The new chief executive of one of Japan’s larger companies sat up late into the night recently puzzling over the accounts. He simply could not work out why there seemed to be so many more people working in the office than appeared on the books.

An assistant explained it to him the next day: we don’t count the women.

Gender equality advocates and women’s groups say that, for as long as anyone can remember, the Japanese political world has done much the same — ignored the interests of half the population, discounted their talents and squandered an economic goldmine.

Those same groups believe that the August 30 general election, for which unofficial campaigning begins today, may represent the single biggest opportunity to subvert a system that feels structurally and emotionally pitted against women.

Even the Cabinet office acknowledges that there is much that needs to change. The international gender empowerment rankings are just one of many equality-focused gauges in which Japan scores badly. It stands in 54th place — behind Tanzania and narrowly ahead of Moldova.

“This is an election that has the potential to change women’s status in Japan more than any in the past,” said Ikuko Tanioka, president of Chukyo Women’s University and a member of parliament’s Upper House. “Previous elections were all about big companies and the macro-economy. This one is about real life.”

Critical policy issues that were traditionally dismissed by Japan’s parliament as “women’s affairs” have become the mainstream issues for this election, she said.

Professor Tanioka’s comments come amid a significant rise in the number of women candidates standing in the coming election: the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) will be fielding a record 35 candidates of 269 for the all-important single-seat constituencies. Its Shadow Cabinet would put women in three key policy-making roles.

“Parliament can no longer be run according to the armchair logic of old men,” Professor Tanioka said.

Few are playing down the significance of this election. The simple headline opportunity, and the one forecast by every poll, is the ousting of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) — an exhausted, nepotistic bloc of ageing politicos that has ruled for all but nine months of the past five decades.

It is the LDP’s longevity in power, say its critics, that has spawned so many of Japan’s fundamental problems, in particular the “iron triangle” of corporate, political and bureaucratic cosiness.

Less tightly defined is what will happen next. The opposition DPJ is expected to win a strong majority but it carries with it a spectacular array of reform ambitions — changes that must tackle everything from demographic catastrophe and fiscal crisis to rural decay and a healthcare system on the brink of failure.

All of these issues, say Japan’s foremost gender equality advocates, can be neatly tied together with a single focus on securing a better deal for women in the workplace and at home.

Machiko Osawa, a professor of labour economics at the Japan Women’s University, said: “So much needs to change but women are at the heart of that. We need equal pay for equal work, pension reform, daycare reform and infinitely better support for working mothers. These are all things that would make fundamental differences to the economy but the underlying problem for Japan is still one of attitude.”

Particularly in need of revolution is corporate Japan, which she condemned as a serial waster of female talent. Toyomi Fujii, the secretary general of the Tokyo Women’s Union, spends her days battling workplace discrimination that she says “is so bad there are no words to describe it”.

It remains a slender hope, but for her the election represents a chance to define the problem. “For Japan’s sake, we need a breakthrough,” she said.

Second-class citizens

— One of the longest-running discrimination cases in Japan concerns six women graduates. They were forced to work as secretaries and watch as men who joined the company at the same time with the same backgrounds went on to become managers. The case has run for 14 years

— Shintaro Ishihara, the Governor of Tokyo, once told a women’s magazine that women who had lived beyond their ability to produce children were of no use to society

— There are no female chief executives of Japan’s largest 225 companies listed in the Nikkei Index

— In one case of workplace discrimination in Japan it was found that a woman would have to work for 32 years at the same company to earn the same as a man who had been there for six years — if the two did exactly the same job

— Only 9.4 per cent of parliamentary seats are held by women — ranking Japan 131st in political participation out of 189 countries

— Only 2.5 per cent of professorial posts in science departments across national universities were occupied by women

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