Someday people will look back in astonishment at the way society treated women.

Women haven't always been regarded as an inferior species. In prehistoric, preagricultural Japan, archaeologists tell us, an instinctive reverence for procreation cast an aura of awe upon the bearers and nurturers of life — namely, mothers. Much later, the high culture of the Heian Period (794-1185) conferred upon well-born women property rights and general respect they subsequently lost and were not to regain until after World War II. Otherwise, the Buddhist view of Woman as a polluted being incapable of attaining salvation spread to secular society and carried the day. Warriors' power was softened by no knightly chivalry, and the corporate warriors of our own day have largely closed ranks against the female workforce, admitting so few women to executive positions as to make Japan a conspicuous international example of gender backwardness.

The weekly Aera this month published the result of its own survey of 95 leading Japanese corporations. Fifty-five of them have no female executives at all. Only six have five or more.