Abenomics and Men: Politics of Masculinity after the Crises in Japan

Despite his conservative ideological orientation, the current Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, after taking office in 2012, pledged to promote women’s advancement in the business sector in his announcement of the “third arrow” of Abenomics. While previous studies concerning gender politics have focused on why and how the conservative leader adopted the ‘womenomics’ theory and implemented women’s advancement policies, few have paid attention to the politics of masculinity evolved from the Japan’s predicament after the Global Financial Crisis and the Great East Japan Earthquake. This paper argues that it is manhood at stake in political struggle for nation’s recovery after the crises. As with the case of other advanced welfare states, Japanese governments have struggled with the restructuring of so-called Japanese-style welfare regime. Under that regime relied upon the male-breadwinner model, small amount of public expenditure for households was compensated by stable employment of male workers combined with corporate welfare and employment-based social insurance programs. However, transformations of social economic structure made the Japanese-style welfare regime unsustainable. While de-familialization of care and de-commodification of female labour were explicitly promoted, it is unclear whether men’s lives and manhood are also required to change. This paper tries to investigate how the politics of masculinity have developed since the crises in Japan, how it was implicated in party competition between the two major parties, and what kind of manhood the current government has tried to construct through policy discourses. To answer these questions, this paper examines discourses employed by governments and opposition parties in policy debates on global trade liberalization, employment and wage regulations, and tax system reforms, taking particular note of gendered subjects that political actors have called up in disputes to justify their policy proposals.