects of a labor
contract will need to be clarified and explicitly written. With this,Japanese women who left Japan to work or study abroad may be
tempted to come back to Japan and would bring a strong degree ofcompetence and true diversity to Japanese business.
In most of the years after 1988, the ratio of university entrants(including entrants into short-cycle colleges) to the total number of
those who have finished their compulsory education has been higher
among women than men. So it would be disastrously wasteful for
the Japanese economy if competent women remain discriminatedagainst or misjudged and deprived of good job opportunities. Thissituation could be substantially altered by a change in job
performance assessments. I hope Japanese men will really help torealize such a wonderful result.

Written with the cooperation of Naoko Sakai who is a freelance writer.

Japan SPOTLIGHT • May / June 201965