A young Japanese couple at a garden in Tokyo. - Photo: Shutterstock via SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
TOKYO: The leader of a Japanese conservative party has apologised for saying the solution to the nation’s population crisis would be to ban women from getting married after the age of 25 and have their uteruses removed at 30.
Naoki Hyakuta, a writer and founder of the Conservative Party of Japan, also said that women should not be permitted to attend university from the age of 18, apparently so they could focus their efforts on producing more babies.
Hyakuta’s comments on his YouTube channel on Friday provoked an immediate and strong response, with the outspoken politician apologising during a speech in Nagoya on Sunday, claiming that the comments were just “a hypothetical idea” and that he did not personally support the ideas.
He added that he had framed the ideas as a “science-fiction storyline” to help reverse Japan’s declining birth rate, adding that his comments had been “extremely harsh” and that he did not advocate such steps against women.
Expressing outrage on the matter, Sumie Kawakami, a lecturer at Yamanashi Gakuin University and author of a book on gender issues, said: “I cannot believe that a Japanese politician has said such a thing.”
She told This Week in Asia: “I can only see these comments as a call to violence against women.”
For the record - Women “would have their uteruses removed when they turn over 30,” Hyakuta, leader of the Conservative Party of Japan, said in a stream on his YouTube channel on Friday.
Naoki Hyakuta, a writer and founder of the Conservative Party of Japan, also said that women should not be permitted to attend university from the age of 18, apparently so they could focus their efforts on producing more babies.
On the channel, he also said that he would make it law for “women who are single after 25 years old not to be allowed to marry.”
The remarks came as he discussed the measures to tackle Japan’s declining birthrate, saying he was “hypothetically speaking of science fiction as a novelist.”
Later, Hyakuta posted an apology on his X account. “I cannot deny that the expressions were too harsh,” he said. “I apologize for those who were offended.”
The Conservative Party of Japan gained three seats at the House of Representatives in the general election held in October. The party has met the criteria to be recognized as a political party under the relevant law.
He also apologized for them on his X social platform the same day, saying they were "undeniably something extremely harsh" even as he had stressed during the program that the ideas were "science-fiction" and "something that should not happen."
When Kaori Arimoto, a senior member of his party joining him on the YouTube programme, suggested his remarks were inappropriate, even if framed as a science-fiction storyline, Hyakuta responded, "I was explaining about the time limitation (faced by women in giving birth) in a plain way."
Hyakuta said the social structure should be changed to overturn that belief.
He suggested women should not be allowed to go to a university once they turn 18 and that single women over 25 be banned by law from getting married for the remainder of their lives.
Those statements came after Hyakuta, who is also an author, repeatedly emphasized that he was not actively promoting them and asked viewers to interpret them as “science fiction by a novelist.”
Arimoto also said people should be taught from childhood that there is a “time restriction” involved in having a biological child.
It was then that Hyakuta responded by suggesting that women over 30 have hysterectomies.
Hyakuta apologized for his remarks in Nagoya on Nov 10 after campaigning for a party candidate running in the mayoral election.
Hyakuta’s remarks sparked an uproar over social media and elsewhere.
“The expressions were coarse and shocking, and some people might take them as even ghoulish,” he told reporters.
The party’s co-leader, Takashi Kawamura, also apologized for the comments. Kawamura, a former Nagoya mayor, and two other party members won seats in the Lower House election in October.
Aichi Governor Hideaki Omura, who was campaigning for a different mayoral election candidate, criticized Hyakuta’s comments as “unspeakably hideous” on Nov 10.
Hyakuta earlier apologized to those who “felt uncomfortable” in a post on X, formerly Twitter, on the night of Nov. 9.
He said his comments were intended as “dystopian analogies,” but acknowledged that the expressions were somewhat shocking.
He also emphasized he had prefaced his comments a number of times by saying those proposals were “what not to do” and that they are nothing more than science fiction.
Hyakuta is one of the founders of the Conservative Party of Japan, which was established last autumn.
For the record, the Conservative Party of Japan won three seats in the House of Representatives election on Oct. 27 and satisfied the condition to become a national political party by securing more than 2 per cent of the votes cast across all 11 proportional representation blocks.
Hyakuta has previously stirred controversy, such as by claiming that the 1937 Nanjing Massacre by Japanese troops in China never happened and characterizing U.S. forces' air raids on Japan during World War II as "genocide".
