Published on October 29, 2019. Citing an essay by Kumiko Takeuchi published in the Sankei Shimbun, this article discusses the Gender Gap Index, Nordic welfare states, Swedish society, crime rates, family collapse, gender equality policies, and the resilience of traditional society.

October 29, 2019.
According to data from the end of the 1990s, compared with Japan in the same period, the incidence of all criminal offenses was 17 times higher, rape more than 20 times higher, and robbery 7 times higher, or 4 times higher compared with the United States.
These unbelievable figures continue.
I am republishing the chapter I published on September 4.
The reason is that now, more than ever, the Japanese people must read the laborious work of Kumiko Takeuchi, a graduate of Kyoto University and one of the world’s leading researchers in animal behavior.
The following is from an essay by Kumiko Takeuchi, animal behavior researcher and essayist, published in today’s Sankei Shimbun under the title “They Speak of Eliminating the ‘Gender Gap,’ but…”
Until August five years ago, when I was still subscribing to the Asahi Shimbun, I did not know Takeuchi at all.
Needless to say, Kyoto University is one of Japan’s finest universities, where people blessed with excellent minds study.
Needless to say, it is one of the finest universities in the world.
Takeuchi is a person worthy of having studied at Kyoto University, and it is no exaggeration to say that she possesses a mind equal to that of Umesao Tadao.
Before the House of Councillors election, Kuwako suddenly made a foolish comment on NHK’s Watch 9, in a feature about Japan having few female legislators, saying that Japan was behind the times.
The following day, the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan announced to the media that it would field many female candidates in the House of Councillors election.
It was reporting that exposed the fact that the people controlling NHK’s news division, along with Kuwako and Arima, are connected at the root with the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan.
This is an essay that the people controlling NHK’s news division, Kuwako, Arima, the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, and its supporters must read with their eyes wide open.
Kuwako and Arima and others should be too ashamed ever again to call themselves anchors.
They will probably try to get through it without a single word of reflection, with the shamelessness peculiar to them, China, and the Korean Peninsula.
The following is Kumiko Takeuchi’s essay.
There is a term called the “Gender Gap Index.”
Within four fields—economic participation, education, health, and political participation—there are several items, and it shows the ratio of women when men are set at 1.
A score of 1 represents complete equality between men and women, and the question is how close the figure is to 1.
Japan’s 2018 Gender Gap Index was 0.662 overall.
The result was 110th out of 149 countries.
Numerical Comparisons Alone Lead One Astray.
That said, Japan rose slightly from the previous year, 2017, when it was 114th out of 144 countries, and improvement was especially noticeable in the field of “economic participation.”
Meanwhile, the top five countries are Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Nicaragua.
Nicaragua’s ranking is the result of recent efforts toward gender equality having borne fruit, while the others are, as expected, Nordic welfare states where gender equality has long been advocated.
However, with statistics such as these, if one judges only by numbers, one may misread the essence.
For example, in Sweden, the proportion of women in parliament is about 40 percent.
If this had occurred naturally, Sweden would be praised as a society where women can shine to such an extent.
But the actual situation is not so.
It is because, under a quota system, a system of allocation, it is decided that women should occupy about that proportion.
This is a digression, but I was so astonished that there is something I want to say.
In the “health” field of the Gender Gap Index, there are items called “sex ratio at birth” and “healthy life expectancy sex ratio,” and it is said that there is a gap between men and women.
At birth, slightly more boys than girls are born.
This is entirely a biological issue.
One reason is that males are more likely to die throughout life, and therefore slightly more boys are born so that the sex ratio will become one to one by the time they reach reproductive age.
The fact that women live longer is also a matter of biology.
It is not a problem to be corrected simply because there is a gap.
What Is a Welfare State Without Gaps?
In any case, for such reasons, the question arises: what is the true reality of a welfare state that tries to eliminate gaps among people, beginning with equality between men and women?
Therefore, I wanted to learn about Sweden, which is said to have the world’s highest level of women’s social advancement and for which there is even the term “Swedish model,” and I examined materials.
The work I referred to most was Tatsuo Takeda’s Welfare State Struggles: Lessons from Sweden, published by Chuko Shinsho in 2001.
Takeda is thoroughly familiar with the Swedish national character and domestic conditions.
He served as a staff member at the Japanese Embassy in Sweden and as a Ministry of Foreign Affairs official in charge of Northern Europe, among other posts.
According to Takeda, the 1950s and 1960s were the golden age of Sweden as a welfare state, to the extent that a wallet forgotten in a taxi would properly be returned.
However, with the economic stagnation from the end of the 1980s onward, crime gradually began to increase.
According to data from the end of the 1990s, compared with Japan in the same period, the incidence of all criminal offenses was 17 times higher, rape more than 20 times higher, and robbery 7 times higher, or 4 times higher compared with the United States.
These unbelievable figures continue.
In addition, crimes related to drugs and alcohol, as well as the smuggling in and out of child pornography, are also numerous.
One of the causes of such Swedish social pathology, as pointed out by an American scholar, is said to be women.
Modern Swedish women, in addition to the traits originally possessed by Swedes, such as individualism and rational thinking, are drilled in egalitarianism.
For that reason, they have a strong desire for independence, are emotionally roughened, and think that women’s liberation and the improvement of women’s status are more important than marital love.
Men, on the other hand, seek such instinctive male desires as tenderness and domestic warmth.
Let Us Know the Strength of Traditional Society.
And there is little of husbands and wives caring for each other, respecting each other, sometimes yielding, and cooperating.
Naturally, relations between men and women do not go well, and divorce is extremely common.
Children grow up starved for love, suffer psychological wounds, and eventually become caught in a whirlpool of distrust of others and loneliness.
Takeda concludes, “Since relations between men and women have collapsed, there is nothing that can be done.”
Also, in one interview, when elderly people over one hundred years old were asked, “What has changed the most in your life?” the answer that came back was “the collapse of the family.”
Seen in this way, we understand that a welfare state of gender equality may be excellent numerically, but its actual condition is荒んでおり—desolate—and it is by no means a rich society.
I think that attempts devised by human beings, saying it would be good if society became like this, are extremely dangerous.
Everyone has learned that communist states collapse.
Extreme welfare states may follow the same path.
On the other hand, traditional society, which was not drawn up as someone’s ideal but emerged naturally, is strong.
It has endured the weight of time and remains, because it is, so to speak, something like the result of natural selection.
We must not abandon tradition.
Once tradition is abandoned, it is nearly impossible to recover it.
Kumiko Takeuchi.