Photo/Illutration Yokosuka Mayor Katsuaki Kamiji apologizes for his sexist remarks at a news conference in Yokosuka on June 21. (Sunao Gushiken)

When Yokosuka Mayor Katsuaki Kamiji made sexist remarks at a recent city assembly meeting, he was following a pattern continually repeated by other public officials in recent years. 

An expert criticized Kamiji for not even being aware that what he was saying was offensive.

The latest flap came as Japan fell to a record low 125th among 146 countries in the global gender equality rankings published by the World Economic Forum in June.

Kamiji, 69, made the remarks at a plenary meeting of the city assembly on June 8.

When a city assembly member of the Liberal Democratic Party asked him whether Yokosuka is becoming a city in which women choose to live, Kamiji replied, “In women’s DNA and mitochondria, there is a history of always being oppressed. (Women’s) grudges and bitterness (born by such a history) are creating the modern society.”

He added, “In reaction (to such a history), we are now talking about a gender-equal society.”

On June 21, Yokosuka citizens submitted to the city government around 1,400 signatures they collected in an online petition demanding that Kamiji retract his remarks and apologize.

They criticized the mayor by saying that it was “irresponsible that he linked women and ideas such as grudges and bitterness in a public place, when doing so was unscientific and baseless.”

Following the submission of the signatures, Kamiji retracted his comments.

“I would like to sincerely apologize for the fact there are people who were offended by my inconsiderate expressions,” he said.

The mayor's comments were deleted from the meeting’s minutes after being criticized as “contempt for women.”

Naoko Oki, lecturer of politics at Sugiyama Jogakuen University, takes note of the fact that Kamiji repeated three times that there is a history of women being oppressed.

Obviously, “It was unscientific and discriminatory to mention their DNA,” Oki said.

She pointed out, “Kamiji’s remarks were devoid of thinking about who have oppressed women and why women have been disadvantaged.”

Oki added that the reason Kamiji made the comments is that he is “in a group of people who have similar values and are in similar circumstances,” and therefore, he “is probably not aware why his comments were a problem in the first place.”

The Yokosuka city assembly has 39 members but just five, less than 20 percent, are women.

Similar analysis has been made about other sexist comments uttered by public figures in recent years. 

In 2014, when a member of the Tokyo metropolitan assembly called for support for childbirth and infertility at an assembly meeting, another assembly member heckled her saying, “Can’t you give birth?”

This incident caused controversy.

At the time, only 20 percent of the Tokyo metropolitan assembly members were women.

In 2021, former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori resigned as chief of the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee after he was criticized for saying, “A meeting of an executive board that includes many women would take too much time.”

Just 20 percent of members of the Japan Olympic Committee’s executive board were women at the time.

Renge Jibu, associate professor of management at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and member of a research council on gender equality set up at the Cabinet Office, said that comments such as Kamiji’s are “regrettably made at many legislative bodies and companies.”

The government has put in place measures such as setting goals for the percentages of women in leadership positions.

But companies and organizations adopted such measures just because they are “the government's policies” without fully supporting them, Jibu said.

She said that such a half-hearted attitude led to the remarks by Kamiji.

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