But in less than two weeks, Momoko Nojo’s #DontBeSilent campaign with other activists has garnered more than 150,000 signatures, sparking worldwide outrage against Tokyo 2020 President Yoshiro Mori.
He quit last week and was replaced by Seiko Hashimoto, a woman who competed in seven Olympics.
The hat brand was created in response to remarks by Mori, a respected former prime minister, that women talk too much. Nojo used it on Twitter and other social media platforms to garner support for a petition in which he acted.
“Few petitions have received 150,000 signatures before. I thought it was great. People also take it personally and do not see it as just Mori’s problem,” a smiling Nojo said in a Zoom interview.
Her activism, born out of a year studying in Denmark, is the latest example of women outside mainstream politics in Japan going to keyboards to bring about social change in the world’s third largest economy, where gender discrimination, wage gaps and stereotyping are rampant.
“It made me realize that this is a great opportunity to pursue gender equality in Japan,” said Nojo, a 4th-year economics student at Keio University in Tokyo.
She said her activism was motivated by questions she often heard from male peers, such as, “You’re a girl, so you have to go to a high school that has nice school uniforms, don’t you?” or “Even if you do not have a job after graduating from college, you can be a housewife, no?”
Nojo started her non-profit organization “NO YOUTH NO JAPAN” in 2019, while she was in Denmark, where she saw the country elect Mette Frederiksen, a woman in her early forties, as prime minister.
According to her, the time in Denmark made her realize how much Japanese politics is dominated by older men.
Keiko Ikeda, a professor of education at Hokkaido University, said it was important for young, worldly people to raise their voices in Japan, where decisions tend to be made by a uniformed group of like-minded people. But change will slowly take place painfully, she said.
“If you have a homogeneous group, it’s impossible to move the compass because the people in it do not realize it if their decision is not central,” Ikeda said.
Nojo this week rejected a proposal by Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party to allow more women into meetings, but only as silent observers, as a weak PR stunt.
“I’m not sure if they have the willingness to fundamentally improve the gender issue,” she said, adding that the party should have more women in key positions, rather than having them as observers.
In fact, Nojo’s victory is only a small step in a long battle.
Japan ranks 121st out of 153 countries on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Gap Index of 2020 – the worst position among advanced countries – earning weak points for women’s economic participation and political empowerment.
Activists and many ordinary women say that drastic change is needed in the workplace and in politics.
“In Japan, when there is an issue related to gender equality, not many voices are heard, and even if there are voices to improve the situation, they become steam and nothing changes,” Nojo said.
“I do not want our next generation to spend their time on it.”