Yuka Yamamoto Woods has cherished travelling since childhood and commenced her dream profession with an airline as a floor workers member in Tokyo at age 19.
But after 4 years of working lengthy hours, she realized she was unlikely to grow to be a mom whereas holding her job, not to mention get promoted.
“I didn’t see a lot of moms there, especially [among] the managers … managers were [mostly] male, [and] the ground staff who worked at the airport were women. Most people quit their job once they got pregnant,” mentioned Yamamoto Woods, now an early childhood facilitator who lives together with her Canadian husband and their two younger kids in Metro Vancouver.
Yamamoto Woods, 40, is among the practically 14,000 ladies who’ve emigrated from Japan to Canada over the previous twenty years. This accounts for 76 per cent of all Japanese immigrants throughout that interval, census information exhibits.
And the entrenched gender inequality in Japan is a compelling purpose for a lot of to depart, based on a few of those that have emigrated — together with a University of Toronto social work professor.
Yamamoto Woods, who first got here to Vancouver in 2006 on a working vacation and have become a everlasting resident a number of years later, says it is simpler to be a working mother in Canada than in Japan. Most of her co-workers are moms, and her husband helps with child-rearing and housekeeping, she mentioned.
“I feel more free in Canada,” she mentioned.
Sexism stays sturdy in Japan, prof says
Emigration numbers have made nationwide headlines in Japan in latest months.
The Asahi Shimbun newspaper says greater than 550,000 Japanese residents — 62 per cent of them feminine — stay and work overseas as everlasting residents primarily on account of frustration with Japan’s sluggish economic system, fears of one other pure catastrophe after the 2011 earthquake and, for ladies particularly, deep-seated gender inequality.
Japan hasn’t progressed a lot in ladies’s empowerment, based on the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Gender Gap Report, which has persistently ranked it round one hundred and twentieth amongst roughly 150 international locations — and lifeless final among the many G7 group of industrialized democracies — on account of a declining feminine workforce and a low variety of ladies in management positions.
University of Toronto social work professor Izumi Sakamoto, who moved from Japan to work in Canada in 2002, says ladies are as nicely educated as males in Japan, however the gender hole turns into apparent instantly after commencement.
She says Japanese society nonetheless locations disproportionate expectations on ladies to rear kids and handle family chores, making it tough for them to remain within the workforce and advance their careers.
Japan’s financial downturn — which started within the early Nineties after an asset bubble burst — has compelled a rise in precarious jobs, Sakamoto says, including that ladies take up most of those roles on account of pervasive male privilege within the office.
“Sexism at all levels of the male-dominant society is very strong,” she mentioned, including that this would possibly clarify why many Japanese ladies have come to Canada as a working vacation visa holder or as a Canadian’s partner with the intention to get everlasting residency.
Anecdotally, only some have returned to Japan on account of language boundaries or being unable to seek out significant employment.
‘Suffocating’ tradition
Mika Nakagawa Antonovic, who gained everlasting residency in 2009 and works as a braille transcriber for visually impaired college students in Victoria, says she immigrated to Canada to interrupt free from what she describes as the “suffocating” elements of Japanese tradition, together with its emphasis on ladies’s bodily look.
One instance of this, says Nakagawa Antonovic, 44, is that every time she travels again to Japan she has to cover the tattoo she obtained in Victoria, because of the commonplace affiliation of tattoos with gangsters in her residence nation.
That’s not a problem in Canada, she says — not even within the office.
“My bosses don’t care that I have a tattoo,” she mentioned.
Nakagawa Antonovic mentioned she feels extra comfy in Canada as a result of she’s an outspoken individual and felt like she did not slot in Japanese tradition, which prefers conformity; and he or she typically feels extra revered right here as a result of she was in a position to get skilled {qualifications} in her subject.
Gender research professor Jacqueline Holler of the University of Northern British Columbia, who taught in Tokyo a decade in the past, says feminine emigration ought to concern Japan given the nation’s growing older inhabitants and low beginning charge.
She says Japanese society ought to attempt to strike a greater steadiness between its conventional communal tradition and Western individualism with the intention to accommodate ladies’s aspirations.
At the identical time, Canada can benefit from the pattern, she mentioned.
“Canada is doing a really good job of attracting highly educated immigrants in general, and these Japanese women are probably part of that broader trend,” Holler mentioned.