The paid-leave pioneers: A few Japanese dads have sparked a child-care revolution

Brigid Schulte wrote for The Lily, a publication of the Washington Post, about some of the men in Japan challenging the cultural norms around who is allowed to take family leave:

To Hideki Nakazato, a sociologist at the University of Kobe who studies fathers and parental leave, Japan is in need of more pioneers. He once searched far and wide to study Japanese men who had taken more than a day or two of parental leave. He found six. These men, Nakazato said, were more motivated by a desire to do something special than by the fear of not fitting in or of suffering reprisals at work.

“It required a kind of pioneer spirit,” Nakazato said. “But in Japan, that kind of spirit is important for the first step.”

That’s why, as the Japanese government has begun to strongly encourage male civil servants to take at least a month of child-rearing leave, all eyes have been on the nation’s 39-year-old environment minister, who took a much-anticipated two weeks of intermittent parental leave earlier this year, even as the coronavirus began to rage. Shinjiro Koizumi received high praise in some quarters for serving as a role model and supporting his wife, Christel Takigawa, a popular television presenter. But he was also roundly criticized in more conservative circles; it wasn’t all that long ago that one of Koizumi’s fellow cabinet ministers famously scoffed that raising infants and toddlers is a job for women.