Female Entrepreneurship in Japan

抄録

Japanese female entrepreneurs constitute a negligible proportion of the total entrepreneurs. However, Japan is undertaking socio-cultural and economic changes in this regard. Female entrepreneurship is at the confluence of tendencies favouring its development on better basis than before. There is an awareness of the necessity for society and economy to make the most of female talents and a willingness among women to play a larger role in the social and industrial fields, a position now largely accepted by Japanese population at large (Debroux, 2003a). It translated first in the willingness to make a career in large companies but more recently, it has also pushed a growing number of women to consider creating their own business. Women are inspired to start their own business by the growing desire for self-achievement through professional career but economic factors are also important. Japanese women get married later or not at all, and the number of divorces is increasing. So, more women are supporting themselves financially. The myth of the immense Japanese middle class is crumbling in the midst of the long slow growth period. A large number of families have difficulties in maintaining their standard of living with one salary. Many male workers have lost their jobs or have to work with reduced salary because of company's restructuring and job transfers to less auspicious workplaces. It forces married women to look for jobs in order to generate an additional family income offsetting the declining earning capability of their husbands. But companies also lay-off female workers and it is hard for those who have never received any specialized training in their company and do not have marketable skills to find a stable job. It is particularly true in a period where companies recruit less female workers in permanent positions. The only job opportunities for most of them are often part-time jobs in retail business, cleaning or health care, or in a small assembling factory in the countryside. As a consequence, the lack of career perspective (compounded with the need for care of small children for the younger women) forces them to consider self-employment. At the other end of the spectrum, there are still few openings for highly educated women and the situation seems unlikely to improve dramatically in the years to come. For the time being at least, there is little evidence that Japanese companies intend to offer a significant number of women the opportunity to enter their shrinking elite of core employees (Rebick, 2001). Companies recruit less people and have a flatter hierarchy. Therefore, for those willing to optimize their potential and creating an area for self-fulfillment, this makes creating a company a more attractive option. Self-employment may give highly educated women the opportunity to optimize their talents while keeping a degree of freedom in term of life-style. All those elements explain why the group female entrepreneurs is very heterogeneous in terms of background, objectives and potentialities. Their portrait is not all of high-flyers creating high technology high growth ventures but it ought not to be reduced either to a group of relatively little educated people toiling in sort of modern age cottage industry at the bottom of the outsourcing industry. The range of categories of female entrepreneurs is larger than that of their male counterparts. It goes from housewives working at home in low added-value sectors to the management of companies with a sales turnover of thousand of billion of yen, such as Temp Staff KK. Access to information and building network remains difficult for most women. Gaining credibility from the banks, suppliers and customers is a perpetual challenge. Nevertheless, the number of successful female entrepreneurs is growing (Mayumi, 2002). Some of them are already considered as role models by the new generation and have received a large

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