I'm not a mother and certainly not a good cook, but I can certainly identify with all the women who reacted to the "potato salad tweet" that went viral in Japan recently.
It began when a Japanese woman who goes by the Twitter handle Mitsu_Bachi_Bee recounted an encounter she witnessed at a local supermarket. An older man approached a young mother, toddler by her side, who was holding a ready-to-eat package of potato salad.
"If you're a mother, surely you can make such a trifling thing as potato salad by yourself?" said the man, as the mother looked down in shame. Mitsu_Bachi_Bee said she and her daughter promptly walked over and bought some potato salad right in front of the mother to show that it is okay.
The old man's offensive mansplaining triggered a wave of responses, with the tweet attracting 390,000 likes in a month. Clearly, the man had never made the deceptively simple potato salad himself. If he had, he would have known how much time it takes.
While it's hardly a dish requiring expert cooking skills, it takes time to wash, peel and boil the potatoes, make sure they aren't watery, and mix in just the right ingredients. It's not as simple as spreading butter on toast as many men might assume.
The mere fact that an old man had a strong opinion on the subject highlights the generation gap and perhaps even lingering stereotypes and insensitivity toward mothers and modern parenting in Japan.
The main sore point is the assumption that mothers are expected to always provide homemade meals, even as they juggle childcare and work. This is especially true in Japan, where married women do significantly more housework than their male spouses.
A chat with a female Japanese friend, who is also a journalist, about this incident gave me a clearer picture about Japanese society's excessive and unfair demands on mothers.
Driven by economic pressure, Japan has twice as many double-income households as single-income households. Yet, Japanese women, on average, spend five times as much time doing housework and taking care of family members as men. This is the highest ratio among 37 OECD countries, where the average is two times. Japan's 23.5% gender pay gap is also the second widest in the OECD.
Japanese society expects mothers, working or not, to be the primary caregivers, locked up in the holy land of motherhood and walled off from the working world. Amid the high emphasis on hands-on parenting, many still preach that baby food must be home-made. Mothers forced to rely on ready-made food or third-party help are made to feel guilty.
With the pandemic shaking so many core beliefs, the opportunity for change will be lost unless society can let go of its obsession with gender roles. With so many people now working from home, those chores that were mostly hidden from men are now on display for all to see. Encouragingly, more fathers are starting to pick up their kids from daycare -- and enjoying it too!
Under the slogan of "womenomics", former prime minister Shinzo Abe busily rolled out policies to advance women's status in the working world. But setting goals and targets will be useless unless the way most households are organised changes as well.
But the Japanese public already has low expectations that Yoshihide Suga, who has been chosen to succeed Mr Abe, will be a vigorous as his predecessor in fulling promises to help women "shine".
Mr Suga, 71, has vowed to carry on with the signature policies of Mr Abe, but seemed to shut the door on one of them: a pledge -- though a largely unfulfilled one -- to empower women. He has appointed two women to his cabinet -- both of them held the same posts in the previous one -- or 10% of total posts. That falls short of Mr Abe's "womenomics" goal of having women in 30% of leadership positions by this year.
Mr Suga also made little mention of policies to reduce one of the biggest gender wage gaps in the developed world during his leadership campaign.
Now people wonder if the Liberal Democrats are committed to gender equality, even after the passage of a law two years ago promoting gender parity in politics, and whether womenomics really works for Japan.
Hopefully, the increased awareness of women's roles afforded by the Covid crisis will provide an opportunity to break down old beliefs in Japanese society and prompt change after all.