The Ladies Vanish: Why Women Are Abandoning Rural Japan

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Why women, more than men, are abandoning rural Japan

Bigger cities are, in turn, skewing more female

Koyasu Miwa traverses Japan, from Sapporo in the north to Miyazaki in the south, with one goal: to make the countryside less hostile to women. Ms. Koyasu runs a consultancy that advises local governments, lectures businessmen on discrimination, and runs workshops urging community elders to let women take a bigger role in local decision-making. On a recent stop in Nanto, a region in central Japan ringed by snow-capped mountains, she leads a session on gender inequality for members of its various community councils, volunteer bodies that deal with issues from disaster preparedness to organising festivals. Of the 31 council chairs in the region, none is a woman.

Ms. Koyasu’s work is part of an effort to assuage a national worry: young women are draining away from the countryside and from small-town Japan. A government report in 2014 expressed alarm about the future of 900 municipalities, half of the country’s total. It concluded that the number of women of child-bearing age in those places would fall by half within the next quarter-century, and that these municipalities faced “extinction” as a result.

Officials in lots of outlying places accept that young people will move to cities for university or a first job, but they count on them doing a u-turn and returning home in their 20s or 30s. Yet in roughly 70% of Japan’s 47 prefectures, young women are leaving at higher rates than young men. In Toyooka, a small city in western Japan, census data show that 52% of men who left as teenagers came back in their 20s, while for women, the figure was just 27%. Tokyo and a handful of other urban centres are seeing the opposite trend, with more young women moving in than men.

The reasons for all this are deeply entrenched: a shortage of good jobs for women, unconscious bias, and inflexible gender roles. Rural areas often struggle with attitudes that larger cities have shed; in many small offices, women still make the tea while men make the decisions. Campaigner Yamamoto Ren says those who have left for cities sometimes dread returning home for holidays because family and neighbours keep asking, “Isn’t it time for a baby?”.

Although many Japanese women are enjoying their lives in the cities, others would willingly return to the countryside if things were different. Tokuno Sayuri, a woman in her 30s from Nanto, returned there after briefly living in Tokyo, finding the capital too hectic. Miura Miwako, a journalist in Akita, says she would ideally spend her whole career there because the countryside suits her better. Yet both are deeply frustrated with the status quo. “When women notice discrimination here, they rarely speak up—they just leave silently,” says Ms. Miura.

Many smaller places have now established strategies to tackle gender discrimination. Initiatives in Toyooka include handing out manga cartoons that raise awareness of the issue and training teachers and businesspeople. Ms. Koyasu says her work was once met with jeers, but people are increasingly realising that being inclusive towards women is a matter of survival.

Therein lies a tension at the heart of many official initiatives: the single biggest reason authorities want women to stay is so they can have children. Ms. Koyasu notes that she never wants women to feel like they are "simply kept around to pop out babies". Promoting gender equality ought to mean accepting a woman’s choice not to marry or have children.

However, many local governments that promote equality also sponsor nannyish matchmaking schemes, such as hosting government-backed parties for singles or getting local elders to encourage pairing off. In Nanto, both programs sit in the same department. Last year, Iwate prefecture published a dating guide urging women to wear skirts that make them look “delicate” and make-up that looks “demure” to attract husbands. As Ms. Koyasu puts it, changing these attitudes will take time.