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Career women in Japan

Jill

I finally have more than five minutes in an internet cafe and I’m going through the massive folder of Feministe-related emails, and finding a ton of great stuff that people sent me that I never wrote about. Apologies. Once I get back to Germany and regular email access, I’ll be better at posting all the interesting articles and links you send on.

In the meantime, check out this article that Fauzia sent me, about the issues facing career women in Japan:

Even with cases of blatant discrimination, lawsuits remain rare because of a cultural aversion to litigation. Another big problem has been that the equal opportunity law is essentially toothless. Despite two revisions, the law includes no real punishment for companies that continue to discriminate. The worst that the Labor Ministry can do is to threaten to publish the names of violators, and the ministry has never done that. As a result, Japan ranks as the most unequal of the world’s rich countries, according to the United Nations Development Program’s “gender empowerment measure,” an index of female participation in a nation’s economy and politics. The country placed 42nd among 75 nations surveyed in 2006 — just above Macedonia and far below other developed nations like the United States, ranked 12th, and top-ranked Norway.

Interestingly (and infuriatingly), the conversation has to turn to Muslim women, with women who are veiled serving as the ultimate comparison point in the Oppression Olympics:

“It’s a pathetic situation,” said Kumiko Morizane, deputy director of the equal employment division in Japan’s Labor Ministry. “Even in Pakistan, where women cover their faces, they had a female prime minister.”

Women getting elected in countries where women cover their faces? Now that’s just crazy-talk.

Articles about obstacles women face in other countries are always interesting, particularly since the American media tends to focus, obviously, on American issues. But the discussion about these articles never fails to get under my skin. Inevitably, someone will point out how backwards and regressive the people of the (usually darker-skinned) other culture are, unlike us here in the USA. Someone will inevitably lecture all the feminists about how we aren’t doing enough to save the women who are really oppressed, and we should stop whining because we don’t have it nearly as bad as those poor, voiceless dears over there have it.

So, you know, read the article and comment, but don’t do the obnoxious oh-those-poor-oppressed-not-like-me-other-women thing.

5 thoughts on Career women in Japan

  1. Jill, I’m a sporadic reader so it’s possible you’ve stated your feelings on women’s situations in largely fundamentalist Islamic societies more fully somewhere and I’ve missed reading them. Could somebody point me in the right direction?

    To clarify, though, are you primarily objecting to the use of oppressed brown women as a rhetorical point, or are you saying that Western feminists shouldn’t fixate on this issue because decrying misogyny in this case is racist and/or religiously intolerant?

  2. I’m not entirely sure that that’s Morizane’s point: Arguably (s)he’s saying that even though Pakistan has a very visible patriarchal system, women there can still succeed and lead in a way that hasn’t happened in Japan. e.g. (do you capitalize that at a start of a sentence?) Obvious situation in Pakistan yields women who are in some ways freer than the hidden sexism in Japan.

  3. I have to deal with this issue all the time since I am a western woman living in Japan. Whenever I go home people always assume that I am must be so relieved to be back where all the equality is, and they can’t fathom how I could be married to a Japanese man (who, apparently, must be a sexist jerk). This from people who have never left their hometown, and whose entire understanding of Japanese culture comes from anime and the Simpsons. Grr.

    Of course there is a lot of blatant sexism in Japan, and it’s still shocking to me that there aren’t more women over 30 in the work force, BUT there are some aspects of Japanese society that “liberated” western societies could learn from. For one thing, the Japanese don’t tend to divide up the sexes at every opportunity as we do in the US. There are no “chick flicks” or intentionally exclusive “girls’/boys’ nights out.” You like what you like regardless of your sex, and you hang out with your friends, male and female, with a minimum of nudging and winking from others. That’s a freedom I never knew until I came here.

    Another thing I love about Japan is that even though the majority of women seem to end up in traditional gender roles, they at least get respect for it. I work from home so I can take care of my daughter full-time, and in the US I put up with a lot for that (I am “just a mom,” not someone who counts, that type of crap). In Japan I get to be a full person. I am not “just” a mom.

    It’s also nice for women to be able to walk alone at night, even drunk, and not be terrified that they will be attacked, or shamed for being drunk.

    Now before anyone responds with millions of examples of Japanese horror stories: I am not saying that Japan is a feminist paradise, but it is certainly not the hell that the western media makes it out to be.

  4. Jill, I’m a sporadic reader so it’s possible you’ve stated your feelings on women’s situations in largely fundamentalist Islamic societies more fully somewhere and I’ve missed reading them. Could somebody point me in the right direction?

    There’s a list of categories on the right-hand side of the main page. Click “international” and/or “Mid-East” and/or “Religion” and you’ll find quite a few.

    To clarify, though, are you primarily objecting to the use of oppressed brown women as a rhetorical point, or are you saying that Western feminists shouldn’t fixate on this issue because decrying misogyny in this case is racist and/or religiously intolerant?

    I’m arguing against the rhetorical strategy that constantly positions non-Western women as the oppressed Other, as a way of inflating our own opinion about ourselves — i.e., decrying the situation of Afghan women as a way of emphasizing how good Western women have it. Feminists should all unite around the oppressions faced by women around the world; I’m certainly not suggesting that we don’t call out misogyny when it happens in non-Western countries. I’m not much of a cultural relativist, and I don’t believe that “It’s their culture” is a sufficient excuse for violating women’s basic human rights. What I object to is the way of speaking about international women’s issues that assumes non-Western women to be voiceless and universally oppressed, needing Western women to speak for them.

    Hope that clarifies things.

  5. The quote in the featured article is incorrect in stating that women in Pakistan cover their faces: They mostly don’t. In cities, they don’t even cover their heads. Not that that says much about the deeply patriarchal society that Pakistan most definitely is, and in more horrible ways than Japan.

    The reference to Benazir Bhutto’s prime minister-ship is also misleading: Bhutto wasn’t elected because she was perceived to be a qualified candidate in her own right. She was elected because she was the daughter of a populist prime minister who had been summarily executed after a military coup. The women PM’s of Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and India had the same advantage — the only advantage — of belonging to the household of a popular MALE. To credit the Pakistani people as progressive is like saying the Victorians must have been enlightened about women because they chose Queen Victoria to be their leader. Um, no.

    To pretend that Muslim women are not almost universally oppressed is simply inane. Yes, don’t condescend and try to reform their religion and/or their societies for them: They have contempt for you and your freedom and largely choose their oppression. But to pretend that it isn’t completely true that we have it better in the West? Tell that to me, an atheist (former Muslim) from Pakistan, or to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an atheist (former Muslim) from Somalia, both of us taking refuge in your freedoms. There’s something to be proud of here. Some cultures ARE inferior to others, as you seem to admit since you are not a cultural relativist. Yes, we still have problems, but there is a scale for these things, and things ARE better.

    I appreciate your good work. Just wanted to set a few things straight. Covered faces generally mean effaced identities, you know, and it does have a lot to do with liberation to be able to claim your body as your own – not public property.

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