This introductory chapter has three objectives. The first is to explain why I chose activities of the women’s bureau as the research targets for this book. In this section, increases in the significance of women’s policy agencies in democratic industrial states from international and domestic perspectives and the Japanese women’s bureau are described. The second purpose is to examine the validity of a theory of state feminism, which predicts that a state institute could rectify gender discrimination and then could improve gender relations in the society, by comparing the other theories. The third aim is to propose an analytical framework to examine whether and how the state rectifies gender inequality. The above gives a rough framework of the book.