Tokyo -- When Ginko Sato landed her first job in the 1950s, the only person who genuinely welcomed her was the other woman in her office, a secretary who was relieved she would have help serving tea to colleagues and guests.
Sato has come a long way since then -- she's now on the board of directors at Hitachi Ltd., one of Japan's top electronics manufacturers. But few other women in Japanese society have advanced as far. Sato is one of just two female board members at the 27 Japanese companies that are members of Fortune's Global 200 list.
Sato blames old-style thinking that she says remains entrenched in the corporate culture of the world's second-largest economy.
"People in management positions are all middle-aged men who can't get beyond their old-fashioned thinking," said Sato, a soft-spoken 70-year-old. "They don't want to use women who, they fear, will get dragged down by family commitments. Given equal ability, they'd rather go with a man."
The life stories of Sato and Sakie T. Fukushima, a board member at electronics and entertainment giant Sony Corp., underscore how difficult it has been for women to advance at Japanese companies and how only a select few, with outstanding education, talent and drive, can hope for success.
A survey released in October by Corporate Women Directors International, a U.S. nonprofit organization that promotes the participation of women on global boards, found Japan ranked at the bottom of the list among nations with female board representation at Fortune Global 200 companies.
The survey mentioned a third woman board member at Nippon Life Insurance Co. But Shigemi Kanamori, whose name sounds female, turned out to be a man. That translates to less than 1 percent representation.
The United States led the list with 17.5 percent of board seats held by women. All 78 U.S. companies in the Global 200 have at least one female board member, led by grocery store chain Albertson's Inc. with 50 percent female representation.
But even after reaching the pinnacle of business power, woman board members still face inequalities in Japan.
Both Fukushima and Sato, for example, are external board members. That would be a plus in the United States and many countries, where independent non-executive directors are the norm. But it's a minus in countries such as Japan where "inside" directors, or senior management that rose up within the ranks of the company, wield far more power, according to the Corporate Women Directors International survey.
For the most part, Japanese women executives tend to have started their own companies or are restricted to lesser companies, including retailers, cosmetics and food companies and other services -- at least for now.
Job-hopping, which could have been a boon for ambitious women, is still relatively rare at Japan's major companies, where employees are groomed over decades for executive posts.
Japanese women, increasingly hired since the 1980s after legislation ensuring sexual equality in employment, are only recently starting to move up the corporate ladder.
"Companies are trying to add female board members because they need diversity. But that doesn't really mean the position of women has improved. It's an important step. But women who've risen internally within the company have to start joining boards," said Fukushima, 55, who is regional managing director for Japan at Korn/Ferry International, a U.S. executive-recruitment company.
Just a few years ago, Fukushima's clients were skeptical about the ability of women to command respect in the male-dominated world of Japanese business, she recalls. These days, they recognize that women have the talent, she said.
There's no question Sato and Fukushima are both extraordinary women.
But each took a different approach in overcoming the obstacles of a sexist society: Sato armed herself with a nationally recognized credential; Fukushima shaped her career at American companies.
When Sato graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1958, she couldn't even apply for a job in the private sector. Those jobs were closed to women. So she become a career bureaucrat to get her foot in the door.
The only ministry then hiring women was the Labor Ministry -- only because it had orders from the U.S. Occupation after World War II to do so. Sato eventually rose to assistant minister and was appointed ambassador to Kenya in 1991.
Fukushima, meanwhile, was educated at Harvard and Stanford, in addition to her schooling in Japan, and started as a Japanese instructor at Harvard.
The network of acquaintances she acquired through her campus life and her husband, Glen S Fukushima, a California native and former deputy assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Japan and China who now is co-president and representative director at NCR Japan Ltd. Those contacts were key to her moving smoothly through job hops from consultant to executive-search expert.
"My husband is someone who believes in my potential. He thinks even more than I do that I can do so much. We're the same age, married after we graduated and built our careers together," said Fukushima, who sports demure mannerisms evocative of traditional Japanese femininity despite her modern business acumen.
Fukushima's and Sato's lives also illustrate the problems women here face in balancing family and career.
The nation's birthrate now averages 1.29 per woman -- a record low for Japan and far short of the 2.13 average in the United States, according to Japanese and U.S. figures.
Like many successful Japanese working women, Fukushima does not have children. And she probably wouldn't have achieved her career if she had children, she says.
Sato says raising her two children was the biggest hardship she ever faced. For years, every yen she earned went into paying for live-in help.
"I decided to view it the same way as starting a business. In the beginning, any enterprise is going to be in the red, but that's OK as long as it turns a profit after a while," she said. "I just wasn't going to quit."
