Japanese women say no to high heels

For Risa Konishi, who works in an event planning company in Tokyo, why women have to wear high heels when the work requires walking or standing almost all day is beyond her.

"Personally, I don't like to wear high heels, I find it annoying," Konishi said, adding that whenever she complained about how tired she was wearing them all day, her colleagues would suggest she wear a pair of sneakers in the office.

"They said I can wear sneakers inside our company but when going out for events or meeting a customer, you have to change."

"I really don't understand the meaning of this rule. Does my respect for customers really be reflected by what kind of shoes I am wearing?" Konishi asked.

Yet, Konishi admits she doesn't have the guts to speak out.

However, things began to change in Japan as the#KuToo campaign, a social media drive against dress codes and expectations that women wear high heels at work, went viral.

The campaign was started in January by Yumi Ishikawa, a 32-yearold actress and freelance writer, who tweeted she had difficulty standing in heels for eight hours during training at a hotel and had to change her career path.

In her tweets, Ishikawa used the hashtag #KuToo - a pun based on the Japanese words, shoe (kutsu) and pain (kutsuu), and it was also a mimic of the #MeToo hashtag, which represents an international movement against sexual harassment.

Since then, KuToo has been used by women to talk about their "high-heel" experiences on social media as Ishikawa's tweets gained more than 67,000 likes and almost 30,000 retweets.

In June, Ishikawa submitted a petition to Japan's labor ministry seeking a ban on companies asking female employees to wear high heels on the job, with more than 19,000 people having signed it.

But the Japanese lawmakers chose not to back the movement. "I think it's within the range of what's commonly accepted as necessary and appropriate at the workplace," Takumi Nemoto, Japan's minister of health, labor and welfare, said during a parliamentary session in June.

Nemoto also said employers forcing female workers who were injured to wear high heels could be viewed as "power harassment".

Ishikawa voiced displeasure at the health minister's remark. "It seems like men don't really understand that wearing high heels can be painful and lead to injuries," she was quoted by Reuters as saying. "Even if women aren't hurt, I'd like such expectations to be considered power harassment," she said.

Ishikawa, however, said Nemoto's remarks might prompt people to debate the issue seriously and some may bring it up with their bosses. "I think this is going in a good direction."

Reactions from the public and private sectors seemed rather cold.

In a telephonic interview with China Daily, an official from Japan's health ministry's equal employment opportunity department said there was no plan to change laws on whether or not employers could insist on a dress code for the staff.

The #KuToo activists are hoping that one day Japan will also see changes that have happened in the Philippines and British Columbia, a Canadian province, which passed laws in 2017, banning employers from asking women to wear high heels at work.

Nai Watanabe, who works in an entertainment company, said there are no such requirements in her organization. "I think it is not a problem because the dressing restrictions in Japan for women are lesser than those for men," said Watanabe. "Besides there are many high heels that are comfortable to wear now."

Meanwhile, a survey conducted in June by Business Insider Japan, the American financial and business news website's Japanese version, has found nearly 60 percent of the targeted 1,229 working females in Japan said they felt they were forced to wear high heels during job hunts or at workplaces, and 70 percent did not like it.

Only 21 percent of respondents said their companies had clearly required women to wear high heels, while others were simply doing so because "it is considered a custom", and "were told to wear by superiors or seniors".

The survey found that companies requiring high heels were mainly in service sectors, such as hotels, restaurants, information and communication corporations, and financial and insurance companies.

Yu Qiang, a researcher of Japan studies at the University of International Relations in Beijing, said the dress codes were changing all the time but nowhere has the change been more slow than in the corporate culture of Japan, but the#KuToo movement is a good start for a change.

wangxu@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily Global 08/08/2019 page3)