A Movement Made of Disclosure

Until 2023 the age of consent in Japan was thirteen. It had been thirteen since 1907, unchanged through the entire twentieth century, two constitutions, an occupation and every social transformation the country went through.

That single fact is the best available summary of what the last decade has been about. Not because it is the most important change — it is arguably not — but because it demonstrates the shape of the problem. The provision was indefensible, everybody who looked at it knew it was indefensible, and it survived for a hundred and sixteen years because nothing in the ordinary machinery of Japanese politics generated enough force to move it.

What finally moved it was a decade of women doing something this country makes extraordinarily expensive: saying in public what happened to them.

This essay is about what that produced, and about what it cost — and specifically about the reaction, which is where the most revealing material is and which is usually reported as an afterthought.

The legal record of the last decade is genuinely substantial and deserves to be stated before anything more critical.

The 2023 revision of the sexual offence provisions replaced a framework long criticised for its practical requirement that a victim demonstrate resistance, with one organised around whether consent was genuinely possible, and it enumerated circumstances in which it is not. It raised the age of consent to sixteen. It extended limitation periods and addressed conduct that had previously fallen between provisions.

The 2022 legislation on coerced appearance in adult video created waiting periods, mandatory written explanation, and a right to withdraw a work regardless of contract.

Access to emergency contraception began moving toward pharmacy availability, contraceptive prescription moved online, and the selective surname question acquired backing from major business organisations, which changes how a reform travels here.

And online abuse penalties were tightened in 2022, in a process driven substantially by a death that this chamber has written about elsewhere.

That is a real decade of legislative movement, and anyone describing Japan as static on this is not looking at the statute book.

None of it arrived because the legislature reconsidered. Each change has people behind it, and the mechanism was the same in every case: somebody made a private matter public at considerable personal cost.

Itō Shiori went public in 2017 with her name and her face, in a country where sexual assault complainants are almost never identifiable and where the social cost of being identifiable is severe. She wrote about it, pursued a civil claim when the criminal route closed, and won — a judgment in her favour that was subsequently upheld, though the litigation was protracted and not wholly one-directional.

The Flower Demo began in 2019 after a sequence of acquittals in sexual assault cases that struck a great many people as impossible to reconcile with the facts reported. It became a monthly gathering, in multiple cities, sustained for years, at which people stood in public and spoke.

The #KuToo campaign, begun the same year over the requirement that women wear heels at work, produced something unusual: a direct ministerial response in the Diet. The response was unsympathetic, and the fact of a labour minister being asked about women’s shoes in parliament was itself the achievement.

The pattern in all three is identical and is the point of this essay. The instrument was disclosure. In each case a woman or a group of women took something that Japanese social practice treats as strictly private and placed it where 世間 could see it.

Now the structural point, and it follows directly from what this chamber has established about the Japanese moral order.

The governing moral categories here are the trouble you cause others, the situation something occurs in, and above all whether it becomes visible. The cardinal failure is not the act. It is the disclosure of the act, and this holds even when the act was done to you rather than by you.

Which produces a cruelty specific to this arrangement. A woman who was assaulted has already had something done to her. If she reports it, she then commits — by the operative logic of the social system, not the legal one — a second and more legible offence: she has made it public, imposed it on others, and required people to have a view about something they would prefer not to.

That is why the reaction in Japan has a particular character. It is rarely the argument that nothing happened. It is far more often the complaint that she made it everybody’s business.

And it means a movement built on disclosure is, in this specific culture, a movement asking women to pay the one price the moral system sets highest. #MeToo works by accumulation — many people speaking makes each speaker safer. That mechanism functions far less well where the objection is not to the truth of any individual account but to the act of accounting at all.

This is not Japanese people being callous. It is a moral system doing exactly what it was built to do, applied to a situation it was never designed for, with entirely predictable results for the person who speaks first.

The reaction in Japan does not resemble the one in the United States, and the difference is worth being precise about because it changes what can be done.

In the American case the opposition is substantially organised and ideological. There are named opponents, funded institutions, a political alignment, and arguments made publicly by people who are prepared to be identified with them. That is unpleasant to face and it has one feature that is genuinely useful: it can be argued with, campaigned against, and defeated in specific venues.

The Japanese version has almost none of that structure. There is no significant organised counter-movement against women reporting sexual violence. What there is instead is a diffuse withdrawal of social permission, administered by nobody in particular.

It arrives as anonymous abuse in volume. As the suggestion that she is doing this for attention or for money. As colleagues who become slightly harder to reach. As a career that quietly stops progressing. As relatives who ask whether this was really necessary. As the sense, communicated by nobody and understood by everybody, that a person has made herself difficult.

Itō Shiori has described sustained abuse and periods of living outside Japan. Others who have spoken publicly report similar, and a great many women observe all of it and reasonably conclude that they will not be the next.

And here is what makes it structurally worse rather than merely different. An organised opponent has an address. 世間 does not. There is nobody to debate, no institution to pressure, no vote to win. A person facing this is not in a fight; she is in weather.

Putting the law and the reaction side by side produces the finding that makes this decade legible, and it is the reverse of the usual sequence.

In many countries the culture moves first. Attitudes shift, what is sayable expands, and law follows some years later, ratifying a change that has already occurred socially.

Japan has done the opposite. The statute book has moved substantially. What a woman can say to her section chief has moved very little.

A Japanese woman today is protected by a consent standard that did not exist three years ago, in a workplace where reporting an incident still means becoming the person who reported an incident. The law now describes her situation accurately. The room has not been informed.

The workplace law makes this concrete in a way that is worth pausing on. Japan’s framework on sexual and power harassment works principally by obliging employers to take measures — to set a policy, to inform staff, and to maintain a consultation channel — rather than by prohibiting the conduct outright and attaching a penalty to it. That is a reasonable design and in many companies it has produced a real desk with a real person behind it.

But notice what the remedy is. The benefit of a consultation channel reaches only a woman who is willing to become the person who used the consultation channel. A legal instrument whose entire mechanism is internal disclosure delivers nothing to anybody for whom disclosure is the expensive part — which, by the argument of this essay, is very nearly everybody. The provision and the obstacle are the same act.

That gap is not a failure of the reforms and it is not evidence that they were cosmetic. Legal change is real and it does things: it shapes what police and prosecutors can pursue, it gives a complainant a route, and over time it shifts what people think is normal. It simply does not, on its own, alter the social cost of being the one who spoke.

Which suggests where the remaining work actually sits, and it is not in the Diet. It is in whether it becomes possible to say something in an ordinary room to ordinary people without the saying itself being the offence.

Underneath the visible movement, slower structural change is documented in official statistics, and it is worth separating from the campaigning because it operates on a different timescale.

Marriage is being deferred and declined at rates without precedent in the modern record. The average age at first marriage continues to rise, and the share of women who reach their fifties never having married has grown very substantially across recent decades. That is not a campaign. It is several million individual decisions producing a change in the shape of the population.

Labour force participation has risen and now sits high by international comparison, while representation in management remains low and the share of women in non-regular employment remains substantial. Participation moved; position did not.

And the things that have not moved are consistent across every measure: political representation, the division of unpaid domestic work, and the take-up of entitlements that require disclosure to an employer.

Read together, the pattern is that Japanese women have changed their own behaviour extensively — in marriage, in work, in childbearing, in what they will accept — and have changed the behaviour of institutions very little. The adaptation is happening at the individual level because the institutional level has not offered an alternative.

The available conclusion is that Japan is behind and slow, and it is wrong in two ways that matter.

The first is factual. The 2023 consent reform is substantial, and several countries that consider themselves ahead on this took a very long time to arrive at comparable standards. Being late on one provision for a century and then making a significant change is not the same as being generally backward, and the assumption that there is a single track along which countries are variously advanced is a bad model that flatters whoever is doing the measuring.

The second is more serious. Describing this as slowness makes Japanese women the passive element in their own story — a population waiting for progress to arrive. That is not what happened. Every change described in this essay was produced by identifiable people who paid identifiable costs. A woman put her name and face to an account in a country where almost nobody does. People stood in public squares monthly for years. Somebody made a labour minister answer a question about shoes.

They were not waiting. They were working, against a social mechanism specifically efficient at making that work expensive, and they moved a provision that had not shifted since 1907.

The honest description is not that Japan is behind. It is that Japan makes this particular kind of change unusually costly to the individual, that a small number of women paid that cost anyway, and that the results of their doing so are now in the statute book.

The 2023 revision is described by its principal features rather than by provision. Its practical effects are still developing and this essay makes no claim about outcomes, only about the change in standard.

The account of Itō Shiori’s case describes her going public, the closure of the criminal route, a civil judgment in her favour and its subsequent upholding. The litigation was protracted and included proceedings that did not run entirely in one direction; the essay says so rather than presenting a clean narrative, and does not summarise the reasoning.

The Flower Demo and the #KuToo campaign are described in outline. The characterisation of the ministerial response as unsympathetic reflects contemporary reporting.

The claim that the backlash is diffuse rather than organised is a comparative characterisation against the American case. Organised opposition to aspects of these reforms does exist in Japan; the claim is about the dominant mode rather than about the absence of any structure.

Accounts of abuse directed at women who spoke publicly come from their own published statements and from reporting. They are not a measurement of how common such treatment is, and no figure is offered.

The statistics on marriage deferral, lifetime never-married proportions, labour participation, management representation and non-regular employment reflect Japanese official series. Specific figures move and are deliberately not quoted; anyone citing them should take them from the current source.

And the central thesis — that a disclosure-based moral order makes a disclosure-based movement maximally expensive — is this chamber’s synthesis, built on its earlier account of Japanese moral structure. It explains the pattern well and it is an argument rather than a measured finding.

If the law has moved and the room has not, then the remaining work is of a different kind, and it is worth being clear about what kind.

It is not primarily legislative. The provisions a woman needs mostly now exist, and the ones still missing — around surname, around political representation, around the entitlements that go unused — are being worked on by people better placed than a Library to work on them.

What is missing is smaller and harder. It is the ordinary capacity to say something true about your own experience to another person without the saying being the thing that costs you. Not in a courtroom, not in a demonstration, not under a hashtag. In a room, to somebody, on a Tuesday.

That capacity is not produced by statute and it is not produced by campaigning either. It is produced by having said something once, somewhere it was safe, and discovering that the sentence exists and can be formed.

Which is the only thing this Library has ever claimed to offer. Language for what is happening and for what you want, assembled somewhere the second question — who will find out — does not apply.

And an evening in which somebody is paying attention, the terms set in advance and by you, where saying what you want is the activity rather than the risk, and where nothing is inferred from your silence. That is not a contribution to any movement, and it is not offered as one. It is a few hours in which the thing this entire country makes expensive happens to be free.