School Uniforms and Gender in Japan

Please review my essay. Thank you!

Did you know one in ten in Japan identify themselves not as neither female nor male but as LGBTQ+ (stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and others). However, there are many laws and policies in Japan that only treat people based on two genders, male and female, such as marriage laws, regulations on uniforms, ... How much suffering have they been when they are treated as a society’s outcast? So, today I’d like to talk about school uniforms and gender issues in Japan.

In Japan, the typical uniform pattern is the military style uniform for boys and the sailor style for girls. Students are required to wear uniforms according to the sex they were assigned at birth, female, or male. For me, I was born with a female biological sex, and I recognize myself as a female. So, wearing a skirt and showing my femininity is my happiness. However, for some students like transgenderstudents, uniforms can be a nightmare. Imagine if you were a boy and you had to wear a skirt to school every day. It's a bad feeling, isn't it? Like me now, I’m wearing a boy uniform, I feel embrace and not comfortable because what I’m wearing force me pretending a person I am not. It’s just not a feeling, the more important issue when students must wear clothes not suitable to their gender is that they are dispossessed of the right to live as themself and aren’t accepted by society.

As I mentioned before, there is about 10 percent population in Japan belongs to the LGBTQ+ community. However, a survey conducted in June 2021 at schools across the country indicated that, when asked, “Are there LGBTQ+ students at your school?”, more than 55% of students surveyed said that they do not know, and 15.4% said that "no". Maybe they don't care enough about their friends? Or is it LGBTQ+ students hide themselves so well. No, rather they were forced to hide. “Uniforms deny themself who they are.”

Since 2015 many movements to spread using “Gender-neutral uniforms”, which allow all students to dress in a way that expresses how they see themselves, have taken place across Japan. As a result, more and more high schools have been introducing some pants version of the uniform for girls. By 2020, about 600 schools across the country have adopted Gender-neutral uniforms. 600 schools, a number that seems large. However, there are more than 10,000 schools across the country, that number only accounts for less than six percent. Moreover, the skirt version of the uniform for boy has almost never been applied. Why has the adoption of Gender-neutral uniforms been so slow and unequally in Japan? The main reason is stereotypes. A professor of Kwansei Gakuin University, Chieko Sakurai, pointed out that in the Meiji period, uniforms for boys were designed based on military uniforms, followed by uniforms for girls, which is the foundation of today's uniforms. Boys were educated to be strong to support a wealthy nation and powerful army, and girls were educated to be good wives and wise mothers to support their male partners. After the war, even though the school became coeducational, the separate uniforms boys and girls still symbolize the individual image of each. Rigid thinking on gender like that makes the application Gender-neutral uniforms in Japan to be difficult. For this reason, we should change our mind about gender. Stop separating everything based on female and male because we have more than five genders. Everyone needs to be free to express their personality and live up to who they want.

To conclude, I once again restate my view that uniforms is the barrier that prevents students from being able to live as themselves. And freedom to choose the uniforms is one of the ways that helps all the students to have a happier life. I believe that all conceptions that have been considered true aren’t always correct. They will be changed by the way we think. Now skirts are defined the women’s clothes but as you know, more than 1000 years ago samurai also wore clothes look like skirts, and they looked cool. Therefore, one day it won't be unusual for men to wear skirts to the street and maybe skirts for everyone will become a trend in the next few years.