Kickboxing Geishas

How Modern Japanese Women Are Changing Their Nation

Veronica Chambers

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780743271578
• eBook ISBN: 9780743298636
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Forget the stereotypes. Today's Japanese women are shattering them -- breaking the bonds of tradition and dramatically transforming their culture. Shopping-crazed schoolgirls in Hello Kitty costumes and the Harajuku girls Gwen Stefani helped make so popular have grabbed the media's attention. But as critically acclaimed author Veronica Chambers has discovered through years of returning to Japan and interviewing Japanese women, the more interesting story is that of the legions of everyday women -- from the office suites to radio and TV studios to the worlds of art and fashion and on to the halls of government -- who have kicked off a revolution in their country.

Japanese men hardly know what has hit them. In a single generation, women in Japan have rewritten the rules in both the bedroom and the boardroom. Not a day goes by in Japan that a powerful woman doesn't make the front page of the newspapers. In the face of still-fierce sexism, a new breed of women is breaking through the "rice paper ceiling" of Japan's salary-man dominated corporate culture. The women are traveling the world -- while the men stay at home -- and returning with a cosmopolitan sophistication that is injecting an edgy, stylish internationalism into Japanese life. So many women are happily delaying marriage into their thirties -- labeled "losing dogs" and yet loving their liberated lives -- that the country's birth rate is in crisis.

With her keen eye for all facets of Japanese life, Veronica Chambers travels through the exciting world of Japan's new modern women to introduce these "kickboxing geishas" and the stories of their lives: the wildly popular young hip-hop DJ; the TV chef who is also a government minister; the entrepreneur who founded a market research firm specializing in charting the tastes of the teenage girls driving the country's GNC -- "gross national cool"; and the Osaka assembly-woman who came out publicly as a lesbian -- the first openly gay politician in the country.

Taking readers deep into these women's lives and giving the lie to the condescending stereotypes, Chambers reveals the vibrant, dynamic, and fascinating true story of the Japanese women we've never met. Kickboxing Geishas is an entrancing journey into the exciting, bold, stylish new Japan these women are making.

1

KICKBOXING GEISHAS

The funny thing about my love affair with Japan is that it was never the country of my dreams. The country I loved, the bad boy I could never get to walk me down the aisle, was France. Two days into my first trip to Paris, I called my mother from a pay phone on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. “Sell everything I own,” I said dramatically, “I’m staying.” Even as the words came out of my mouth I knew they were untrue. I was twenty-four years old. I worked for the New York Times at a job that journalists twice my age would kill for. All that, and I didn’t own much worth selling. I had just enough money to cover the cost of my trip and I was too pragmatic to play the starving artist. But the sentiment, the desire to stay, said everything I could not about how deeply I had fallen in love with the city, how I longed to follow in the footsteps of all the writers who had made Paris their home before me.

I spent the next five years trying to get to Paris, watching French movies, reading French Elle, studying French, visiting whenever I could. I was twenty-nine and working at Newsweek magazine when a colleague named Greg Beals suggested I apply for a fellowship to go to Japan. “But I’m not trying to go to Japan,” I told him. “I want to go to Paris.” He rolled his eyes. Anyone who had spent any amount of time with me knew that I was gunning for Newsweek’s Paris bureau. “Yeah, well, they’re not giving out fellowships to go to Paris,” he says. “You should apply for this fellowship, check out Tokyo.”

I had visited my friend Mina in Shanghai just a few months before. I remember overhearing a lengthy discussion among foreign correspondents at a bar in New York about the difference between those who go to China and those who go to Japan. China folks were serious. People who went to Japan, said the journalists I was with, only filed superficial stories about music and fashion. They said this as if it were a bad thing, but it piqued my interest nonetheless. I liked music and fashion. I adored the writer Banana Yoshimoto, author of Kitchen, and her warm, frothy tales of young women coming of age in Tokyo. I took the application from Greg and promptly forgot it.

God bless Greg Beals. Two months later, he came by my office. “Did you apply for that fellowship?” I shook my head no, dug it out from the “Don’t Forget” pile on my desk and was sad to see that I’d missed the deadline. “Maybe next year?” I said weakly. An hour later, Greg was back. “You’re in luck,” he said. “I called over there and they’ve extended the deadline.”

In Tokyo I stayed at International House, or I-House, a kind of Harvard Club for Western writers and academics in the Roppongi section of the city. Roppongi is known for its high-density population of foreigners, nightclubs, and restaurants. Later, I would look down on Roppongi as a gaijin ghetto, gaijin being the Japanese word for foreigners. But for me, it was a good starting place: filled with clubs and restaurants and a lively street life that kept me from feeling completely isolated.

I grew up in New York City, so I knew a thing or two about crowds. But in Tokyo, density is the thing. Tokyo is the most heavily populated city in the world: more than a quarter of the nation’s population live crammed into an area that represents less than 2 percent of the country. It’s got a good ten million people on Mexico City, Sao Paolo, or New York. So the second most important phrase I learned was “sumimasen,” a hybrid of “excuse me” and “I’m sorry.” It is the oil that keeps the wheels of social grace turning. You say sumimasen when you bump into someone on the train or when you want them to know that if they don’t move, you will bump into them. Sumimasen is used when you want to catch the attention of a friend, colleague, or stranger, or when you want to ask a question, the time, directions, anything.

But it is also a kind of thank you. A way to say, “I’m sorry that I’ve taken up some of your precious time. I so appreciate it.” The first time I took a rush hour train and watched a white gloved official literally shove us into the subway car, I realized that sumimasen was the vocabulary equivalent of those white gloves. In a city of twelve million people, you are bound to step on some toes. But sumimasen smoothes it out.

In one of my favorite poems, Yusef Komunyakaa writes about a black man’s sense of isolation and humiliation in the American South. The poem is called I Apologize For the Eyes in My Head. In Japan, I apologized constantly, but it did not make me feel ashamed or isolated. Sumimasen was the thread that wove me closer to the fabric of Tokyo.

It was five years before Sofia Coppola’s soporific tale of a young woman in Japan, but I soon began to live out my own Lost in Translation scenario. I had studied Japanese for six months before my trip. I did not yet dream in Japanese, but occasionally, I daydreamed in the language: a kind of Romper Room fantasy where various brightly colored objects would be pointed out to me and I would, correctly, call them by their Japanese name. When I arrived in Tokyo, I was immediately set up with a series of translators. I asked if the translators could take a back seat, filling in where necessary. “Well…” my fellowship adviser said, “we’ll see.” As any visitor to Japan and I suspect many other Asian countries soon learns, you are rarely told a straight-out “No.” Instead, your host oh so politely sidesteps a yes.

During meetings when I greeted the interviewee with a simple “Ohayo gozaimasu,” there would be much exclamation about how wonderful my Japanese was. If I introduced myself and said where I was from, there would be more amusement and praise. Once I started to ask a question in Japanese, however, my interpreters firmly stepped in. Later, they would tell me that I could speak a little Japanese, but they were there to make the interviewee feel at ease. It was important to a Japanese artist or executive that he or she not be misquoted or misunderstood.

There were more dangers in my trying to express myself in Japanese. If I spoke more Japanese than my counterpart spoke English, this would cause them to lose face. Losing face being of course, the utmost dishonor. Finally, my translator explained, I was a representative of the United States and the Japan Society, who had been kind enough to give me this fellowship. Did I want to risk repercussions to fall down upon my country and future fellows should I make some sort of careless mistake? This confirmed the comical Lost in Translation scenes that anyone who has worked with an interpreter has experienced. You ask a question to a dignitary, say, the mayor of Yokohama. Your interpreter asks the question in Japanese. The mayor gives a long, elaborate answer in Japanese. There is much gesturing and emotion and nuance. You don’t need to understand the words to know this: you can see it, you can feel it. Then your interpreter turns to you and says “He says yes.” The interpreters are always filtering and yet it is so easy to put yourself in their hands.

There were two main interpreters I worked with. One I secretly called “Mama-san.” She was a fifty-something woman whose only child had gone off to college and who had recently reentered the work force. I called her “Mama-san” because she was a Japanese Doris Day: prim and proper, always in skirts and sensible shoes, a frilly pink umbrella by her side, in case it should rain. She showed up early for every appointment and dragged me, like a child, down the streets of Tokyo at lightning bolt speed. She told me what I should or shouldn’t do and what I should or shouldn’t say.

It was March when I arrived, and colder than I had expected. Sex and the City was the hit show back at home and following Carrie Bradshaw’s stylistic lead, I had stopped wearing stockings. This did not escape Mama-san’s notice.

“You aren’t wearing stockings,” she pointed out.

I muttered something in a twelve-year-old’s voice about this being the style.

She sighed, “Maybe no one will notice.”

I was stockingless again the next time she saw me. “Your legs must be very cold,” she said.

I was, in fact, freezing and I had tried to remedy the situation. “I went to the store, but they didn’t have any stockings in my size.”

She could hardly argue with this. Japanese women are universally tiny. I am universally not. She clucked, “Maybe no one will notice.”

I-House was located on a side street of Roppongi, at the high point of a small hill. If you went down the hill, you found the streets and clubs along the wide street Roppongi-dori. It was great for people watching: men in shiny suits pressing strip club flyers into the reluctant hands of passersby; young club girls teetering around in high heels while looking for foreign boyfriends; salarymen—the Japanese equivalent of the man in the grey flannel suit—working women, students, and lots of foreigners from all over the world. At that time, spring 2000, schoolgirls, the joshi kosei, were all the rage. It was not uncommon on a Sunday afternoon to pass one group of girls dressed up like the court of Marie Antoinette, walk one block down and see another group of girls dressed like Hello Kitty and then turn the corner and bump into a bunch of leather-clad biker chicks. It wasn’t so much that these girls pioneered one particular style, as it was that they were fearless and relentless in their ability to cycle through every period in fashion history. These Japanese had long been the master of a certain kind of copycat culture. But the teenage girls, who took care of every detail—from the right period shoe, to a three-hour makeup job to get the punk rock look just right—took the copycatting to another level. This was a case of “Anything you can do, I can do better.”

The obsession with teenage girls was not relegated to street culture. For a retrospective of his work at the Tokyo Contemporary Museum of Art, seminal designer Issey Miyake invited over one hundred cheerleaders from local high schools and colleges to perform in the museum’s courtyard. It was the very antithesis of the fashion scene, a hundred girls in brightly colored sweaters and miniskirts, shaking their pom-poms around, but Miyake declared that the girls captured the joy he felt when “making things.” At the Venice Biennale, the following year, the Japanese pavilion was called “City of Girls” and visitors traversed through a stark white structure, white pebbles underfoot, white trees to the left and right, in and out of hundreds of portraits of Japanese girls. The fact that the girls were both super trendy and trendsetters had morphed into something more. Back home in Brooklyn, my minister always said at every christening, that life was our most powerful answer to death. He would hold the new baby up to the congregation and remind us that whatever and whomever we had lost in the past year, here was new life, here was new hope. I saw Japan as doing the same thing. After the economic depression of the nineties, when big business had been this country’s religion, Japanese teenage girls were a symbol that all was not lost. Japan held the girls up, in art and in the media, and eventually in business, as a symbol to the world that new life coursed through its veins.

Any weekday afternoon, you can still spot the joshi kosei in front of Shibuya 109, a legendary department store in one of Tokyo’s most popular shopping areas. “Moshi-moshi!” one will screech into her cell phone. It’s one of her friends, and if you ask, she’ll pull out a fat album of purikura—tiny sticker photos that she and her friends have taken in photo booths at game centers all around town. The phone rings again. “Moshi-moshi!” she calls out again. It’s another friend, asking if she knows the plan for tonight’s late night karaoke session. With mock exasperation, she rolls her eyes. It’s tough being popular.

The cliques of girls who roam Tokyo’s streets like to identify themselves by wearing something that matches: they sport the same Coach handbag or hang the same Hello Kitty charm on their cell phone. They believe that the sameness strengthens the bond of their friendship.

The schoolgirl craze, while concentrated in Tokyo, commanded national, even global attention. On my first visit, every weekend in Shibuya, in Ueno Park, in Harajuku, you could find foreign photographers and foreign news crews, shooting pictures of schoolgirls in their blue and white sailor-style uniforms and other more outrageously dressed Japanese teenage girls. In all the Western fascination with these girls, it shouldn’t be lost just how sexualized the images of Japanese teenage girls were and continue to be. Google “Japanese teenage girls” and you get a glut of porn sites. Google “American teenage girls” and you get hits ranging from fashion to music to health issues. The teen girls who were being pursued by the foreign press in Tokyo’s most stylish quarters, are part of a long tradition of Westerners traveling great distances to see exotic Japanese women. From the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, Japan’s borders were closed to foreigners. When Japan was open to the West in 1868 at the beginning of the Meiji era, Japanese women were quickly stereotyped as beautiful, docile, sexual, and selfless. Shuttered from the rest of the world for nearly two hundred years, the Japanese woman was perceived as both exotic and innocent, pure and highly desirable. Such stereotypes continue to this day. In Contemporary Portraits of Japanese Women, Yukiko Tanaka discusses about how powerful and perennial the image of the Japanese female is: small, pale, delicate, childlike, sexually sophisticated, and submissive. This most recent foreign obsession with schoolgirls is in fact part of a much longer tradition.

It is hard to overestimate how the worldwide fascination with Japanese girls plays into the stereotype of the Japanese as a nation of cartoonish, eccentric people—“Oh those crazy Japanese”—who are too polite or too stupid, to know that they are the butt of the joke. In the newspaper I read an outrageous tale—complete with photographs—about girls who were having their lips sewn together to create a Hello Kitty smile. Whether or not this was actually true, I’m not sure—it was a proper newspaper, not the Japanese equivalent of the National Enquirer. But I thought it was telling that the boyfriend of one of the girls pictured said that what he liked best about his girlfriend’s new look wasn’t how kawaii she looked—kawaii meaning supercute, and the Japanese catchall equivalent to cool. What the boyfriend liked about his girlfriend’s Hello Kitty lip job was that now she talked less. (Cue the cameras, “Oh those crazy Japanese!”)

I had to admit, I found them fascinating too: laughing elementary age girls, traveling in packs like wolves, their school uniforms immaculate, Hello Kitty key chains and other brightly colored decorations hanging off of their backpacks, with the full confidence that only comes from knowing you are in charge. Before long, I began to realize that as dominant as the schoolgirls were in the popular culture, they’re weren’t the only Japanese women making bold statements, and not all of those women were playing the part of the shopping-crazed child.

During my Roppongi strolls I developed a fascination with a lurid group of young women who stood out on a street it was hard to stand out on. These were the yamamba girls, slang for old mountain hag, but they were more like Palm Beach divas than spinsters. They had deep George Hamilton-like tans, dyed platinum blonde hair, and wore high platform shoes and white lipstick.

Their behavior and dress was shocking to a nation of conformers and each day, some new tale recounting a yamamba girl’s exploits appeared in the paper. One woman in her early twenties said that before she adopted the yamamba look, she was constantly being hit upon—on the subway, at school, at her part-time job. “Now,” she said, triumphantly, “nobody touches me.” Lascivious salarymen on the train are ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Also by Veronica Chambers
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 Kickboxing Geishas
• 2 A Mile in Her Kimono: Japan’s Costume Culture
• 3 Tea and Sympathy: Working Women in Japan
• 4 Bananas: How Travel and Life Abroad Liberates Japanese Women
• 5 Love, Japanese Style
• 6 Blushing Brides and Charismatic Housewives: The More Traditional Route
• 7 Derailing the Mommy Track: Women, Pregnancy, and Politics
• 8 Outside of Corporate Japan: Women Entrepreneurs
• 9 Men in the Kitchen: How Japanese Male Roles Are Changing
• 10 Revolution at Bullet Train Speed: How Women Are Forging Change and Tradition in Japan
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author