The All Japan Obachan Party: A Political Voice for Middle-Aged Women

Punning Our Way into Politics

In November 2012 we held a launch ceremony in Osaka and announced our own eight-point plan in response to Mayor Hashimoto’s plan for the Japan Renovation Party. The hassaku in our Obachan Hassaku, though, punned on the Japanese word for “oranges.” The event was picked up by numerous overseas media, appearing in English, French, Chinese, and Korean.

All Japan Obachan Party “Eight Oranges”

1. We won’t send our kids, nor any other folks’ kids, to war!
2. Collect taxes from the rich first! But if you use our taxes properly, we won’t stint in paying our own fair share, too.
3. Use the budget to help folks suffering from the earthquake and tsunami rebuild their lives. We’ll never forgive you if you use ‘em for something else!
4. We don’t need no nuclear garbage we can’t clean up way into the future. We don’t want to irradiate our kids!
5. We want to all help each other out in raising the kids and taking care of our elders and the sick. Build us a good, solid structure for doing that!
6. Treat working folk well! And make it easy for people who want to work to find work.
7. We like a society that takes care of the weak and those who don’t speak up much.
8. So reflect obachan views in politics!

Policy and Poetry

In March 2013, we held our own Tokyo Basho, evoking the basho sumō tournaments, and announced—as opposed to Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō’s and now Prime Minister Abe Shinzō’s honebuto no hōshin, or “big-boned policy” of robust economic and fiscal stimulus—our own harabuto no hōshin, or “flabby policy.” This also went down well. People started saying the day had finally come for obachan to speak out on politics. And along the way we got in a few more digs at ossan politics.

In early May that same year we released our AJOP “Declaration on the Introduction of the Women’s Handbook” in response to a Liberal Democratic Party proposal to mail a guidebook to every woman in Japan giving hectoring “advice” about pregnancy and childbirth as a way of combating the country’s falling birthrate. And we followed that up by publishing translations into English and other foreign languages of Mayor Hashimoto’s comments that the US Marines on Okinawa should make more use of sex industry establishments on the island and that the wartime comfort women system was “necessary.”

Along the way, we have also been releasing humorous poems. The following example concerns the Japanese government’s refusal to let husbands and wives use their own surnames instead of a single (almost always the husband’s) surname under Japan’s family register system.

Carefully counting
the brush strokes of good fortune,
our parents named us.
Swapped out for another,
ill luck never ending!

This summer, on the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II, we also issued our own statement in opposition to the governmental Abe Statement, as an expression of our own firm resolution—part of the Obachan Party platform—that “We won’t send our kids, nor any other folks’ kids, to war!”

For these and for all of our various projects, we start by pulling together the topics and issues that have spurred the most lively discussions within our All Japan Obachan Party, send out calls for any final opinions, and finally get the approval from our party members before announcing them publicly.

Love, Courage, and Obachan

So let me return to that first question. Has there really been no progress in political participation by women in Japan?

It is a public pledge of the Government of Japan that it will strive to raise the ratio of women in leadership positions throughout Japanese society to approximately 30 percent by the year 2020, the year of the Tokyo Olympics. This effort even has the nickname “202030.”

Now, while this is just an approximation, I would guess that women make up about half of Japan’s population. To say that hitting just 30% would be good enough for now strikes me as a modest proposal. It’s clear that even today—70 years since the end of the war—we’re lagging considerably if we’re still at a place where we need government pledges like this one.

The playwright Wakagi Efu has been so good as to praise the work of our All Japan Obachan Party as Japan’s “second suffrage movement.” May there be more and more obachan who think for themselves, who speak out in their own words, and who take action on their own behalf. May we reach a point where we do talk politics with the obachan next door. And may there be more and more obachan out there who will support those of us who choose to exercise their right to run for elected office. These aspirations may sound modest. Yet I think these are the goals that Japan’s new women’s suffrage movement should be aiming for today.

It’s still a little way off, but by next year or the year after, our All Japan Obachan Party plans to convene a World Obachan Summit in Osaka. It’s our belief that love, courage, and obachan can change Japan, and the world.