Gender Inequality in Contemporary Japan - Robert Smith

The Society for Japanese Studies

Gender Inequality in Contemporary JapanAuthor(s): Robert J. SmithReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Winter, 1987), pp. 1-25Published by: The Society for Japanese StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/132584 .

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ROBERT J. SMITH

Gender Inequality in Contemporary Japan

It has been suggested recently that the time has come for those who have focused too narrowly on the position of women in Japanese society to re- cast the terms of their inquiry as the study of gender. Such a shift will broaden and enrich our understanding of Japanese society and culture, it is claimed, because "gender is a relational concept and considering gender . . . requires that all domains be examined for the relational structures they embody." ' It is indeed the case that the focus on "women's roles" in Japan has led to an emphasis on the domestic and familial, on exceptional female-dominated domains such as those of the geisha and bar hostess, and on the few women who compete successfully in male-dominated domains. While I would never dismiss that literature as unimportant, I agree that it is time to move on to broaden areas of investigation to include the educational system, labor market, and law. In these as in all other domains of the culture, men and women may or may not be differentially defined and dealt with in very different ways. Therefore, to describe the situation only of one sex is to imply something about the other and therein lies a problem, for the implication may be wide of the mark.

Reports on women in the Japanese labor force, for example, often include the finding that few even asked about starting wages or salary before accepting the job. That depressing figure is offered as evidence that women

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Duke University, the University of Illi- nois, Ohio State University, the University of Iowa, McGill University, and the University of Washington. I am indebted to all those whose searching questions forced me to rethink certain issues and to the anonymous reader of the manuscript I originally submitted to the Journal of Japanese Studies.

1. Theodore C. Bestor, "Gendered Domains: A Commentary on Research in Japanese Studies," Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1 (1985), p. 284. This is a report of a workshop sponsored by the Joint Committee on Japanese Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council.

Journal of Japanese Studies, 13:1 ? 1987 Society for Japanese Studies



Journal of Japanese Studies

enter the labor market at so great a disadvantage and with such poor prospects that it is not even worth their while to ask about pay because they will in any case have to be content with whatever they receive. I know of no

study, however, that asks male workers if they inquired about starting pay. I have asked several people that question myself and checked with researchers who have some knowledge of the situation. Without exception their guess is that men are only marginally more likely than women to know what their starting wage or salary will be.2 In this domain and with

respect to this particular issue, then, gender is irrelevant. The relevant cate-

gory is that of workers entering the labor force where, for men and women

alike, alternatives are few. In the domain of language an analogous situation exists. As Jorden3 has

pointed out, in linguistic studies of the Japanese language there is a lot of material on what is called feminine speech, but rarely do we find a separate treatment of anything called masculine language. "The implication is that masculine Japanese is . . . part of the language proper and that feminine

Japanese is a deviant variety which departs from the norm."4 Even more relevant to the discussion at hand is her description of what is usually called feminine language:

Feminine language can be described in terms of features that occur almost

exclusively in the language of females and features that are, qualitatively or quantatively, more typical of the language of females in a given context. But more frequently, feminine language is characterized by certain features which occur in a particular context or with a marked frequency. The most

striking example is the feature of politeness. Given the socialization process which trains Japanese women to be polite and subservient to men, it follows that the honorific and formal varieties of Japanese language are used more frequently by women. This does not mean that the forms themselves are feminine, but rather that their frequent use and their occurrence in certain social situations are typical of female usage. Thus, a polite form that would be used by a man only when talking to a person of ex-

2. For a discussion of this and many related issues see Glenda S. Roberts, "Non-Trivial Pursuits: Japanese Blue-Collar Women in the Lifetime Employment System" (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1986), especially Chapter 4. Bandfo observes that "Even though young employees are given poor status and low pay, if they persist with the organization, they will

gradually be promoted and their salary increased. The company and the employees calculate lifetime earnings, not initial salary." See Bando Mariko Sugahara, "When Women Change Jobs," Japan Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 2 (1986), p. 177. As Roberts conclusively demon- strates, however, pdto make the transition to the status of regular employee so rarely that they seldom advance significantly on the wage scale however long their service to the company.

3. See Eleanor Jorden, "Feminine Language" and "Masculine Language," Kodansha

Encyclopedia of Japan (1983), Vol. 2, pp. 250-52 and Vol. 5, pp. 124-25, respectively. 4. Jorden, "Masculine Language," p. 124.

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Smith: Gender Inequality in Contemporary Japan

tremely high position might be used by a woman in talking to a casual acquaintance.5

So we may agree that gender is a relational concept. And yet, many years ago the British social anthropologist Evans-Pritchard wrote: "Ulti- mately the [issue of the] status of women goes beyond the scope of social analysis. It is fundamentally a moral question."6 I endorse that judgment wholeheartedly, yet surely social analysis still has its place. If it serves no other function it does at the very least lend credibility and plausibility to whatever moral position one may in the end adopt. What follows is a discussion of the position of women in Japanese society broadly defined, touching on several domains, and drawing gender-based contrasts and similarities where these are warranted.

Japanese society is not at all unusual in the explicitness of its expectation that men behave like men, women like women. From early childhood the words otokorashii (manly; masculine) and onnarashii (womanly; feminine) are applied to demeanor, activities, interests, and preferences. The unstated but quite clear implication is that what is deemed appropriate to one sex is by definition inappropriate to the other. In this and myriad other ways the complementarity of male and female competence is presented as the ideal. As we shall see, neither sex is viewed as totally helpless or incompetent; both men and women are accorded equal respect for the effective, accurate performance of their respective gender-specific roles. Yet, viewed from the standpoint of society's requirements of its members, women are conceived to serve an auxiliary function, albeit a crucially important one, for it has been defined as their responsibility to offer the kind of private, domestic support that enables men to make their way in the public world of affairs. Neither can manage alone; marriage, therefore, is a partnership, matching two people of very different abilities regarded as necessary to the creation and maintenance of the family unit.7

In terms of status, however, it is overwhelmingly the case that men out- rank women. This cannot be universally true, of course, for in Japan there are female company presidents and section chiefs, a few princesses, and some powerful women in the art world and demi-monde. Nonetheless,

5. Jorden, "Feminine Language," p. 251. 6. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, "The Position of Women in Primitive Societies and in Our

Own (1955)," in Evans-Pritchard, The Position of Women in Primitive Societies and Other Essays in Social Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1965), p. 56.

7. See Walter D. Edwards, "Ritual in the Commercial World: Japanese Society Through Its Weddings" (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1984), especially pp. 179-80 and 185-89, for a discussion of marriage defined as a partnership of two persons of unequal status and " complementary incompetence."

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given a hypothetical encounter between a man and woman, any Japanese can predict with reasonable certainty that the speech forms used, seating arrangement, and style of interaction all will demonstrate the superiority of the male and subordinate status of the female. Both men and women share that expectation. So pervasive are these markers of gender inequality that they provide the ground upon which the behavior and attitudes of men and women toward one another ultimately are based. For the exceptional woman is just that-a person who by virtue of position, power, or accom- plishments cannot be dealt with routinely. One solution to the ambiguity of relative status thus posed is to treat her as sociologically male.

Given the irreducible inequality of the sexes, it is important nonetheless to see that as members of Japanese society they necessarily share a great deal. One of the features of that society both must deal with is that the individual is offered few options in life. Writing of the hiring of male university graduates by Japan's large companies, for example, Jolivet points out that the candidates interviewed fall in the narrow age-range of 22 to 25. The process, which begins in July, is completed when an informal mutual commitment is made on the following November first. "The peculiar- ity, then, of the Japanese system of hiring was the limitation in period and age group; there was no chance of employment outside this framework, and students' choices were guided by what was possible, not what was dreamed of. "8 It is conceivable, of course, that a Japanese student of mine was right when she observed some years ago that after living in the United States for a while she was convinced that Japanese have more options than they think and Americans fewer. However that may be the fact remains that the sense that options are limited reinforces the notion that men and women alike should prepare themselves to make the best of what life has to offer. Lebra's book on Japanese women bears the apt subtitle "Constraint and Fulfillment."9 It has always seemed to me that, although men's lives are somewhat less constrained, they too are required to seek fulfillment within the narrow confines of a limited range of possibilities.

Many discussions of the place of women in Japanese society begin with an assessment of how far they have come. The assumption, whether explic- itly stated or merely implied, is that however far that may be, it has been a slow journey. Those who wish to show that Japanese women today occupy

8. See the report of a talk presented at a meeting of the Asiatic Society of Japan by Muriel Jolivet, "The Impact of the University on the Hiring Process and the Promotion Sys- tem within Japanese Companies," Bulletin of the Asiatic Society of Japan, No. 4 (1986), p. 3. More detailed information can be found in Muriel Jolivet, L'universite au service de I'econo- miejaponaise (Paris: Economica, 1985).

9. Takie Sugiyama Lebra, Japanese Women: Constraint and Fulfillment (Honolulu: Uni- versity of Hawaii Press, 1984).

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a far more advantageous position in their society than was the case in the past will, of course, stress the great changes that have taken place since the end of World War II. Those who lament the disadvantaged position they are seen to occupy still ordinarily employ one of two strategies. The first of these is to argue that women in prewar Japan were severely oppressed- and remain so. The second strategy is to maintain that the oppression of women in prewar times was not so great as has been alleged, but that they have nonetheless made little headway in the past forty years.

There have, of course, been many far-reaching changes since Japan's catastrophic defeat in 1945. The following incident I think points up the character of some of the more fundamental ones as well as the reaction of younger Japanese women to them. In the late 1950s I was on a tour-bus on the island of Kyushu. It was still a time when bus drivers were male and the attendants-called bus-girls-were young women. It was the kind of job much sought after by the daughters of farm households between graduation from middle school and marriage, for it was light work and considered re- spectable enough for a young lady intending to marry soon. As our bus passed places of note, this teenager informed us of their local or historical importance, filled the intervals with stories and songs, and otherwise enter- tained the passengers. Demurely dressed in the uniform and cap of the company, she employed an extremely polite level of speech.

Just as my attention was beginning to flag, the bus took a turn onto the coastal highway and the girl directed our attention to a small island lying a few hundred yards off shore. "This is called Amadake Island," she in- toned, "on which there is a shrine to the deity of the local fishermen. Until about ten years ago women were not allowed to set foot on it because of its sacred character and their inherently polluting nature. Now that the restric- tion has been lifted women go there to worship and gather mussels." Fair enough, I thought, and almost missed her concluding comment, delivered without any noticeable change of tone: "Nothing untoward seems to have occurred as a consequence of the lifting of the ban."

There were hundreds if not thousands of such places in prewar Japan, where it was felt the mere presence of a woman might bring down the wrath of the gods. By the time I took my bus-tour the gods themselves had been brought down and the whole structure of indigenous belief shaken to its foundations. Women had set foot on Amadake Island after centuries of being barred from it, yet, she was saying, there had been no tidal waves, the fish had not all died, the village fleet had not been lost at sea. It had turned out-almost certainly-that the presence or absence of women in such a place had nothing whatsoever to do with the cosmic order.

If that is what she thought, I submit that in all likelihood her mother and grandmother had observed the ban on women in full faith that the men

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were right to monopolize the rites and grounds of the deity. I think it equally likely that both women had since gone there to worship and gather mussels for their family's table. Some traditions fade very quickly in Japan. As we shall see, others do not.

Let us consider the legal position of women in Japan in the period from 1870 to 1945-roughly from the restoration of imperial rule following the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate to the surrender of Japan at the end of World War II. It clearly derived from the low estate to which women of the warrior class, which had ruled the country in the preceding period, had fallen. In the Confucian view it was both natural and virtuous that a woman throughout the course of her life obey three men in turn: her father in her youth, her husband in her maturity, and her son, as head of the household, in her old age. Women were incompetent, barred from carrying out legal acts without the permission of their husbands. A husband had the right to administer, use, and retain the profits accruing from any property brought to the marriage by the wife.

The household, as embodied in the Civil Code of 1898, was a legal entity headed by a male, save for interim periods when a woman might hold the position until such time as an appropriate male head could be found. The head of the household exercised extensive authority over the lives of its members, for it was he who decided on the family's domicile, gave permission for its children to marry, and sent back sons' wives who failed to meet the requirements of his house. The chief cause of the rou-

tinely early divorces of the period, of course, was that the woman had failed to bear a child who could carry on the family line into the next generation of succession to the headship. Contrary to popular impression, a woman also could secure a divorce under terms of the code, but only with great difficulty. The crime of adultery was grounds for divorce, for ex-

ample, but for the husband it was required only that he discover the act of

adultery. For the wife to obtain a divorce on these grounds, the husband had to have been convicted of the crime in a court of law.'0 There are innumerable examples of such gender disparity in the legal position of individuals.

Small wonder then that for many years prior to the surrender in 1945 liberal elements in Japan had been attempting to revise the civil code. Re-

cently I came across a poignant comment on the meaning of the household

system for women of the time. Nakano Takashi, one of Japan's leading soci-

ologists, has published a book that is an annotation of one year's entries in

10. See J. E. de Becker, Annotated Civil Code of Japan, Volume III (Yokohama: Kelly and Walsh, 1910), pp. 73-75.

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a diary kept by his mother. The year is 1910.11 In the introduction he writes of the many occasions, before her death at the age of 88, on which they had discussed the contents of the diary. She had at first been uneasy about his plans to publish it, but he reports that one day she said, "Go ahead. Per- haps those who read it will understand how severely women were oppressed by the old household system."

Although no law differentiated men from women with respect to educational opportunity, the de facto differences between them were very great. In place by 1900, the modern school system offered roughly the same curriculum to boys and girls through the four (later six) years of compulsory education. After reaching that level, however, their paths diverged dramatically. Most girls did not go on, while boys entered either a five-year middle school or vocational school. Those girls who did continue might enter a four- or five-year higher school with a curriculum heavily weighted toward what Americans used to call home economics. Above these levels were several others, but few women attended them and almost none entered a national university. Behind this obvious discrimination lay the quite ex- plicit dictum that "learning is unnecessary for women," 12 and the clear recognition on the part of parents that an over-educated daughter would fare poorly in the marriage market of the times. In the Meiji period the proper role for the adult woman came to be defined as the dual one of good wife and wise mother-a slogan that does not, as is often assumed, represent the survival of a sturdy Confucian principle, but rather is the Japanese ver- sion of the nineteenth-century Western cult of female domesticity-a direct borrowing of the 1880s and 1890s.13 A clear exposition of the ideologi- cal position is given by Baron Kikuchi Dairoku, at one time Minister of Education and President of both Tokyo and Kyoto Universities:

11. Nakano Takashi, Meiji yonjusannen Kyoto: aru shoka no wakazuma no nikki (Tokyo: Shin'yosha, 1981).

12. Kikuchi Kan, novelist and founder of the renowned literary periodical Bungei shunju, wrote, "Cases are extremely rare in which learning alone is demanded of a woman." Acknowledging that education is essential for a woman who wishes to become an attorney, teacher, or member of an office staff, he suggests that "good sense, tact, care, gentleness, and generosity are . . . much more useful in a housewife than learning." Concluding that "even the girls' school today stresses learning too much," he urges women's educational institutions to teach them "how to create a happy home life." See Kan Kikuchi, "Women and Marriage," Contemporary Japan, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1940), pp. 55-60.

13. See Sharon L. Sievers, "Feminist Criticism in Japanese Politics in the 1880s: The Experience of Kishida Toshiko," Signs, Vol. 6, No. 4 (1981), pp. 602-16, and Robert J. Smith, "Making Village Women into 'Good Wives and Wise Mothers,"'" Journal of Family History, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1983), pp. 70-84.

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Our female education, then, is based on the assumption that women marry, and that its object is to fit girls to become "good wives and wise mothers." The question naturally arises what constitutes a good wife and wise mother, and the answer requires a knowledge of the position of the wife and mother in the household and the standing of women in society and her status in the State. . .. [The] man goes outside to work to earn his living, to fulfill his duties to the State; it is the wife's part to help him, for the common interests of the house, and as her share of duty to the State, by sympathy and encouragement, by relieving him of anxieties at home, managing household affairs, looking after the household economy, and, above all, tending the old people and bringing up the children in a fit and proper manner. 14

Lest the reader imagine this statement represents a hopelessly outdated sentiment, I offer in evidence for my claim that it is very much alive today a passage from a speech given by the president of an apparel company to its assembled employees, most of whom were women, in 1985:

Thinking of Japan's past, when we ask who was greater, men or women, it is true that it was the men who were in the foreground, engaged in activities such as politics, economics, and education. But in the background there were always the women who, with firm hand, maintained the household and brought up the children, encouraging their husbands and sharing their hardships. . . . The post-war recovery, which required tremendous

strength, is also due to such women.

However, when I came to this realization I began shaking with fear. Nowa- days, women have totally changed. The women who had a wonderful tradi- tion and extraordinary strength have now begun to fall. [long pause] They no longer maintain the household. They dislike raising children. That is what it has come to. And women, just like men-perhaps more so- have become lost in amusements. Today, who is going to maintain the household?

Azumi is a company founded with the grand purpose of making women beautiful, but beauty is not only a matter of form. A splendid heart and beautiful spirit are even more important. I want to make this anniversary an occasion to instill this kind of thinking firmly into the women of Azumi. [In the past], as fitting complements to such splendid women, there were great men. However, when the women changed the men began to fall as well. Men no longer have strength. There are few manly men nowadays and I feel that is the result of this kind of [modern] woman. "

14. Dairoku Kikuchi, Japanese Education (London: John Murray, 1909), p. 266. 15. Roberts, "Non-Trivial Pursuits," pp. 199-200.

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His employees received this message with mixed emotion, for most of them work because they have to, find it difficult to manage both domestic and job requirements, worry about the children, and feel they work hard for their wages. These women blue-collar workers found a certain irony in being told by their employer that woman's proper place was in the home, looking after her husband and children.

Despite the prevalence of such sentiments in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, Japanese industry found an essential place for women who had completed their education but were not yet married. The country's growth as an industrial power simply would not have proceeded as rapidly as it did without the large labor force of young, unmarried women who worked in the textile factories and other light industry. As the population was still largely rural, the majority of these young women came from farm families, as did the young men who made up the conscript military forces. The factory girls worked in generally poor conditions for very low wages that often went directly to their households or into the pockets of the labor recruiters. They provided an inexhaustible stream of readily controlled, generally compliant operatives whose employment histories were short, for women were expected to leave to marry in their early twenties. Working conditions did improve over the period in question and there can be no doubt that many farm girls found life in the factory far less rigorous than that in the fields, but one central fact remains. Although large numbers of women in prewar Japan held jobs at one time or another during their lives, with the rarest of exceptions none ever had a career.

In sum, prewar Japan was a highly androcentric society in which women lived out their lives at a disadvantage that was not merely legally defined. Marriage meant being separated from their natal families and going into another with the chief requirement that they bear children. Work meant short-term employment in dead-end jobs. Security, which lay in conforming to the ideal of good wife and wise mother, was to be found only in the domestic realm. Divorce rates were very high, and those who failed to achieve domestic security were likely to meet a very grim fate indeed. Underlying all this is the prevailing sentiment held by those who constructed and operated the political, economic, and social systems. In their view the good and virtuous woman-mother and wife, be it remem- bered-was nonetheless a limited being. Women were thought to be less intelligent than men, more emotional and so less rational, less reliable, vindictive, potentially dangerous if not rigorously disciplined, and worst of all, silly. It is a major irony of that system that the rearing of the men who made it was largely entrusted to women and that the harsh discipline

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thought so necessary in the training of a young wife was administered almost exclusively by her mother-in-law.

Ella Wiswell and I recently have offered a picture of rural women in Japan in the 1930s that seems to stand in sharp contrast to the one I have just presented.16 The women of the farming village of Suye in Kyushu were far less docile and acquiescent than the picture given above would appear to suggest. They left or divorced their husbands and remarried with great frequency, sometimes taking their children with them despite the general view that they belonged to their father's household. Nevertheless, a close reading of the book will show, I submit, that male dominance was the rule and that even those strong-minded women lived out their sometimes colorful lives in the interstices of the system. Stronger by far than the stereotype of the good and virtuous (read, obedient) woman of prewar Japan, it is nevertheless the case that no one would ever mistake the women of Suye for village matriarchs or even suggest that there was anything like gender equality there.

After 1945, then, did it all change? Much of it did, as a matter of fact, and much that happened was the direct result of pressure on the Japanese government by the American occupation forces. We need not under- estimate the courage and dedication of those Japanese women who had striven so valiantly before the war to improve their condition in society in order to see that had it not been for Japan's defeat and surrender, women would never have come as far as they have done in the last forty years.

Article 14 of the 1947 Constitution reads: "All the people are equal under the law and there shall be no discrimination in political, economic, or social relations because of race, creed, sex, social status, or family origin." The postwar constitution of Japan, it would seem, requires no Equal Rights Amendment. Article 24 reads: "Marriage shall be based only on the mutual consent of both sexes and it shall be maintained through mutual cooperation with the equal rights of the husband and wife as a basis. With regard to choice of spouse, property rights, inheritance, choice of domicile, divorce, and other matters pertaining to the family, laws shall be en- acted from the standpoint of individual dignity and the essential equality of the sexes." This single article required extensive revision of the civil code, for the legal basis of the old household system had been swept away.

Surely greater assurances of equality before the law could hardly be asked for. It is a measure of the extent to which behavioral and attitudinal changes lag behind statute that one can say without any fear of responsible contradiction that women's position in Japanese society today is still very

16. Robert J. Smith and Ella Lury Wiswell, The Women of Suye Mura (Chicago: Univer-

sity of Chicago Press, 1982).

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far from the equality long guaranteed them. Indeed, so clearly is this the case that in 1985, after extended and acrimonious debate, an equal employment opportunity bill finally passed the Diet. The intent of its authors had been to guarantee equal employment opportunities to men and women, but the bill's many critics charged that in its final form the law is far more favorable to the interests of employers than those of employees. There can be no doubt that it fails to provide effective sanctions against those who violate its provisions, but it is too early to assess the impact of the Parity in Employment Law (Danjo Koyo Kinto Ho), which went into effect on April 1, 1986.

It was further the concern of the Americans to improve educational opportunities for women, an aim subsumed under the general program of reform designed to overhaul the Japanese educational system from top to bot- tom. Article 3 of the Fundamental Law of Education reads: "All people shall be given the opportunity to receive an equal education corresponding to their ability. There shall be no discrimination in education because of race, creed, sex, social status, economic position, or family origin." In 1984 a slightly higher proportion of girls than boys advanced from middle school to high school (the figure for girls was 95 per cent and for boys 92.8 per cent). In that same year 32.7 per cent of female and 38.3 per cent of male high school graduates went on to attend college or university.17

This apparent parity masks a significant difference in the kind and quality of education available to the two groups, however. For in 1980 men accounted for 82 per cent of all four-year college students; women accounted for 90 per cent of all junior-college students. Put another way, two of every three female high school graduates continuing their education went on to junior college, while nine of every ten males going on headed for a four-year college or university.'8 Furthermore, more than half the courses offered in the junior colleges are essentially in home economics and education. It is with considerable justice that they are called modern versions of the old schools for brides. Surveys of the attitudes of women enrolled in two-year colleges repeatedly produce the finding that they see themselves as preparing for marriage. They plan to work until they marry

17. These Ministry of Education statistics appear in Report on Working Women (Tokyo: Ministry of Labor, 1984). Between 1975 and 1984, while the proportion of females going on to colleges of all kinds rose very slightly from 32.4 to 32.7 per cent, that for males actually declined from 43.0 to 38.2 per cent.

18. Thomas P. Rohlen, Japan's High Schools (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), p. 85. For a review of changes in school enrollments from 1920 to 1980 see Ushiogi Morikazu, "Population Growth and Educational Development," Population of Japan, Country Monograph Series No. 11 (New York: United Nations, Economic and So- cial Commission for Asia and the Pacific, 1984), pp. 174-86.

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or have their first child, and then take up the role of homemaker for a time before reentering the labor market. Some of Japan's most highly educated women, many of them with doctorates from foreign universities, can find teaching positions only in these institutions, where they endure a high level of frustration and discouragement.

What of the small proportion of women who do attend the coeducational four-year colleges and universities? Not surprisingly, the great majority of them are in the humanities. There are as well several excellent women's universities where emphasis is on giving the students an education fully equal to that offered in the better coeducational institutions. Never- theless, it is difficult to disagree with the assessment of the future of women's education offered by Okamura:

As long as society continues in the traditional belief that girls must sooner or later marry, leave their families and be absorbed into their husband's family, become dependent on him, and find their happiness in being married to a man of high social and economic standing-as long as these con- ventional beliefs remain prevalent, so will the current system of educating women persist. 9

Let me now turn to the two most fundamental changes of the postwar period-those in family law and those that have occurred in the labor market. The promulgation of the new Civil Code of 1947 marked a shift of major proportions in the former. Most fundamental of all was the total elimination of the household; in the law, at least, Japan became a land of families in which men and women alike were guaranteed equal rights. They may hold property separately and both spouses are fully competent legally. The right to seek a divorce is granted equally to both, and although adultery is no longer a crime, it is grounds for divorce for both husband and wife. Parental authority in such matters as permission to marry is rec- ognized only insofar as the parents are the adult guardians of their minor children. Whereas the old code required impartible inheritance, the new one does not. Should there be a division of property on the death of the family head, females have the same rights in it as do males. In short, there no longer exist any legal distinctions based on gender that deprive either males or females of their rights.

Nonetheless, there are formidable barriers to a woman's full exercise of those rights in the face of familial opposition, just as a wife still finds it difficult to contest her husband's demand for a divorce. Under the current civil code, anyone qualifying as a potential heir to a portion of an estate

19. Masu Okamura, Changing Japan: Women's Status (Tokyo: International Society for Educational Information, 1973), pp. 81-82.

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may renounce his or her share in favor of another claimant. The records of the family courts reveal that more than twice as many women as men re- fuse their share of a parent's estate.2" Clearly, the assets are going to their brothers, with one notable exception. It may happen, upon the death of the father, that the widow and children gather to agree on the settlement of the estate. The widow is eligible to receive one-half, the children to divide the remainder. In some cases all the children but one and the widow will renounce their claims after it has been agreed that one of the children will accept both the assets and the responsibility for the care of the mother in her old age. For that reason, in these times, the heir may well turn out to be a daughter.

In the matter of divorce we need only look at the figures on the distri- bution of the types of divorce in Japan. There are two-consent and judicial. Divorce by consent requires only that a simple form, impressed with the personal seals of both spouses, be submitted to the authorities. Judicial divorce involves either third-party arbitration or a trial. In 1900, 99.7 per cent of all divorces were by consent; in 1980 the figure was still just under 90 per cent.2' In this statistic lies yet one more bit of evidence of the glacial character of fundamental change in the conjugal relationship. Divorce by consent, it is well known, makes it notoriously easy for a husband or his family to force a woman to agree to an action she does not seek. Con- versely, it is difficult for a wife to press her husband to accept a divorce he does not want. The high percentage of divorces by consent may be taken as a handy index of female powerlessness in Japanese society.22

The second major change in the postwar period has occurred in the la-

20. Joy Larsen Paulson, "Family Law Reform in Postwar Japan: Succession and Adop- tion" (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, 1983). Between 1954 and 1961, when records in- dicated the sex of those requesting renunciation of share of an estate, two-thirds of those making application were women. Furthermore,'between 1949 and 1980 there was a decline of 70 per cent in the number of requests for renunciation (148,192 to 44,549 cases), suggesting that the matter increasingly is being settled informally. I see no reason to doubt Paulson's claim that the Family Court commissions were constituted in such a way as to intimidate the young and females (although there probably was no intention to do so); I assume that informal means for settling estates equally operate against their desires and interests.

21. Jinko d6tai tokei (Statistics on population trends) (Tokyo: Kiseisho [Ministry of Health and Welfare], 1981), p. 279.

22. See Taimie L. Bryant, "Marital Dissolution in Japan: Legal Obstacles and Their Im- pact," Law in Japan, Vol. 17 (1984), pp. 73-97, especially pages 94-97, where she discusses the prevalence of the practice of one spouse submitting divorce papers without the knowledge or consent of the other. Such fraudulent "consent divorces" are easily obtained, for only the impress of the personal seals of both parties and two witnesses on a form is required. The form may be sent in by mail or delivered by a third party to the appropriate ward office, which does not have even to notify the principals that the document has been processed (p. 95). The interpretation advanced in the text, that this system operates chiefly to the dis-

13




bor force and women's place in it. Any consideration of this complex issue must begin with a discussion of two critical matters. The first, of course, is the nature of Japanese employment practices, the structure of wages and salaries, and the character of the labor market. The second matter, by far the more important of the two in my view, is the current status of the family-and by extension the related issues of marriage, divorce, child- rearing, and above all the tendency of the Japanese to divide the world into two domains, that of women on the one hand and men on the other.

Japanese women, although protected by quite advanced legislation, enter the labor market under massive handicaps. They are so great that it is no exaggeration to say that while most women at one time or another in their lives hold down a job, it is still exceedingly rare for a woman to pursue a career outside the home. It is only slightly less rare for a woman to find a rewarding or challenging job, and for the work they do, they receive somewhat less than 60 per cent of a man's income, just as in the United States.23

Still, more than half of all Japanese women above the age of 15 work outside the home today. Typically they enter the labor market upon com- pleting high school, junior-college, or university. Until recently they tended to work for a few years-in effect, until they married at age 24 or 25. In 1980, however, 12.6 per cent of women between the ages of 25 and 39 had not yet married;24 nevertheless, the employer typically expects a woman to resign her position when she marries, or when she has her first child, or at age 30, whether or not she is planning to marry. There are several advantages to this system. The most obvious is that the employer can keep taking on young female school graduates at low wages, advance them slowly if at all, and ease them out without further commitment to them. For their part, women save from their wages and salaries so that they can bring some personal assets to their marriage-often referred to as a woman's true career. The beginnings of change can be seen in the tendency of women,

advantage of women, is my own. Bryant discusses the complexities of the situation in ex- haustive detail.

23. For a stimulating analysis of the situation in the United States, see Victor R. Fuchs, "Sex Differences in Economic Well-Being," Science, Vol. 232 (1986), pp. 459-64. His

major finding of interest in this context is that the economic well-being of American white women did not improve between 1959 and 1983 despite all the positive changes in the labor market and labor legislation, principally because they still bear primary responsibility for

raising children. The situation among black women is even more bleak. 24. See Yoko Sato, "Work and Life of Single Women of the Post-War Generation" in

Yasuko Muramatsu, ed., Proceedings of '83 Tokyo Symposium on Women: Women and Work

(Tokyo: International Group for the Study on Women and Kuala Lumpur: Asian and Pacific

Development Center, 1983), pp. 199-216. For statistics on per cent of women married by age cohort, see Statistical Bureau, Prime Minister's Office, 1980 Population Census of Japan, Vol. 2, Table 5, p. 80.

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especially in the last decade, to stay on the job longer, even after they have married and have children.

For women and their work prospects, probably the most important feature of the Japanese employment system is the nenko-seido, the age- seniority system. Firms with more than 300 employees usually have this system which, put simply, bases a worker's income on his chronological age and years of service to the company. It offers the workers something close to permanent job security if they will be patient about advancement, predictable pay increases on which to base their plans for the future, and company housing and several kinds of fringe benefits, all in return for the worker's loyalty and commitment to stay with the company until he retires. Insofar as this system applies to anyone in the Japanese labor force, it applies to the so-called regular workers, almost all of whom are male, and with whom the unions are almost exclusively concerned.

There are also temporary and part-time workers. The nenko system does not apply to them, nor are the unions interested in them. Because the temporaries, women and men alike, can be cut loose at any time, they are not expected to demonstrate such profound degrees of loyalty to the firm as are the regulars. When they resign their relationship with the company is completely severed. Should a woman return to work even at the same firm after a lapse of ten or fifteen years, as many in their forties and fifties are doing, with rare exceptions she will start at the beginning, for there is no accrual of time spent in previous service, which means that her wages and job responsibility alike are held to a minimum. The distinction between a woman's job and a man's career could hardly be drawn more sharply.

It is often remarked that far more women between the ages of 35 and 54 are now in the labor force than ever before. That is true of the absolute numbers, for the Japanese population has aged very rapidly and there is a greatly expanded pool of women in that age range compared to the past. However, the participation rate of women in the labor force has not changed all that dramatically between 1960, when it was 59 per cent, and 1983 when it reached 63.9. In 1984 over 60 per cent of women in their thirties and two-thirds of those in their forties were working (their average age was 41.8), one of the highest rates of female labor-force participation in the capitalist world.25 Indeed, the percentage of women over forty who are working is almost as high as that for not-yet-married women, and it is their entry into the labor market that has produced a steady rise in the number of women in temporary (pdto) jobs. In 1984, 90 per cent of all such workers were housewives.26

25. Labor Force Survey (Tokyo: Prime Minister's Office, 1984). 26. Japanese Ministry of Labor, Basic Statistical Survey of the Wage Structure (Tokyo,

15




Several factors account for the change in the labor market for women. The first is the shortage of young labor that occurred in the 1970s, the result of the sharp drop in the birthrate following the passage of the law legal- izing abortion and the increased rates of attendance of the young through high school. Employers were forced to turn to older women who could be hired on an equivalently low pay-scale. The second factor is the combined effect of the consumer boom and an ever-increasing push toward higher levels of education for one's children. Most married women who have been propelled into the labor market to supplement family income tend to seek jobs convenient to home so they can continue to discharge their domestic duties as well. Because their role as wife and mother remains undiminished in importance, they are concerned to find employment that offers convenient hours and is located close to home. Work is not an alternative to homemaking; it is an extension of the domestic role.

The Ministry of Labor, through its Bureau of Women and Minors (it goes without saying there is no Bureau of Men), has tried to enforce compliance with the law, particularly that provision guaranteeing equal pay for men and women doing the same work. It has had some success, for today the starting salaries of men and women are nearly the same. They soon diverge, however, as the mechanism of nenko comes to affect the young men but not their female counterparts.27

Employers, who have a ready rationale for their treatment of female workers, offer five major defenses of their policies:

1. Women have less physical strength, less intelligence, and less commitment to work.

2. Married women carry the burden of housework, and therefore have less energy to devote to their jobs.

3. Women's short working life makes it uneconomical for employers to invest in their training.

1984). Pato are defined as workers whose hours do not exceed 35 per week. Of the women in the paid non-agricultural workforce, only 22.1 per cent are pdto; however, 95 per cent of all

pato are women. 27. In 1983, in the age group 20-24, women's earnings were 87.7 per cent of men's. The

comparable figure for those aged 40-44 was 50.4 per cent. However, a note of caution is

required in interpreting these figures, for the educational level of young women today is far

higher than that of their counterparts twenty years ago. But see the detailed data in Shino- tsuka Eiko, Nihon no joshi rodod (Japan's women workers) (Tokyo: Tokyo- keizai shinpo sha, 1982), p. 186, which shows nevertheless that at every level of educational attainment and number of years of service to the company, the income of female employees is lower than that of males. The New York Times (April 8, 1984) reports on a study by the International Labor

Organization that reveals that in the decade ending in 1983 Japan was the only advanced nation where the wage gap between male and female industrial workers had widened, largely because of growth in the service industry and because Japan's booming electronics and semi- conductor factories employ women almost exclusively.

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4. College graduates are the worst risk because they enter the firm at about twenty-two and leave it in three or four years to get married.

5. Since women are not trained, they cannot rise in the wage scale by taking on more demanding tasks.28

A common expectation of the young women hired by a firm is that they will provide tea for everyone (in addition to performing other duties) and maintain a demure and pleasant manner toward all. Preference in hiring is given to those who may be described as suitably ornamental. In a recently uncovered personnel department memorandum, a major Japanese firm was found to recommend against hiring several categories of female applicants. The long list, which speaks volumes for an attitude still very prevalent in the white-collar and service sectors, includes the following: Be wary of young women who wear glasses, are very short, speak in loud voices, have been divorced, or are daughters of college professors. It would be a serious error, however, to imagine that such factors are never taken into account in the assessment of male job candidates and employees. In discussing the situation in large companies, Jolivet29 says that the qualities sought in the hiring process are those that also determine chances for promotion after the first ten years with a firm: "character traits were all-important-so- ciability, dynamism, obedience, adaptability, the ability to inspire confi- dence, tenacity, leadership capacity." She observes that male employees "must also live morally upright lives, not tainted by scandal, and make a good marriage." When a choice had to be made between candidates equally qualified otherwise, some of the factors weighing against promotion were taking all the vacation time to which one is entitled, having "an aggressive, gloomy or soft nature," or taking "a too academic approach."

Let us turn now to the second and more important of the two issues in the postwar period that I have already referred to-the Japanese family and the ways it has changed-and focus on only some of its aspects that are relevant to the topic at hand. One of the most fundamental distinctions in Japan is that drawn between uchi and soto. Uchi is that which is within, inside, private, "ours." Soto is the outside, public world. The prime example of uchi is of course the family unit. Indeed, the word itself is often used to mean exactly what Americans mean when they say "family." Uchi no hito is a person of our family. Uchi is the house itself. It is, above all, the domestic domain thought properly to be controlled by women, who are responsible for its day-to-day operation, the care of its children, and the management of its budget. The domain of men is outside in the world of

28. Alice H. Cook and Hiroko Hayashi, Working Women in Japan: Discrimination, Re- sistance, and Reform (Ithaca: New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cor- nell University, 1980), p. 28.

29. Jolivet, "Impact," pp. 4 and 5.

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work and public affairs. Typically, it is said, the woman rules the home, while the man is the breadwinner.

It is this distinction that has had such a profound effect on the present position and future prospects of women in the labor market. Suzanne Vogel 3( has described what she calls the role of the professional housewife:

When a woman marries, she takes on a fulltime lifelong commitment to a

job, specifically the job of taking care of her husband, their children, and often other kin as well. And though some women attempt to combine the career of housewife with a career outside the home, the difficulties they encounter only serve to underscore the fact that the overwhelming majority of women still adhere to the basic and traditional idea of the good wife and wise mother, and consider their family responsibilities to be their life-work and their profession. In contrast to that of the American housewife, the

Japanese wife's job is more clearly focused and does not include a good many of the roles an American housewife plays, such as hostess, conversa- tionalist, entertainer, wage earner, keeper of worldly wisdom, nor even sex

object or lover. ...

In short, the married woman's duties and responsibilities are clearly set out and as clearly delimited. It is the far more diffuse character of the duties of the American wife that often causes Japanese married women newly arrived in the United States to express pity for American women, of whom

they feel too much is expected. Needless to say, however, feminists have

argued that Vogel's view of the housewife's career is identical to that held by Japanese men, but not by women, who want more freedom. Yet it would be unwise to overlook that most signal of virtues traditionally ascribed to the

Japanese woman, one in which she is trained by her mother from an early age. That is the virtue of making the best of what life gives. Endurance, forebearance, and development within the constraints imposed by one's life are also expected of men-how much more so for women. My own guess is that Vogel is right in thinking that the majority of women still adhere to a conservative view of proper conjugal roles.

What kind of authority do women exercise in the domestic realm? In

many ways it is considerable, for to an extent unfamiliar to most Ameri- cans the roles of husband and wife are remarkably complementary-separate, but each highly dependent on the other. Husbands expect to accord their wives a great deal of power and autonomy within the domestic realm.

Although the pattern is said to be less common than it was only ten years ago, a white-collar worker or professional is quite likely to turn over his

30. Suzanne H. Vogel, "The Professional Housewife," in Merry I. White and Barbara

Molony, eds., Proceedings of the Tokyo Symposium on Women (Tokyo: International Group for the Study of Women, 1978), p. 150.

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entire salary to his wife. I know men in their 40s and 50s who do not even know how much they make, for they have asked their employer to deposit their checks directly to the family bank account, which is managed by the wife. She is responsible, then, for budgeting and saving-up to and in- cluding providing a generous spending allowance for her husband. This practice is said by some to be eroding slowly, but the evidence is incon- clusive.3' Whatever the degree of its current prevalence, Lebra reminds us that it is incorrect to say that even the emblematic role of wife-as-money- manager is in fact gender-determined. The two financial responsibilities of earning and managing are clearly distinguished and the latter is normally assigned to the wife. But in the rare case where the husband is incapaci- tated and therefore housebound and the wife works outside, it is he who manages the domestic finances.32

It is important not to overlook one of the major reasons that women are accorded such a degree of authority and responsibility in the home. It is because men do not wish to be concerned with what is defined as the woman's world, and wives commonly discourage their husbands from ex- pressing too much interest in such matters. Thirty years ago I knew many older Japanese men who did not carry money or wear a watch and who subsequently never bothered to learn to drive an automobile. It was the wife's duty to pay, keep track of the time, and serve as chauffeur. What must not be lost sight of is that this dependency of the husband on the wife is the outcome of two very different, again complementary perceptions and strategies. Women know that their greatest security lies in rendering the husband as dependent on his wife as can possibly be managed. Japanese women are extremely adept at this tactic. The man who cannot care for himself must look to his wife to do so for him. This situation goes a long way toward explaining the low rates of divorce, for marriage, which occurs very late, is seen as a mutual commitment made by two people of complementary competence. The man commits himself to providing for his family, the women to maintaining a comfortable home for all. But, be it noted, when push comes to shove, the power of the male proves infinitely greater than that of the female. The brutal fact is that should a husband decide to withdraw financial support, the carefully crafted career and vaunted domestic authority of the professional housewife will fall in ruins. The autonomy of the married woman is wholly contingent. What has been said for

31. In an interview with Sahashi Kei, president of an all-female marketing consulting firm, for example, we are told that 74 per cent of all Japanese husbands still hand over pay- checks to their wives, but in the same article it is reported that surveys conducted in 1973 and 1982 showed a decline in this practice from 67 per cent to 55 per cent. See Kittredge Cherry, "Breaking New Ground," PHP (February 1984), pp. 10-11.

32. Lebra, Japanese Women, p. 135.

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the United States is perhaps even truer for Japan: most women are only one man away from poverty.

We are brought, then, to the final-one might say the ultimate-issue, that of the character of conjugal relations. It is a subject on which the out- sider comments diffidently and in full recognition that he may have got it all wrong. Modesty is required of the analyst of this matter in any society-how much more so when dealing with the Japanese, who are a very private people. Let me start at the beginning. Do the Japanese marry for love? Some do. It may well be that an increasing proportion of first marriages are based at least in part on love. Yet a significant percentage of mar-

riages are still arranged, so difficult is it for young unmarried women and men to socialize casually with one another once they are out of school. Does Japanese marriage lead to love? Indeed it may. After all, the prime symbol of conjugal felicity is the elderly couple whose mutual affection has grown thoughout their married life together. It is commonly remarked that after the children are married and gone from home comes the time when a husband and wife may enter into a period of genuinely companionate marriage, based on mutual affection, respect, and understanding. Not all couples are so fortunate; in this Japan is very like many other societies, perhaps. Indeed, the number of divorces sought by women over the age of thirty-five has risen steadily since the end of World War II.33 There is little chance that they could remarry even if they wished to do so. And widows, who are more likely than divorcees to be able to remarry successfully if they choose to do so, generally do not. One reason for remaining unmarried after being widowed is summarized in the pithy phrase zenkon de korita, best loosely rendered as "I had it with my first marriage."

In Japan, casual association with members of the opposite sex was not easy for members of my generation and no period of courtship preceded marriage. The psychological unease that seemed so much a feature of interaction between the sexes has diminished, apparently, among the younger generations, but an apposite story is told by Angela Carter, a British novelist who lived in Japan in the 1960s. She introduces it by saying that Japa- nese men seem to find women who cannot be categorized easily as either wives or mothers something of a threat, and continues:

A foreign girlfriend of mine once had an affair with a Japanese man. They had a rather tormented first five months when he would do no more than

occasionally touch her foot under the table and then retreat. And then, fi-

nally, he told her he had dreamed of her, he had dreamed they had gone to a

33. Yuzawa Yasuhiko, "Sengo kazoku hendo no tokeiteki kansatsu" in Fukushima

Masao, ed., Kazoku: seisaku to ho: 3. Sengo nihon kazoku do doko (Tokyo: University of

Tokyo Press, 1977), p. 38.

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beach at sunset, and they had made love, and then he had cut off her head and swum out to sea holding it and drowned himself. She said to me, "You know, that's the first time I realized he was really interested in me."34

In a recent book, the only genuinely informative one in English on the subject, Coleman deals with the complicated matter of family planning in Japanese society.35 His discussion centers on the relationship between husband and wife and its effect on such matters as opting for abortion, choice of contraceptive device, and sexual activity. His conclusions are sobering:

The aggregate effects of women's status on Japan's family planning scene are minimal . . . because Japanese women have a much lower status in their society than do women in the West. Education, for example, has less over- all impact simply because the proportion of women in Japan enjoying a higher educational background is much smaller than in the West.36

Coleman further finds extremely high degrees of passivity and compliance among Japanese married women, despite the brave talk about a new generation of New Women, and a marked tendency on the part of young married women to see in motherhood the ultimate legitimater of marital sexual activity.37

The women interviewed by Coleman were well aware of all this, and what is important for our purposes, they wished it were otherwise. They spoke of a desire for display of greater empathy on the part of their husbands; they wanted to share more activities and decisions; they gave every indication of wishing that their marriages were precisely what they were not-companionate unions of equal partners. Among these younger married women there was no trace of that sentiment embodied in the durable Japanese saying that the best husband is jobu de rusu-healthy and out of the house.

It is clear enough that the legal basis for gender inequalities of an earlier day has been eradicated and that other kinds of inequalities are much reduced. But the position of women in any society, I need hardly remind my readers, does not necessarily reflect their own perceptions of what it ought to be nor is their standing in the law necessarily an accurate guide to the treatment they receive. The position of women in any society is in large

34. From an interview in Ronald Bell, ed., The Japanese Experience (New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1973), p. 31.

35. Samuel Coleman, Family Planning in Japanese Society: Traditional Birth Control in a Modern Urban Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

36. Ibid., pp. 149-50. 37. For strong support of Coleman's position, see Masako Tanaka, "Maternal Authority

in the Japanese Family," in George DeVos and Takao Sofue, eds., Religion and Family in East Asia, Senri Ethnological Studies No. 11 (1984), pp. 227-36.

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part the result of the attitudes of men toward them, and herein lies the crux of the matter. It is no secret that the foundations of gender identity are laid early in life. Nor is there any doubt that in the contemporary Japanese family it is the young mother who bears almost sole responsibility for the rearing and training of the children. Directly, then, and indirectly through her outward demeanor toward her husband and other men, as well as toward other women, she communicates a set of dispositions to her sons and daughters alike.38

Sometimes an event highlights with awful clarity attitudes so basic that they are seldom openly expressed. Not long ago the wife of a young Japa- nese colleague of mine at Cornell gave birth to their first child. She was 26, he about 30. When he went to her hospital room for the first time she looked up at him, eyes filled with tears, and said, " Yurushite kudasai. For- give me," and showed him the face of their baby daughter. He told me they really had never discussed the matter, but that she had just known he would have preferred a son. For their part, mothers routinely say that daughters are easier to raise than sons, for they can be trained early in obedience and compliance as a boy cannot, lest it unfit for him for the struggle and com-

petitiveness of later life. Girls trained otherwise run the risk of not settling down into the patterns of behavior that will recommend them as prospec- tive brides. When asked to choose the characteristics most desirable in a marriage partner, unmarried women overwhelmingly choose sincerity (sei- jitsusa), dependability (tayori ni naru dansei), and intelligence (rikai no aru dansei), assigning almost no importance to physical attractiveness (bidan gata). For their part men seek gentle (yasashii), charming (kawaii), and staunch, competent (shikkari shita josei) wives. Indeed, in one 1978 survey men split almost evenly among three revealing options offered by the interviewer:

sewa nyobo gata (housewife type-a close 24.6% approximation of the good wife and wise mother)

jobu de nagamochi gata (healthy and durable) 26.1% yasashii taipu (gentle) 27.0%

The fourth option, bijo gata (beautiful) was chosen by only 3.7 per cent.39 It follows that the ideal wife is thought to be ill-equipped temperamentally

38. Writing from a reformist perspective, Higuchi Keiko deals with this complex issue in an engaging book entitled Onna no ko no sodatekata (Tokyo: Bunka shuppan kyoku, 1978). It has been translated by Tomii Akiko as Bringing Up Girls (Kyoto: Shokado Booksellers Private Company, 1985); despite the title one of the book's four chapters concerns the rearing of boys.

39. Two such surveys are reported in Seron chosa nenkan (Tokyo: Sorifu, 1979),

22




for the struggle of serious employment in either jobs or careers. What will fit her for one ideal role by definition unfits her for the other.

If further change is on the way, it is with respect to attitudes toward marriage and the family that it will have to begin. Until very recently it could fairly be said that in Japan almost everyone married and that virtually all married women bore children. A change of potential importance is foreshadowed in the results of some surveys conducted in the late 1970s. Between 25 and 30 per cent of the unmarried women interviewed agreed with the statement "You don't have to get married just because you're a woman." 40 What surveys never tell us, alas, is whether or not the respondents ever act on their opinions. Nevertheless, there is good evidence for the observation that young women who do express doubts about marrying at all see in marriage a profound commitment to home and family that pre- cludes pursuit of a career. That most women do in fact marry is partly at- tributable to their realization that as the system is structured today taking any alternative path into adulthood is very risky.

Thus, the complementarity of the roles of wife and husband remains very much a feature of the family, despite all the contextual shifts that have occurred. It has been remarked that as a consequence of the increasing tendency to live as conjugal families rather than in the older style multi- generational households, Japanese women appear to have taken on an even more demanding domestic role than they played in the past. The young wife, as we have seen, is the caretaker of the children, for day-care centers are few in number and quite costly, and husbands are only marginally more involved in the task of child-care today than they have ever been. The ma- ture wife has become the caretaker of the elderly, either her husband's parents or her own. There have been some changes in this area as well. In 1980, 69 per cent of those 65 and older lived with a married or unmarried child, down from 87 per cent in 1960. However, the overwhelming choice remains coresidence with one's eldest son (73 per cent in 1983) and, contrary to much press speculation, the long-established pattern for parent- child coresidence to begin before or at the time of the child's marriage still holds (82 per cent in 1983).41 That is, it is not yet usual for parents to live

pp. 563-64 and 590, and another in the 1980 edition of the annual, on page 121. I am indebted to Walter D. Edwards for his assistance in locating them.

40. The 25 per cent figure is from a Public Opinion Survey on Women in 1979 conducted by the Prime Minister's Office; the 30 per cent result was obtained in a small survey of an unspecified sample in 1976. See Sato, "Work and Life of Single Women," p. 212, and Cherry, "Breaking New Ground," p. 10, respectively.

41. Takeji Kamiko and Michihiko Noguchi, "On the Coresidence of Parents and Mar- ried Child," in Kiyomi Morioka, ed., Family and Life Course of Middle-Aged Men (No place: The Family and Life Course Study Group, 1985), pp. 163-87. As for those cases where a

23




separately for a time and only later move in with a child in their old age- coresidence is a much longer-term affair than that. The government of Japan has been able to provide such meager social services as it does at both ends of the life cycle largely because of the time and energy Japanese women devote to the care of the very young and the very old members of that society. It is an additional burden borne with remarkable equanimity by women who increasingly hold down jobs outside the home as well.42

Where, then, are we left? In some ways the position of women in Japa- nese society can be said to have improved immeasurably insofar as inequalities based solely on gender have been reduced. A bit of evidence to back up this claim comes from surveys that ask women and men whether they would prefer to have been born as a member of the opposite sex. Be- tween 1958 and 1980 the percentage of women replying that they are content to have been born female has risen from 27 to 67. For men who say they are content to have been born male, the percentage has held steady at about 90.43 These results may mean that today's women have more to be content with; it may also mean that they have come to see that the lot of men is less enviable than their predecessors thought.

Nonetheless, I think it would be a grave error to overestimate the degree of improvement in the lot of women; at the very least the survey results show that it has not been sufficiently dramatic to persuade men that they would have been better off had they been born female. The reasons for what I see as the slow pace of change in so many areas of gender inequality are not far to seek. Most Japanese still regard the family as the fundamental unit of society on which the future of the nation depends. The family is

wife does assume responsibility for the care of her own parents, Kamiko and Noguchi offer the following observation based on their study of Shizuoka City from 1981 to 1984: "coresidence of parents and their married daughter more often occurs when parents have no sons or when their son(s) lives at a great distance from them . . . parents are more likely to live to-

gether with their married daughter when her husband is not the eldest son of his parents . . . when parents coreside with their married daughter, her husband is more likely to change his

family name for hers. In short, the coresidence of parents and their married daughters does not contravene that social norm of the coresidence of parents with the eldest son. It is merely a

minority pattern resorted to only in case the majority pattern is not feasible" (p. 175). 42. What is the source of this equanimity? An intriguing answer is provided in Masako

Tanaka, "Maternal Authority," p. 236. She points out that the moral authority of the Japanese wife-and-mother is far higher than one might expect from her low jural status and customary usages. She is both life-giver and care-giver without whom life is impossible. Her moral au-

thority, then, is "related to the structural position she occupies in the household connecting the past and future, by taking care of aged parents and ancestors and by bearing and raising the children."

43. NKH Hoso Seron Ch6sajo, ed., Nihonjin to Amerikajin (Tokyo: Nihon hoso shuppan kyokai, 1982), p. 73.

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seen ultimately as the product of the wife's investment of her adult life in her husband and their children. The concern felt by many Japanese about the changes that are occurring may easily be inferred. Should women be encouraged or permitted to stand on an equal footing with men, they be- lieve, the result would be destructive competition between the sexes, the breakup of the family with attendant rises in rates of divorce and re- marriage, a growth in the number of single-parent families and juvenile delinquency, and a host of other social ills. As a young Japanese friend of mine said, "We are desperately trying to avoid catching the American dis- ease. Women are important here, for it is they who will make or break our society-and they will do it as the mothers who raise our children and the wives who support us in our effort not to fall behind." In his view, clearly, for women that is reward enough; certainly his father and grandfather would have agreed wholeheartedly. It remains to be seen whether or not his daughter and granddaughter will see it that way, for in all the polls44 I know of, from two-thirds to three-quarters of women surveyed say they are rea- sonably or very satisfied with their lives.

CORNELL UNIVERSITY

44. Margaret Lock has generously shared the preliminary analysis of the results of a lengthy questionnaire she administered to 1,500 women between the ages of 45 and 55 (in- clusive), in Kyoto and its environs in 1984. She asked the question, "All things considered, which of the following best describes your present situation?" ("iro iro na koto o kangae awasete chikagoro no anata no jotai wa tsugi no dore ni gaito suru to omoimasu ka"). Of the 1,321 usable responses the results were as follows: very happy (taihen shiawase da), 17 per cent; fairly happy (mama no tokoro da), 73 per cent; not particularly happy (amari shiawase de wa nai), 7 per cent; unhappy (fuko da), 1 per cent. The Asahi Evening News, January, 16, 1986, carried a report on a survey of 3,000 wives of wage-earners in Tokyo and Yokohama conducted by a research group at Seijo University which found that "about 80 percent of the respondents are content with their home life, husbands, and children." It may be that both results reflect reluctance on the part of women to admit to being unhappy, but the percentages of those claiming to be content, happy, or satisfied are large enough to command our attention.

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Gender Inequality in Contemporary Japan - Robert Smith

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