Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival (29 page)

Women were the driving force behind Japan’s early industrialization after the Meiji Restoration. In the first decades of the twentieth century, 60 per cent of the industrial workforce and 80 per cent of those working in the all-important textile industry were women. They were, in the words of one historian, ‘the backbone of Japan’s Industrial Revolution’.
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Today, shifting social attitudes, new economic impulses and the introduction of laws – for example equal-opportunity
legislation in 1986 – were altering the landscape, Hama said. ‘What’s changed is that society has become more receptive towards women. That behind-the-silk-screen role was a very comfortable place to be. Women did not have to come out into the open to compete. Now that this on-stage performance has become open to women, they have started to feel that choosing to remain behind closed doors is detrimental to them. They have begun to think they need to communicate what they want and what they are thinking, and to make their positions verbally clear.’ That required adjustment from both sexes. ‘The virtue and talent of Japanese women used to be seen as their ability to have everything go their own way without saying a word. But that is not enough any more. They have to start making noise.’

Hama said many women would agree with Kirino that men and women moved on separate tracks. They even sometimes travelled separately since the metro had introduced women-only carriages to address the worries at the prevalence of
chikan
, or groping, in intensely crowded rush-hour trains. ‘But I tend to feel that’s a myth. It makes each side kind of comfortable. If you are on different tracks, your paths don’t cross and it tidies the picture up. But in reality, things are not that simple. To the extent that we keep talking about things in that way, there’s not a lot of room for change and progress. I don’t want to pigeonhole Japanese society in that way. It is not even very challenging for men. They’ll just say, “Oh yes. We’re the villains of the piece. How terrible.” But it doesn’t actually challenge them to come up with their own ideas about how things are, or where they should go. It lets them off the hook.’

•   •   •

Japanese women are rebelling in powerful ways. Perhaps their most subversive act is to marry later. That has directly contributed to the low birth rate that is said by some to imperil the nation’s future. Women are effectively on strike, although their participation in the labour force has edged up as a consequence of delayed marriage. But they are refusing to comply with either of the traditional roles expected of them, those of wife and mother. Until fairly recently, women who were still single at twenty-five were referred to disparagingly as ‘Christmas cake’, an item that plummets in value after 25 December. Now, some argued, women had turned the tables on men, holding out for partners who were
financially stable, emotionally supportive and willing to help around the house. Machiko Osawa, an author and academic, said men’s position had weakened relative to that of women. ‘It used to be so wonderful for men in Japan. Now they’re disillusioned,’ she told me over lunch across the road from the grand red-brick building of Tokyo’s central station. Whereas women used to fawn over the most unattractive of men with a decent job, she said, now they are much more choosy. The growing ranks of men with part-time work found it almost impossible to find a partner. ‘Rather than feeling they need to do something to attract a woman, some men have just given up,’ she said.

In 2008, a 25-year-old man ploughed a two-tonne truck into a crowd in Akihabara Electric Town, a gadget-crammed district of Tokyo that is a magnet to socially awkward nerds known as
otaku
. He then leapt from the vehicle and went on a stabbing spree. In all, seven people were killed and several injured. Osawa said the incident was symbolic of a growing feeling of male impotence. Before the attack, the young man had posted messages on the internet from his mobile phone, complaining he was too ugly to get a girlfriend. ‘It used to be that women could not make a living without a man. Now that’s changed and men have to be attractive to get a woman,’ she said. For many younger Japanese, the shift in power relations meant better, more equal, relationships, she went on. Many married couples over fifty had a less-than-ideal setup. ‘The husband played at making money, the wife at being a mother. It’s very different from forming a real partnership.’

Yayoi Kusama, an artist who has become famous for her polka-dot-covered canvases, was also disparaging of traditional marriage. Speaking of her father’s persistent affairs with geisha when she was a child growing up after the war, she wrote in her autobiography, ‘The menfolk were practitioners of unconditional free sex, while the women had to sit in the shadows and bear it. Even as a child I was angered and repelled by the injustice.’
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Kusama felt so constrained by Japanese society of the 1960s that she fled to New York. At one point in her career, she took to covering furniture in hundreds of phalluses that she had sewn herself, an act that was intended, she said, to ‘obliterate’ her dislike of the male organ. One photograph shows her posing naked, her back to the camera, in front of a rowing boat encrusted in penises. She called it: ‘Aggregation: 1000 Boats Show’.

Old attitudes are far from extinguished. In 2003, members of Waseda University’s ‘Super Free’ club organized gang rapes of female students after inviting them to rave parties and getting them drunk. In parliament, one MP raised a snicker when he said, ‘At least gang rapists are still virile.’
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The case did, though, provoke a strong public outcry and questioning of a legal system where rape carried a minimum sentence of two years and robbery five. Shinichiro Wada, the president of the club and the ringleader, was sentenced to fourteen years, close to the fifteen-year maximum.
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Still, politicians sometimes found it hard to hide their Neanderthal attitudes. Hakuo Yanagisawa, the septuagenarian former health minister, referred to women between fifteen and fifty as ‘baby-making machines’ – and defective ones at that. Under duress, he later apologized for his remark, clarifying that what he’d meant to say was ‘women whose role it is to give birth’.
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Changed economic and social circumstances mean many more women don’t have to ‘sit in the shadows and bear it’ any more. As a result of becoming more selective, the percentage who remain single into their thirties has almost doubled since the 1980s. Many of the ‘parasite singles’ identified by Masahiro Yamada are women in their twenties, thirties or forties, living with their parents and spending their salaries on luxury goods, eating out or travelling abroad. Yamada dismissed them as ‘fantasists’, holding out for an elusive Prince Charming. In fact, only 4 per cent of women over forty-five remain unmarried, about half the rate of the US. One could just as easily interpret women’s behaviour as a refusal to bend to social pressure by settling for marriage at any cost.

Another way in which women are asserting their independence is by divorcing. Divorces have nearly doubled since the 1990s, with about one in four marriages now ending in separation.
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That is getting on for the same as Europe, though it is still about half the rate of the United States.
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Research shows that Japanese women tend to initiate divorce and, unlike men, do not rush to remarry. In 2003, legislation was passed enabling women to collect back instalments of unpaid alimony. Since 2007, women who filed for divorce have been eligible for up to half of their husband’s pension.
¹⁴
In 2001, the Domestic Violence Prevention Law was passed, signalling that violence within the home would no longer be treated as a family affair.
A law on the prevention of spousal violence allowed district courts to issue six-month restraining orders against the perpetrators and to evict them from the home for short periods.

The divorce rate of 45–64-year-olds rose fifteen-fold between 1960 and 2005. Since 1985, divorce among couples married more than thirty years has quadrupled. That suggests women, trapped in bad marriages by legal and social norms, are finding ways to escape. Many of the divorces take place after the husband retires and the wife discovers she can no longer stand living under the same roof with her previously absent husband. In a phrase suggesting that women are not the quietly suffering shrinking violets sometimes depicted, retired husbands are sometimes referred to as
sodai gomi
, ‘big garbage’, after the clapped-out appliances thrown out for collection, though the phrase can be used affectionately.

Young people, of course, get divorced too. The ‘Narita divorce’, named after the international airport, describes the phenomenon of post-honeymoon separations. These are said to occur when internationally minded, confident women discover that their monolingual, narrow-minded husbands can’t function outside Japan. More and more women are marrying foreign men. Pico Iyer, a British-born essayist who married a Japanese woman, once told me, ‘Women have everything to be gained by escaping Japan. Men are wedded in all senses to the status quo.’
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The fraying of the family structure might reflect growing female assertiveness, but it comes with problems. Contrary to common perceptions of a nanny state that looks after its coddled citizens from cradle to grave, Japan actually has a relatively underdeveloped social welfare system. Traditionally, care has been outsourced to families. Because of social and economic changes, those families are no longer always in a position to provide. Divorce has pushed more women into low-paid work, adding to the numbers of working poor and struggling one-parent families. According to Unesco, Japan’s child poverty rate climbed to 14.9 per cent in 2012, lower than the US, but the ninth worst among thirty-five advanced OECD countries. Divorced women make up a disproportionate slice of the 20 million-strong ‘precariat’ – the ‘precarious proletariat’ without full-time employment.
¹⁶
Half of working women are stuck in part-time, low-paid
jobs.
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The proportion of Japanese single mothers who are working is the highest in the industrial world, suggesting a lower level of state support – and conceivably a stronger work ethic – than in other advanced nations.
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The erosion of the old model, with its certainties of lifelong employment for the man and lifelong housekeeping for the woman, has brought a fluidity to male–female relations. But Kirino was less optimistic than some about the benefits of what she called ‘this big societal shuffle’. Changes in the workforce might, she said, provide greater opportunity for a narrow spectrum of educated women. But for the majority, the new ‘flexible’ employment market would mean dead-end jobs for deadbeat pay, like the women working in her fictional lunch-box factory.

I put it to Kirino that Japanese women, certainly the more privileged ones, tended to be less constrained by social norms, more worldly, interesting and daring. They were more likely than men to speak English or to have travelled abroad. As Hama had said it was still fairly common for a man to hand over his pay cheque to his wife, who might dish him out a little ‘spending money’ if he was lucky. Women also appeared to be having more fun. I remembered once having lunch in Tokyo with a Chanel executive at Chateau Joel Robuchon, an expensive French restaurant. Apart from the two of us, the diners were exclusively female, all impeccably dressed and leisurely advancing from
amuse bouche
to
petits fours
. Many were sipping wine or champagne. I couldn’t help picturing their overworked husbands shovelling down warmed-up pork cutlet at a desk piled with papers. ‘I can’t say unequivocally that Japanese women are oppressed or not oppressed,’ Kirino replied after thinking about what I had said. ‘In hidden places, Japanese women always had power, it’s true. All Japanese men also have a tendency to suffer from
mazacon
,’ she added, using the contraction of ‘mother complex’ to refer to the obsessive devotion men are said to harbour for their mothers. ‘That is why Japanese women are seemingly rather strong . . . You talked about running the household accounts. But this means that men don’t have to worry about how much to save. They are relieved of such worries. Once you get married, it is not a case of man and wife, but man and mother. Once they are married, mothers can have fun. That is what you saw in the French restaurant.’

•   •   •

Kaori Nakahara,
¹⁹
a working woman in her mid-twenties, was more privileged than most. A graduate of Hitotsubashi, one of Japan’s most prestigious universities, she joined a large bank as a career-track employee. But rather than being a draw, she saw her high status as a barrier to marriage. ‘Many Japanese guys hate it when the woman does better or has a better label,’ she said. ‘The younger career women at work are finding it very difficult to find boyfriends and future marriage prospects.’ (Japanese men had told me something similar. One said, ‘There’s a preference for the traditional type of female. Men are not so confident in themselves these days, so they pursue women who are shorter than they are, who earn less than they do and who are less accomplished than them. There’s not much of a market for over-achievers.’)

Nakahara said she didn’t feel discriminated against at work. In some situations, the rarity factor – in her year there were four fast-track men for every woman – could work to her advantage. She was sometimes invited to meetings she might not normally have attended simply because it was considered better to have some women present. Still, sexism persisted. One friend was admonished for asking a pertinent question in a meeting. ‘You talk a lot for a woman,’ her boss told her later, implying that it had been inappropriate to challenge an elder male employee in public. The primary role of many women at the office was still to look good and be subservient, she said. The reception desks at many offices and department stores are staffed with doll-like women, trained to speak in an odd falsetto and to spring to attention every time a visitor approaches. Doll-like coquettishness is generally considered an attractive feature in Japanese women. ‘What they do is just take people upstairs to the meeting room and look nice and bow when someone comes in,’ is how Nakahara described it. ‘They have the perfect bow. That’s probably what they were taught when they were recruited.’