There is something I have been thinking about for a long time, and I want to try to say it carefully.
I grew up in a house with three children: my older sister, me, and our younger brother. At dinner, my father and my brother had one more dish than we did. Not a large difference. Not dramatic. Just one extra dish — a piece of meat, a small portion of something — placed on their side of the table.
I was a child. I did not think much about it. I thought, ‘Men need to eat more.’ That seemed logical. My father worked. My brother was growing. These were the kinds of explanations children give themselves to make sense of the world they are handed.
I am in my late forties now. And when I think back to that table, I see it differently.
Nobody announced that my brother mattered more.
Nobody said it. It was not a policy. It was not cruelty. It was simply the shape of an ordinary dinner in an ordinary Japanese household in the latter half of the twentieth century — and embedded in that shape, as quietly as furniture, was an understanding of who needed more, who was being prepared for what, and whose future was being taken most seriously.
My mother called my sister and me into the kitchen to watch how she cut vegetables, how she seasoned the broth, and how she timed the rice. She wanted us to learn. She didn’t call our brother. He was not expected to need this knowledge.
We both took piano lessons for ten years. Our brother did not. My mother arranged it — not out of malice, I think, but out of a genuine belief about what a woman should be able to do. A woman who could play the piano was cultured. A woman who could cook was prepared. These were investments in a certain kind of future.
Nobody named this future. It didn’t need a name. It was simply what was expected, absorbed through the texture of daily life, present in the arrangement of dishes on a table.
This is how culture transmits itself most effectively: not through declarations, but through dinner.
In Japan, there are two festivals for children.
On the third day of the third month, Hinamatsuri — the Doll Festival — celebrates girls. Elaborate tiered displays of hina dolls are arranged inside the home: the Emperor and Empress at the top, courtiers below, ladies-in-waiting, musicians, ministers, miniature furniture, miniature food, an entire miniature world arranged in careful hierarchy and kept very, very still.
There is a saying about hina dolls: if you leave them out too long after the festival, your daughter will be late to marry. The dolls must be put away promptly, or they bring bad luck.
On the fifth day of the fifth month, Kodomo no Hi — officially Children’s Day, originally Boys’ Day — celebrates boys. Koinobori, carp-shaped streamers, are raised on poles outside the house. They fly in the wind. They leap toward the sky. They are modelled on a Chinese legend in which a carp swam upstream, endured every difficulty, climbed the waterfall, and became a dragon.
There is one more detail worth noting.
Kodomo no Hi — Children’s Day, May 5th — is a national public holiday. Schools close. Offices close. The country stops.
Hinamatsuri — the Doll Festival, March 3rd — is not a public holiday. It is a tradition observed in homes. But it is an ordinary working day.
This was not always the case. In the Edo period, both festivals were official holidays. When Japan adopted the Western calendar in the Meiji era, all five traditional festival days were removed from the holiday calendar at once — including both March 3rd and May 5th.
After the Second World War, as Japan rebuilt its calendar of national holidays, both dates were considered. There were voices in favour of making both official. The discussion happened. And the result, in 1948, was that May 5th became Kodomo no Hi — Children’s Day, officially for all children regardless of gender — while March 3rd remained an ordinary day.
The law said Kodomo no Hi was for all children. But the festival traditions of koinobori and Boys’ Day continued as they always had. In practice, May 5th remained the day for boys. And March 3rd — the day for girls — was simply not a holiday.
The girl’s day was considered and set aside.
Consider these two images for a moment.
The girl: inside. Still. Ornamental. Surrounded by the symbols of a good marriage, under pressure to be properly stored away.
The boy: outside. Moving. Striving upward. Becoming something beyond what he started as.
I am not sure a culture could communicate its expectations more clearly if it tried.
The philosophy behind those dinner arrangements and those festivals has a name: Ryōsai Kenbo（良妻賢母） — “good wife, wise mother.”
The term was formalized during the Meiji era, as Japan was modernizing at speed and needed an ideology to explain what women were for in the new national project. Women would be educated — but their education would serve the family and, through the family, the state. They would be cultured, capable, skilled. They would raise strong children and support hardworking husbands. They would be the moral center of the household.
This was, in its historical context, not entirely without dignity. It gave women a defined role and argued for their education at a time when many had neither. But it was a dignity that operated entirely within a structure built by and for men — and it asked women to be excellent precisely within the space that had been assigned to them, and not to question the assignment.
The ideology of Ryōsai Kenbo did not disappear after the Meiji era. It shapeshifted. After the Second World War, the language changed — the ideal became sengyo shufu（専業主婦）, the “professional housewife” — but the structure remained. Men worked.
Women managed the home. The nuclear family became the dominant form. The patriarchal logic underneath it was untouched.
My mother’s generation lived inside this without much questioning. Her mother’s generation lived inside it without a name for it. The name was always there — the word Ryōsai Kenbo existed — but it was like the word for the air you breathe. Why would you need to say it?
In Japan, there is a word for quitting your job when you get married.
Kotobuki taisha（寿退社） — literally, “celebratory departure.” The kotobuki is the same character used for longevity, felicity, congratulations. It is the word you put on a wedding invitation. And it is the word used to describe a woman leaving her career.
The word is remarkable not for its meaning but for its existence. In English, there is no equivalent. You would have to say “she quit her job when she got married” — which sounds like a description of something someone did. Kotobuki taisha sounds like a category. A recognized phenomenon so common it needed its own term.
In the 1960s, large Japanese companies routinely expected women to resign upon marriage. Some women were hired specifically with the understanding that they would leave when they married. One account describes a woman being offered a job at a publishing company in the 1960s largely because she promised to leave after marriage. The practice was not hidden. It was formalized.
The formal expectation has faded. The practice has not, entirely.
Women I know — colleagues, friends, people I have watched move through the working world — have left jobs after having children not because they wanted to, but because continuing became impossible. Not dramatically impossible. Quietly, structurally impossible.
There is a particular thing that happens in Japan when a woman takes maternity leave: she may return to find herself reassigned. The new position is described as “lighter.” Lighter means: less important. Lighter means: administrative work that doesn’t require your expertise. Lighter means: we have decided, on your behalf, that you now have less capacity for meaningful work.
Some women accept this. Some leave rather than accept it. Either way, the result is the same.
In the 2025 World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report, Japan ranked 118th out of 148 countries — unchanged from the previous year, and the lowest ranking among the G7 nations. The United Kingdom ranked 4th, Germany 9th, Canada 32nd, France 35th, the United States 42nd, Italy 85th. Japan: 118th.
This number is startling for a country that is, by most measures, highly developed — with excellent infrastructure, high education levels, sophisticated culture. The gap is not in health or in basic education. The sharpest decline in Japan’s 2025 ranking came in political empowerment, dropping from 11.8% to 8.5% — driven partly by the fact that the new cabinet formed in October 2024 contained only two female ministers out of twenty, down from five the previous year.
In January 2025, Japan announced it would halt funding to CEDAW — the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women — following CEDAW’s recommendation that Japan reconsider its male-only imperial succession law.
I find it difficult to write about these numbers without feeling something I cannot quite name. Not surprise — I grew up here, I know this country. Something more like the feeling of watching a confirmation of something you already knew but hoped, somewhere, might be wrong.
Japan is not a country where women are treated badly in obvious ways. The violence is not usually visible. The architecture is. The one extra dish. The girls called into the kitchen, the boy left to himself. The piano lessons that were not about music. The word for leaving your career as if it were a celebration.
I did not have a hina doll set of my own. My older sister had one — elaborate, beautiful, arranged on its tiered stand every March. Mine was not purchased. I was the second daughter; perhaps the expense was not repeated, or perhaps by the time I arrived the intention had faded.
I did not miss it, particularly. I was not a child who wanted dolls.
But I think about it now. About what the doll represented. About the message encoded in the image of the perfectly still figure, arranged just so, put away promptly so as not to bring misfortune.
About the girl who was supposed to see herself in that image and understand what she was for.
I was not told I was less important than my brother. I was told, through every ordinary thing, what shape my life was expected to take. The kitchen lessons. The piano. The extra dish on the other side of the table. These were not cruelties. They were preparations.
The question is: preparation for what?
Something is shifting in Japan. It is real, and it is slow, and it is contested at every step.
More women are working. More women are staying in their careers after having children, though the structural barriers remain formidable. The concept of ikumen（イクメン） — a father who is actively involved in childcare — has entered the language and, increasingly, the practice. Young men in Japan are, in measurable ways, doing more domestic work than their fathers did.
The conversation about gender is louder than it has ever been.
Women who experience discrimination in the workplace are more likely to name it, and more likely to find community in naming it. The language of gender equality, long resisted as a Western import, has found purchase in some corners of Japanese public life.
And yet. A poll of around 2,000 people in April 2024 found that 90% of respondents support allowing female emperors. Yet successive governments have remained steadfast in resisting change, with some citing the unbroken imperial lineage. The cabinet declined. The funding to CEDAW was cut. The ranking held at 118th.
The dinner table has changed. One more dish on one side is no longer the norm in the households I know — in part because the households I know have changed, in part because the Japan my generation is creating is not entirely the Japan we inherited. But the logic that placed the dish there has not been fully dismantled. It has gone underground. It operates in hiring decisions and reassignment policies and the quiet assumption, still alive in too many rooms, that a woman’s career is contingent in ways that a man’s is not.
My mother taught my sister and me to cook. She taught us to play the piano. She arranged these things with care, out of genuine love, because she wanted us to be prepared.
Prepared for what, exactly? For a life that looked like hers — centered on a household, skilled in its management, supported by and supporting a man who worked outside it.
She was not wrong that these skills have value. They do. She was not wrong that the world she was preparing us for was real. It was.
But I find myself wondering, sometimes, what she might have taught me if she had been preparing me for a different world. One in which what I learned in the kitchen was not preparation for a role, but simply something worth knowing.
One in which the carp flew for me too.
What is something you absorbed in childhood — not told to you, but present in the shape of ordinary life — that you only understood much later as a message about who you were supposed to be?