Japanese Women

TOKYO -- Japan's 74 million women, long regarded as oppressed victims of one of the world's most male-dominated societies, are gaining power over their lives faster than women anywhere else, some social scientists say."The position of the woman in the Japanese family has come 180 degrees in the last 15 years," says Sumiko Iwao, a Keio University social psychologist. "And yet nobody's taken a serious look at how radically it's changing the society."Indeed, what emerges is a picture that stands on its ear everything most foreigners -- and many Japanese -- think they know about Japanese women.

TOKYO -- "The cry of Japanese women is that enough is enough!" the new head of the Japan Federation of Employers' Organizations declared.In the pressures of Japan's company-dominated lifestyle, Eiji Suzuki wrote, too many women find that their husbands are rarely at home to help, so, "having children is too much of a financial, physical and psychological burden."Mr. Suzuki is neither a child-welfare crusader nor a feminist. He is the head of one of Japan's small innermost circles of power-packed business federations.

TOKYO -- This land of high tech and recurring health fads is preparing, with no little trepidation, for a medical invention the rest of the industrialized world adopted three decades ago.The pill, the small hormone tablet that has been profoundly changing both personal lives and national population curves in other societies since the 1960s, is expected to get Ministry of Health approval later this year for use as a means of birth control.Akira Kawahara, assistant director of the ministry's New Drugs Division, said last week that the first pills could be on the market by late 1991.