Is culture a blanket excuse for bad behavior? Just because a country has a history of doing something doesn't make it worth respecting. Bad things are bad no matter how long they've been practiced.
Human rights should be universal and not something that should be limited just because you were born a certain way in a certain place.
Why is it that you think so?
Why is it that your definition of human right, which seem to include being able to occupy that board of directors, should apply to anyone else?
It was American culture to not let women vote, to keep them as stay at home parents, to load them up with children constantly to build our families. That doesn't mean that that treatment was right.
But, as for the board of directors, women have been working full time in professional roles in Japan for decades now. Japan, to this day, still has famously sexist workplace culture. More than half of all adult women in Japan are employed, yet even those with college degrees have a hard time finding full time employment, compared to men with the same degrees from the same schools. Women are not treated equally in the workplace in Japan. 2nd highest gender pay gap in the OECD, behind only Korea.
"Be sexist towards women" isn't something you get a pass on just because it's your culture. This isn't moral relativism. Human beings are human beings, and shouldn't be discriminated against because of their gender, skin color, etc. Unless you want to argue that women are biologically less suited for being members of a companies board?
This requirement tells Japanese companies they need to do one of three things, if they want foreign investment: They need to either find qualified women within their company and promote them and bring them onto the board as they should have been doing all along, find qualified candidates from outside, or begin actually hiring and developing women in their company if they have not been doing so.
They have no obligation to share your view on any of these things.
Stating "sexism is bad" is indeed not moral relativism, it's idealism. Saying that because america did things a certain way, Japan should follow is moral imperialism.
Even if your argument were based on some objective metric (and not an ideal) they still wouldn't have any reason to care. That's what I mean by moral relativism. Forcing your views of social dynamics on them is direspectful to their views and autonomy as a society.
Nothing you can say is ever going to convince me that FGM is OK or anything except horrific.
Can you name any events? I would be hard pressed to find any where anything happened "on their own" (and that is not specific to Japan). No country is completely isolated, not even Japan during Sakoku.
For the to last major ones, I wouldn't call "On their own" an entirely accurate description: Being on the losing side of WWII and under occupation, and negotiating at gunpoint a treaty with US to end the self-isolation of Japan.
They're not asking for 50%, and just 1 woman representative realistically would not change the culture so much.
I've never been on the board of a large public corporation....but I've been in all-male military units, and nothing starts to tear up unit cohesion quite like a female getting dropped into the mix. Over the past 10 years in Japan, I definitely see some parallels between the two cultures. The Japanese are very big on "shared experience" as a means of bonding as a team. Maybe in a team of young entrepreneurs adding a single female would make fewer waves, but on leadership team of 40-70yo established Japanese businessmen? I would not expect it to go smoothly. At all.