July 3rd, 2009, Chancellor MIZUTA Noriko gave a report as the Vice Chair of the Chiba prefecture joint-committee for the advancement of gender equality at the General Meeting of the Council for Gender Equality. The General Meeting was held at the Prime Minister’s Residence, inviting ten regional committees to give reports on local efforts. (See details below)

The meeting brought together Obuchi Yuko, Minister of Gender Equality in charge of state measures to counteract the declining birth rate, Bando Mariko, director of the cabinet bureau on gender equality, the members of the council for gender equality, ten regional committees, as well as people from gender equality centers from throughout the country. Reports were made on general activities and the revision of the basic plan for gender equality, the 2010 APEC WLN held in Japan, and the workings of recent gender equality measures.

Chief Cabinet Secretary, Kawamura Takeo urgently called for efforts to materialize a gender equal society step by step by gathering national and local power together. In the end, all members made a declaration calling for the formation of a “national-local gender equality promotion network,” and made appeals to the numerous news media gathered there.

The organization of the Chiba prefecture joint-committee for the advancement of gender equality is divided into three fields between industry, regional government and education and has 71 organizations registered with it. The committee chair is Otsuka Hiroshi, from the business world and chair of the Chiba business association, while Chancellor MIZUTA Noriko, was selected to be the vice committee chair from the education world.

As last year’s objective, a symposium on the activities of spreading the WLB was held with the joint-sponsorship of the Cabinet’s Gender Equality Bureau on January 15th. Entitled, “Message from Chiba, A work life- balance gentle on people,” the symposium was held at the Hotel Port Prince in Chiba, aiming to from Sweden, a leading country in gender equality with the highest ratio of female employment, and drew about 400 participants. It opened with a greeting by bureau chief Bando of the Cabinet’s Gender Equality Bureau, was coordinated by Kashima Takashi, a professor at Jissen Women’s University, and had panelists such as Chiba prefectural governor Domoto Akiko, Eva Lotta Sjostedt, who is advancing efforts at Swedish corporations to promote work sharing in Chiba, Ando Tetsuya who operates an NPO called Fathering Japan that supports fathers’ participation in parenting, delivering concrete reports and information from a variety of perspectives, with the venue often becoming quite lively at times.

As an especially effective effort of Chiba, a DVD of street interviews about WLB was made through the cooperation of Josai International University’s Media Studies Department, and then shown at the meeting. After the screening,“My Work Life Balance Declaration” signed by all the participants was read at the podium by Otsuka.