The Group

The position of women in Japanese society is one of the major differences between it and American society and a subject that is likely to raise indignation in the West. They clearly occupy a better position than in most Islamic nations and many other countries, but there is severe job discrimination against them, and there is a saying that a woman should in youth obey her father, in maturity her husband, and in old age her son still has some validity. Social life, insofar as it exists, has little place for the married woman. A double sexual standard, which leaves the man free and the woman restricted, is still common. Thus attitudes to­ward love, marriage, and the place of women in society contrast sharply in Japan and the United States, though in both countries these are undergoing rapid change, and in Japan many of the changes are headed in the same direction as in the West.

An important characteristic of early Japan was a definitely ‘matr’iarchal ‘sub­’stratum (основа) in society. The mythical ancestor of the imperial line was a sun goddess; Chinese texts tell us that feminine leadership was common in the third century; and there were ruling empresses as late as the eighth. Even in early feudal days women could inherit property and have a role in the feudal system.

Subsequently, however, Con’fucian philosophy and the long feudal ex­perience combined to restrict the freedom of women and force them into complete subordination to men. Women, who in the age of swordsman­ship were obviously less capable of fighting than men, were gradually pushed out of the feudal structure and into a peripheral and supplemen­tary role to men. Confucianism, which was the product of a ‘patri’archal and strongly male-dominated society in China.

Among the peasantry women always retained their importance as co­workers with men in the fields and consequently retained a more earthy independence as individuals, but in polite society women by the Toku-gawa period had become the entirely subservient handmaidens and playthings of men. No extra familial social life was considered necessary for her, and in fact any contact with men outside the family was seen as potentially dangerous. Since marriage was determined by family needs and was not the result of attraction between the young couple, who very likely had never seen each other before marriage, conjugal love seemed a secondary matter that might, or might not, develop between the pair.

At present the marriage situation is quite mixed. The continuing strictness with which most girls are raised and the Japanese tendency to do things by groups means that there is much less pairing off of couples than in the West, and boys and girls as a result are much shyer in their one-to-one relations. While many do establish bonds that lead to mar­riage, others feel that family aid in identifying a suitable mate can be helpful. Young people rarely feel obliged to bow to family wishes against their own preferences, but a first meeting between a young man and woman is still commonly arranged by the respective families, and, if the principals are pleased, this will lead to marriage. Moreover, an official go-between couple is likely to play a central role in the marriage cere­mony itself, whether or not it has been a partially arranged marriage. One happy result of this system is that almost everyone who would like to get married and is free from serious disabilities can count on finding a spouse.

Conjugal love in such a marriage system is still likely to be something that develops more after marriage than before, and several external cir­cumstances militate against its becoming as central to family life as it is in the West. The long hours devoted to commuting in urban Japan, the relative paucity of vacations, the five-and-a-half-day work week, which is still common, the willingness of Japanese to devote long hours to over­time work, and the limitation of social life largely to men, all combine to make the amount of time a Japanese couple spends together much less than would be customary in the West. The confined living condi­tions of most homes and the custom of sleeping with the children also cut down on conjugal intimacies. Finally, premodern attitudes of dis­regard for conjugal love and harsh subordination of women still persist to some extent, especially among the more old-fashioned, and diminish the warmth of the marriage bond.

The double moral standard also remains stronger in Japan than in some Western countries. Many young women, like their contemporaries in the West, now have premarital sexual freedom, but Japanese girls on the whole are still raised much more strictly in such matters than Japa­nese boys or than most girls in the West. Married women, moreover, are expected to be far more faithful than men. They have virtually no social life outside the family. Except for a very few at the top of society, who may participate stiffly and unhappily in formal banquets, usually those that include foreigners, married women rarely go out with their hus­bands to dinners and parties or entertain outsiders in their homes, which in any case are usually too small for such activities. Their life is likely to be limited to husband, children, a few close relatives, some old school-day girlfriends, and possibly the activities of the РТА.

Meanwhile their husbands develop a fuller social life with their work group, which may include a few young unmarried women. Very commonly a group of men from work will stop on their way home at one or more of the myriad bars that are a feature of all cities. Here the bar hostesses, the successors to the geisha tradition, engage them in amusing conversation, skillfully tickle their male egos, and afford an atmosphere of sexual titillation, which can lead to more serious involvements and for some bar girls to a more prosperous and stable life as a mistress or even a wife. The milieu may be very different, but the spirit of the modern Japanese bar is close to that of the amusement quarters of feudal times.

All this is, of course, changing, and the contemporary woman is by no means as browbeaten as she was only a few decades ago or as she some­times appears to be to Westerners today. Surface appearances can be misleading. Husbands and wives tend not to demonstrate affection for each other in public, and the curtness and derogation some men show their wives until recently an old-fashioned man might routinely refer to his spouse as "my stupid wife" are at least partly a convention in speaking to or about a member of one's own family. Most wives for their part would never dream of praising their husbands before somebody else. These are for the most part superficial characteristics inherited from an earlier system. Underneath, great changes are going on, as women win a position of greater equality with men and the assumption grows that there should be a strong bond of love between husband and wife.

Perhaps these tendencies can be best seen through some small but significant examples. I can remember very well that in the 1920s a wife was likely to follow deferentially a pace behind her husband on the street, encumbered with whatever babies or bundles needed to be carried, while he strode ahead in lordly grandeur. Over the years I have seen the wife catch up with her husband, until they now walk side by side, and the babies and bundles are often in his arms. If the family has a car, the wife is likely to drive it as much as the husband. Whereas once no husband would stoop to doing any housework, increasing numbers now help out with the evening dishes. And many a wife has made it clear that she will not tolerate bar hopping or other dalliances on the part of her husband. No one can say how far or how fast these trends will develop, but their direction is unmistakably toward a single standard either of mutual permissiveness at the one end of the spectrum or mutual respect and fidelity at the other.

There is another way in which the position of Japanese women is something more than it has often seemed to be. As we have seen, Japan may originally have had a matriarchal society, and elements of this ma­triarchy seem to have persisted, despite the heavy overlay of male su­premacy resulting from feudalism and Confucianism. There is a hint of this in the expectation in medieval times that women would have as much strength of will and bravery as men. In modern times, it is gener­ally accepted that women have more will power and psychological strength than men, and there can be no doubt that the modern Japanese family centers on and is dominated by the mother, not the father. In fact, the father, though the principal financial support, is otherwise pretty much of a cypher in family affairs. Family finances are run almost exclu­sively by the mother, with the father often on a sort of allowance pro­vided by her. He is likely to be away from home almost all of the waking hours of his smaller children. Their life is basically with the mother, and it is she who sees to their good performance in school. American comic strips like "Blondie" and family situation comedies on TV and in films, which commonly depict a bumbling, henpecked father, have long been popular in Japan as being entirely understandable despite their unfamil­iar social setting. The domineering father of Freudian psychiatry hardly exists in the Japanese psychological makeup, though another Freudian concern, the male child's excessive attachment to and dependence upon the mother is a major psychological problem. This is the amae syndrome we have already encountered. A husband sometimes seems to be the wife's big grown-up child, requiring tender care and pampering like the other chil­dren, or else he shows a need for special feminine attention and flattery from other women—as from geisha in earlier times or bar girls today. Husbands are likely to demonstrate weaknesses of personality and cause family problems. On the other hand, wives are expected to have a strong character, to be always "ladylike," and to hold the family together— and for the most part they live up to these expectations.

The wife may be the dominant member of the family, but women still have an overwhelmingly subservient position in the broader society. With education compulsory through the ninth grade and 94 percent of the age group going through twelve years of schooling, girls receive as much education as boys through secondary school, but they fall off badly at higher levels. Though the majority of junior college students are women, many of these colleges are looked upon, in a sense, as finish­ing schools, furnishing women with polite accomplishments for marriage. At the four-year university level, women decline sharply in num­bers. There are a few women's universities, largely of Christian background, but in the other universities, all of which are now coedu­cational, women constitute only about a fifth of the student population and a mere 10 percent in the best institutions. An expensive four-year university education seems less worthwhile for girls, who are expected to end up as no more than housewives.

Japanese tend to marry later than Americans do—at around age twenty-four for women and twenty-eight for men, which is about three years later than in the United States. Most women thus have from two to six years between the completion of their schooling and their marriages, and during this time, they enter the labor market. Those with lesser educations commonly become the labor force in light industries, such as textiles and electronics, or perform menial jobs as waitresses, salesgirls, or elevator attendants. Those with more education are likely to become secretaries and O.L., or "office ladies," as they are known in Japan, but these too are expected to perform menial jobs, such as serving tea to the men in the office. Because of the likelihood of marriage within a few years, both groups of women workers are considered to be temporary and for the most part are denied positions on the escalator of lifetime employment at constantly rising wages. Marrying later and being con­fined longer to motherly supervision of their children than in the United States, Japanese women return later and in smaller numbers to the job market, and once there they are again likely to be excluded from the privileged lifetime employment and seniority system of male workers. On average, women employees earn only about half the pay of men. Despite these conditions more than half of Japanese women are members of the work force, and they constitute more than 40 percent of its total, though most are kept in its lower brackets.

In contrast to urban workers, women in rural areas have always had a large role in agricultural employment, and postwar conditions have made them even more important than before. Since the war, both farm boys and girls have for the most part streamed off after their schooling to more lucrative employment in the cities. Those young men who re­mained to inherit the family farm have found it very difficult to find brides, and these conditions of scarcity have resulted in a sharp rise in the relative status of farm wives. As we have seen, most men on farms now find their chief employment elsewhere, and though women also commonly find outside employment too, they probably perform more of the farm work than do the men.

The educated career woman does exist in Japan, but in fewer numbers than in most industrialized Western countries. They are prominent in education and research, constituting about a half of the teaching force in elementary education and sizable numbers in secondary schools, jun­ior colleges, women's universities, and research institutes, though ex­tremely few of the professors in four-year universities. They play a large role in literature and the arts and have a role in journalism. Women are often in leadership positions in small businesses, but as executives in big business, they are all but unknown. There are many female doctors and occasional female judges, especially in the juvenile courts. Many are petty government workers, but only recently have a few crept into the elite higher bureaucracy. There is about the same small proportion of women in the Diet as in the House of Representatives or the Senate in the United States, but in September 1986 Japanese women pushed ahead of their American counterparts when Miss Doi Takako was elected the secretary general and thereby became the candidate for prime minister of the Socialist Party, Japan's second-largest political party. The chief role of women in politics, however, is in popular citizens' and local res­idents' movements. More than half of Japanese women belong to orga­nizations such as the ubiquitous Women's Associations (Fujinkai), and it is through these and the influential РТА, which are largely run by mothers, that they have become very active in local politics. Nevertheless, most leadership roles in society remain predominantly the preserves of men. Japan is still definitely a "man's world," with women confined to a sec­ondary position. Their status, however, has changed greatly for the bet­ter during the past century, especially since World War II, and it will obviously continue to change. The provisions of the 1947 constitution, which is quite explicit about the equality of the sexes, tip the scales quite definitively toward increased equality and greater prestige for them: There shall be no discrimination in political, economic or social relations, because of . . . sex. . . . 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.

The laws now give women full legal equality. For example, prewar laws made divorce easy for men and all but impossible for women, but now women constitute the majority of applicants for divorce (a higher percentage by full-time housewives than by women workers), though divorce rates remain far below those current in the United States and much lower even than in Japan a half century ago. The divorce rate is only one eighteenth that of the United States, one reason being that wage discrimination, particularly against older women, makes it more difficult for a divorced wife in Japan to make a decent living; another reason may be that it is usually more difficult for her to remarry.

Despite the great gains made by women in recent decades, social lim­itations on them and discrimination in employment remain severe. Many Westerners wonder indignantly why Japanese women do not agitate more aggressively against their unequal status. One reason may be that Japa­nese women in recent decades have made such huge advances that they are still busy digesting them. Labor shortages in the years leading up to and through World War II and then again in the postwar economic surge have given them a much larger economic role and therefore a greater chance for economic independence. The mechanization of housework since the war, through washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and electric cooking utensils, especially electric rice cookers and microwaves, have freed them from much of the drudgery of domestic labor, releasing time for outside work or other activities. These factors combined with the postwar legal gains and sweeping social changes, have given women much wider opportunities, which are expanding steadily.

Another reason why Japanese women have not taken up the women's liberation movement more aggressively may be that it does not fit their self-image or "ladylike" style. They realize that they dominate the home and tend to be psychologically stronger than men. They may sense that, while the bitter underdog attitude of Western women may fit their tra­ditional role as the "weaker sex," it would not be becoming for Japanese women as actually the stronger sex.

This attitude may tie in with what may well be the most important reason. Japanese women are clearly aware of the satisfactions as well as handicaps of their biological differences from men. They cherish their role as mothers and homemakers who dominate domestic life and supervise the raising of the next generation. The result is that many of them are forced into somewhat empty lives once the children are grown up, but on the whole they seem to find at least as much satisfaction in the balance they have struck as do women in the United States.

Japanese women, however, seem on the verge of a veritable revolution in their status, as was underscored by the enthusiasm that accompanied Miss Doi's election as the head of the Socialist Party and Prime Minister Uno Sosuke's being forced to resign his post on June 2, 1989, in part because of charges of womanizing. Women, who for long had played leadership roles in local politics, began to show their muscle in national politics as well. The LDP countered by selecting two women cabinet members for the first time in 1987 and a woman to a major party post in 1989. This was, of course, only a small beginning, but women appeared to be on the point of breaking through the crust of male domination. It seems improbable that Japanese women will erupt in a stridently assertive female movement, as in the United States, but it appears quite likely that a "women's revolution" will be the next great step in Japanese social and political development.