The Day Japan’s Political Mountain Moved

In 1989, the first major Japanese political party headed by a woman tripled its seats in Upper House elections, while the mighty Liberal Democratic Party lost its majority for the first time in thirty-odd years. The Socialist Party leader, Doi Takako, celebrated by proclaiming, “The mountain has moved.”

Even in Japan, not everyone caught her reference to Yosano Akiko’s famous poem, a kind of anthem for Japanese feminists. It goes like this:

The day the mountains move has come,
So I say but am not believed.
For some time the mountains have been sleeping,
But long ago they danced with fire.
It doesn’t matter if you believe,
Just believe this:
All the sleeping women
Are now awake, are moving.

Doi Takako

As it happens, Takako Doi’s great moment was short. Her Socialist Party was buoyed briefly by public enthusiasm for her party’s pacifist, socially progressive platform, but the mood changed abruptly with the collapse of Japan’s economic “bubble” and the onset of the first Gulf War. The timing was unlucky. She stepped down from the party leadership in 1991.

Still, social progress often takes the form of ‘two-steps-forward-one-step-back’, like waves advancing on sand. Takako Doi leaned into Yosano Akiko, who leaned into others before her. The current Governor of Tokyo, Koike Yuriko, surely leans into the opening created by women such as Ms. Doi. And the long arc of the moral universe bends, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr told us, toward justice.