Fed up with money politics, the new sales tax, influence peddling, and sex scandals, women voters dealt it stunning blow to the conservative ruling party in the summer election of 1989. In addition, women are shedding their traditionally subordinate role and using the courts to assert their rights, as was evidenced by the filing of the first sexual harassment charge ever last year. The Equal Employment Opportunity Law specifies that women be given equal opportunities in hiring, training, and promotion. Managers reasoned that they could get more years of service out of two-year college and high school graduates before the young women quit to marry or have families. For example, although 70 percent of Japanese parents expect their sons to get a four-year college education, only 35 percent have the same goal for their daughters.
Japan is a country where female college graduates have very few career women as role models.
Society sends a clear message. Japanese must be among the most marrying people in the world. By their late forties, only 4 percent have never married. And they have an expression, tekireiki, which means the appropriate age for marriage. Young women tend to marry before age 26 and young men at about 29.5 years old, with a three-year difference in age being considered ideal.