Japan and Korea are two of the world’s largest economies (ranked 3rd and 11th, respectively) (World Bank, 2017), as well as advanced democracies (ranked 20th and 32nd, respectively) (Global Democracy Ranking, 2015). Nevertheless, these statistics run contrary to the status of women in the two countries. The Global Gender Gap Index ranks Japan and Korea 101st and 115th among a total of 145 countries (World Economic Forum, 2015). In the political arena, traditions of patriarchal and Confucian cultures have often worked as key barriers for women. That is, women must rely on personal connections or family networks to gain access to the political world dominated by men’s social capital (LeBlanc, 2010). Given these social and cultural circumstances, low levels of women’s parliamentary representation are not surprising.

Nevertheless, female activists in both countries have long recognized local councils as an important political sphere for women. In Korea, women’s groups led a nationwide movement in support of women’s political representation in local politics soon after the rebirth of local elections in 1991, particularly in the form of adopting quota policies (Yoon & Shin, 2015). The political representation of women became a priority for the women’s movement, where groups with different ideological backgrounds united to promote a common goal (Cho & Kim, 2010; Kim & Oh, 2010). Since newly established political parties competing in democratic elections perceived women as a powerful voting bloc, the women’s movement took advantage of this political opportunity to push for quota policies as part of a broader range of political reforms. Quotas recommending that parties nominate at least 30% and 50% of female candidates in the majoritarian and proportional representation (PR) tiers of the mixed electoral system were adopted and first applied in local elections in 2002.

In Japan, grassroots movements in support of women’s access to politics have been successful in local politics. In particular, a local grassroots movement called the Seikatsu Kurabu Seikyo (Seikatsu Club Cooperative), which promotes the health, welfare, environment, and educational well-being of local residents—typical concerns and responsibilities of housewives (shufu)—organized a political movement/party called the Tokyo Seikatsusha Network (i.e., the Net) (Gelb & Estevez-Abe, 1998; LeBlanc, 1999). The founding members believed in the importance of sending their representatives to local councils as a way of attaining political influence. This party fundamentally represents women’s political interests, though the party does not promote itself as a women-only party (Shin, 2016). The Net first appeared in Tokyo in 1977, and successfully won a seat in the Nerima municipal election in 1979. This party, which currently has branches in nine different prefectures and a total of 98 seats in prefectural and municipal assemblies nationwide, has proven particularly successful in the Tokyo region (Fusae Ichikawa Center for Women and Governance, 2015, p. 15).

How have women fared in local politics in Japan and Korea, and particularly in Tokyo and Seoul? As Figures 1A and 1B show, the proportion of women is the highest at the level of general cities, with an average of 11.2% between 1998 and 2012, followed by prefectures (6.8%) and towns/villages (6.2%) in Japan. The Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, on the other hand, has the highest proportion. Similarly in Korea, the average proportion of female members is higher in municipal (13.2%) than provincial councils (11.2%). In particular, the proportion of women in the Korean local councils increased significantly in 2006, when a number of electoral and quota reforms were undertaken to promote women’s political representation. Similar to the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, Seoul ranks highest in the percentage of women in its council, although the percentage of female members is still below 20%.⁵ Japanese and Korean women have been relatively successful in advancing into local politics; however, the two countries differ with regard to the formal electoral rules governing their local elections, which have led to the emergence of distinct party systems. Local council elections in Korea operate under the mixed parallel system that combines proportional representation (PR) lists with majoritarian constituencies. Accordingly, in the case of the Seoul Metropolitan Council, 10 out of 106 seats are assigned via PR, and the rest (96 seats) are assigned via elections in single-member districts (typically won by candidates from one of the two major parties). Gender quotas are applied to both majoritarian and PR tiers of the mixed electoral system, which mandate political parties to include women in their candidate lists (30% and 50% in majoritarian and PR tiers, respectively). In Japan, local council elections operate under multi-member majoritarian systems. For instance, the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly is comprised of 127 members, who are elected in districts represented by multiple members (between 1 to 8). Multi-member districts have allowed candidates from minor parties to win the election, thereby giving them representation on the local council. As we discuss later, these different party systems significantly influence how women’s substantive representation occurs in Tokyo and Seoul.

Figures 1A and 1B. 
Percentage of Women in Local Councils. Sourced from the Gender Statistics Database in Japan (http://winet.nwec.jp/toukei/), and the Korea National Election Commission (http://info.nec.go.kr/).

Figure 1A. Women in the Korean Local Councils

Figure 1B. Women in the Japanese Local Councils

The main goal of this paper is to describe and examine how the substantive representation of women’s interests occurs in the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly and the Seoul Metropolitan Council. As a way of measuring the substantive representation of women’s interests, we used statements/speeches made by legislators in plenary sessions and committee meetings in local councils by focusing on one aspect of substantive representation, namely speaking for women. This approach is particularly adequate for studying representation in local politics, because local council members primarily represent their constituents’ interests through verbal statements, mainly by asking questions of, and keeping their eyes on, the activities of the prefectural/city government. The data analyzed in this paper covers the periods in which different parties served as the ruling party in Tokyo and Seoul. We analyzed 1461 sessions for the Seoul Metropolitan Council, and 1388 sessions for the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly.

The data for the Seoul case covers the period between June 22, 2009 and June 30, 2014. It includes the entire 8th session of the Seoul Metropolitan Council, as well as one final year of the 7th council. The election of the 8th council took place on June 2, 2010. As a result, the DP became the majority party of the Seoul Metropolitan Council for the first time, holding a total of 66 seats. The conservative Saenuri ended with a total of 28 seats. This was considered a dramatic change from the 7th session, when the Saenuri (the Grand National Party at the time) dominated almost the entire council (see Figure 2A). Three different mayors assumed leadership in this time period, beginning with Oh Se-hoon (2006-2011), who was voted out of office in August 2011 by the Free Lunch referendum, which he himself initiated by betting on his position as the city mayor. Kwon Young-kyu filled the position for two months following his resignation (August to October 2011), until Park Won-soon was finally elected as the new mayor in October 2011.

Figures 2A and 2B. 
Number of male and female members. These Figures depict the composition of the 7th (2006-2010) and 8th (2010-2014) Seoul Metropolitan Council, and the 18th (2009-2013) and 19th (2013-2017) of the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly across sex and party affiliation. Numbers note seats held by male and female members of each party at the time of the election.

Figure 2A. Seoul Metropolitan Council

Figure 2B. Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly⁸

The data for the Tokyo case covers the period from July 21, 2009 to the end of 2015. This period includes the entire 18th session and part of the 19th session. The 18th session began following the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly election on July 21, 2009, in which the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) won the majority of the seats. The 19th session started after another election on June 23, 2013, in which the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) regained the status of the largest party in the assembly (see Figure 2B).⁶ The governor of Tokyo was elected on February 9, 2014. Prior to the election, the governor had been Ishihara Shintaro, who is well known for his right wing and hawkish political orientation. Masuzoe Yoichi was elected as the new governor in the 2014 election.⁷ Although Masuzoe can be seen as less of an extremist than Ishihara in his political orientation, he was still supported mainly by the LDP and Komei, the ruling coalition in the assembly at the time of the election.

The structure of plenary sessions and committee meetings and the tasks of local council members are similar in the two countries. As mentioned above, executives typically propose bills, and local council members react to these bills. Council members make an effort to advocate the interests of their constituents and to reflect their own thoughts and ideas in the policy process by asking questions and expressing their opinions. In Korea, in the case of plenary sessions, the council chair begins by proposing agenda items. Policy proposals are voted on following a brief debate (or sometimes no debate), after a council member has asked to speak from the floor. For committee meetings, a typical meeting begins with the committee chair listing policy proposals (often initiated by the city mayor), followed by a brief introduction to the items by the city’s senior bureaucrat, who heads a policy division/bureau (e.g., the head of the Women and Family Affairs Bureau). The chair then opens the floor for debate, when council members take turns asking questions. At other times, the bureaucrat will first outline the bureau’s current activities, after which there is a question and answer session.

In Tokyo, the plenary session is the venue in which proposals regarding ordinances and budgets, contracts, personnel matters, and petitions are first submitted. Those who propose bills explain the relevant contents during the plenary session. The committees with jurisdiction over the bills conduct intensive discussions of these bills. For committee meetings the decision-making procedure is similar to that in Korea. Following bureaucrats’ introductions and explanations of policy proposals, committee members ask questions, express their opinions, and ask the executive questions about the bills and the executive. Once the committees make decisions on the bills, they are sent to the plenary session, where assembly members discuss them further, and vote on them. The plenary session also serves as a forum in which assembly members ask questions of the governor and the executive branch with regard to the governor’s annual policy speech made at the beginning of each calendar year (Sasaki, 2003; Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, 2017).

One major difference between the two cases that is relevant to our analysis is that in the Seoul Metropolitan Council, there is a specific committee—the Welfare Committee—designated to address a wide range of issues concerning women. Such a committee can be both a plus and a minus for the representation of women’s interests. While the presence of a designated committee for women’s affairs can encourage members of the committee to speak actively on behalf of women, it can also lead members to limit the discussion of women’s issues exclusively to this committee, and thereby decrease the number of possible opportunities for representing women’s interests outside the committee. We examine the effects of such differences on how women’s interests are discursively represented in the two local councils.

We selected the statements made by legislators in plenary sessions and committee meetings when they “spoke for women.” We follow Celis, Childs, Kantola, and Krook’s (2014) approach in “eliminating more generic references that do not involve representative claims about women per se” (p. 159). Thus, focusing on members’ use of gendered rhetoric in their statements, we pay attention to the ways in which members themselves describe the issues that are of interest to women. Specifically, we count statements as speaking for women when 1) they claim women need and want certain things, 2) they claim women face difficulties and disadvantages that need to be improved, and/or 3) women have certain rights.⁹ In addition, the statements should explicitly (and in rare instances implicitly) mention women as the group being represented.¹⁰ After recording representatives’ gendered rhetoric in their statements, we developed 20 nonexclusive policy categories, and assigned topic codes to each record. Our method ensures that we do not exclude instances in which members refer to issues of importance to women without using one of the predetermined policies’ key words (e.g., childcare). At the same time, simple references to words like women, mothers, and girls are not enough to qualify for inclusion in our data set. Instead, for a statement to be coded as a gendered rhetoric in our data set, members must express concerns and interests relevant to the well-being of women.

One author was responsible for coding the contents of plenary sessions and committee meetings in each of the two countries, and we made an effort to ensure that our codes corresponded well across the two countries. While making sure that we categorized similar issues under identical topic categories for comparative purposes, we also kept track of unique issues in each country context, with key information illustrating the differences in women’s concerns in each country.

In this section, we discuss our major findings, and generally confirm our key research expectations.

What issues are considered as being relevant to women’s concerns by the council members? Similar issues emerged in both cases as women’s issues, namely women’s jobs, low fertility rates, women’s health, and crime and violence against women. At the same time, the policy issues mentioned more frequently in each of the councils differ. Figure 3 shows the distribution of mentions across our 20 topic categories. In the Seoul Metropolitan Council, the most widely mentioned topics include childcare (15.8%), public work contracts (13.0%), promoting marriage and childbirth (11.9%), jobs (9.7%), and other topics (9.5%). In contrast, topics receiving most attention in Tokyo were jobs (23.9%), medical services (14.4%), disaster response and prevention (11.7%), women’s rights (9.5%), and childcare (7.9%). These findings support the claim made in previous research that there is no fixed set of women’s issues (Celis, 2008; Celis, Hilds, Kantola, & Krook, 2014). Instead, women’s issues reflect the unique contexts in which they are discussed and debated.

Figure 3. 
Council members’ mentions of issues relevant to women by topic. This figure depicts the distribution of woman-related mentions across 20 topic areas. A total of 570 and 683 mentions were recorded in the Seoul Metropolitan Council and the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, respectively. The most-often mentioned topic in the Seoul Metropolitan Council appears on the far left of the figure.

Another difference we identify is the tendency of the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly to concentrate on a few topics. The five topics discussed most often represented 40.7% of the total mentions in the Seoul Metropolitan Council, and 67.3% in the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly.

As shown in Table 1, in the case of Tokyo, the largest number of remarks regarding women’s issues are made in plenary sessions (28.1%), followed by those made in the Welfare Committee (15.4%), the Special Committee for Annual Settlement of Accounts (12.0%), the Education Committee (9.8%), and the Special Budget Committee (8.9%). In contrast, in Seoul, most discussions regarding women occur in the Welfare Committee (64.2%), followed by those made in plenary sessions (12.1%).

Why do the discussions of women’s concerns occur mostly in the Welfare Committee in the Seoul Metropolitan Council? We believe this is because the Health and Welfare Committee in the National Assembly monitors the Ministry of Gender Equality (an executive agency in Korea). Consequently, when the Women and Family Affairs Bureau (the metropolitan government’s version of the Ministry of Gender Equality) was established by the Seoul Metropolitan Council Welfare Committee, it was designated as the place for addressing women’s issues. Thus, the presence of agencies such as the Ministry of Gender Equality responsible for dealing with women’s affairs in the national government has implications for women’s substantive representation in local councils as well. When, as in Japan, no agency has been given responsibility for handling women’s affairs, politicians wishing to address women’s issues have no alternative but to target different institutional venues simultaneously, in an attempt to find a suitable place for the discussion. Alternatively, members wishing to advocate for women’s issues must raise them whenever and wherever there is an opportunity to do so.

The concentration of mentions in Korea’s welfare committee is quite interesting, particularly given the wide range of women’s issues as summarized in Figure 3. Designating a specific venue for discussing women’s issues can be concerning, as doing so may confine the discussion to a narrow set of issues over which a specific agency or committee has jurisdiction. However, the Seoul case indicates that assigning a specific venue for discussion does not necessarily limit the scope of discussion.

Although women constitute a minority in both councils, we found that they are actively advocating for women in both Seoul and Tokyo. Given that the percentages of female legislators in both the Seoul Metropolitan Council and the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly are less than 20%, this finding suggests that female members do indeed speak more for women in both councils relative to male members. In the Seoul Metropolitan Council, 254 and 252 mentions were from male and female members, respectively. Examining the speakers’ party affiliations, we found that mentions by members of the DP and the Saenuri Party accounted for 69.2% and 27.5% of the total mentions, respectively. This does not necessarily imply that as a relatively more progressive party the DP cares more about women’s concerns. Rather, the DP held more than 70% of seats in the 8th Seoul Metropolitan Council, which simply suggests that more DP members were given the opportunity to speak. At the same time, female DP members were responsible for the largest portion of mentions (38.7%), followed by male DP members (30.4%). On the other hand, male members of the Saenuri Party were responsible only for 17.2% of the mentions, and female members for 10.3% of the mentions. Thus, individuals who are both women and members of the DP are more likely to advocate actively for women.

In Tokyo as well, female legislators speak more often for women’s issues than male legislators, with 369 and 295 mentions from female and male members, respectively. Across parties, members of the Komei Party (Komei) made the largest number of statements for women (25%), followed by the Net (19.2%), the Japan Communist Party (JCP, 17.1%), the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP, 16.9%), the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ, 11.2%), and Others (10.5%). It is important to note that the time available for making statements and asking questions is allocated according to the number of seats each faction has (Otokita, 2013; Shiomura, 2015). Comparing the size of the factions and the number of times each faction speaks for women (Figures 2B and 4), we notice that the Komei, the Net, and the JCP tend to speak for women more often than other parties. At the same time, predominantly, female members speak for women in both the JCP (2.4% male and 14.7% female) and the Net (19.2% female). Not surprisingly, the Net has only female members (100% women), and the JCP has the second largest percentage of female members (63% in the DPJ era and 65% in the LDP era). Regarding the case of Komei, more male than female members made statements on women’s issues (16.3% male and 8.7% female), but given that there are 20 male members and only 3 female members, respectively, the data suggests that female Komei members are on average more active in speaking for women than male Komei members.

Figure 4. 
Speakers by gender and party. This Figure depicts the gender and party affiliation of speakers who made woman-related mentions. Three bars on the left indicate mentions that occurred in the Seoul Metropolitan Council by male and female members of various parties (total 100%). Six bars on the right indicate mentions that occurred in the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly by male and female members of various parties (total 100%). Labels indicate the percentage of mentions specifically made by female members of each party in Seoul and Tokyo.

We conducted a more thorough analysis to explore substantive differences in the contents of these statements across parties. Our findings indicate that party systems shape the ways in which women’s interests are represented. In the case of Seoul, whereas the Saenuri Party members tended to focus on traditional issues concerning women such as promoting marriage and childbirth (20.5%) and childcare (14.9%) in their discussion of women’s interests, the DP’s understanding of women’s concerns was clearly broader, particularly concerning underprivileged women (e.g., women-friendly public facilities, women’s rights, foreign wives, victims of war crimes, and others including single mothers and women with disabilities). Looking specifically into the substantive contents under the categories of childcare and jobs (topics that were frequently discussed by both parties), we noticed that apart from the fact that only members of the DP mentioned contents specifically relevant to work-life balance (under the jobs category), distinctions between the two parties were negligible.

In contrast, in Tokyo, depending on the topic, a clear difference is noticeable across parties. Focusing on the two most frequently mentioned topics—jobs and medical services—we notice that there is no major difference across parties’ statements about medical services, although parties talk about jobs in very different ways. Two findings stand out. First, the LDP tends to tie women’s employment and job opportunities to the national economy, while other parties like the JCP and the Net indicate their support for women’s employment and well-being, rather than for the sake of other goals. Additionally, while all other parties argue that women (and men, for some parties) should be able to balance work and family, the LDP does not mention this aspect of the issue in their discussion of jobs and employment. Generally, whereas parties like Komei, the JCP, and most notably the Net understand women’s employment and work as having various implications for women’s lives, this is not the case for the LDP. These findings suggest that the multi-party system of the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, compared with the two-party system of the Seoul Metropolitan Council, which allows smaller parties to gain legislative access, makes it possible for various aspects of women’s interests and difficulties to be acknowledged and represented by the legislators.