Published on September 4, 2019.
Based on Takeuchi Kumiko’s essay “They Speak of Eliminating the ‘Gender Gap’” published in the Sankei Shimbun, this article discusses the problems of the Gender Gap Index, the reality of Nordic welfare states, the social pathology of Sweden, and the resilience of traditional society formed naturally over time.
It warns against judging gender equality by numerical indicators alone and argues that abandoning tradition carries a grave and nearly irreversible cost.

September 4, 2019.
Do not abandon tradition.
Once tradition is abandoned, it is almost impossible to recover it.
The following is from an essay by Takeuchi Kumiko, an animal-behavior researcher and essayist, published in today’s Sankei Shimbun under the title “They Speak of Eliminating the ‘Gender Gap,’ But…”
Until five years ago in August, when I was still subscribing to the Asahi Shimbun, I knew nothing at all about Takeuchi as well.
Needless to say, Kyoto University is one of Japan’s finest universities, where people blessed with excellent minds study.
It goes without saying that it is also one of the finest universities in the world.
It is not a university for people with stupid minds who studied for entrance examinations like fools, or for people with stupid minds formed by Asahi Shimbun editorials, to become traitors who degrade Japan.
Takeuchi is a person worthy of having studied at Kyoto University, and it is no exaggeration to say that she has a mind equal to that of Umesao Tadao.
Before the House of Councillors election, NHK’s Watch 9 suddenly aired a special feature saying things such as “Japan has few female lawmakers.”
In it, Kuwako made a foolish comment that Japan was lagging behind the global trend.
The next day, the Constitutional Democratic Party announced to the media that it would field many female candidates in the House of Councillors election.
It was a report that exposed the fact that the people controlling NHK’s news department, and Kuwako, Arima and the others, are connected at the root with the Constitutional Democratic Party.
This is an essay that the people controlling NHK’s news department, Kuwako, Arima and the others, and the Constitutional Democratic Party must read with their eyes wide open.
Kuwako and Arima should be so ashamed that they can never again call themselves anchors.
Though they will probably try to get through it without a word of reflection, with the shamelessness peculiar to them, China, and the Korean Peninsula.
The following is Takeuchi Kumiko’s essay.
There is a term called the “Gender Gap Index.”
It contains several items in four fields: economic participation, education, health, and political participation, and indicates the female ratio when men are set as 1.
A score of 1 represents complete gender equality, and the question is how close a country is to 1.
Japan’s Gender Gap Index in 2018, or Heisei 30, was 0.662 overall.
The result was 110th out of 149 countries.
Numerical comparison alone leads one astray.
That said, Japan had moved up somewhat from the previous year, 2017, when it ranked 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 position is the result of recent efforts toward gender equality bearing fruit, while the others are, as expected, Nordic welfare states where gender equality has been advocated for quite some time.
However, with statistics like these, if one judges only by the numbers, one may misread the essence.
For example, in Sweden, women account for about 40 percent of members of parliament.
If this had happened naturally, Sweden would be praised as a society where women can shine so much.
But the reality is not like that.
It is because, through an allocation system called the “quota system,” it is stipulated that women should occupy approximately this proportion.
This is a digression, but I was so astonished that there is something I want to say.
Within the “health” field of the Gender Gap Index, there are items called “sex ratio at birth” and “sex ratio in healthy life expectancy,” and they are said to show a gender gap.
At birth, slightly more boys are born than girls.
This is entirely a biological matter, and one reason is that males are more likely to die throughout life, so slightly more are born in order for the male-female ratio to become one-to-one by the time they reach reproductive age.
The fact that women live longer is also a matter of biology.
This is not a matter that should be corrected simply because there is a gap.
What is a welfare state without disparities?
At any rate, for that reason, a question arises: what is a welfare state that tries to eliminate disparities among people, beginning with gender equality, really like?
Therefore, I wanted to know about Sweden, which is said to lead the world in women’s social advancement and even has the term “Swedish model,” and I examined materials.
The work I found most helpful was Takeda Tatsuo’s The Struggle of the Welfare State: Lessons from Sweden, published by Chuko Shinsho in 2001, by a man well versed in both the Swedish national character and the country’s domestic circumstances.
Takeda served as a member of the Japanese Embassy in Sweden and as the Foreign Ministry official in charge of Northern Europe.
According to Takeda, the 1950s and 1960s were the golden age of the welfare state Sweden, to the extent that even a wallet forgotten in a taxi would properly come back, but due to economic stagnation from the late 1980s onward, crime gradually began to increase.
According to data from the late 1990s, compared with Japan during the same period, the incidence of criminal offenses overall was 17 times higher, rape more than 20 times higher, and robbery 7 times higher, or 4 times higher compared with the United States, continuing at unbelievable levels.
In addition, crimes related to drugs and alcohol, as well as the smuggling in and out of child pornography, were also numerous.
One of the causes of this kind of Swedish social pathology, as pointed out by an American scholar, is said to be women.
Modern Swedish women are drilled in egalitarianism, in addition to traits originally possessed by Swedes, such as individualism and rational thinking.
For that reason, they have a strong desire for independence, are emotionally unsettled, and think that women’s liberation and the improvement of women’s status are more important than conjugal love.
Men, on the other hand, seek instinctive male desires such as gentleness and domestic warmth.
Let us know the strength of traditional society.
And there are also few cases in which husbands and wives think of each other, respect each other, sometimes yield, and cooperate with each other.
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 engulfed in a whirlpool of distrust of others and loneliness.
Takeda concludes, “Since relations between men and women have collapsed, there is nothing to be done.”
In addition, in one interview, when people over 100 years old were asked, “What has changed most in your life?” the answer that came back was “the collapse of the family.”
Looking at it this way, one can see that a gender-equal welfare state, while excellent numerically, is in reality desolate and is by no means a rich society.
I believe that attempts by human beings to think up a society and say that 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, a traditional society that was not drawn up as an ideal by someone but came into being naturally is resilient.
It has endured the weight of time and remains, so to speak, like the result of natural selection.
Do not abandon tradition.
Once tradition is abandoned, it is almost impossible to recover it.
(Takeuchi Kumiko)