Yumi Ishikawa gave her speech at the #KuToo festival. (Image via Kyodo News)

Japan's #KuToo Movement Giving Women a Leg-Up in the Workplace

TOKYO – A festival as the extension for #KuToo online movement was held in Tokyo. The festival, which came out with the tag-line that is questioning whether women can go to work in sneakers, is a plight to many women.

#KuToo is a movement started by Yumi Ishikawa. She is an actress and writer, but has a part-time job at a funeral parlor. Ishikawa worked as an usher and it is required for her to wear closed-toe heels between 5 until 7 cm high. At the end of the day, she got bleeding pinky toes. However, she noticed that her male colleague was able to wear light flat shoes during their shifts. This frustrates her and back in January, Ishikawa tweeted about the unfairness of the dress code. The tweet eventually had 67,000 likes and almost 30,000 retweets. It then made her to create the #KuToo movement.

It turned out that the petition for women to be able not wearing heels at work has over 18,700 signatures. Some of the supporters give reasons that it would be dangerous to wear heels while there’s a sudden earthquake happening. It will threaten the women’s lives.

Men were participated on the festival by wearing high heels. A shoemaker, Jun Ito, stated that it would be annoying if people forced him to wear heels, because it feels unstable and his feet got sweaty.

Source: https://japantoday.com/category/national/feature-japan's-kutoo-movement-giving-women-a-leg-up-in-the-workplace