Anyone reading about the failure in letting married women use their maiden names in their family registers, or watching the latest to-do over whaling, could be forgiven for concluding that nothing ever changes in Japan. Quiet currents of change, however, are running under the surface.
Not so many years ago, smoking was accepted as a matter of course everywhere, even in hospitals. Now Japan has largely become a smoke-free zone. On July 1, Osaka became the 40th of Japan's 47 prefectures to ban smoking in taxis, and Japan's universities are increasingly imposing a total ban throughout their campuses. According to the Japanese Association of School Health (Nihon Gakko Hoken Gakkai), as of the next academic year, 151 campuses at 107 universities will have imposed such bans, both to prevent secondhand smoke and to nip the smoking habit in the bud among their students.
In another quiet change, women are slowly advancing into previously all-male domains such as the railways. Commuters in Tokyo are no longer startled to see a woman checking the doors on subway platforms or to hear a nonrecorded female voice making announcements inside a Yamanote-line car.