But in less than two weeks, Momoko Nojo’s #DontBeSilent campaign organized with other activists gathered more than 150,000 signatures, galvanizing global outrage against Yoshiro Mori, the president of Tokyo 2020.
He gave up last week and was replaced by Seiko Hashimoto, a woman who competed in seven Olympic Games.
The hashtag was created in response to remarks by Mori, a former octogenarian prime minister, that women talk too much. Nojo used it on Twitter and other social media platforms to gather support for a petition calling for action against him.
“Few petitions have obtained 150,000 signatures before. I thought it was very good. People take it personally, too, not seeing it as just Mori’s problem,” said a smiling Nojo in an interview with Zoom.
Her activism, born from a year of study in Denmark, is the latest example of women outside Japan’s dominant politics taking on keyboards to bring about social change in the world’s third largest economy, where gender discrimination, wage disparities and stereotypes are increasing.
“It made me realize that this is a good opportunity to promote gender equality in Japan,” said Nojo, a 4th-year economics student at Keio University in Tokyo.
She said that her activism was motivated by questions she always heard from her male colleagues, such as: “You are a girl, so you have to go to a school that has beautiful school uniforms, don’t you?” or “Even if you don’t have a job after graduating from college, you can be a housewife, can’t you?”
Nojo started her non-profit organization “NO YOUTH NO JAPAN” in 2019, while she was in Denmark, where she saw how the country chose Mette Frederiksen, a woman in her forties, as prime minister.
The time she spent in Denmark, she said, made her realize how much Japanese politics was dominated by older men.
Keiko Ikeda, professor of education at the University of Hokkaido, said it is important for young people around the world to raise their voices in Japan, where decisions tend to be made by a uniform group of like-minded people. But the change will come painfully slow, she said.
“If you have a homogeneous group, it is impossibly difficult to move the compass because the people in it do not realize when their decision is off center,” said Ikeda.
Nojo rejected Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party’s proposal this week to allow more women at meetings, but only as silent observers, as a poorly executed public relations ploy.
“I’m not sure if they want 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 a small step in a long struggle.
Japan ranks 121st out of 153 countries on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Differences Index 2020 – the worst ranking among advanced countries – with a low score for women’s economic participation and political empowerment.
Activists and many ordinary women say that drastic changes are needed in the workplace and in politics.
“In Japan, when there is an issue related to gender equality, not many voices are heard and, even if there are some voices to improve the situation, they lose their breath and nothing changes,” said Nojo.
“I don’t want our next generation to waste time on this problem.”