Purpose: To help students understand the role of basic values and attitudes in making decisions about who and how individuals will be allowed to participate in an economy.
"We're angry because the government hasn't heard what we've been saying," Japan Socialist Party leader Takako Doi told thousands of cheering women on the campaign trail last July. Her remarks obviously found an echo in large sectors of a staunchly traditionalist society in which the place of women in public has been several deferential paces behind men.
The presence of Doi, 60, at the helm of the country's largest opposition party and the record 22 successful female candidates in the July elections for the Diet's Upper House suggest that Japanese women are making appreciable strides out of the household and into positions of authority. Onna no Jidai, the era of women, has become a catchphrase implying that it is women, not men, who have become dynamic and fulfilled members of society.
That hearts-and-flowers euphoria, however, glosses over a reality that is emotionally wrenching and not very rosy. The movement of large numbers of women into the work place has created a host of additional problems for females, largely having to do with lagging acceptance of their new roles. Nearly 50% of women work outside the home, but sexual stereotyping and continuing unofficial discrimination hold most of them back. They have made few inroads into the important halls of power; the bureaucracy, government and major corporations. The average monthly salary for women working full time is $1,143, 60% that of men. But for one sector, mostly middle-class housewives, Onna no Jidai has brought a shift, as they pass up the man's world of work and explore new ways to balance family responsibility with a life outside the home.
Japanese women who are not satisfied to be housewives must overcome attitudes deeply embedded in the culture. According to a 1987 government survey, more than a third of women and half of men believe a man's place is at work while a woman's is at home. Japan's economic success owes much to that idea. Because their wives remained dutifully at home, men have been able to put their energy into long hours at work - plus hours of business entertaining afterward.
As recently as three years ago, the government found that Japanese men spent an average of only eleven minutes a day on domestic chores, including child rearing. The expectation that women must run households unaided has kept many career women from getting married. "I can't cook and prepare a bath for a husband with this job," says Misako Kaji, 31, a diplomat in Tokyo's Foreign Ministry.
Not many women achieve top jobs. Among Japan's 750 career diplomats, just 20 are female (only three of them married). Less than 1% of management-level bureaucrats are women. Females hold seven, or 1.4%, of the 497 occupied seats in the Lower House of the Diet. Some 25 million women, 40% of the labor force, work, but women make up only 10% of students graduating in law and economics, the white-collar groups favored for hiring by government ministries and major corporations.
Discrimination against women in hiring and working conditions was banned by the Diet in 1985. Since then, most Japanese companies have launched more women onto the "male" career track, using job rotation, training and promotion opportunities. The booming economy has helped, but the response of women has been lukewarm. Many still opt for the traditional secretarial track, and some leave their upwardly mobile white-collar jobs after only a few years. Says Tomoko Shibata, executive director of the Japan Institute of Women's Employment, a government-funded organization that promotes career opportunities for women: "The number of women who really want to work like men is still very low."
The forces that oppose such a choice are intense, many women complain, both at home and on the job. Sakiko Maejima, 47, who has been writing for health publications for the past 17 years, says, "I still don't know if working full time is good. It's been like a scene of carnage." One daughter accused Maejima of neglecting her and ran away from home. Mariko Mitsui, 41, today a member of the Tokyo metropolitan assembly, remembers how as a high school teacher she was humiliated for refusing to make tea for her colleagues. Once, Mitsui recalls, a male teacher said to a female applicant, "There are two types of women at this school - those who come in the morning and won't even make tea and those who promptly carry out such a simple task. Which type are you?" Subjected to similar pressures at a major bank, a 26-year-old resigned in anguish after two years. She reports that her male colleagues commended her, saying, "This will lead to your happiness."
A few enterprising women have found male stereotyping to be a business opportunity. In 1963 Kei Sahashi and six other women launched the Tokyo research firm Idea Bank, which provides marketing and product-development information for consumer goods targeted at women. Says she: "Business was a man's world then, but we felt, as the users of the goods, we were the best equipped to advise about product development." Today Idea Bank employs 15 workers.
Reiko Okutani, 39, who worked eight years as a flight attendant for Japan Air Lines, saw no route from that position into management. So in 1982 she and two colleagues started The R, a Tokyo-based job-placement and employee-training company for women. The R, with 30 employees and annual revenues of $6.4 million, remains an all-woman firm. Says Okutani: "I want to try to see how far we can get with just women."
Perhaps not so far as she would like. Many younger working women thought their generation would be enthusiastic about trying new jobs or starting new businesses, but, like Okutani, many have been disappointed. Says the former flight attendant: "At one point there were a lot of women interested in pursuing careers. Then they found out how hard it was and concluded that perhaps a woman's happiness is in the home after all."
Who, then, are the women cheering on Takako Doi at political rallies? Most are middle-class housewives who enjoy considerable independence because they control all household affairs, including the purse strings. High-technology gadgets have reduced the time needed for housework, and younger women are having fewer children, usually one or two. These women are devoting substantial energy to jobs and enterprises that are unlike those of their workaholic husbands. Says Mariko Bando, director of consumer statistics at the General Affairs Agency and author of several books on women: "While the housewife is radiant, the working woman is like a shadow."
One-fourth of working Japanese women have part-time jobs to increase their disposable income. Others attend school, pursue hobbies or work in the community. Says home-economics professor Keiko Higuchi of Tokyo's Kasei University: "Women took their unfavorable circumstances and turned them around to their advantage."
Junko Arimura, 40, is typical of the new "radiant" class. When she gave birth to her first child, she quit her job as a reporter for an air-conditioning-machinery newsletter. After several years as a housewife in the suburbs, she found that "the only people I spoke to were my children, my husband and the delivery man." A sale of preservative-free foods by a consumer cooperative attracted her interest because of her concern for her children's nutrition, and when that group, the Seikatsu (Livelihood) Consumer Cooperative Movement, asked her to work on its newsletter, she quickly said yes.
The Seikatsu group grew out of a 1965 movement by 200 Tokyo housewives who decided to organize a milk-purchasing cooperative to combat rising prices. With 170,000 members nationwide, it lobbies for environmental and health measures and organizes community projects.
Arimura, who has become a director, oversees 50 people who for a small fee offer housework help, especially to the increasing number of elderly Japanese who live alone. Seikatsu has become politically active: 36 of its members sit on city councils. Two weeks ago, the Swedish Right Livelihood Society, which presents the so-called alternate Nobel Prize to innovative grass-roots-organizations and individuals, gave Seikatsu an honorary award.
Winning prizes abroad may be easier than overturning long-held beliefs at home. As Japan attempts to slow down to enjoy the fruits of its frantically built success, interests are changing. Women are playing a key role now that politics no longer seems to belong to "a faraway world of me," as Arimura puts it. In part as a result of growing female activism, the political agenda has moved beyond economic matters to include such issues as care for the elderly, consumer rights and nuclear safety.
"Our society is being forced to think about how to improve the quality of our lives, and women have already been thinking about these things" says Higuchi. Perhaps for the first time in Japanese history, women have reason to believe they will have a major role in formulating the answers to their country's emerging problems.
| This article was published in the October 23, 1989 edition of Time. It is used with permission. |
For more than a year I lived with my husband and our two young sons in a neighborhood in Yokohama called Utsukushigaoka, literally "beautiful hills." Our rented house was small but cheerful, with a backyard so tiny our sons trimmed the grass wih scissors. Wind gusted up the hills, swirling the leaves off our front walkway. A well-swept walk is a must in suburban Japan, and the wind was a wonderful convenience.
Or so I thought, until the day my kindly neighbor, Mrs. Kamimura, came over to present yet another elaborate dish she'd cooked for us Americans. She casually mentioned that in our absence she had swept the walk. I looked outside - the walk looked the same as usual - and realized with embarrassment that she, not the wind, had been sweeping away the leaves all along.
My neighbor let me know gently and indirectly that she'd been sweeping up after me, but that it was now high time I assumed this chore myself. Because I was a foreigner who could not be expected to know what was expected of me, Kamimura-san had taken it on herself to keep up the standards of the street and also to save face for me. The longer I lived in Japan, the more I realized that Kamimura-san's good deed illustrated a basic truth about Japanese life: the unquestioned and unquestionable duty to do what is expected of you and do it properly.
Foreigners stumble over many mysterious customs in Japan. What is an appropriate gift to present to your new neighbors when you move into the neighborhood? (A small towel). How do you fill your cup of sake? (Pour the other person's and hope he fills yours).
These enduring customs are an important reason why postwar Japan runs so smoothly and successfully despite profound political, economic, and social change. Customs also play a fundamental role in binding Japanese women, the sector of society least affected by these changes, to their traditional role as mother-housekeeper-wife. Training for that complex and demanding role begins early.
My best Japanese friend, Keiko Wada, and I took our 12-year-olds, Sachiko and Tommy, shopping for gym clothes at the start of the school year. Tommy went into the changing room, leaving his shoes outside the curtain. When he stepped out and walked over to me to show off his selection, Keiko whispered into Sachiko's ear. Sachiko discreetly retrieved Tommy's shoes and knelt to place them beside him. What was embarrassing for Tommy and surprising to me was perfectly natural for our Japanese friends - Sashiko was a well-brought-up Japanese girl doing the expected thing.
Some Japanese women still help dress their husbands in the morning and routinely serve them the choicest morsels from the family rice pot. And once, on a crowded bullet train out of Yokohama, I watched a harried woman in her 50s rush onto the train weighted down with suitcases, shopping bags, and various parcels. She scrambled to claim the last free seat. A moment later her husband strolled onto the train, cool and collected, and slipped into the seat his wife had saved for him. While he read the newspaper, she stood in the aisle, bags and purse still dangling, all the way to Kyoto, a two-and-a-half-hour trip.
Like the self-sacrificing wife on the train, Japanese women are expected to do all that they do with patience, selflessness - and, above all, without complaining. Linda Matsui, an American who grew up in Illinois, married a Japanese salaryman (white-collar worker), and has lived in Japan for ten years, told me about her experience of childbirth in a Japanese hospital. "The labor was difficult, and after 12 hours I asked for an anesthetic," Linda said. But her doctor, a man, gave her a scolding instead. "Be quiet and perservere!" he said. In other words, be a woman.
Quiet perseverance seems to describe the life of Shizuko Go, author of Requiem, a moving and realistic novel based on her experiences as a teenager during wartime incendiary raids on Yokohama. She published her book in 1972, nearly 30 years after the war. A biographical note states, "Marriage and raising two sons postponed her writing debut."
Popular Japanese literature abounds with stories about lengthy, solitary vigils by Japanese women performing their duty of caring for the young, the family, the elderly. Akiko, in The Twilight Years, by Sawako Ariyoshi, takes care of her aging father-in-law through his senility and physical degeneration while her husband, the old man's son, simply looks on. A character named Tomo, in The Waiting Years, by Fumiko Enchi, endures a lifetime of unfaithfulness by her husband, shocking him on her deathbed by demanding that her scorned body be dumped into the sea.
Times are changing for women in Japan, but change is slow. Most Japanese women I know say that they are raising their daughters and sons by the same rules and standards, yet I never saw a Japanese boy do for anyone what Sachiko did for Tommy in that clothing store. In the summer elections of 1989 a record number of women (143) ran for public office, greater numbers of women (65 percent of them) voted than men, and there were more women's issues at the forefront than ever before.
But Hisao Horinouchi, minister of agriculture, forestry, and fisheries in Prime Minister Sousuko Uno's government, seized the occasion to remark that Japan Socialist Party leader Takako Doi was unfit to lead because she had never been married. In a sign of the times Horinouchi had to apologize. But when Japan's first silver medalist in the 1988 Olympics, a young policewoman who competed in marksmanship, returned in triumph from Seoul, every interview I heard began with the same question: Now that you've won your medal, when do you think you'll be getting married?"
It was a friendly question. Today, as in the past, marriage is the only truly acceptable state of being for any Japanese woman or man. As a woman approaches tekireiki, the "suitable age" to marry (traditionally 23 to 25, now closer to 27), all Japan will help her find the right mate. Large companies often have marriage bureaus to facilitate introductions between single employees. Match-makers, sometimes professional, often a friend of the family, suggest suitable mates. Parents hire detectives to check out each other's families - they look for assurances of mental and physical well-being, and for signs of shady ancestors.
The Japanese aren't as superstitious as some other Asians, but even for them, 1966, the Year of the Fiery Horse in the 60-year Chinese calendar, was considered bad luck. Females born in that year are called man-eating women, hino-e-uma, literally "fiery horses." So many couples feared bearing a girl in 1966 that the official birthrate plummeted by more than 25 percent.
Many young women enroll in bridal training courses; they work on the tea ceremony or flower arranging - or if they're very modern, driver's education or even word processing. Buffing oneself up to become the ideal okusan, literally "Mrs. Interior," can be, and often is, a full-time job. Fumiyo Arai, a 23-year-old woman who lives around the corner from us, showed up regularly at our door to practice her English on our sons; she loved to play board games with our eight-year-old and would do so by the hour when most Japanese were at work. I asked Fumiyo what she did with her time since quitting her part-time job as a receptionist. She answered, "I'm helping my mother." I was puzzled until I learned that Fumiyo was a kaji tetsudai, or "house-hold helper," spending a few quiet years training to be a full-time housewife.
I don't know whether Fumiyo had undertaken any omiai - the formal meetings between virtual strangers that precede arranged marriages - but many Japanese marriages are the result of such encounters. Some go through 10 or 12 or 15 omiai without embarrassment. If either party has any objections to the other as a potential spouse, he or she is supposed to speak up quickly. No second date is assumed, but if three of four meetings take place, the couple will likely begin making wedding arrangements.
One woman I met, an English interpreter in her mid-20s who was sophisticated by any standard, called off a courtship after the third meeting. "My suitor was surprised," she told me. "By then he had assumed we'd keep meeting and eventually make it a formal engagement." She was obliged to apologize to the mediator, who had a difficult time convincing the young man's family that it was really over.
Spinsterhood remains a dreaded fate. (An only slightly outdated slang term for an unmarried woman over 25 is "Christmas cake," because the latter drops sharply in value after December 25). For wedding halls and hotels the Japanese wedding spells big business, as I saw when I visited the Tokyo Hilton's spring wedding show one Sunday afternoon. Engaged couples and their eager mothers turned out by the hundreds in their best clothes, sampling food trays and studying pricey menus. Bedazzled brides-to-be tried on the different costumes that every Japanese bride rents or buys for the greatest occasion of her life. The basic three are the age-old white kimono, the multicolored kimono, and - the favorite of all - the elaborate Western-style dress. This year's in color: fire-engine red.
Western concepts of romance play little or no part in Japanese marriage. An appropriate match of family standing and education comes first, love second. If love develops and grows, that's a bonus. But the life-style of Japanese families hardly encourages love - or even companionship. Men are out on the job from early morning until late at night, and most fathers in our neighborhood were so tired from their weekly schedules that they slept all day Sunday, their day off.
During our year in Japan, I met the husbands of only two of my friends and caught a fleeting glimpse of a third. When my English class, which met in my home, first saw my husband, a writer who often works at home, and who came downstairs on a Friday morning, they were dumbstruck. What was he doing there?
Although female salespersons sell condoms door-to-door in the most respectable Japanese neighborhoods, my women friends were puzzled when I suggested that more modern methods of family planning existed. Birth control pills are banned in Japan except for strict medicinal purposes and my friends didn't know anyone who used them. The youngest and liveliest wife in the group provided a telling insight into the pressures of urban life and the general lack of interest in improved methods of contraception. "After all," she shrugged, "there's so little change ..." It is estimated that there is an abortion for every live birth in this country, and one of the most moving sights in all Japan is the "abortion cemetery," where rows of little stone figures, often dressed in knitted caps and bibs, commemorate infants who were never born.
As an American raised to regard marriage as a union of interests, I was constantly surprised at the way wives led lives separate from their husbands. One worldly and well travelled friend whose husband worked in another city for months at a time (a situation so common that there's a special word for it - tanshin-funin) claimed she and most others in the same boat didn't really mind. "It's just one less person to arrange my life around," she said.
The baby sitter is practically unknown in Japan - couples simply don't go out together. Women do. The mothers of my older son's class got together at least four or five times during the school year for potluck dinners, restaurant lunches, afternoon picnics (with kids) and even pub crawling. "We went to two or three little places around the neighborhood," a demure mother told me, "and finally sent Nakagawa-sensei (their children's young male teacher) off on the last train out!"
It is a commonplace statement in Japan that the nation's hardworking house-wives are its secret weapon, the unrecognized segment of the work force that makes the country so successful, the backbone of the nation that enables its men to perform their economic miracle, and the insurance that the next generation of Japanese will behave in the same hardworking way.
Like women elsewhere, Japanese women clean house, fix meals, do the laundry, shop, and take care of their children. But household help is even rarer in Japan than in the U.S., and for these First World women, in one of the world's richest countries, daily life is laborious. The reason? Customs - again.
The school lunch, obento - literally "honorable lunch box" - is extremely important in the lives of most Japanese women. To take a lunch box to school is to take a little bit of mother with you. The standard tricolor obento is packed in a rectangular plastic box about the size of a book. One section may consist of bright, round, firm, fresh peas. Next to the peas rests minced chicken in soya sauce with a tad of sugar. The indispensable ingredient is a field of pure, bright, white rice with a plump, red, pickled plum set in the middle - the inspirational rising sun of Japan.
Our boys attended the public schools, and when Tommy began junior high, the one question posed to me by his home room teacher was, "How are you doing with obento, Mrs. Fallows?" Fine, I thought. But my best efforts were apparently not up to par. My friend Keiko gave me illustrated books entitled Speed Obento, Volumes I and II. She took me shopping for proper ingredients, and we practiced in my kitchen. When even then Keiko doubted I could pull it off, 12 year-old Sachiko showed up before school at the front door with a sample obento for Tommy.
The ritual of doing laundry is as important as the ritual of making lunches. First thing every morning, clothing flutters like family standards from balconies and windows; I could look outside and see who was out of town, who had slept late, or who was simply lazy that morning and hadn't gotten to the dirty clothes. On sunny days every futon is draped over a railing, a fence, or even the family car.
The mythological mother of Japan, the Shinto sun goddess Amaterasu, is said to frown on clothes not dried in the sun, and I didn't meet anyone who owned a dryer. On rainy days everyone resorts to hanging damp laundry inside, all around the tiny living quarters, in doorways, from jury-rigged laundry lines, from ceiling hooks.
Many women do their grocery shopping daily because it has to be done on foot, and most kitchens are too small to store much. At first I resisted this Japanese way of doing things. We bought an old car, mostly so I could shop. But then I discovered that the only store with an adequate parking lot had put it on the roof, and the only way to the roof was an awkward combination of escalators and stairs, bags in hand.
I gave up and slowly grew accustomed to joining my neighbors in the daily search for that extra fresh vegetable, or perhaps a packet of tofu or a bit of fresh squid or salmon at an end-of-the-day sale. I knew that every Thursday at five o'clock I'd meet the woman with the new baby waiting for the drive-by fishmonger, or every Sunday between nine and ten I'd be ready like the rest of our block to trade my old newspapers for rolls of toilet paper from the man in the pickup truck.
And I looked forward to the spirited music issuing from the loudspeakers of the trash trucks late mornings three times a week, confident that my trash was as neatly bagged and tied as any other housewife's. As I set about my last task of the night, preparing the next morning's rice in the automatic cooker, I thought of the millions of women around Japan doing exactly the same thing.
Japanese mothers are devoted companions to their babies. When I walked my boys to school in the mornings, I would see legions of young mothers hanging laundry on their balconies or bent over their kitchen sinks, always with babies bound to their backs. They never left them and would even lie down and nap next to them during the day. Not until Japanese children start school do they move out of their parents' bedrooms.
A later and inspiring stage of attentive mother is the kyoiku mama, or education mama. Mothers consider their children's studies so important - every opportunity in Japan depends on education and exams - they'll do anything to encourage them. At a Yokohama department store I inspected the ultimate in student desks that kyoiku mamas can buy for their children. Its most noticeable feature is a call button connected to the kitchen. A hungry - and spoiled - student can buzz his mom to bring him a snack or some sharpened pencils.
Japanese women are quick to point out that they do far more than sweep, scrub, cook, and tend their children. They also manage family finances, making housing and schooling decisions, and handle almost all major household purchases. Half the women I met admitted (with a trace of condescension that creeps into many discussions about their husbands or men in general) that their grip on the family purse strings included doling out a strictly controlled allowance to their salary-men for walking-around money.
The force behind the women's movement in the West - the search for self-expression and satisfaction - doesn't appeal much to Japanese women; in their country every man, woman, and child is expected to consider the well-being of the group before his or her own self-interest. This custom may be the most important and pervasive one in Japanese life.
Keiko introduced me to a friend of hers, Takako Hasegawa, who, along with three other middle-aged mothers, had started a very successful company called MaMa. MaMa trains older women to work as mother's helpers for the new generation of mothers. Nowadays many young couples move away from their hometowns for career reasons, and grandmothers are no longer able to help out when new babies come, so the idea caught on.
"What about the satisfaction of starting a successful company?" I asked Hasegawa-san. "Do you feel proud of what you've achieved?" She hesitated, then replied shyly and politely, "Yes, we are quite proud of what we have done." But she was clearly puzzled by this strange turn in the conversation. Later Keiko explained why. "Japanese women consider Western women and their search for self-fulfillment to be rather wagamama, she said. "Selfish."
Women have always worked in Japan, many of them at hard manual labor - in rice fields, farms, and fisheries - and others in the same few occupations, on factory lines or as nurses or teachers. Now some women are venturing out in new directions: housewives are taking part-time jobs; university graduates are breaking into fast-track lanes. Individualists, always rare in Japan regardless of gender, are becoming "firsts" - first woman skipper, soldier, bank manager.
Tsuneko Ikeda, 47, falls into the traditional mold of Japanese working women. She has worked in her family's tea-processing business in Shizuoka, southwest of Tokyo, for 26 years - ever since she married her husband, Seiji, at 21 and moved in with his family, as is the custom. The small family shop was a bit chilly on the rainy April day when I visited her. Like many encounters in Japan, this one started rather formally. Ikeda-san offered green tea while her husband stood by, a little nervous but eager to answer questions for his wife or to speak up for himself.
Ikeda-san and her mother-in-law shared the work of raising the couple's three children, tending the home, and running the business. Over the years, as her husband's parents grew older, the burden of responsibility shifted increasingly to Ikeda-san. She does all the bookkeeping, using a traditional abacus or a simple electric adding machine. During tea season she rises at 4 a.m. to boil water for the buyers who drive down early from Tokyo to sample tea and place their orders. She works throughout the day, running upstairs during lulls to clean the rooms or prepare the family's meals. Her husband calls her "arumaiti - almighty."
Ikeda-san's sense of self-confidence surely comes from all she has accomplished. "I felt I could do it, and I did it," she says.
Women in managerial positions still number only 160,000, about one percent of all working women. Those few women who have "made it" tend to be feminine - that is, humble-about their success. They resist calling themselves role models and offer little encouragement to young women starting out. Patience is still the key word.
Sadae Ishida is one of the real success stories at the Matsushita (Panasonic) plant outside Osaka. She came looking for a job in 1965, a fresh junior high school graduate - "golden eggs" as they were called - because her parents couldn't afford the school fees for her to continue. Today, at 39, she is the first woman subsection chief, or hancho, in the factory, a position she said she resisted accepting for a while. "I felt I would rather train men to be hanchos than be one myself," Ishida-san explained.
Ishida-san is a model Japanese worker. She's up at 5 a.m., arrives at the plant at 6:30, reads in her car while waiting for the plant gate to open at 7. Then, like all Matsushita employees, many managers included, she changes into her company uniform of blue overalls. After most of her co-workers leave at 5 p.m., Ishida-san stays on to wind down her day with cleaning, reviewing the day's work, and sometimes meeting with her work group. She finally heads home about 7:30.
Ishida-san - unmarried, with a 25 year career, self-made - is an exception to the usual profile of women factory workers. Typically they are high school graduates who work for five or six years until they leave to marry. Nowadays more are middle-aged housewives returning to temporary and part-time work.
The new part-time workers, like those at Matsushita, have become part of the largest group of working women in Japan. But, for most, jobs are as low paying and unpromising as the ones they held before they quit to have their children - frying burgers at McDonald's, ringing up groceries at supermarkets, or marching door-to-door selling cosmetics. Yet, when the Isetan department store advertised for 300 paato, or part-timers, 2,000 hopeful women turned up.
Often these women work as many as 40 hours a week, alongside full-time workers of equal experience and training but for wages that average 30 percent less, and with fewer fringe benefits such as health insurance, paid vacations, retirement plans, bonuses, and job security. Because they are repeatedly hired and fired, the slang word for part-times is "throwaways."
Until a few years ago the largest group of working women in Japan was the young army of office ladies, "OLs," who serve tea, mop up spills, hold doors, handle phone calls, and generally provide a soft, feminine presence for the big companies. Modern pressures have made some companies and some women edgy about the title if not the role of office ladies, and my requests to Mitsui, one of Japan's largest trading companies, to talk with some were met with the explanation the company no longer employs office ladies. "Women in Japan have more responsibilities now," a Mitsui spokesman explained.
Instead, I interviewed two women in their 20s who were "clerk-secretaries" for the staff of men who deal in fertilizer trading. They weren't serving tea (companies like Mitsui now contract with professional caterers). And they weren't wearing uniforms.
Sachiko Maeda is 26, perky and attractive, well-mannered and sweet. She graduated from Rikkyo Junior College and wrote an essay called "My Dream" to get her position at Mitsui. "I wrote about my wish to lead a fulfilled life," she said. "I don't want to look back and feel disappointed."
After work Maeda-san often goes to the movies or dinner with friends before heading home to her parents' apartment - unmarried female Mitsui employees are required to live with their parents. When I asked her about her dream for the future, Maeda-san shyly demurred with a typical Japanese response, "Wakaranai - I don't know." But then she revealed the homely truth: "I see myself married, at home, with children."
Combining a career with marriage is an idea whose time has not quite come in Japan. Few have struck the right combination of family circumstances and professional zeal to "have it all." Sachiyo Suzuki, in her 20s, is a buyer of women's golf wear for the big Mitsukoshi department store, and she's optimistic about her chances. "My future husband is happy I'm working and has said he'd help at home," she told me. "My parents are supportive, and my mother-in-law even offered to cook dinner for us."
My friend Setsuko Yamamota, the mother of a nine-year-old, is less upbeat. "What happens when a mother-in-law gets tired of cooking, when the husband gets longer working hours, when she gets more responsibility at her job, when they have children?" she asks. "I thought very hard about this myself, but I realized it just wouldn't work."
Some women try nearly a lifetime to make a career work. Keiko Atsumi, who started a successful international financial newsletter five years ago, said it took her three times the effort of any man, plus 20 years of trying, to be accepted by the virtually all-male financial community. Many young women are not willing to wait. They flock instead to American or European companies operating in Japan, which eagerly welcome them. Others gravitate to newer, more flexible specialities - software, consulting, interpreting, the media.
From big companies come many stories about problems professional women still face. Bylines are erased and replaced with names of male colleagues. Meetings are held, but women don't know about them or are not invited to attend; if they do go, they can't speak up. After-hours socializing, when many decisions are made, usually excludes women. Shizu Munekata, a graduate of Georgetown and Stanford Universities who has one foot in Japan and the other in the West, says male colleagues routinely stacked papers on her desk to copy, and if she complained, they complained right back, "You're forgetting your place as a Japanese woman."
And yet when I asked these women if they were angry or resentful about their working climate, Munekata, Atsumi, and others seemed surprised at my question. "I'm grateful that certain jobs are now open to me," said Munekata-san. "I was happy to learn patience and tolerance and a sense of priorities from this," adds Atsumi-san. Munekata-san like many other hard-driving Japanese women, is more impatient with her own gender than with the system: "Most women have a fantasy about their ambitions," she says. "Everyone I know has ulcers, and most non-working women have no idea about those realities. It's a lot easier to catch a big fish and stay home all day."
One of the oldest, and certainly the most famous, of female workers in Japan is the geisha. I met Yayoi, an 18-year-old maiko, or trainee, in Kyoto, traditional home of the most elegant and talented members of the craft. Yayoi, like many of this vanishing breed, comes from a rural family.
"I dreamed of life as a geisha, but my parents were against it," she told me. But after her parents contacted the local kimono maker, who contacted a kimono maker he knew in Kyoto, who found a teahouse pro-prietress, or okami-san, willing to take Yayoi in and train her, they relented.
On the day I say Yayoi in the downstairs receiving rooms of the okami-san's elegant house, she was marking the end of two years' training by being fitted with a new kimono. In ordinary clothes she looked and behaved like a tired, grouchy adolescent from any place on earth. The dresser, a seedy gap-toothed man, was there to tighten Yayoi's wide red-and-white-cloth sash, or obi. He teased her, gave her a playful spank, and pulled on the obi with all his might.
The okami-san pinned a new silver hairpin and some bright plastic flowers into Yayoi's lacquered hair. The effect was stunning - white powdered face, rosebud lips, glistening elaborate coiffure, bright kimono. Yayoi was transformed into an elegant figure from another time, another Japan.
Rie Nakano took another path. Now about 40, she grew up on the Izu Peninsula. She liked school and was a good student. Because her parents couldn't afford it, she put herself through college. Nakano-san wanted to go into journalism, but when the newspaper she wanted to work for wasn't hiring that year, she joined a big company instead. Later she switched to a smaller firm, and eventually she decided to try her luck at starting her own film-distribution and publishing company. This made the difference. "Once you're off the beaten path," Nakano-san says, "you can do anything you want."
Nakano-san's office bears the mark of her individuality. It is cluttered and homemade looking, like the office of a small magazine or radio station in the West. All the employees are women, dressed according to all manner of individual taste, rather than in the usual conservative, tailored uniforms. She offers crackers and tea, served in unmatched mugs. In the background a humidifier buzzes on, out of water - forgotten in a society where women never forget such things.
Nakano-san's goal was lofty from the start: to raise consciousness about women's issues. Her self-help books show women how to think about jobs, find vocational schools, locate child care, understand birth control, plan for the elderly, choose recreation, solve legal problems - even challenge pornography, which is everywhere in Japan. On crowded trains, salarymen casually read "sports papers' with blatantly pornographic pictures in them. Even a popular comic book for adolescent boys, Young Jump, contains explicit sexual illustrations.
Nakano-san's success has been modest, her best-selling book having sold 10,000 copies since 1986. But she is surviving. And when she digs her fat address book out of her purse and begins jotting down names of friends, you think Japan is fairly bursting with fascinating, strong, independent women.
One is Mariko Nakano, who lives in Kamagasaki, one of Japan's two major slums, with her husband and two children. The slum, outside Osaka, is less shocking than those in most other countries. There's a park with some homeless men, many broken bottles, and the stink of urine. "This is where you feel the real humanity," say Nakano-san. She spends winter nights roaming the streets, carting homeless people to shelters.
Nakano-san lived in the smallest quarters I visited in Japan - three tiny rooms, stacked from floor to ceiling with pots, pans, dishes, books, records, clothes, toys, and a caged rabbit. The only place to sit was on three small cushions around a coffee table. In the bedroom a child played on his bunk bed. There was floor space for an additional mattress. The house has no bathroom; the family uses the public bath down the street.
Some of Japan's most interesting women are hidden in the nation's far corners. Makku Uchima, a noro, or priestess, of a traditional religion, lives in a wind-swept village on the small island of Kudaka, off the southeast coast of Okinawa.
Uchima-san looks every bit the priestess, with filmy gray hair flying about her head and age spots on her fragile-bones face. She has been a priestess since she was 42, she said, when she received a calling. At that time she had been sick, but no doctor could explain her illness. So she went to consult a yuta, or shaman, who told her that her ailment must be a sign that she should be a priestess.
Now, several decades later, Uchima-san prays for people, helps with spiritual healing of the sick, and twice a year climbs before daylight to an island hilltop to pray to the goddess of the sea. Fishermen often call on her to guide them on safe and successful ventures. Uchima-san's house is in the elegant traditional Japanese style, with wooden and tatami floors, an ancestral altar, and family treasures. But in the background are her Western-size kitchen appliances in matching shades of avocado.
One of the last women I met during my year in Japan embodied many of the contradictory elements in the lives of her countrywomen. Nobuko Kayo is a 36-year-old mother of three; we met on Okinawa. She had just been admitted to medical school. As a result, she quickly became a phenomenon, celebrated in the local newspapers.
When I asked about the response to the articles about her, she admitted modestly that there had been quite a lot. Only that morning she had received five telephone calls from women asking how she did it, how she managed to get into medical school. I took this for a positive sign and wondered if she felt like a role model for women to follow. "Oh no," she said, laughing at my naivete, "the women weren't calling about themselves, they were calling on behalf of their sons!"
| Copied with the permission of Deborah Fallows. This article was published in the April, 1990 edition of National Geographic. |