Reiko Abe became a civil engineer in Japan, but she couldn’t find a job. An ancient Shinto superstition, made part of Japan’s labor law, held that if a woman entered a tunnel under construction, she would anger the jealous mountain goddess and cause worker accidents.
Two decades later, Abe has become the face of Japan’s global engagement as the nation seeks to overcome its image as an economic laggard and a wasteland for career women. Television advertisements featuring her have run on CNN and the BBC. She’s been lauded by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (no relation) for showcasing Japan’s strengths abroad and symbolizing why the country needs to promote more women in a workforce where less than 5 percent of managers are female.
The irony? Abe, 51, had to leave Japan. After overseeing construction safety on Indian metro projects for seven years, she’s been promoted to head Oriental Consultants India Pvt., a unit of Tokyo-based ACKG Ltd. The company is working to extend subway systems in New Delhi and Mumbai and build them in cities including Bengaluru and Ahmedabad. Abe is also overseeing a mass transit project in Jakarta, having previously worked on Taiwan’s high-speed rail, the metro in Ukraine’s capital, an undersea tunnel in Norway and an urban-planning project in Qatar.
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After graduating with a civil engineering degree from Yamaguchi University, a first for a woman at the institution, Abe discovered that Shinto beliefs and paternalistic notions about protecting women left her without a future. Japan’s Labor Standards Act, which banned women from underground construction sites and mines, wouldn’t be revised until 2006. (Pregnant and post-natal women are still barred.)
“No matter how hard I studied or gained experience, I was at a disadvantage because I was a woman,” Abe said. “I had to find ways to overcome that disadvantage: learn English, gain experience in developing countries, work on difficult South Asian projects. Somewhere along the way, all of those things became my weapons.”
In less than a year, she taught herself English. She beat 4,000 applicants for a spot in a master’s degree program at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and left in 1995. A training position gave her a shot, finally, to work in a tunnel: the undersea North Cape project linking Norway’s mainland to Mageroya island.
Does anyone know if that Shinto superstition part is true?
What part of the underlying religious logic is absent from the quoted bits that leads you to your conclusion of secular rationale?
