HITACHI: By pledging to revitalise depopulated rural areas, Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba hopes to help his party retain its majority in Sunday`s general election.

Over 40 percent of municipalities risk extinction, according to a recent study, because of an ageing population and an exodus of young people from the countryside particularly women who wish to escape sexist attitudes.

`Outdated` firms Ren Yamamoto, 25, rejects the idea that women who move away should be held responsible for the situation. `Should indi-vidual women be blamed for that?` said the web producer who lives in the mountainous Yamanashi region.

When job-hunting, Yamamoto found companies there `outdated` compared to the capital, with a culture of `asking women to step back` in roles to support their male colleagues.

`Japan is still a society where gender roles for men and women tend to be fixed`, but in places like Tokyo women `suffer less discrimination and enjoy more options`.

Yamamoto launched an online channel to highlight why women leave their hometowns, with one contributor comparing countryside life to the 17th-to-19th centuryEdo Period. Yamamoto plans to submit testimonies from her online project to decision-makers in local and central governments, which are still heavily male-dominated.

`The image of women discussed by such a parliament is far from the reality,` she said.

Nosy neighbours The insularity of rural Japan was stifling for 37-year-old Akane Tanaka Schneider, who grew up in Niigata and now runs a small business on the outskirts of Tokyo.

`One thing I felt negative about while living in the countryside was that the community is too watchful of what you do. Forexample, I was told that at a certain age I should be married and have children,` she said. But she had her own ideas about her career, and about starting a family at the `right time`.

`I was lucky to grow up in an environment where it was natural for me to make my own decisions,` including periods spent abroad or working for an NGO, she said.

`But when you look at the whole of Japan, a majority of women don`t seem to have that,` and instead are pressured by social norms to get married and have children.

One issue, debated by politicians, that interestsTanakaSchneideristhatJapaneselaw requires married couples to share a surname in practice, almost always the man`s.

Tanaka Schneider said she `hates` the idea of changing her name. `I would feel my life and career was being denied`.

Male-dominated politics To change, Japan needs more women in politics, says Kaori Ishikawa, 39, an assemblywoman and mother-of-two in Hitachi, a city in rural Ibaraki. Ishikawa was brought up there but attended high school in the more urban next-door region, then college in Tokyo, which had more job opportunities after graduation.-AFP