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Notes -
Do modern Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have strict gender norms? All of these countries have a thriving feminist movement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism_in_South_Korea
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism_in_Japan#World_War_II
I don't think so. Saudi Arabia and to a lesser extent Turkey have strict gender norms. I recently read an interesting article about how Turkish government officials and the media ruthlessly promote family values. Apparently over 50% of Turkish daytime television is devoted to marriage shows, where they explicitly promote women getting married. Ankara’s Mayor, Melih Gökçek, has stated that a mother who considers abortion should ‘kill herself instead and not let the child bear the brunt of her mistake.’ There might have been something more in the context or translation but this was in 2012 and he only got criticized for it- he was mayor up until 2017.
I think saying modern Japan has strict gender roles is a bit like someone from Greenland arriving in Inverness and saying "this is a big city!" But then there's Manchester, London, Shanghai and Tokyo. Pre-WW2 Japan had strict gender norms. Afghanistan has strict gender roles. The West hasn't experienced strict gender roles in living memory, we don't know what they look like. This isn't to say that strict gender roles are a good or a bad thing - that really depends on what you think about the Repugnant Conclusion. But I think truly strict gender roles do work at raising fertility, even in fairly rich countries like Turkey.
Admittedly this is just me living here (in Japan), but Japan has pretty damn solid gender norms to this day. As with all generalizations of this sort, there are many many exceptions, and yes, it depends on one's definitions of strict in this case. Women still go about in frocks and heels here--and I mean college students going to class. The biggest changes I've seen in 20 years are not necessarily on the side of women--for whom the glass ceiling is still very much present and the most lucrative work to be found relatively easily is sex work (and you name it, it exists here)--but in men. Men here have slowly (at least in popular culture and what I routinely witness say, on trains) become more dandified and dainty. This could be to some degree a temporary influence of trends in South Korean pop (There's a complex relationship there--South Korean banned Japanese music entirely until 1998 and only then did the Japanese begin thawing attitudes toward K-Pop, which has since become massive here, along with Korean TV dramas). Anyway Japan is no Afghanistan to be sure but it's night and day compared to, say, Australia or the US.
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