Career Women in Contemporary Japan

Pursuing Identities, Fashioning Lives

Anne Stefanie Aronsson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317686972
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Since Japan's economic recession began in the 1990s, the female workforce has experienced revolutionary changes as greater numbers of women have sought to establish careers. Employment trends indicate that increasingly white-collar professional women are succeeding in breaking through the "glass ceiling", as digital technologies blur and redefine work in spatial, gendered, and ideological terms.

This book examines what motivates Japanese women to pursue professional careers in the contemporary neoliberal economy, and how they reconfigure notions of selfhood while doing so. It analyses how professional women contest conventional notions of femininity in contemporary Japan and in turn, negotiate new gender roles and cultural assumptions about women, whilst reorganizing the Japanese workplace and wider socio-economic relationships. Further, the book explores how professional women create new social identities through the mutual conditioning of structure and self, and asks how women come to understand their experiences; how their actions change the gendering of the workforce; and how their lives shape the economic, political, social, and cultural landscapes of this post-industrial nation.

Based on extensive fieldwork, Career Women in Contemporary Japan will have broad appeal across a range of disciplines including Japanese culture and society, gender and family studies, women's studies, anthropology, ethnology and sociology.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315775289-1

Times of major transitions

What motivates Japanese women to pursue professional careers in today’s neoliberal economy and how does this pursuit affect notions of selfhood? Japanese labor markets for women are in turmoil. The occupational changes present contemporary professional women with serious challenges, as they contest conventional notions of femininity and negotiate new gender roles. Employment trends in Japan indicate that more white-collar professional women are breaking through the glass ceiling, as digital technologies blur and redefine work in spatial, gendered, and ideological terms. Here, we will focus on the professional women who are at the forefront of these profound changes.

Japanese women have been employed in professional career tracks for decades, thanks in part to the 1985 Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEOL), which guarantees women equal opportunities and treatment. Despite this, women still must fight institutionalized prejudice in order to be accepted as equals in the workforce. Since the Japanese economic recession of the 1990s, the female workforce has experienced revolutionary changes as even more women have sought to establish careers. In fact, the economic stasis has opened managerial posts for women, as the downturn has led to a liberalization of certain career paths that fit female tendencies to engage in short-term and part-time work. How do these women view themselves, how do they act in, and outside, the workplace, and how are they changing the gender hierarchy? In this book I analyze how white-collar professional women fashion their gender identities through the mutual conditioning of structure and self.

Inoguchi Kuniko, a political scientist and politician who served as Minister of State for Gender Equality and Social Affairs, insists that the glass ceiling is global. He believes that breaking it in one country might trigger advancement in other countries as well. This may be true, but societal differences remain in every country. For instance, there is still a glass ceiling in the United States (Coughlin et al. 2005; Eagly and Carli 2007; Hanson 2006; Roberts 2011; Shipman and Kay 2009), but it is only an obstacle during certain life stages in a woman’s career. In Japan, by contrast, this barrier exists throughout a woman’s life (Plath 1983). The glass ceiling follows the female employee and the chance of promotion into higher levels remains inaccessible for most women. This is why the wage gap between men and women is still very large, and this is one of the reasons why the number of female managers is still so low (Fackler 2007; Jackson and Tomioka 2004; Kimoto 2003; Lam 1992; Ōsawa et al. 1996; Roberts 2011). Because Japanese society remains age-ordered and stages of life do not affect a woman’s position, women become isolated. In other words, better work does not necessarily translate to career promotion.

In light of this, the Japanese labor market for women is currently going through major changes in terms of improved gender equality policies, a more adequate work–life balance, better maternity leave options, and improved childcare facilities. Women can finally enter the marketplace and remain employed, even after marriage and childbirth. Although many women now have long-term careers, they are still bound to the Confucian concept of filial piety. As social psychologist Iwao Sumiko notes, “[t]he Japanese mother’s childrearing techniques engrave the actual and symbolic warmth and importance of the home … forming a strong association between home and mother” (1993: 127). The same holds true for taking care of her husband; she is expected to make his life at home as untroubled as possible. Sociologist Ogasawara Yuko observes that if women reenter the working place, they usually work in either smaller firms or part-time jobs, because the larger firms mostly employ recent graduates. Iwao further explains that the age distribution of employed Japanese women forms an M-shaped curve with the first peak around ages 20 and 24 and the second peak around ages 45 to 49 (1993: 162). After women have briefly worked they are expected to drop out of the labor force, and only after their children have finished school do they have the possibility of working again. Nevertheless, many women are unable to reenter the workforce full-time, as they might have to take care of aging parents at home.

The following analysis explores the gendered dilemmas these women confront on a daily basis and examines how conventional family ties have been undermined by a neoliberal global economy, which accentuates the fluidity of this process of changing social structures (Borovoy 2010a; Kurihara 2009; Linhart 1984; Ōsawa 1999; Rebick and Takenaka 2006; Rindfuss et al. 2004; Roberts 2011). Japanese women remain underrepresented in advanced career positions in finance, industry, entrepreneurship, government, and academia, leaving them to creatively redefine what it means to have a career in a maledominated sphere (Kurihara 2009; Marcus 1983; Moeran 2005). Career paths for Japanese white-collar men in these sectors remain fairly standardized; however, Japanese women are just beginning to redefine what it means for them to have a career.

We will begin by analyzing how the changing global economy has had an impact on Japan and how the country positions itself in a new environment. Next, how these changes have an impact on shifting gender hierarchies in the different work sectors and finally how these changes play out on the individual level of the white-collar professional women. The focus will be on the three cycles of life, family, and career, and how these three cycles interact. These cycles are currently out of sync for most women, but major transitions are shifting more favorably for most women.

Career is the central concept to understanding these women’s lives, because it is their professional career that sets them apart. From the postwar period until the early 2000s, most women became housewives – either full-time or with a part-time job – and they framed their careers in more domestic terms; raising a family was the primary aim of a woman. By definition, a career woman reverses this aim. Thus, building a career becomes the primary goal and although this path is not always straightforward because of lingering gender hierarchies, building a career also helps to establish an identity. These women try to shape a life that includes family and a career. Different historical moments create different environments in the working world, but all of the women interviewed, regardless of historical circumstances, achieved a career.

For the past thirty years more women have been pursuing higher educational degrees and lifelong careers rather than dropping out of the workforce after marriage and childbirth or returning several years later for a part-time job. As Sylvia Ann Hewlett et al. ask in a recent study, what continually compels three-quarters of Japanese women to drop out of their careers? (2011: 10). The answer involves many factors:

For most career women in our U.S. and Germany studies, off-ramps are the result of a complex interaction between ‘pull factors’ rooted within family, community and society and ‘push factors’ centered around work. In Japan, however, while family pulls are significant, push factors in an unsupportive workplace are even more effective in derailing female careers.

(Hewlett et al. 2011: 10)

Many believe that the main reason Japanese women leave the workforce is because of a lack in adequate childcare support, but this is not true. In Japan, only 32 percent of Japanese women report inadequate childcare, while in the United States 74 percent do (Hewlett et al. 2011:10). Another reason given for why women would quit their jobs is a lack of senior care and homes, but only 38 percent of university-educated women say that they would quit their work to take care of parents or in-laws. Thus, the main obstacle keeping women away from their career track is the workplace itself (Hewlett et al. 2011: 10).

Hewlett joins many others, including policymakers and labor scholars, in posing the issue of why Japanese women and careers are positioned in the negative: why do they not stay on track? This book reverses the analysis to ask why and how it is that one-quarter of women do get on and try to stay on a career track. The interests here are not the three-quarters of women who drop out of the work force but the other quarter who do fashion work careers, often against considerable odds. Considering both the past and the present condition of Japanese female career trajectories, I analyze this historical trajectory through different work sectors and life course perspectives by interviewing and interacting with 120 informants ranging from their early twenties to mid-nineties.

Japanese women have always worked; it is just that their labor was less structured and seldom required a university degree, and their main identity was tied to their domestic roles. In the 1870s, prominent Japanese philosopher Nakamura Masanao coined the term ryōsai kenbo (good wife, wise mother). This philosophy was established by the Meiji government in order to facilitate Japan’s transition to modernity. Women were expected to contribute to that new nation by taking a more active role in childrearing, by engaging in patriotic activities, and by contributing to the household income. According to Hewlett and colleagues:

Nakamura’s vision of the ryōsai kenbo – “Good Wife, Wise Mother” – still colors a woman’s major life decisions, from where to go to school, when to marry and how to be a good parent. Many Japanese women spend their early twenties worrying about getting married, and the bulk of their adulthood shouldering the burden of caring for children, elders and home – even if they work. The home front is both a source of security and an encumbrance of women’s ambitions. The pull of home is clearly an important contributory factor in explaining why many young Japanese women off-ramp early in their career. Just over a fifth (22%) of Japanese female college graduates surveyed by CWLP [Center for Work-Life Policy] say that their parents expected them to have a high-powered career. Fifty-three percent of our respondents (55% of men and 47% of women), meanwhile, agree that it is not socially acceptable for women with small children to pursue a career.

(2011: 26)

The academic literature on the female Japanese labor force focuses on the work of farmers’ wives, urban housewives, and blue-collar workers but very little attention has been paid to professional career women (Beardsley et al. 1959; Brinton 1993; Cole 1971; Cornell and Smith 1956; Dore 1978; Embree 1939; Roberts 1994; Shimpo 1976; Smith 1978). Immediately prior to the First World War, Japanese women held part-time jobs in the cities and the countryside. Since 1945, Japanese women have been encouraged to work outside the home, both to rebuild the nation and to support the household. The steep increase in work participation among Japanese women after 1950 had a significant impact on family structures (Hirayama 2009; Ochiai 2004). However, the Japanese government still directs men into a long-term and women into a short-term employment track. In immediate postwar Japan, women could work only briefly before dropping out of the workforce: after getting married and having a child, they became professional housewives (Allison 2000; Ehara 2000; Hendry 1993; Ueno 1982; White 1987a, 1987b). During the 1970s, there was a shift toward the professionalization of the housewife. As Glenda Roberts explains, Eileen Appelbaum’s model of the “unencumbered worker and devalued caregiver” (2005: 194) reflects the difference between husband and wife, to borrow Walter Edwards’ terminology (Ōsawa 2002). While men were caught in the “iron triangle” of lifetime employment, the women became “professional housewives.” The identity of Japanese women is still based on public policy, as well as personal, cultural, and institutional values.

Between the 1950s and 1980s the only possibility for a young woman looking for white-collar office work was to become an “office lady,” or secretary. Companies employed young women immediately after their graduation from high school, junior college or university. Ogasawara describes the women’s work as “mostly simple and repetitive, requiring little time to learn, and after a while OLs are bored with their work” (1998: 24). Office ladies were expected to show deference before their male coworkers, clients and visitors and to always be self-effacing and polite. For instance, if they work on a report with male coworkers, the men take the credit. A strong ethic of familialism was emphasized at work (Kondo 1990). An office lady was the “wife” in the office and she was expected to “[cater] to the needs of men” (1998: 39). Life at home could be seen as a micro level of the family, while life in the company was the macro level. Anthropologist Dorinne Kondo explains that these circumstances within the company were meant “to make work life more pleasant in accordance with meaningful, accepted cultural practices, but also to make work more efficient and productive” (1990: 203).

After the 1973 oil crisis, Japanese industries began to restructure, shifting to software and services. Heavy industry had experienced sustained economy growth during the 1960s and was now slowly declining, replaced by light industries such as banking and finance. At that point, the Japanese economy entered the post-industrial age (Ueno 2009: 44). This shift opened up new opportunities for women through part-time jobs that appealed to women who had been out of the labor force for more than a decade at least.

The position of office lady is no longer the only professional option available to Japanese women. A number of major companies have full promotion systems for female workers. Japan is presently attempting to improve the conditions of female employment, but, when compared to Western countries, very few women in Japan hold managerial positions. As Iwao explains, in previous years most corporations neither expected nor allowed women to work overtime, or to be recommended for promotion (1993: 191). Iwao adds that some corporations have recently revised their rules, as more women are staying on the job long enough to be qualified for promotion (1993: 192). In Japan, earnings are based on seniority, not merit. Even though the EEOL ensures that women and men should earn equal wages for equitable work, women still earn much less.

The path to managerial posts remains challenging for women. Women are expected to leave work earlier than their male coworkers so that they ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Explanatory notes
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Women and work in modern Japan
• 3 Identity, family, and career
• 4 Pioneering female career tracks in Japan – women in their sixties and above
• 5 The performative aspect of self-fulfilling prophecies – women in their fifties
• 6 Through the labyrinth of their working lives – women in their forties
• 7 Reevaluating the self – women in their thirties
• 8 Transitioning to a career – women in their twenties
• 9 Conclusion
• Appendix – list of informants
• Glossary
• Index