Women: A Separate Sphere

By Jane O'Reilly

Deference to tradition, dreams of the future

It is hard to avoid mentioning Madame Butterfly. Rustling compliantly in her kimono chrysalis, she forever set the Western image of the Japanese woman. Poor Butterfly first appeared on the stage of Milan's La Scala in 1904, decades after Western ideas about women's rights had reached Japan. In 1947 the American-dictated revision of the Japanese constitution and legal codes gave women the right to vote and explicitly forbade sex discrimination. But the idea of equality is a long time being assimilated into practice.

Today's Japanese women--urbanized, educated, middle class and seeking to reconcile traditional identities with present realities--sound like American women of ten years ago. The echoes from across the Pacific are recognizable, considering that until the 1860s Japan was a feudal patriarchy in which the harshness of women's inferior status was unrelieved by such Western niceties as the chivalric code. Until World War II women bowed to the authority of father, husband and son. Today, they bow for the same reasons that they take weekly lessons in wearing kimonos: out of attachment to cultural graces.

What defines a Japanese woman? It is not the kimono. She is more likely to wear Calvin Klein than a kimono, or even the modern Japanese designs currently fascinating New York. It is not her aspirations, which are no different from women's all over the world. She wants a husband and children, education and fair pay, a role in the larger society guaranteed by legal equality, and the right to control her childbearing.

Perhaps the one trait that makes both men and women distinctively Japanese is their extreme deference to the harmony of the group. Says Author and Feminist Yumiko Yansson, explaining why Japanese women remain mostly kakure feministo (closet feminists), despite their increasing discontent: " 'Resignation is the first lesson of life,' the saying goes. In Japan, rebellion means being an outsider."

If Japan's social "groupism" inhibits fire-in-the-belly feminism, Japanese women nonetheless recognize and resent their disadvantages. Says Student Ritsuko Yamariyo: "Of course, there's a mountain of discrimination in society, but women are incredibly strong because of it." A government White Paper last year reported that although most women are still content with their responsibilities as keepers of the home, only 13% feel they are given equal status at work, and only 10% believe they are treated equally in terms of social perceptions and customs. Shigeo Saito, author of a national sex survey, found that "Japanese housewives are frustrated in many ways. Women at the moment are giving signs of warning, and the men aren't really paying attention to them."

Marriage, preferably by the age of 24, remains a woman's primary goal; the event is so significant that the average cost of a wedding is $23,000. The ideal husband is a sarariman (salary man), who is slightly older and slightly higher in status and who understands the new notions about companionship and a mate chosen for love. Nearly 60% of marriages are still omiai, arrangements made mostly through family and friends but also through counseling and computer centers, and company introduction services. A bride no longer enters her husband's household as a kind of servant to her mother-in-law, nor will she shuffle respectfully three steps behind her husband.

She will see very little of her husband, and unless she has a job she will see almost no one else except her children. The tradition of separate social spheres for men and women means that many of today's housewives, living in minuscule but easily maintained apartments, have hours of free time to fill with lessons and P.T.A. meetings.

A man's job, and his relaxation, involves long evenings of drinking with other men, and he is far more likely to share his conversation with bar hostesses than with his own wife. Yumiko Kitazawa, a teacher in her early 60s, is perfectly content: "I wouldn't want my husband around all the time. I wouldn't want to be beta-beta [stickily clinging all over each other]." But the younger Japanese who have had the great adventure of getting to know each other in school, want to be able to share their ideal heaven, a "sweet home." This desire partly explains the diminishing willingness of younger men to sacrifice their lives for their jobs, a situation that Japanese economic planners find alarming.

Japanese women are expected to sacrifice their lives for their children, and they do. Their isolated efforts are now being denounced as "smother love" and blamed by professionals for the intractability of the young. Furthermore, even the most dedicated kyoiku-mama (education mamma) finds that the years spent doggedly nagging her two children toward success take up far less of her life span than it did of her grandmother's, who probably had five children and died, on average, 30 years younger.

Two out of three Japanese women have had an abortion, which is so common, "it is like having a tooth out," says

Dr. Etsuko Negishi, a woman gynecologist. One reason for the routine acceptance of abortion as a means of birth control is that culturally and religiously the Japanese do not consider sex, or abortion, as presenting moral problems. A more practical reason is the fact that the most effective contraceptive, the pill, is still believed to be medically unsafe, and has never been approved for general use, despite Japan's dense population.

Last year a new fundamentalist religious group called Seicho no le (House of Growth) collected 7 million signatures in an effort to remove the "economic reasons" clause cited by 99.7% of women who obtained abortions. The antiabortion effort, supported by Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, prompted more than 100 women's groups to a rare demonstration of organized political protest.

When her children are grown, a Japanese woman has half her life before her.

"At this point," says Shigeo Saito, author of the bestselling Wives' Adolescence, a book on the problems of housewives, "there is no really meaningful life for women." For many, flower arranging, English lessons and shopping are unsatisfactory time fillers. Japanese universities offer no chance for the kind of re-entry education possible in the U.S.

As a way of giving purpose to their lives, women are increasingly turning to politics. Japanese women have a higher voting rate than their men. They are the backbone of the peace movement, and although they constitute only about 3% of the elected members of parliament (25 of 763), this percentage is about the same as that of American women members of Congress ten years ago. For some women, divorce is a new junpingubodo (jumping board). While the divorce rate last year (1.39 per 1,000 population) was far lower than in the U.S. (5.3 per 1,000), it is doubling every year.

Divorce is perilous in a country where women have little chance of earning an adequate income. Even housewives, who are credited with having great power because they manage the family finances, have in fact no legal control over the purse. Although the ideal continues to be a traditional marriage with a woman totally occupied by her family, in reality women make up more than one-third of the Japanese labor force. Seventy percent of them are married, and their wages are half that of men. In the workplace, they face an impenetrable wall of discrimination. The job-placement tests that determine the careers of young men are often not open to young women, who are hired as ornamental tea makers, "O.L.s" (office ladies) destined to be eased out as they reach 27, on the assumption that they will soon be getting married. Mitsubishi, the nation's No. 1 trading company, last year recruited, with fanfare, 90 female college graduates. But, said a spokesman, "they were hired under the category of secretarial work. We cannot go ahead with higher-ranking recruitment at a time when many people find it improper for women to be at business negotiations."

A great scandal (prompting the typical Japanese reaction: a resigned and knowing shrug) broke out recently when Fujin Minshu Shimbun, a Tokyo feminist newspaper, published a personnel memo from the office of Kinokuniya Bookstore, one of the nation's largest retailers. The memo listed some warning signs when considering hiring women: ugly women, short women, argumentative women, divorcees, women interested in reformist politics, women who "respect passionate artists like Van Gogh"--in fact, practically all women. Nevertheless, nearly half of Kinokuniya's employees are women, 60% of whom work part-time.

Therein lies the secret of Japan's vaunted lifetime employment system. Women, whose salaries are often necessary to maintain their family's middle-class status, have quadrupled the part-time labor force in the past two decades. They are paid only about half of their full-time counterparts, and they receive almost no fringe benefits or long-term security, although they work the same amount of hours. "Women part-time workers are holding down the entire Japanese wage scale," says a specialist in women's labor, Emiko Shibayama. "Use of part-time women workers is part of Japan's international economic strategy for the 1980s."

For more than 150,000 Japanese women the solution has been to join foreign companies, usually as English-speaking executive secretaries. Still, they are given responsibility and treated respectfully. Half of the medical technicians, teachers and entertainers in Japan are women. Japanese fiction has been revitalized by women writers, a tradition going back to the 11th century when Lady Murasaki wrote The Tale of Genji, Japan's greatest work.

Japanese women today are educated in nearly the same numbers and by the same standards as men, and some possess technical skills too valuable to ignore. However, says 23-year-old Kayoko Hirosawa, "as a woman you have to work twice as hard as a man to get to the same place. If you don't, you're not recognized." Hirosawa is one of a generation of young Japanese women who were trained at home by such precepts as "You're a girl, you bathe after the man" and "You're a girl, you cover your mouth when you smile." Education would once have been something that "polished" her for marriage. But Hirosawa wants to go to a university so that some day she can realize both her ambitions: to have a husband and to run her own trading company.

Hirosawa is one of Japan's new women, the wave of the future. She believes she is rare. Sumiko Okuzawa, a 36-year-old housewife, thinks of herself as rare as well. She says, "I want my daughter to be a career woman, because I learned while working that you can't be a real person unless you work." And so does 57-year-old Michiko Fujita, a woman who wears the traditional kimono but who nevertheless operates her own business. She says, "I want to live my life, not be given life by my husband. Young people have it easier now and think more about these things, but I have the same dreams." --By Jane O'Reilly. Reported by Alan Tansman/Tokyo

With reporting by Alan Tansman This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.