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The government is aiming for 55% of women to continue working after having their first baby by 2020, up from 38% in 2005, sources familiar with the matter said Monday. Under its employment policy to be included in its growth strategy, the government will also aim to improve employment conditions for women and reinforce growth amid the declining birthrate and the aging of society.

The government will also seek to raise the ratio of fathers taking childcare leave to 13% from 1.23% in 2008 and to increase the rate of annual paid holidays taken by employees to 70% from 47.4% in 2008, the sources said.

The government will aim to reduce the number of part-time workers to 1.24 million, about 40% lower than in 2003, when it hit a peak of 2.17 million, the sources said.

The goals were agreed Monday at a working group meeting of government officials, experts, and labor and management representatives. The working group will work out the details of how to achieve the numerical targets.

Do fictional characters have human rights? Feminists working with the Japanese government apparently think so.

From a series of documents published on the Japanese cabinet’s Gender Equality Bureau, who may already be familiar:

"Media depictions of sexual violence against women constitute a violation of the human rights of women, and are a major obstacle to the creation of a gender-equal society."

"Where violent or sexual media depictions of women are concerned, we must promote public understanding of this as a “human rights violation,” and ensure media are subjected to voluntary restraints."

"Voluntary censorship of media depictions of sexual violence should be promoted, and laws including censorship of virtual sexual violence against women in DVDs, video and PC games should be considered.
Rarely has the concept of “human rights” been abused so egregiously as by the latest wave of feminist inspired moral panic over two dimensional media."

In fact even the most cursory consideration reveals censorship according to “virtual human rights” could easily threaten a complete elimination of freedom of expression – if fictional women and children have human rights, by extension even men may have them too, meaning any story dealing with nonconsensual violence against men (practically all fiction of any interest) involves massive human rights violations.

Indeed, any criticism of the brave defenders of the rights of non-existent people might as well be condemned as promoting human rights violations.

The fundamental irony of using the rubric of “human rights” to rob people of one of their most fundamental rights seems lost on the advocates of this new wave of moral hysteria – hardly surprising considering it appears they have simply decided to parrot a serious sounding UN buzzword in the hopes of giving their extremist writings an air of legal credibility, with no appreciation of the ridiculousness of what they are saying.

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