Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival Page 27
Kirino was born in 1951 in Kanazawa, the castle town where I had lived briefly in my first month in Japan. Her father was an architect and her family moved around before settling down in Tokyo when she was fourteen. She studied law and later started to write pulp romantic fiction for a mainly adolescent audience. It was not until she was forty that she won critical acclaim for one of her novels, Rain Falling on My Face, and started writing more serious fiction about things she considered important. Her biggest breakthrough came with Out, the first of her novels to be translated into English.
I met Kirino one May afternoon in 2008 in the plush surroundings of the Fiorentina, an Italian café in the lobby of Tokyo’s Grand Hyatt Hotel, where large-scale works of modern art vied for attention with the beautiful people milling about. Burned once before by a foreign journalist, Kirino had brought along a female chaperone for protection, though the author of more than fifteen novels looked more than capable of looking after herself. Her face had a toughness about it. At fifty-six, she was an attractive, even beautiful, woman, though hers was not the pristine mask worn by some age-defying Japanese women. She was dressed casually in a flowery top, slacks and cork-soled shoes. Her nails were thickly painted with sparkly polish. Her voice was powerful and husky, yet of strangely low decibel.
She talked about a ‘sense of pent-up retribution’ driving her protagonists. ‘Men and women are not on good terms in Japanese society. They don’t get along,’ she said, toying with her coffee cup. ‘There is too much gender-specific role division. Men are almost like slaves in the corporate world and Japanese women are contained within the household. Their lives are disconnected. That is one of the sources of this boiling rage.’ Writing fiction, she explained, allowed her to explore this deep well of anger, often unexpressed in a society that prized smooth surface relations. ‘Writers try to cluster into words the things that lie buried in society, unconscious things. That is our duty.’
She was mindful that fiction could affect the world outside its pages. ‘Writers have to be powerful. But I also live in the real world, and sometimes I find the power of fiction frightening. After my book Out appeared – and this is scary to talk about – but I think there have been more cases of wives killing their husbands. And there may be people who found new ways of doing things because of what’s written in my book.’ Not long before we met, a case had come to court in which Kaori Mihashi, a fashionable 32-year-old, had killed her abusive husband, a Morgan Stanley employee, with a wine bottle. Like Yayoi in Kirino’s novel, she had cut him into pieces and distributed the sections among different locations. The luxury apartment where the murder took place was two minutes from my house.
If Kirino worried that she might have unwittingly inspired violence, as well as depicting it, she also thought she had performed a service by giving voice to women’s rage. ‘After Out, male readers can expect anything from me. I think I have educated them,’ she said, looking coyly at the table. ‘I was on a radio programme with a male personality once, and during the show he wouldn’t utter a single word to me. Towards the end, he asked: “What do you think of murdering somebody?” So I said: “It’s not a good thing to kill a person.” And he said: “Oh, that’s good. I’m really relieved to hear that.”’
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Japan is often portrayed in the west as a society of powerful men and timid, subservient women. It generally scores poorly in international comparisons that seek to quantify equality of opportunity. According to a 2010 global study on women’s economic opportunity by the Economist Intelligence Unit, Japan came 32nd in the world with a score of 68.2 out of a possible 100. It was above all other Asian nations, apart from Hong Kong, but below Scandinavian countries, which scored in the high 80s, as well as the United States, at 76.7. Japan scored reasonably well in the legal and social status categories. Women’s rights are, after all, protected in the post-war constitution. Article 14 outlaws discrimination based on sex and Article 24 states:
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 husband and wife as a basis. With regard to choice of spouse, property rights, inheritance, choice of domicile, divorce and other matters pertaining to marriage and the family, laws shall be enacted from the standpoint of individual dignity and the essential equality of the sexes.1
In other categories, Japan did less well. On labour policy practice, which measured pay equality, workplace discrimination and childcare provision, it came below several developing countries, including the Philippines, Brazil and Tanzania. Even South Korea, another advanced Asian economy said to discriminate against women, did better on that measure. By contrast, Japan scored well in the ‘access to finance’ category, reflecting the fact that women still tend to control household income.2 Different surveys throw up different results. In the United Nations Gender Inequality Index,3 Japan does well, coming fourteenth in the world, below Scandinavian countries but above Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia. On the other hand, in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, Japan performs abysmally, ranking 98th. There it comes below such well-known bastions of feminism as Azerbaijan, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh and Brunei.
Clearly there is a good deal of subjectivity to such surveys.4 But there are obvious ways in which Japanese women face discrimination. In business, female managers are rarer than in other rich countries, making up a lowly 1.2 per cent of senior executives in listed companies. Women don’t get such good jobs as men, and earn, on average, about 60 per cent as much as they do. By law, married women are not allowed to keep their maiden name – unless, curiously, they are married to foreigners, who presumably rank even lower in the pecking order. Only about 10 per cent of Japanese legislators are women, putting Japan in 121st place out of 186 nations, and prompting a government committee to recommend mandatory quotas for female MPs.5 Unlike Britain, Germany or India – and now South Korea, following the election of Park Geun-hye in 2012 – Japan has never had a female leader. Nor, of course, has the US. But in Japan, there are fewer role models to emulate.
Obstacles to women having what many of their western counterparts might consider a rounded life – juggling motherhood with a career – are very real. Though the traditional employment system is eroding, women hired by big companies still tend to be placed on career tracks that go precisely nowhere. It is not unusual to see women with college degrees reduced to fragrant presences in the office, bearers of green tea and objects of gossip about which colleague they will end up marrying. If women marry and have children, few take up their old job at the same company. Many firms are reluctant to let women return, particularly after a lengthy maternity break. Sometimes women themselves elect not to go back to work, although such choices are reinforced by strong social expectations about what it means to be a good wife and mother, even what it means to be happy. (In Japanese ‘to become happy’, shiawase ni naru, can be used as a synonym for ‘to get married’.) The job of bringing up children is, perhaps, more respected in Japan than in some other countries, where women who don’t manage to have a job as well as bring up a family are sometimes looked down upon. When my wife took our young son to Japanese kindergarten, she was touched by the fact that children were taught to thank their mothers for making their bento-box lunches, something she thought might not happen in the west. (The expectation was firmly that the mother, not the father, would have made the lunch.) Still, there are undoubtedly women in Japan who would like to work but who cannot because of a chronic lack of affordable childcare, especially for very young children.
Discrimination, like pornography, can be hard to define. But you know it when you see it. Take the example of the Japanese women’s soccer team, which made history by defeating the US to win the FIFA Women’s World Cup in the summer of 2011. Coming so soon after the devastating tsunami, the victory prompted national euphoria. Members of the team, nicknamed the Nadeshiko – after a pink flower, an
d the idealized beauty and strength of Japanese womanhood – became national celebrities. But when the victorious Nadeshiko team members set off for the 2012 London Olympics, they flew economy class. The less successful men’s team was seated in business.
Japan’s most neglected resource is its women. In a country with no oil, gas or precious minerals, national prosperity is almost entirely predicated on the diligence and ingenuity of its people. But social conventions have suppressed the potential of half Japan’s population. Japanese women, less restrained by social convention than corporate-bound men, often strike foreigners as the more dynamic, inventive and sometimes plainly more competent half of the population. That their talents are so often sidelined strikes many as a terrible waste of national, not to mention individual, potential.
We should be wary, though, of looking only at the surface. Relations between the sexes in Japan are more nuanced than the caricature might suggest. And, as with many other areas of contemporary society, the position of women is in flux. The end of fast growth and the consequent strains at work and at home have had a profound impact on male–female relations. Richard Koo, the economist, said one of the attractions of the fast-growth period was that people didn’t have to think too much. It made for smooth, if not exactly modern, relations between the sexes. ‘Men concentrated on getting the job done. Someone would arrange a nice girl for them to get married to. The girl knows the guy will have job security, a steady wage increase, a nice house. So why not?’ The loss of that certainty had spawned angst. ‘Those guys have no idea how to date a girl or find a wife. These days the matchmakers are scared because you never know what is going to happen to this guy next, what with corporate restructuring, downsizing, outsourcing. There are a lot of men out there who never trained themselves to attract members of the opposite sex.’ Women, he said, were generally not interested in men who could not provide – one reason they were marrying later. The relative shift in power had even spawned a new take on manliness and femininity. The Japanese, forever inventing new categories to describe shifting social patterns, now talked about ‘grass-eating’ men who were not interested in sex, and ‘meat-eating’ women who knew what they wanted and how to get it. Tokyo Island, it seemed, was not entirely fiction.
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Noriko Hama, professor of economics at Kyoto’s Doshisha University, did not fit the stereotype of a demure Japanese woman. She had forthright opinions about almost everything, often delivered with withering sarcasm in the upper-class English accent she had acquired when she lived in Britain as a child. She had a penchant for shockingly loud hair dye, often purple, and dressed in what I took to be designer clothes, thrown together in a manner that suggested they had been picked randomly from her wardrobe. We had known each other for years. Hama had never bought the argument that Japanese women played second fiddle to men. In important respects, she argued, they had been running Japan for centuries. It was a woman, the lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote Japan’s – and indeed the world’s – first novel, The Tale of Genji, in the early years of the eleventh century. Women had long been the powers behind its public figures and the bosses of its households, she said. ‘Women have always had control of the purse strings and had responsibility for running everything smoothly. Japanese men have been incredibly reliant on the female of the species, not knowing where anything is, not knowing how to dress. Without women they would have to go around naked,’ she told me, shooting me a look of contempt mixed with sorrow. ‘There has always been a depth to Japanese women behind the silk screen. There was never that much of an idea of being the protected, pampered species put on a pedestal in the sort of “ladies are gods” culture that predominated in medieval Europe or in Victorian times. Women were deemed to be the tougher sex, tirelessly working, physically as well as mentally, taking on anything that was remotely awkward or a strain on the male intelligence.’ Another look of contempt followed. I was reminded of something a well-known former geisha once told me when she described what she called the ‘lady-first’ culture of the west as sexist.6
Women were the driving force behind Japan’s early industrialization after the Meiji Restoration. In the first decades of the twentieth century, 60 per cent of the industrial workforce and 80 per cent of those working in the all-important textile industry were women. They were, in the words of one historian, ‘the backbone of Japan’s Industrial Revolution’.7 Today, shifting social attitudes, new economic impulses and the introduction of laws – for example equal-opportunity legislation in 1986 – were altering the landscape, Hama said. ‘What’s changed is that society has become more receptive towards women. That behind-the-silk-screen role was a very comfortable place to be. Women did not have to come out into the open to compete. Now that this on-stage performance has become open to women, they have started to feel that choosing to remain behind closed doors is detrimental to them. They have begun to think they need to communicate what they want and what they are thinking, and to make their positions verbally clear.’ That required adjustment from both sexes. ‘The virtue and talent of Japanese women used to be seen as their ability to have everything go their own way without saying a word. But that is not enough any more. They have to start making noise.’
Hama said many women would agree with Kirino that men and women moved on separate tracks. They even sometimes travelled separately since the metro had introduced women-only carriages to address the worries at the prevalence of chikan, or groping, in intensely crowded rush-hour trains. ‘But I tend to feel that’s a myth. It makes each side kind of comfortable. If you are on different tracks, your paths don’t cross and it tidies the picture up. But in reality, things are not that simple. To the extent that we keep talking about things in that way, there’s not a lot of room for change and progress. I don’t want to pigeonhole Japanese society in that way. It is not even very challenging for men. They’ll just say, “Oh yes. We’re the villains of the piece. How terrible.” But it doesn’t actually challenge them to come up with their own ideas about how things are, or where they should go. It lets them off the hook.’
• • •
Japanese women are rebelling in powerful ways. Perhaps their most subversive act is to marry later. That has directly contributed to the low birth rate that is said by some to imperil the nation’s future. Women are effectively on strike, although their participation in the labour force has edged up as a consequence of delayed marriage. But they are refusing to comply with either of the traditional roles expected of them, those of wife and mother. Until fairly recently, women who were still single at twenty-five were referred to disparagingly as ‘Christmas cake’, an item that plummets in value after 25 December. Now, some argued, women had turned the tables on men, holding out for partners who were financially stable, emotionally supportive and willing to help around the house. Machiko Osawa, an author and academic, said men’s position had weakened relative to that of women. ‘It used to be so wonderful for men in Japan. Now they’re disillusioned,’ she told me over lunch across the road from the grand red-brick building of Tokyo’s central station. Whereas women used to fawn over the most unattractive of men with a decent job, she said, now they are much more choosy. The growing ranks of men with part-time work found it almost impossible to find a partner. ‘Rather than feeling they need to do something to attract a woman, some men have just given up,’ she said.
In 2008, a 25-year-old man ploughed a two-tonne truck into a crowd in Akihabara Electric Town, a gadget-crammed district of Tokyo that is a magnet to socially awkward nerds known as otaku. He then leapt from the vehicle and went on a stabbing spree. In all, seven people were killed and several injured. Osawa said the incident was symbolic of a growing feeling of male impotence. Before the attack, the young man had posted messages on the internet from his mobile phone, complaining he was too ugly to get a girlfriend. ‘It used to be that women could not make a living without a man. Now that’s changed and men have to be attractive to get a woman,’
she said. For many younger Japanese, the shift in power relations meant better, more equal, relationships, she went on. Many married couples over fifty had a less-than-ideal setup. ‘The husband played at making money, the wife at being a mother. It’s very different from forming a real partnership.’
Yayoi Kusama, an artist who has become famous for her polka-dot-covered canvases, was also disparaging of traditional marriage. Speaking of her father’s persistent affairs with geisha when she was a child growing up after the war, she wrote in her autobiography, ‘The menfolk were practitioners of unconditional free sex, while the women had to sit in the shadows and bear it. Even as a child I was angered and repelled by the injustice.’8 Kusama felt so constrained by Japanese society of the 1960s that she fled to New York. At one point in her career, she took to covering furniture in hundreds of phalluses that she had sewn herself, an act that was intended, she said, to ‘obliterate’ her dislike of the male organ. One photograph shows her posing naked, her back to the camera, in front of a rowing boat encrusted in penises. She called it: ‘Aggregation: 1000 Boats Show’.
Old attitudes are far from extinguished. In 2003, members of Waseda University’s ‘Super Free’ club organized gang rapes of female students after inviting them to rave parties and getting them drunk. In parliament, one MP raised a snicker when he said, ‘At least gang rapists are still virile.’9 The case did, though, provoke a strong public outcry and questioning of a legal system where rape carried a minimum sentence of two years and robbery five. Shinichiro Wada, the president of the club and the ringleader, was sentenced to fourteen years, close to the fifteen-year maximum.10 Still, politicians sometimes found it hard to hide their Neanderthal attitudes. Hakuo Yanagisawa, the septuagenarian former health minister, referred to women between fifteen and fifty as ‘baby-making machines’ – and defective ones at that. Under duress, he later apologized for his remark, clarifying that what he’d meant to say was ‘women whose role it is to give birth’.11