To watch the full interview on YouTube, click here. Interview starts at [05:00]
Prefer to listen?
Subscribe to the show in your favourite podcast player here: Apple Podcasts/Spotify/Stitcher/Google Podcasts
Full transcript below.
Have you ever been through the process of changing your name? Many women in Japan have, most men have not. The Japanese family law requires that couples share the same last name, and this burden falls on women 95% of the time. Shu shares with us not only the arduous process of changing his name in Japan, but also his awakening to the importance of feminist advocacy for gender-equal relations in the home. We are thrilled to have him join enjoi from 2021 as an enjoi educator and co-facilitator for the enjoi Wolfpack Initiative supporting safe space conversations on diversity and gender for men in Japan.
In this episode you’ll hear:
- How Shu changed his name despite the challenges of the Japanese family register
- How recent the system of family names actually is in Japan
- What is toxic masculinity and why it’s limiting the men in our lives
- The risks that couples with different family names face when disaster strikes
- Why feminism and gender equality are not just “women’s issues”
- How father’s empowerment in the home can support gender equality at work
- How embracing gender equality has helped Shu to be more “human”
About Shu:
Shu Matsuo Post is a successful businessperson in Japan, one of the most gender-rigid nations on the planet. He is the author of I Took Her Name, published in 2020 and from 2021 is an enjoi educator and co-facilitator for the enjoi Wolfpack Initiative supporting safe space conversations on diversity and gender for men in Japan. He is a feminism and zero-waste advocate, a plant-based endurance athlete, and a real estate investor. He lives in Tokyo, Japan, with his wife and their son.
Useful links:
Shu’s Book: I Took Her Name: Lessons From My Journey Into Vulnerability, Authenticity, and Feminism
Shu’s recent blog post: 9 Surprising Benefits of Paternity Leave
Connect with Shu:
Website: https://shumatsuopost.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ITookHerName
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shumatsuopost/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shu-matsuo-post-a6910049/
Connect with Jackie:
Website: https://en-joi.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/enjoidiversityandinnovation
https://www.facebook.com/jackiefsteelephd
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackie-f-steele-phd/
Transcript
Jackie Steele: Welcome to Diversity rocks innovation! Volume Two.
Welcome. My name is Jackie Steele. I’m a long time Canadian, political scientist, living and teaching and working here in Japan for many years. And also the recently launched in the last two years, CEO and chief diversity officer of enjoi Diversity and Innovation. enjoi is a Japan based global facing business.
We work in English, Japanese, and French, and we’re committed to bringing the research policy and evidence-based diversity, equity and innovation training and education to leaders and corporations on the importance of all the different facets of what we mean by building out intersectional diversity.
About thinking about accessibility and disability, but from an accessibility perspective. About holistic corporate policy ecosystems and what that looks like in terms of empowering individual employees. And of course innovation, but not innovation just for its sake, innovation that supports the holistic wheel wellbeing of democratic equality of mental health, and that powers our people systems for personal and collective good.
So the livestream is aiming to shine a spotlight on the diversity of the enjoi Diversity and Innovation thought partner network, all of these individuals, professionals working in Japan and across APAC and who are making really individual efforts to bring their inclusive, diversity-positive, supportive of gender equality and championing women’s leadership into the world in their own industries, their own professional ways and through their own example.
So one of the ways that this live stream is attempting to accomplish that is through this practice of ‘thought partnering out loud’. So thought partnering is really just a simple practice. It’s this idea where two people as individuals get together and we share our expertise, our worldviews, our lived realities, and we share about our individual diversities.
We learn from each other, real time. And we meet in solidarity as equals, as individuals throwing out the meishi, the business cards, the hierarchy, the age generation gaps, the status gaps, the different language communities, whatever it is, just meet and thought partner out loud and learn together in solidarity, regardless of hierarchies that we think constantly get channeled through our society and through our socialization unfortunately.
So we’re trying to disrupt that very actively by bringing a different performative practice of thought partnering out loud into the world through this live stream. So with this live stream format each week, I invite and feature one of the enjoi Diversity and Innovation thought partners, and this collaborator joins me and shares about their work, about their individual pursuits, their passions, their challenges, what enriches their perspectives and how we can learn about how diversity really rocks innovation.
Diversity, of course, is a driver of innovation when it’s coupled with equality. And it makes for me, as a political scientist and long time, political, critical democratic theorist, I believe that it really makes the project of democratic self-government together, worth pursuing in our homes, our workplaces, our communities, our countries, and through our transnational social justice and global sustainability networks.
So with that in mind, I would love to extend a huge welcome to Shu Matsuo Post for joining us as today’s guest on Diversity rocks innovation!
Shu Matsuo Post: Hi Jackie, thank you for such a warm welcome and introduction. I’m glad to be here today,
Jackie Steele: Thank you for joining us and I’m so excited to share so much about what you have been doing in Japan and also elsewhere, and just your international efforts to really bring a different lens to the way that empowered masculinity and positive masculinity can really just be a game-changer for equality and diversity and equity and for innovation, frankly, within the family and even within the family registry in Japan. So there’s so many things we’re going to dive into today. Before that maybe I could just ask you to share what you think to be the core pieces of what you would like people to understand about yourself and your identities and what you’ve been up to lately.
Shu Matsuo Post: Yeah. Again, thanks for that intro and I’m so excited to be here. Being part of this amazing wonderful series. So I’d say my area of expertise is gender equality focusing on positive masculinity, like you mentioned. And some of the audience members might be wondering why a man is talking about feminism and gender equality, isn’t that a women’s issue? Well, here’s my story: So I’m a Japanese national who has spent time in Japan, the US and Hong Kong. And I’m also a husband and a new father.
Jackie Steele: Congratulations.
Shu Matsuo Post: And I consider myself a feminist and a feminism advocate. So that’s my personal background. And I recently published a book where you wrote that lovely, wonderful foreword too.
Jackie Steele: That was my pleasure. I was so excited to read your book, that I just wanted to do everything I could to amplify it.
Shu Matsuo Post: Yeah. And I’m excited to be your thought partner of enjoi DNI and talk more about positive masculinity and feminism from a male perspective, especially as a Japanese man.
Jackie Steele: Well I was so excited to meet you because I had been working with another thought partner in Canada in Vancouver; Jake Stika, who I also introduced to you and lovely to see that flourish between the two of you, but he’s very active with an organization called Next Gen Men that are really moving the dial on men’s leadership for positive masculinity as well. And so I had this thought partner in Canada, but I hadn’t found a Japanese national man who was a thought partner and a change agent on these issues.
So when I learned that you were speaking for Her Story that was put out six or eight… oh my gosh, that’s a long time now, quite a few months ago, last year, and that you and your spouse, life partner, were going to be talking about your journey of changing your last name, I just was over the moon. And so that became, of course, a very first entry point for our conversations on a topic that I’ve been passionate about for 20 years. From the beginning of my personal experience, confronting this issue in Canada and then, finding out that it was an issue in Japan and then coming back and I did my master’s in law on this topic because I wanted to know what is the gap, around how couples choose their last name and what is the legal gap? And your book, of course, you document so much more than just this legal issue. And I want to get into that first. So I’m going to bracket, the legal side of what I had been looking at, but that’s where I’ve just found it so wonderful to find not only a Japanese national man who was engaging and leading on this topic, but you went to all this personal challenge to, David and Goliath, go up against the Japanese family registry to assert your individuality and your right to freedom and to self name. That’s phenomenally inspiring. So for one, I’m just going to put that out there that is phenomenally inspiring. So maybe we can back up a couple of steps and just tell us about your journey and how you came to maybe delve into your interest in feminism and become on this journey.
Shu Matsuo Post: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. So the thing is I don’t have a, I talked about my expertise is positive masculinity and whatnot, but I don’t have a Ph.D. like you do in gender studies or masculinity, or even a degree in gender studies, but I do have an MBA and a unique story. As you mentioned, I took my wife’s name as a Japanese national and my partner is American and we got married in the US. We actually met in Hong Kong, but we got married in the US, and then after our wedding, we moved to Japan. So when we got engaged, we decided to combine our last names to Matsuo Post. So Matsuo was my name and Post was her name and the reason.
Jackie Steele: It’s combined.
Shu Matsuo Post: Yeah, combined. So it’s like why did you say you took her name? So I’ll get there in a second. So we wanted to keep our identity because that was important to us, right? You have so much identity, you attach your identity to your name. So we both acknowledged that that was an important thing.
And while having, we wanted to keep a sense of unity as well, because we wanted to have children in the future and we wanted them to have the same last name. So that was our choice, and I think other married couples might have other thoughts and that’s totally fine, but that was our choice.
And the day after we got married, we changed our last name at a city hall in San Diego, where we got married, and the process was very simple and easy. It probably took less than 10 minutes to officially change our last name. So I was like, okay, that was pretty cool. And after our honeymoon, we actually moved back to Japan and I decided to change my name as a Japanese national.
So I wanted to go through the same process and I thought, to be honest I thought it was going to be simple and easy, like it was in the US but boy, I was very wrong.
Jackie Steele: Can I ask one question when you, so you’re in the United States as a, are you a permanent resident or are you a visitor?
Shu Matsuo Post: No. So every time I go back, I’m a tourist basically.
Jackie Steele: So you didn’t have to change your name legally with the United States government side? Just she did, because she was a national in the United States. Is that correct?
Shu Matsuo Post: Yeah. So on the marriage certificate I am officially Matsuo Post. My last name is…
Jackie Steele: So you put it on the marriage certificate?
Shu Matsuo Post: Yeah, marriage certificate as well, but I do have some identification cards and stuff in the US and I haven’t changed those yet. They’re all Matsuo. So I have a driver’s license in California, other credit cards and stuff. I haven’t changed those yet.
Jackie Steele: I imagine if you show the marriage certificate though, they just morph it forward because that’s fairly standard.
Shu Matsuo Post Yeah, I think so. Yeah.
Jackie Steele: Okay. Interesting. And then you came back to Japan.
Shu Matsuo Post: Came back to Japan.
Jackie Steele: And how many hundred steps and hoops did you have to jump through administratively?
Shu Matsuo Post: Very many, and to be honest, I didn’t know too much about the Japanese law. So like 夫婦別姓（Married couple with a different surname) it’s not allowed and I had heard of it, but I didn’t know that was actually a thing still in 2017. So I was like, oh wow. Okay. And then the person at the city hall told me that I can’t even combine last names with my spouse.
Jackie Steele: Did they say why?
Shu Matsuo Post: Yeah, because you have to have either the husband’s name or wife’s name, nothing in between
Jackie Steele: Ok, so full stop on combinations.
Shu Matsuo Post: Exactly. So in Japan, for those of the audience members who might not be familiar with the Japanese law, inevitably because of this, about 96% of the wives end up taking the husband’s name in Japan, which kind of makes sense and I think all over the world too, the number is probably quite similar
Jackie Steele: Countries that have this common law, so in Britain, Canada, United States, and everyone that follows the British common law tradition, that’s where the British custom of Patrinomy began. And so it’s through the common law that you would be customarily through patrinomy, be customarily known by your spouses’, your husband’s name, or you could actually do the alternative. You could actually take customarily, be known by your other name, your spouse, your wife’s name, but it was custom. It didn’t have force of law. And so this was the thing that I found so interesting is it took on the force of law and became understood to be law when it was just a custom and it was absolutely free choice. Individuality framework. But over time it became so prevalent that administrators and bureaucrats in Britain and Canada, the United States, assumed that women were forced to take the name of their husbands. So different legal battles in Canada. We can talk about that later. I want to first delve in.
So in Japan, it’s not so much this custom of patrinomy, but it is actually the family registry, right? The family registry in the civil code. From 1896, really, it’s quite recent. If you think about it, that’s only the last 120 years, I would say, that really mandatory, this law has this, the civil code obligation has been in effect of forcing couples to have a shared surname. Did they tell you how to challenge it or did they just send you away?
Shu Matsuo Post: Yeah, they did actually, because I was so determined. I was like, no, I’m going to do this. I’m not going to give up. So I asked the person what I could do. And he was nice enough to tell me to go to the family court and deal with it there. So I did, I went to the family court thinking, family courts for, usually people, couples that are getting divorced.
So I was like, man, we just got married two weeks ago and I’m already going to a family court, such a weird feeling. But I talked to the judge and pleaded my case that I basically needed to do it. Kind of made up a reason that it was an important identity for us. And, whenever we travel it’s important to have the same last name or whatever that might be.
But I totally respect people who choose not to have the same last names as well, but that was my pleading to the judge. And the judge told me that, since I married a foreign national, I could ask my spouse to change her name first because she’s from a different country.
So that’s what she did. And what ended up happening was I literally took her new name, which is Matsu Post.
Jackie Steele: So in the States, had she not already put in the process to be a Matsuo Post?
Shu Matsuo Post: She did in the marriage certificate.
Jackie Steele: But the judge didn’t take that to be proof?
Shu Matsuo Post: Right, she had to change her passport. So yeah, we came to Japan literally two weeks after we got married.
Jackie Steele: So she doesn’t have the updated passport under the new married surname.
Shu Matsuo Post: Yeah, so she had to go to the embassy, the US embassy in Tokyo and all that stuff. And I took her passport to the family court and proved like, hey, she changed her name. So this is actually her last name now. Can I take her name?
And then they said yes, and then the process took a few months after that. And yeah, that’s how my name got changed. And, if I married another Japanese national, I wouldn’t have been able to do this because yeah. Which is not fair either. So I’m obviously all for 選択的夫婦別姓 it means…
Jackie Steele: Individual choice in married last names, right?
Shu Matsuo Post: Yeah. Names are so important and it’s up to the individuals and it’s up to the couples to decide what they want to do, not the government, right? Not the law. So that’s my take on it, obviously.
Jackie Steele: Yeah, and I applaud this, tremendous administrative hurdles that you were willing to go to and going to court and obviously Tina also having to go to update her passport so that there’s proof beyond the marriage certificate and then changing all of her ID, I imagine, right? Foreign registration cards or the residency cards and all of the documents that then have to follow in every single time you have to redo. You redo it all once, presumably to update all of those administrative pieces of ID that are so important.
But then after she does hers, then it’s you still have to do all of yours, but it’s still an exception to the rule because you happen to be married to a foreign spouse. And this is one of the challenges in Japan, there’s so much rule making by exception, which is quite different, I would say from the common law tradition and what we see in terms of Canadian constitutionalism, where we have a constitutional precedent come out that affects everything below that might be of a similarly situated case. And so that Supreme Court decision really echoes down to the lower courts. Often in Japan through the civil code system, that doesn’t happen. So having to go to court each and every time to try each and every different possible scenario of what’s coming forward as a problem or a gap in the law.
And you don’t get the benefit of having these precedents that have strong sort of resonance to allow the adjustment of the system and of law to be like a living law that supports the population. It supports the democracy. It supports the changing times because the new interpretations are aligning with the values that really should be brought forward as a democratic society honoring individuality.
And we know that’s the case for democracies. The premise is that the family unit is no longer the baseline unit of a society anymore if you are a democracy. Now, the base unit is an individual. And so there’s this disconnect that I see and that I’ve been looking at for now 25 years and looking at Japan, is article 13 of the Japanese constitution is in some ways, this affirmation around respect for individuality, but the family law system and the family registry system just flouts that, with respect to surnaming, absolutely does not honor that the individual marrying, people, citizens get the right to choose their last name.
From my perspective, it’s been disappointing to see different Supreme, high court decisions and the grand bench of the Supreme court in Japan, not upholding that there’s discrimination against women who are, like you say, 96%, before it used to be 98%…
When I was looking at it 20 years ago, it was 98, 99% of women always changing their last name. Now he’s 96. So there’s a little bit of a wiggle room of maybe 3 to 4% of men who are willing to change their names and are not so attached and what I found fascinating, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this;
One of the things that Japan struggles with is declining birth rate, and you have fewer children, and you have more single children, single child syndrome, right? Single children in a family unit are supposed to carry on their family line and their family last name. So this tradition of carrying on your family line and your family last name, when you have a whole bunch of families that only have one child, when those one single children, only children, marry another only child, there’s a real challenge on which family heritage, which household heritage gets to continue. If you can only have one be accommodated, right? Now I realize the way that you’ve blended, and your choice of blending means that you get to keep both heritage, right? Like the heritage from both your spouse and you to be passed on to children.
And I think that’s a really interesting creative option. But I think it’s hard when we in Japan, when the there’s two trends that are at cross purposes like that we want to have descendancy continuing for all these different family lines, but now you have too many only children and if they marry the law’s now undermining that tradition of carrying on the heritage and passing it on to children for both families. So have you had a chance to talk with other women or men who are engaged in this issue and what is, where do you find that your experiences fit within that context?
Shu Matsuo Post: Yeah. So in terms of picking your last name after marriage, a lot of people are starting to talk more about this and you see these articles and op-eds in newspapers, which is great. And I do think it’s one of the factors of the declining population. I know that there are many couples who are refusing to get married because of this.
And I completely understand it. Cause like I said earlier, identity is such an important part of an individual. For everyone. And because this law prohibits one of the spouses in a couple to let go of it or give up, a lot of people are just saying, forget it then I don’t want to get married, and they end up breaking up as well. So when they actually break up, they’re no longer a couple, so maybe they were planning to have kids, but they chose not to or something like that. So I’m not saying this is the only root cause obviously, but I think it’s one of the things that can help with a declining population in Japan too.
Jackie Steele: And I think in some ways, it can be a trigger conversation because maybe there are gender role expectations that they’ve neither of them really spoken about. And then when it comes to, we’re getting married, you’re taking my name, right? And maybe the other spouse, predominantly the woman, is going; yeah, really? what? I hadn’t known that was your expectation. And then there’s a whole bunch of other conversations that maybe rightly need to be had about what is your understanding of what a life partnership means. And just because I’m a girl or you’re a boy like, look, can we move beyond. I think those are important conversations to have, but it is a shame that the freedom to self-define isn’t left to that couple to deal with and then talk to each other about their wishes.
Because the government, I think, really has no business determining those things. And moreover, it’s actually again, another facet where the family registry undermines the household security and household sustainability. And I’ll just speak from a personal example. Even if we take common law status, common law relationships have no legal standing.
So if you are choosing to stay outside of that legal, protected privilege, and that’s for both obviously same-sex couples, as well as heterosexual couples, all of those couples are left outside of legal recognition, and they’re not recognized as family members. And this is a huge risk when you have things like, and so the first time I was really confronted with this was, back in Sendai in 2011, I was in a same sex relationship.
I had a baby, we had a child and triple disaster hits and we are not a family. We are not recognized as a family. So if ever I had died, I having been the birth parent, there was no legal tie back to the individual who of course was the other parent in our daughter’s life.
So it just puts you into this legal limbo and in a disaster prone country, like Japan, you cannot get access to any information on a family member unless you’re legally recognized as family. So during the global pandemic, now we’re dealing with a global pandemic, common law couples learned you don’t have the right to call up a hospital and get information about their spouse.
They’re not legally recognized. They’re outside of the boundaries. And so it creates so much risk. So much risk, so much potential trauma and exacerbates what is already a horrible situation in a way that the law could be an ally and could be providing empowerment to couples and empowerment stability to families, which is what the role of the law is supposed to be.
Law is supposed to be emancipatory in a democracy. It’s not supposed to punish you. It’s supposed to help really be a support to families and a support to citizens. So I think that’s so disappointing. The ideology, or maybe it’s the conservative ideology that we need to go back to, the traditional – men are the head of the household and their heritage matters and their culture matters and their family line matters.
And so everything just needs to pass through predominantly their line and women are brought intoお嫁さん (wife). You’re brought into the family. And that traditional gender role is so protected by the parliament right now that they won’t let law reform through to let the family registry be evolving and innovating to meet the needs of you, and so many other common law spouses, and so many other same sex relationships, right? There’s just no room for innovation because the old school ideology on traditional patriarchal gender is still being privileged by parliamentarians when this is a democracy and we’re supposed to have equality.
But somehow those values, those democratic equality values aren’t actually what is being followed. And I wonder how we can, so examples like yours that have been successful and then making that seen, and I just want to tell you to run for office, frankly, because we need a handover of power to young, well-educated, global minded, gender equal men and women leaders to be in politics. In the Japanese Diet. And in the 25 years I’ve been looking at the Japanese politics, that’s not emerging yet in sufficient numbers to get changed in the actual laws that get adopted by parliament. Don’t want to put you on the spot there, but I would love you to run for office. Can I launch your campaign?
I’ll vote for you. I can’t vote in Japan, but I would vote for you.
Shu Matsuo Post: I want to do whatever I can to promote equality, but I have no plans to run for office at this moment, but ask me in 10 years.
Jackie Steele: I’m just going to plant a seed, right? Because we need exactly this kind of visionary leadership, right?
To bring these different models of masculinity and different values of what needs to be brought into the law. So can you tell me a bit about your book and what your book captures in this journey? Cause you’ve had, I think we’ve skipped to the meaty part of what the output was of what your innovation in the Japanese family registry went straight to the heart of that.
But maybe to give some background context of what led up to that. To that whole awareness and mindset shift, I would suggest.
Shu Matsuo Post: Yeah. So my book, which was published about two months ago on December 1st, 2020, it’s called I Took Her Name. And it’s a book about gender and feminism in Japan and actually all over the world.
And I decided to write this in English because I felt English was a little bit easier to write to begin with. And I thought this gender equality topic is relevant all over the world. So I decided to write in English first. But I am translating and publishing in Japanese.
Jackie Steele: Can we send one to Mori? Can we please send one to Mori, and to the Prime Minister?
Shu Matsuo Post: I’ll send like a hundred copies to the cabinet and Mori for sure. But anyway, so going back to my name changing process a little bit. So I did change my name, so that was hard enough, to go through a bunch of hoops.
And after that, obviously I had to change my name in every form of ID; passport, credit cards, email address, 保険証 (Insurance card), you name it and many women in the past have gone through this. But as a man, I had no idea how time consuming that was and how much energy that sucks out of you.
Cause I had to make adjustments like, oh man, I need to do this. I need to go here to change my driver’s license and that’s when it really hit me. I was like, oh my gosh, I didn’t know, because I was born a male and I had this male privilege and I had no idea changing your name takes this much effort, time and energy. And I just felt that it’s wrong to expect one gender to go through this.
Only because they identify themselves as women. And that was kinda like my aha moment. And that kinda got me thinking; what else is there? What other inequalities are there in this society and around the world? And that’s what really got me curious to research more about it and then think about inequalities and gender bias in our everyday life.
And what I found out ever since that moment. Have you heard of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon? Like when you buy a car, you see the same car everywhere. It’s like the phenomenon, it’s in my head and I see everything through the lens of gender.
And I saw so much and I wonder how much of it I didn’t see before because of the male privilege that I mentioned. And, people sometimes ask me like, okay, well you changed your name? That’s cool. And so what, like why do we have to care? Well, we need to care because it’s not just about me changing my name, it’s about acknowledging that male privilege exists. And if you don’t know it exists because you never paid attention to it and we need to otherwise this whole conversation of gender equality wouldn’t even start. So that’s why I wanted to write this book for fellow men
Jackie Steele: And that’s so key, right?
Because I feel like, and this is where maybe I’m slightly coming from a different angle from even within the research field that I’ve been in for political science or feminist book philosophy or those kinds of areas. I’ve found that I did a lot of thinking about democracy and democratic theory, as well as all of the different feminism or critical race studies or post-colonialism, or those like other systems of critique that it wasn’t just always gender.
It was in an intersectional understanding of gender and that training. But I even find that there’s a difference where sometimes within social movements and feminist movements and critical race movements. Sometimes we forget that we need to keep putting those responsibilities for solving these issues back on the public agenda as not just affected communities. And so affected communities know this. Affected communities know if you’re amongst the marginalized organizations or social groups advocating, you know that it’s not our burden like it’s not women’s responsibility to solve women’s inequality. We didn’t create this problem. So why is it our job to clean it up? But at the same time, because of privilege, because of male privilege in the case of maybe gender inequality, it is largely women’s organizations left to clean it all up for democracy.
When it’s fundamentally the homework of a democratic society and of the government and of political parties. And of every individual in that community to be shouldering the responsibility. So we definitely need men as our core leadership co allies, and co-leaders doing the work of bringing on greater democratization of gender relations, right? It can’t be done and accomplished just by women’s movements or feminist movements. It really has to be accomplished as a democratic project, it’s a democratic project. And this is where men’s roles are pivotal. And I certainly see it and work with a lot of different men in different countries because the democratic project is so huge, right?
And most of it is actually looking at dismantling the inequality in the law and in the policy. So it’s in our legal system, really. The whole policy and legal ecosystem through our state and our government machinery is churning out and reproducing the discriminatory laws and policies. Every year, they just keep churning it out and reproducing it and you start to go, why hasn’t gender inequality ended?
Because the government is subsidizing it through all of these new laws and policies still. And our corporations are still subsidizing that, whether they realize it or not, in the way that they use corporate policy. And there’s a lot of blind spots, and people just don’t realize those blind spots in the design of the laws and the policies, but having men engaged in these conversations and realize it’s not just an individual; oh, you wanted to change your name and then it’s done. It’s this broader system wide critique that you’re opening up through your example and inviting men into your worldview. And we often talk about the lens, like a gender equality lens, like glasses, you put that on.
And until you put that on, you kinda didn’t realize there was, and then you see it everywhere. It’s like; wow, now I see it everywhere. And same with racism and white privilege, or if it’s whatever ethnonational, cultural domination there is within each country, that’s in every country.
But until you realize that and put on those glasses, you don’t see it necessarily
Shu Matsuo Post: A hundred percent.
Jackie Steele: How does this journey unfold for you in the book?
Shu Matsuo Post: So since I saw this side of like feminist, let me back up a little bit. So if you ask me do you believe in gender equality?
Seven years ago, I would have said. Yeah. Yeah. I like that idea. I think all genders should be equal and I think it is now, isn’t it? I’d like to consider myself, someone who believes in equal things, with everything.
But if someone asked me, are you are a feminist, are you doing anything about feminism? And I probably would have said no, that word sounds a little bit too strong. Let’s just stop at gender equality, but the truth is feminism is about gender equality, promoting gender equality.
And it’s as simple as that, and I didn’t know, because I just chose not to pay too much attention to that. But this experience gave me the opportunity to learn more because I felt like I had the responsibility to share this with people who didn’t know just like me before.
And to your point, I think feminism is not just a women’s issue. Definitely not. It’s a humanity issue. And if half the population is not actively involved in trying to dismantle the patriarchy I don’t think we’ll ever achieve the equality that we need to have.
Jackie Steele: The trend would suggest you’re right.
The trend in all countries everywhere until we really have men championing this through their roles in public political leadership and through all levels, until that happens, I think you don’t see the countries that are the best performing, they really do have, a sense of men and women working together in solidarity.
Shu Matsuo Post: Yeah. And here’s the thing, many men might come to me like; hey dude what are you trying to do? Like it’s working this system is working out for men. What are you doing? Like, why are you trying to like, make the playing field equal? And I say no, it’s actually going to benefit men too.
And I got to experience it through this journey, while I was writing my manuscript as well. So what I mean by that, I believe patriarchy is the root cause of these rigid gender norms. Like men are supposed to be this way, like our gender role is strong, stoic, primary sole breadwinner, powerful, controlling, dominant, and women are the opposite. And, we’re conditioned to see that side of the spectrum as a weakness, right? So we just reject femininity and then are stuck in the man box per se. And that can be very toxic. And that’s what I call toxic masculinity as well.
If you’re just focused on being the best, like dominating, controlling, like not showing your emotions and all that stuff. If you look at the statistics of suicide rates, more men, way more men are committing suicide, even though I think more women are diagnosed with depression more easily, but they seek help.
They seek support early on. So men don’t and they end up committing suicide and killing themselves. And that’s a big issue and that’s only one of them. And what if we just take out all those gender expectations that don’t serve men, women, anyone in-between like, how free would that be?
Feminism really frees everyone like people, men included. So that’s what I experienced. Like I went through this experience of vulnerability, really being true to myself and showing who I am. Publishing my book was scary enough. I was so scared to actually send in my manuscript.
Jackie Steele: Really?
Shu Matsuo Post: Yeah. I went back and forth so many times in my head. Are you sure? Are you sure you want to do this because you’re really exposing yourself.
Jackie Steele: You’re revealing a lot about your journey and I guess your relationship with your spouse. And so that’s also very intimate and we often think that’s exclusively private, but I think maybe you could share a little bit about that.
You, obviously, the subtitle is really, lessons from my journey into vulnerability, authenticity and feminism, which is a lovely subtitle. How did you work through when you were maybe lacking courage or wanting to understand where you were, like what your previous understandings of feminism were and then how did you move and evolve to come to this view of feminism? Was it through dialogue with your spouse? Was it through conversations with other people? You document some of it in the book, but maybe how did you, cause it’s a big process of thought partnering. Thought partnering is obviously an important practice around learning and growing and vulnerability and being open to learn from somebody else.
And so how did you deal with those lack of courage moments when you were like, should I do this or should I not? Or am I on the right track? Is my understanding of feminism accurate or whatever it is that you were feeling worried about?
Shu Matsuo Post: I think the biggest piece is I was really focused on doing human, instead of being a human. So what I mean by that is I wanted to, just as a person and I still feel this way too, people want to be successful in life. And for me, the success looked like getting acknowledged by society, it’s very measurable, like getting these things, winning these things.
And I knew I had to make a lot of effort to get there to collect those things. And oftentimes, when I became emotional, that took a lot of energy out of me so I couldn’t focus on what I thought I had to do, like doing those tasks or things. So I really associated my emotions with pain or something that’s not productive.
Jackie Steele: Gets in the way of performance.
Shu Matsuo Post: Exactly. It gets in the way of performance. And I used to think that. So even dating, I wanted to, there was a period of my life where I just wanted to perform as a man, meaning like getting many dates, and I kinda looked at dating as like a number game and there was a period my life.
Jackie Steele: Kinda transactional.
Shu Matsuo Post: Very transactional. At one point, I was having fun and all, but at one point, I felt like I couldn’t even connect with my deeper self cause I was just so focused on doing my life. Like I’m supposed to be doing it.
Jackie Steele: Like the projection, like who you project yourself to be, but isn’t actually who you feel you are, but you just keep projecting success of performance.
Shu Matsuo Post: Exactly. And, I dug really deep, where does this come from? And I really think it came from my view of the gender norm, like the traditional gender norm that I thought I had to perform. Only because I was born a male.
Jackie Steele: Well we forget that men get trapped in the man box.
Shu Matsuo Post: Yeah, exactly. And I do want to give a lot of credit to Tina, my wife.
She did a really phenomenal job dismantling, untangling the box that I was in, not by just attacking me or anything with her feminist views. But very gently, slowly. And asking me questions about why I used to do the things that I did, like those traditional male behaviors and whatnot.
So she definitely dismantled my traditional view of a feminist. Like feminists are just angry women that are just attacking men and all that stuff.
There are very kind feminists, as well. And she was definitely one of them and she also is a teacher and she teaches feminism and gender and language to her students as well. So it’s her expertise and, it just happened to be, we just started to have those conversations on our dates.
And that’s when I really started my journey into feminism and I started to open up more and I started to share my struggles with her and other people in my life. And I saw, once I started to do that, I started to connect with those people more deeply. And I just started to connect with myself more deeply.
And I found a lot more meaning in that way of living than just to focus on the measurables, measurables are important, but just doing things like to succeed at my goals per se. But being a human is feeling like being here right now, being present. And connection right?
Jackie Steele: Yeah. I imagine that because you were connecting at a different level of your being, rather than the doing side, they could actually see you for who you were.
And then you get a sense of, they accept you for who you are. They like you for who you are, and you’re having a meaningful connection around who you are, which is maybe, I wonder if it’s hard to find a sense of security and confidence that, oh, they actually genuinely like and accept me if they’ve never seen you, because all they’ve seen is all the doing and the performance. They never get a glimpse of who you are. So you don’t get that sense that they actually do accept you unconditionally for who you have shown yourself to be, which gives you a greater sense of, oh, I can just breathe and relax and say, wow, like our friendship goes beyond, I can run a marathon and they think that I’m cool for that or whatever it is.
It’s not just about the performance. It’s about really just like you say the being, not the doing.
Shu Matsuo Post: Yeah, no, I couldn’t have said it better myself. That’s exactly how I felt. So I’m still in the work.
Jackie Steele: We all are always in the work. This is never ending.
Shu Matsuo Post: Yeah. I’d like to think of it as a practice. So if you stop trying, you’re going to go back to who you were before, so you gotta be constantly in the practice of being, so that’s something I’m practicing right now.
Jackie Steele: Wonderful. And I guess we’ve spoken on a lot of different topics today. You obviously have taken on a new, exciting role as a new father. Would you be willing to share just a little bit about how, I personally think that my feminism really became stronger actually and bounced back when I became a parent, when I became a mother because I realized I have a daughter and a son, and I’ll be damned if any society is going to prevent them, or either of the gender boxes, from finding really substantive wellbeing. And so it’s like the mother lion comes out and says, oh no, you’re not going to put my children in a box due to the fact that they were born into this body that happens to have a vagina or a penis because that is ridiculous. It is ridiculous, right? That we should put these boundaries on these bodies when the spirit of the individuality of our children needs to be just supported and flourished and honored.
And so for me, that was like a really, important point in my journey of saying, okay, what do I, as a diversity loving feminist, cause there’s a lot of different versions of feminism out there, which is another problem. And our myth or misunderstanding is that not everybody thinks the same version of feminism. I’ve studied at least 10 different versions of feminisms over the last 20 years. And so which one you’re self-identifying as is a journey of how you find your fit. But as far as the diversity, positive feminist mother and parent and life partner, how do I practice that? And as somebody who believes strongly in democracy, obviously, how do you practice that in our family?
So how does that enrich or change, or has it altered your view of how you’re worried about your role or how you think about your role or the beauty of the talent that you have to be like a mother, or a father lion protecting, right? Because the world out there puts our children in boxes constantly.
Shu Matsuo Post: Absolutely. It made me more of a strong advocate of feminism and gender equality, now that I’m a father. So to begin with, when my wife Tina got pregnant, we actually didn’t want to find out the sex of the baby. So we chose not to find out because that the gender reveal party should be sex reveal, actually.
It’s not gender. Cause we thought the reason people do it is because they want to put their child in the box.
Jackie Steele: And start acquiring all the blue or pink.
Shu Matsuo Post: Exactly. And we’re like, no, we don’t need to do that. That’s not something we believe because naturally the society is going to try to do that as soon as the baby’s born. So we don’t need to do that way before they’re born.
Jackie Steele: Everybody has to buy gender neutral, gender flexible, gender inclusive gifts, right?
Like just to pick something that is gender inclusive and follow the rainbow.
Shu Matsuo Post: Until we went through this whole process of childbearing and all that stuff, but we just didn’t realize how much of box ticking society’s trying to do with the gender of kids. It starts even before they’re born. So we’re constantly trying to talk to each other and say, okay, how do we want to raise our child? We have a son. That’s a constant conversation and I think I might’ve mentioned in the previous talk before, I think society has done a better job raising daughters to be more independent, strong. That’s kinda like the theme of the last decade or two, strong girls, which is good.
Jackie Steele: Maybe not so much in Japan.
Shu Matsuo Post: Maybe not so much in Japan just yet.
Jackie Steele: But certainly in North America and Europe and other places, I would say yes. In Japan, I think what I experienced through the public education system and the attitudes that my daughter encompasses. Yeah. It’s really not that prevalent in her classroom. And she finds that troubling. I think we have a lot of work to do still on that piece too, for Japan.
Shu Matsuo Post: But the gender expression piece, just embracing differences, the wider spectrum of gender expressions regardless of their gender identity identification. But boys it’s so much, still in North America too I think, the boys are very narrow. And now that we have a son, we want our son to really explore just being a human cause masculinity, femininity, those are just human qualities. Doesn’t matter how you identify yourself. So that’s something that we’re committed to just really celebrating whatever the gender expression that our son wants to have and and really advocating for that.
And childcare is so important because they’re going to be the future of our society. So we definitely prioritize education, how we raise our son, even though he’s only almost five months old. That’s a huge focus.
Jackie Steele: I think that is the democratic homework for all of us, in societies, to support all these little beautiful children. And with that, I would like to thank you for this very enriching and inspiring thought partnering out loud experiment that we’ve been able to do together today. I really enjoyed speaking with you and I do want to encourage everyone listening to please go out and get your copy of ‘I took her name.’
It is a really amazing read. Beautiful writing, such an amazing story about what I described as, I think, one man’s love of a life partner, of country and a freedom that I think is so inspiring for both women and for men. And I hope everyone will read it and learn from it.
And seek you out to be a speaker for other opportunities, because you’re a great person to inspire the world for change, particularly in Japan, but also around the world. So thank you today for this Shu Matsuo Post for joining us today. I want to thank you.
And our next guest for next week will be Casey Wall, the CEO of EQIQ, and Japan based Wall and Case. And Casey will be sharing about how to build technology for good. For the collective good, for the greater good, and also he will speak about his passion for the concept of intrinsic motivation and how that guides hiring and people happiness at work.
And I’m sure we’ll dive in a little bit also about his personal commitments and passion for supporting women’s leadership in the startup entrepreneurial spaces in Japan, where he’s been active. So please tune in for that. Once again, I’m happy to let people know that enjoi has workshops and consulting offerings that you can find online trainings on diversity, equity and innovation.
So check us out at www.en-joi.com. Shu Matsuo Post and I of course, have an upcoming collaboration that we are building for enjoi. It will be a safe space discussion for Japanese national men on gender, on diversity, on equity and on the value of feminism for men’s emancipation and for men’s freedom.
So that will be launching probably later in the year. And we look forward, I look so forward to having that and that collaboration with you, and I’m grateful to have you join our team and work with us on that.
Thank you very much for joining us today everyone.