One small group of women seems to escape the sexual discrimination that blights Japan's research system — foreigners. “Japan can be a lot more gender-neutral than people would think,” says Kathleen Rockland, an American neuroscientist who one year ago was appointed as a team leader at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Wako.

Foreigners in general are given a certain amount of leeway in Japan, and it seems that foreign women are put in a special class. They are anticipated to be strong characters, and as such are treated with a degree of respect rarely accorded to Japanese women.

Suzi Jarvis is one of the few foreign research group leaders in Japan and earned her position after working for six years at the Joint Research Center for Atom Technology in Tsukuba. She believes that foreign women, as a result of their inherent novelty, are more able to assert themselves. “I never had a problem specifically because I am a woman,” she says, adding that the threat of physical harassment — at least for foreigners — is far less in Japan than, for example, in her native England. “Not everything has been easy, but wherever you go you are going to hit obstacles, and you just have to go around them, or over them, or through them.”