Word: japanized
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...from Nagasaki prefecture is one of more than two dozen rookie female politicians who three months ago swept into the legislature on a groundswell of antiestablishment public sentiment. During watershed national elections on Aug. 30, voters not only handed control of the government to the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) after more than five decades of rule by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), they also elected a record number of women to high office. The Diet now includes 96 women among its 722 members in the upper and lower houses. More than one-fourth of them are serving...
...office in the House of Representatives Building No. 1 in Tokyo, freshman Japanese lawmaker Eriko Fukuda, her hair characteristically tucked behind her right ear, sighs that her male secretaries don't know how to care for flowers. Fukuda is settling in as the upcoming session of the Diet, Japan's parliament, approaches. Her office is filled with bouquets and orchids sent by well-wishers, adding a splash of color to the building's dreary halls - as does Fukuda herself. At age 29, she is the country's youngest member of the Diet; her pink cell phone with a tiny plush...
...This miniature women's movement is a small step toward equality in a society still steeped in conservative, patriarchal values. Japan's government for decades has been dominated by older men, most hailing from the right schools and the right families, who staked out politics as their exclusive domain. In 1997, a former Health Minister offered a glimpse of prevailing attitudes in Tokyo's men's club when he referred to women as "babymaking machines." Still relatively few in number and junior in status, women are unlikely to have much of an immediate impact on the Diet. But their influx...
...Ichiro Ozawa, the DPJ's 67-year-old secretary general and chief election strategist. By running a slate of female neophytes - many of them unknowns and outsiders - Ozawa drew fire from some pundits who accused him of offering up unfit candidates to capitalize on voters' increasing concern over Japan's worsening economic plight and their frustration with an ineffective political establishment. (See pictures of young Japanese women...
...infected with the hepatitis virus by a contaminated blood transfusion she received as a newborn. She was just one of thousands of Japanese who received contaminated clotting agents in blood in the 1970s, '80s and '90s, which became a major health care scandal. Fukuda's lobbying against Japan's Ministry of Health and private companies that had sold the tainted blood-clotting agents established her public profile - she wrote two books about her experiences - and ultimately brought her to Ozawa's attention...