Notes on the status of Japanese women

This post is not so much a comment on Japanese women - a topic too big for me even to consider undertaking - but an attempt to describe some details about the situation of Japanese women as I understand it from my encounters so far in the Land of the Rising Sun. I shall make no bones of the fact that this post is partially at least in response to the constant barrage of screaming hooting scorn which westerners poor down on Japanese society, with the constant claim that women here are "subjected" (because you know, in the rest of the world complete freedom of both sexes is assured). In a sense also this post shall take on a bit of a task of comparative feministology (and word invention), based on the simple premise that, in fact, women's rights generally throughout the world are not a complete project, and therefore every country has its ups and downs in this regard. It is my intent to show that, in essence, life for women in Japan is a trade of some things westerners take for granted, in exchange for some things westerners see as a distant dream. I also wanted to touch on the idea that some, at least, of these differences derive not from a different or superior Japanese view of women's rights, but from the different way in which society here is structured, but I don't think I will have time, so I shall put it off for another post. I don't want to make any pretensions to academic style, though, so I'll try not to act like I'm writing an essay. My posts are long enough as it is!

So the first thing I should say is that, far and above anything else, Japan is an incredibly safe place for people of all ages and sexes. Public sexual assault of any scale more serious than groping has a very low prevalence (and groping has declined since the city governments introduced programs to fight it). The Japanese are not exactly unconscious of safety, but it is reasonable to say that they are generally pretty ignorant of many of the basic practices we take for granted, such as locking one's door when one goes across the road; turning off the car and taking the keys when one goes to the convenience store; always keeping one's valuables near oneself; and, in the case of young women at night, travelling in company and wearing "sensible" clothes. A young woman, alone in a dark alley, hobbling along in stupidly high heels and wearing extremely revealing clothes, far away from any assistance, is as common a sight here as ... well, as women going out at night. The best two examples of this I have seen is a woman tottering alone through the darkened university at midnight in her nightclub clothes, something I'm sure women in Australia avoid at all costs; and the woman picking her way over sleeping homeless men after midnight under Hiroshima station, her skirt no longer than her heels. This sense of safety is a very real consequence of a very real lack of harrassment and abuse in Japan; for example women in skimpy clothes never get yelled at or abused in public, and even minor acts of intimidation like whistling or group staring by men just don't happen here. Women judge what they will wear according to the usual conservative standards of their day, but not, it would seem, according to what will happen to them outside the home.

A second fascinating thing to note about women's life in Japan is that, contrary to many of the claims one hears about the language, Japanese is essentially gender neutral. There are very few words for occupations or people which are gender biassed; and those that are, are almost universally imported. For example, the Japanese word for "businessman" is "kaishain", which means "member of a company" and is completely gender neutral. To describe the phenomenon of lowly paid office ladies and hard-working businessmen on career paths, they have introduced the foreign words of "OL" and "Salaryman". Even the word for humanity - ningen - is gender neutral, since the word "nin" literally means person. One cannot speak of "mankind" in any general sense in Japanese, nor can one have "manpower" (the nearest words are based on words for "people" and "work", or "names" and "work"). Japanese changes completely when it is reduced to daily casual language, and here the language used by men and women diverges radically, even to the level of its rhythms; but I have seen little evidence yet that these differences represent some kind of discrimination, rather than just a powerful type of gender segregation which extends all through Japanese society. In general, as surely as night follows day men and women in this country naturally separate into their own groups, and why and how this happens is a mystery to me.

Having said that, in most of the daily interactions I witness here, women are given a fair amount of respect and time to say their piece, though they undoubtedly do so in a less assertive fashion than men. This could be a consequence of my having hung about primarily with academics and young people, but I have watched women come and go at kickboxing and they are taken seriously in their efforts and interests. Age and seniority seems to be a far greater barrier to gaining respect in most of the environments I have seen, than does sex.

The topic of kickboxing leads to another interesting point, which is that women's sport, while highly segregated and gender specified here, is taken very seriously. Women do not generally play soccer or rugby, for example; but the sports they play get a great deal of respect relative to those of important western women's sports like netball - women's wrestling, for example, gets primary position in the sports pages of the newspaper when it is on, and women's figure skating, golf and tennis is very popular. Women in table tennis are taken seriously too. The status of women in the traditional martial arts is also surprising - I think the Shimane University kenpo club is run by a woman, for example, and there is never any question of her seniority in the training I have witnessed. The traditional martial arts are also very well stocked with women compared to Australia, and women take a great deal of interest in fighting sports - I have had several discussions about K1 and Sumo with middle aged women teachers, for example. Also, of the 4 women who taught me Japanese at Tottori University one was a fanatical surfer; one a black belt in Kendo; and one a black belt in Archery. The other one was a big k1 fan.

I think this represents a simple fact about Japanese peoples' attitude to each other which is very endearing - if you are trying with all your might to do something difficult, you win instant respect regardless of all the extraneous details of your private and personal life. One is judged first and foremost on what one does here, and only secondarily on everything else. Which is terrible if one is not allowed to do certain things, for example in work; and this is a topic we have to come to next, because work is seen as the big area where women in Japan are worse off than the West.

Certainly women's participation rate in Japan is terrible, with only 48% of Japanese women in the labour force, as against 74% of Australian women. Interestingly, the Australian participation rate has increased from 35% since 1970, while the Japanese rate has been consistent at 50% for all that time. So what do these statistics mean? Women's pay differential in Japan and Australia is broadly similar, although the statistics I have been able to find on women's pay in Japan seem to be heavily biassed towards the large companies, which do not represent a full picture of the many ways in which part-time women workers and self-employed women live. But then, probably Australian statistics don't either; certainly it does not seem to be the case that women are paid any less than men here in a way which is systematically different to Australia, but perhaps discussion of this topic requires an enormous amount of attention to the way in which modern women's earnings lag men's - a problem of balancing work and family commitments, and life courses, which is probably worse here in Japan because, ostensibly, women have less opportunity for maternity leave and flexible working arrangements.

Which, incidentally, is probably also not quite the way people outside Japan perceive it to be. It is a little known fact about Japan that the shared government/private health insurance scheme, Shakai Hoken, includes 9 months maternity leave paid at 60% of full-time wages, and equivalent paternity leave if requested. For full-time company employees, Japan probably has one of the best maternity leave schemes in the world. But as we all know, access to government paid maternity leave requires permission from the workplace to take 9 months off; and many companies are probably unwilling to give this time. People in Japan are also loathe to take it, and probably prefer not to put out their workplace than to do such a thing. But it is definitely there in black and white in the information on Shakai Hoken, which all salaried employees working more than 32 (?) hours a week are required to purchase.

Probably though, the falling birthrate in Japan relates to another, more complex series of social changes which no-one here is willing to discuss, and which I will go out on a limb to identify - most women don't want to, and have the freedom to choose not to, have children. Since the 60s women have had unfettered access to abortion on demand, with "economic" reasons sufficient for women to choose to have an abortion; they have had unfettered access to condoms since the war, and although the pill has been slow to catch up, a complete lack of religious barriers to abortion has meant that reproductive choice remained very free in this country when women in the West were still struggling for it. In fact, Japanese feminism has had a pretty complex relationship with the pill, and as late as the late 80s Japanese feminists were opposed to its use. It is, however, now freely available, so women now have complete financial and sexual independence. In a society which has stressed low birthrates since world war 2, and where having a child is generally socially accepted as requiring that the woman cease work permanently, this is going to lead in only one direction - a decision to defer or cancel childbirth in favour of work. And yes, it is my view that free access to reproductive medicine makes this choice easier, and I further think that is just dandy. Reproductive choice has to include the choice not to reproduce, or it ain't reproductive choice. If Japanese women are sensible enough to recognise that, and Japanese men are happy to go along with it, well and good to them. Japan has only 2 choices here if it wants to increase it's birthrate - revoke the choice, or revoke the cultural assumption that women should stop working when they have a child. They have the maternity leave in place, they have childcare in this country and working women use it; they simply need to complete the triangle.

(but on this topic, one has to consider; with a participation rate of 50%, there are an awful lot of working-age people in this country not working, so Japan does not need to increase its birthrate to avoid its so-called demographic trap; it just needs to encourage the half of its female population who are not working to return to work).

The topic of encouraging women to return to work is an interesting one, for it leads to another sly observation I have to make about Japanese women's supposedly terrible state of discrimination. One would suppose that in a society where not many women work, part of the reason they are choosing not to work is that they would rather be kept by a husband than have to take up some crappy service job they don't want to do. But this is not a requirement for women in Japan, because women in Japan actually have available to them a much larger range of socially acceptable jobs than their Western counterparts. Japanese women can be doctors, nurses, child care workers, school teachers and librarians just as they can in the west. But they can also work in construction, transport, fisheries, agriculture, engineering and industry. For example, 33% of farmers, lumber workers and fishermen are women (of course, in Japan "fisherman" is a gender neutral word). 6% of transport workers, and fully 43% of labourers, were women in 1998. To quote from my personal experience, I think I see a female taxi driver here in rural Matsue at least once a week; riding to work this morning I passed a huge dirt moving truck being driven by a woman; and I see a female truck driver at least once a month. Bus drivers are also female. The fantastically handsome Mr. Hiroki's pretty and charming girlfriend, Miss K, has a boat license at the age of 23, and works as a tour guide using this license. Women's work opportunities here are much wider than they are in Australia, and interestingly so are men's. Men can be hairdressers (all the coolest boys are) and, according to my Japanese teacher, child care work and old age care work is very popular with men. There is no such term as "checkout chick" in Japan, because they are half male; and clothing salespeople are also very often men. Floristry is also a popular pursuit for the cool boys, and why wouldn't it be? Flowers are very manly. This is precisely the opposite situation to that envisaged by the opponents of 60s feminism, who supposed that when women started working in construction it would push men into narrower job opportunities and out of the workforce; but here, where women can do much more, they work less and men take up their posts. A fascinating contradiction...

This sharing of labour seems to occur across the age periods, with for example retired Japanese men and women taking up farming. In this case frequently the man farms rice, and the woman farms vegetables and fruit (which makes the man a dole- bludger, since rice here is heavily subsidized). It is almost as if the Japanese are at every step of the working process blind to the differences in gender which sensitize Australians to "womens" and "men's" work; but at the same time acutely aware of women's role as wives and mothers, which forces them to think that women should leave work for children. This has a huge effect on women's lifetime earnings, since progress at work here is strongly associated with seniority and uninterrupted service, and this cannot be achieved by women who have to take time out for work. Which might explain why they don't return.

Finally, I should mention another area of "men's" and "women's" work which is far less discriminatory and much safer than in the West: prostitution. Prostitution is treated with much less scorn and derision here than in the English speaking world, it is much more open and it is much more honest. There is also a whole world of non-sex bars where men go to be charmed by, and spend money on, young women; and in this world of equal opportunity working roles, there are a growing number of such bars where women go to be charmed by young men. These bars undoubtedly come with the assumption that if you spend enough, your young charmer will put out; but you have to go through a certain ritualized pursuit first, and the young charmer juggles several suitors before deciding which one to accomodate. How different can this world be to the seedy backroom life of the Australian sex industry?

So there we have it, a society which for women is generally safer, offers a wider range of job opportunities, and comes with the massive benefits of complete freedom of reproductive choice and freedom from childbearing. In exchange, women have to endure some additional kinds of discrimination at work, which I think have a lot to do with the importance attached to the childbearing role; and greater restrictions on the range of roles available to mothers. This hardly seems like a nightmare of women's discrimination, unless you judge the entirety of women's rights primarily through the prism of work and family, the current boutique obssession of the Australian middle class. If, on the other hand, you also value (as I do) your partner's ability to move freely at night without harrassment; her ability to choose working roles freely; and her confidence in her complete right to control her own body; then Japan is a much less discriminatory place than you have been led to believe.