Japan's tax laws get in way of more women working full time
I can&#x27;t help but feel like this is a strong misinterpretation of the circumstances.<p>The author tries really hard to make this a woman&#x27;s issue, but as far as I know the law doesn&#x27;t lay out different rules for women specifically, just the less-earning spouses that take care of the children, so the same problems exist for husbands that stay at home.
However, women universally tend to not marry &quot;down&quot; when it comes to finances, education, etc., while men do. They also tend to find men without a career to be unambitious, which is generally considered to be an unattractive trait in men for romantic purposes. This is true for poor countries rife with sexism, as well as for rich countries that treat women and men equally. (All of this has been covered by extensive sutdies)
In Japan in particular young women tend to have high expectations of men, because their parents and grandparents had no financial issues during the economic bubble and their mothers and grandmothers did not have to work at all or much. Many Japanese women can&#x27;t wait to marry in order to start a family and stop working; it&#x27;s their life goal and they only consider their career to be temporary from the start. This even true for most women who graduate from elite universities in Japan (I saw a study about Tokyo university graduates mentioning this).
So that&#x27;s why in practice we&#x27;re talking about mostly women here and I wouldn&#x27;t blame men for that.<p>The argument about the time spent on housework also sounds rather weird and insignificant to me, because it mentions a significant gap between men and women, but also mentions that Japanese spend less time on housework in general. 263mins = 4h23m a week is a number that I pull off without trouble as a single man working full-time without the least bit of help from a spouse. The article also doesn&#x27;t mention whether this number is limited to families with children or the whole population.<p>The part about bento boxes is just a meme. Women are not considered to be bad mothers if they don&#x27;t create bento boxes that look like Pikachu and friends.<p>There are legitimate issues for women working in Japan, some of which we have in other countries, some we don&#x27;t, but I don&#x27;t see any of them in this article. All I see is &quot;less-earning spouses (usually women) get too many benefits, that&#x27;s why the alternative of working isn&#x27;t attractive enough&quot;.
And instead of complaining about beautiful bento boxes, the author should draw attention to serious issues like the incredible lack of kindergarden spots and the like.