Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Japan

Dislocating the Salaryman Doxa

James E. Roberson, Nobue Suzuki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415244466
• eBook ISBN: 9781134541621
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is the first comprehensive account of the changing role of men and the construction of masculinity in contemporary Japan. The book moves beyond the stereotype of the Japanese white-collar businessman to explore the diversity of identities and experiences that may be found among men in contemporary Japan, including those versions of masculinity which are marginalized and subversive. The book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of contemporary Japanese society and identity.

1 Introduction

James E. Roberson and Nobue Suzuki

In 1963, Ezra Vogel described the then newly (re)emerging lifestyle of Japan’s ‘new middle class’, introducing Western readers to ‘the salaryman’, white-collar workers in large corporations and government bureaucracies (1971/1963: 5). Vogel portrayed the salaryman in terms of economic security, social status and sex role division. For Japanese people in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the salaryman represented a ‘bright new life’ (ibid.: 9). ‘The young Japanese girl [sic] hopes to marry a salary man’, Vogel (ibid.) wrote, while ‘the new order of the salary man is not only a way of life for people in large organizations, but a model affecting the life of others’ (ibid.: 268). Over thirty years later, Fujimura-Fanselow and Kameda describe the image of the typical Japanese man, held by people both inside and outside Japan, as that of

a workaholic who toils long hours for Mitsubishi or Sony or some other large corporation, goes out drinking with his fellow workers or clients after work and plays golf with them on weekends, and rarely spends much time at home with his wife and children, much less does anything around the house, such as cleaning or changing diapers.

(1995: 229)

Writing at different ends of Japan’s postwar economic expansion, these two descriptions merge to encapsulate a set of images of Japanese men and masculinity which witnesses the transformation of the salaryman from emergent and desired to everyday and dominant. Descriptions such as these, while perhaps also recognizing diversity and critique, simultaneously participate in the reflexive manufacture of the salaryman as masculine stereotype in, of and for Japan. The salaryman as dominant (self-)image, model and representation of men and masculinity in Japan indexes overlapping discourses of gender, sexuality, class and nation: the middle-class, heterosexual, married salaryman considered as responsible for and representative of ‘Japan’.

The essays collected here present research which critically engages with these intersecting discourses of masculinity in contemporary Japan. Discussing a variety of men and masculine practices, performances, performativity and politics, the chapters simultaneously demonstrate and deconstruct the power of the homologies of (salary)men–masculinity–heterosexuality. The goals of the book are thus twofold. First, the book offers gender-sensitive and critical views of the diversity of identities and experiences that may be found among men in contemporary Japan. Such complexity is seen within, and is sometimes the product of struggles against, contexts framed by ideological and institutional power and constraints. Second, by examining (the politics of ) the multiplicity of Japanese masculinities, the book also helps problematize the notion of ‘masculinity’ in Japan, and beyond.

In this Introduction, we first mobilize some of the recent gender literature on men and masculinities to suggest the need for increased interchange between ethnographic (and other) research and the study of masculinities and men in Japan. In this, we warn against the complicity of scholarship with the reproduction of gender(ed) ideologies. We then discuss the ideological and representational hegemony of the salaryman model of Japanese manhood in more detail. Next, we describe the multiple and changing representations, relations and realities of men and masculinities in Japan and in Japan studies. Here we note the political and intellectual importance of critical recognition and interpretation of such diversity and dynamics. Finally, we provide a brief guide to the chapters to follow.

Theorizing masculinities in contemporary Japan

Especially since the mid-1980s, an expanding body of academic literature has emerged in the West, and more recently in Japan, which critically analyses the constructions, performances and practices of men and masculinities.¹ The best of this work draws on the insights of feminist gender studies – most fundamentally that ‘gender is a system of power and not just a set of stereotypes or observable differences between women and men’ (Brod and Kaufman 1994b: 4). A major theme in critical studies of masculinities has been that ‘of breaking down artificial unities of genders and sexualities’ (Hearn and Morgan 1990b: 11). Indeed, some authors contend that masculinities and femininities may be viewed as objectified attributes that people ‘do’ and ‘perform’ (Butler 1990; Robertson 1998), while Sedgwick (1995) maintains that masculinity sometimes has nothing to do with men.

The significance of critically investigating the plurality of masculinities is at least twofold. Ethnographically, moving from the assumed and essentialized homogeneity and homology of men and masculinity to detailed descriptions of situated gender practice and performance permits us to view the ‘multiple, contested, and at times contradictory’ (Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994c: 40) nature of gendered diversity in a given society. Researching multiplicity and difference involves recognizing and investigating the consequences of the fact that, as di Leonardo puts it: ‘In any particular population, major social divisions – race/ethnicity, class, religion, age, sexual preference, nationality – will crosscut and influence the meanings of gender division’ (1991: 30; see also Connell 1995: 75; Moore 1988: 80). Ong and Peletz similarly note the contribution of studies of masculinities to understandings of gender ‘in relation to other forms of difference and inequality (class, race, etc.) which are in a very basic sense constituting, and constitutive of, masculinity and femininity alike’ (1995: 10).

Thus, while recognizing that gender is interrelational, involving relations of power (including those of misogyny and homophobia) which have overwhelmingly benefited heterosexual men in most societies, it is also important, as di Leonardo notes of ‘cultural feminist essentialism’ (1991: 26), to avoid essentializing men or masculinities. It is crucial instead critically to interpret and understand the multiplicity of men and masculinities and to ‘dislocate’ (see Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994a) notions which assume a homology of men with masculinity. Connell, moreover, argues that

To recognize the diversity of masculinities is not enough. We must also recognize the relations between the different kinds of masculinity, relations of alliance, dominance and subordination. These relationships are constructed through practices that exclude and include, that intimidate, exploit and so on. There is a gender politics within masculinity.

(1995: 37)

In addition to describing and deconstructing such ethnographic dimensions of the complexity of men and masculinities, there are other discursive reflexivities involved which implicate scholarship in a different fashion. Descriptions of the ‘unities and differences between men and between masculinities’ (Hearn and Collinson 1994: 97) bring these gendered relations into even closer view and under more detailed scrutiny. In a recent review of men’s studies in Japan, Shibuya (2001: 454) argues against the tendency to pursue minute groupings of masculinities in a fashion which ignores if not avoids analysis of the structuring of gendered relations. This is an important reminder of the dangers of not seeing the forest for the trees, of ‘recentering men at the center of the discourse’ (Hearn and Collinson 1994: 98), and of self-servingly and reductionistically conceiving ‘the study of men to [only] be about liberating men’ (Hanmer 1990: 29).

However, studies of the diversities, differences and divisions among men and masculinities may also reflexively act to ‘dislocate the hegemonic versions of masculinity which privilege some people over others’ (Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994b: 4). As Conway-Long puts it, ‘The recognition of difference within this gendered category called masculinity and an identification of the plurality of masculinities are the beginnings of the deconstruction of dominant masculine “doxa’’ [taken-for-grantedness]’ (1994: 63). Implicated here are both local and everyday as well as scholarly discourses of what Ortner calls the ‘big man bias’:

We take the privileges of certain men – leaders, or elites, or . . . whatever – and assume them to apply to male actors in general. We thus obscure (and thereby unwittingly collude with cultural ideologies) what many men have in common with women in general, or with specific sectors of women.

(1996: 133–4)

Sugimoto similarly indicts both Western and Japanese scholarship that has ‘attempted to generalize about Japanese society on the basis of observations of its male elite sector’ (1997: 2). Collusion with cultural ideologies in obscuring gender and sexual divisions within Japanese society risks complicity with interrelated Nihonjinron (theories about the Japanese) discourses of cultural nationalism which attempt to downplay or deny other dimensions of difference (see Lie 2001: 150–9). Such ideological ‘hegemony of homogeneity’, Befu notes, is produced by intellectuals, maintained and supported by the state and put into practice by the corporate establishment (2001: 81). Clammer, meanwhile, reminds us that ‘[d]ifference is a slippery concept. But far from this being a reason for abandoning it, it suggests that following its contours and transformations actually takes one into the heart of contemporary cultural debates in and about Japan’ (2001: 26).

As Connell notes, ‘The way we do our intellectual work of inquiry, analysis and reportage has consequences; epistemology and sexual politics are intertwined’ (1993: 598). Critical scholarship which recognizes, investigates and writes about gendered diversity has the potential to contribute to discourses which deconstruct and dislocate the broader ‘hegemony of homogeneity’ and the ‘dominant masculine “doxa”’. Such scholarship must involve critical analyses not just of the hegemonic but of the non-hegemonic, not assuming male homogeneity, the singularity of masculinity or the homology of men with (heterosexual) masculinity, but investigating divergences, differences, divisions. This further requires a simultaneous and reflexive interrogation of individual identities and experiences and of what di Leonardo refers to as the ‘embedded nature of gender both as a material, social institution and as a set of ideologies’ (1991: 30).

Connell (1995) usefully discusses three intersecting dimensions or sites of the ‘gender configuring of practice’ which basically correspond to individual, institutional and ideological levels of analysis (see also Kelly 1993). The individual site of gender configuration includes lifecourse and individual identity constructions (see Mathews, this volume, Chapter 7), personal psychology or character and the embodied nature of gender and sexuality (see Connell 1993: 602). This site may also be conceived of as the stage of gender performance and performativity (Butler 1990) and of what Sedgwick (1995) calls the ‘n-dimensional space’ of sex(uality) and gender in which men and femininity intersect (see Lunsing, this volume, Chapter 2). This is also the space of ‘gender geometries’ (Halberstam 1998: 21), where there is a field of female masculinities which are not simply the opposite of female femininity nor female versions of male masculinity (ibid.: 29; Nakamura and Matsuo, this volume, Chapter 4), the exploration of which ‘affords us a glimpse of how masculinity is constructed as masculinity’ (ibid.: 1).

The second site of the gender configuring of practice includes discourse, ideology and culture where ‘gender is organized in symbolic practices’ (Connell 1995: 72). This is obviously a very complex field and necessarily engages the notion of hegemony (see Connell 1987: 184; Ortner 1996: 145–6). As Donaldson notes:

The ability to impose a definition of the situation, to set the terms in which events are understood and issues discussed, to formulate ideals and define morality is an essential part of this process. Hegemony involves persuasion of the greater part of the population, particularly through the media, and the organization of social institutions in ways that appear ‘natural’, ‘ordinary’, ‘normal’ [or doxic].

(1993: 645; see also Allison 1994: 29, 100)²

However, no hegemony is historically static or complete: ‘There are always sites . . .
of alternative practices and perspectives available, and these may become the bases of resistance and transformat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Note On Names
• 1. Introduction
• 2. What Masculinity? Transgender Practices Among Japanese ‘Men’
• 3. Male Beauty Work In Japan
• 4. Female Masculinity and Fantasy Spaces: Transcending Genders In the Takarazuka Theatre and Japanese Popular Culture
• 5. The Burning of Men: Masculinities and the Nation In Japanese Popular Song
• 6. Of Love and the Marriage Market: Masculinity Politics and Filipina–Japanese Marriages In Japan
• 7. Can ‘A Real Man’ Live for His Family? Ikigai and Masculinity In Today’s Japan
• 8. Japanese Working-Class Masculinities: Marginalized Complicity
• 9. When Pillars Evaporate: Structuring Masculinity On the Japanese Margins
• 10. Regendering Batterers: Domestic Violence and Men’s Movements
• 11. HIV Risk and the (Im)permeability of the Male Body: Representations and Realities of Gay Men In Japan
• 12. Balancing Fatherhood and Work: Emergence of Diverse Masculinities In Contemporary Japan