The literature racks at Tokyo’s free clinics look exactly the same as their equivalents overseas: a rank-and-file conglomeration of pastel colors and rosy images of happy people with infectious diseases, broken up by the occasional stark, dead-on portrait photography-driven HIV booklet.

This informational booklet, more in league visually with the packaging of Escalator Records‘ releases than any sexual health literature I’ve witnessed in Japan (or the U.S.), stands proud as a breakout piece of graphic design in its category.

Have A Nice Sex, a lovely little two-color booklet about the niceties of anal sex, is a commendably gigantic departure from the soft-focus world of STD pamphleteering. A strategically-placed HIV information sticker on the front cover easily peels off the glossy stock to reveal the cover illustration’s genitalia. Inside, it’s full of irreverent, scrappy illustrations, hand-lettering, and admirable typography, all in a punky, neon green and black print job on two considered paper stocks.

Before you go and open the gallery, be warned: NSFW.

I am happy to present my selection for the first annual Néojaponisme Graphic Design Award, the booklet Have a Nice Sex designed by MMKG for Rainbow Ring here here.

The publication of the magazine Koakuma Ageha in 2005 sent a shock-wave through Japanese society: when did cabaret-club hostesses become socially accepted to the degree that they have their own widely-available fashion magazine? And when did “kyabakura girl” become a glamorous and enviable occupation for young women? The answers to these questions were not apparent. And since the Japanese media is not allowed to talk about trends in terms of socioeconomic class or subculture, Koakuma Ageha‘s popularity gave the impression that all young women, no matter the family background, have suddenly clamored to work nights in Kabukicho.

Enter market researcher Miura Atsushi, who started looking at the why’s of the phenomenon. Back in the 1990s, Miura worked for shopping building PARCO‘s think-tank Across, where his job was to pontificate on the latest consumer trends and social movements to keep corporate clients in touch with the “leading-edge.” Now with the sharp decline of art-infused, cutting-edge consumer culture, Miura has turned his eye to heavier and less optimistic social issues. The popularity of his 2005 book Karyū Shakai (『下流社会』, “Downwardly-Mobile Society”) provided the media sphere with an easy way to bring up the slightly-taboo topic of Japan’s growing income divide. The credibility of Miura’s claims relies on his simple methodology: his conclusions mostly come straight from data analysis, based on his company Cultural Studies‘s large-scale youth surveys. Unlike the other pop cultural theoreticians, Miura is just “reporting the survey results” — an inductive antidote to the wilder and generally-unprovable “latent desire” pontificating of formal sociologists like Miyadai Shinji.

Miura’s latest book is Onna ha naze kyabakurajō ni naritai no ka? 『女はなぜキャバクラ嬢になりたいのか?』 — “Why Do Women Want to Become Kyabajō?” He took interest in the topic after conducting a mobile phone survey in 2007 for the advertising firm Standard Tsushinsha on the topic of “Generation Z” — Japanese aged 15 to 22. The survey asked young women, “What profession do you want to do/which job would you like to try doing?” (「なりたい職業、してみたい仕事」). He was shocked to find that “kyabajō (cabaret club girl) / hostess” ranked at #9 with 22.3%. Thinking this must be some statistical fluke, Miura chartered another survey of the same demographic in 2008, but he got nearly the same result: the kyabajō / hostess category came in at #12 with 20.5%. In short, one-fifth of young Japanese women aged 15 to 22 apparently hoped to work in the mizu shōbai industry. When he took a similar survey of women in “Generation Y” (age 25 to 32) for comparison, he found that only 9.1% had either wanted or still want to try out the hostess profession. Miura came to the conclusion that there has been a recent social shift toward wanting to work in this sector and started on specific research towards the topic.

The premise of the book — that young women have increased desire to become hostesses and kyabajō — is obviously controversial, and there has been some backlash against Miura’s statistical methods, best outlined in the Amazon review section for the book. Most criticism focuses on the fact that women in the survey could freely check as many occupations as they pleased, thus not proving they “want” to become hostesses as much are “would be fine with it.” To Miura’s credit, however, he fleshes out the hard data by interviewing 32 actual kyabajō and kyabajōs-in-training, and nothing about their stories seems to contradict his general conclusions on the phenomenon.

Even taking the possible survey biases into account, Miura’s results do match up with multiple clues in the broader pop culture that the hostess profession has become more socially-acceptable in the last decade. Prime time television dramas like Jotei follow the exploits of hostesses without any moral judgment on their line of work. Popular manga in mass market weekly magazines take up the challenge of young hosts and hostesses aiming to become “#1″ with the same narrative tone as if they were in an amateur band aiming for the top of the pops. Coffee advertisements offer quotes from hosts to convince consumers about the product’s value. The aforementioned popular magazine Koakuma Ageha has transformed real-life kyabajō into elegant fashion leaders and lifestyle models for the gyaru community.

Of course, the actual situation is much more complicated than “all Japanese girls want to become hostesses.” Miura is able to build a very specific demographic and psychographic profile of young kyabajō and kyabajō-wannabes, illustrating exactly which subset of Japanese society is most contributing to this growing labor sector. He found that kyabajō are most likely to have the following characteristics:

• low socioeconomic background
• low level of education
• moved to Tokyo from small villages in outlying prefectures (in the case of Tokyo, most hostesses are from the Tohoku region)
• high rate of parental divorce (double the rate of the total survey sample)
• hate being in their school, their own house, their own room, or their own living room (especially compared to those who want to become government workers)
• are confident about their looks
• strongly dependent on men
• comfortable with traditional gender roles
• hate their moms, like their dads
• read magazines Egg and Koakuma Ageha
• love the music of Hamasaki Ayumi

This list almost perfectly illustrates the profile of a single Japanese socioeconomic class-bound taste culture: namely, the “yankii” taste culture situated in lower-middle and working-class communities outside of Tokyo. Many of the above factors — divorce rate and socioeconomic background, for example — are well-known to be correlated. The embrace of “traditional” values such as gender role division and dependence on males could also be posited to be more associated with a certain social environment and education level. And when Miura asked women in the survey whether they wanted to “break the rules,” the hostess set generally answered in the negative. (Those who want to work in the sex industry, in comparison, were affirmative on the question.) The data’s “typical” kyabajō does not see the profession as a “rebellion” against community mores, but as a logical extension of her teenage lifestyle and limited career opportunities.

To explain why this specific group of women has embraced the kyabajō profession as a legitimate career, Miura mainly focuses upon structural economic factors. First and foremost, women are no longer able to secure a middle-class existence for themselves solely by marrying a man with a full-time job. During the Lost Decade, writes Miura, the steady dismantling of the corporate safety net meant men could no longer provide economic stability for their wives and girlfriends. Furthermore, even if women want to work themselves, they have had a particularly hard time becoming sei-shain “regular employees” in the recessionary environment. These conditions have created more pressure for women to establish financial independence, but for women with low levels of education and low social capital (both the result of non-urban working-class backgrounds), kyabajō is one of the few jobs that can provide high incomes and independence at a young age.

The women’s economic necessity for hostessing is reflected in their fiduciary behavior. Contrary to popular dismissals of kyabajō as soullessly selling their sexual dignity to buy foreign luxury goods, the kyabajō interviewed by Miura for the book claim they are mostly saving the money for the future. (The average salary seems to be around ¥6,000,000 a year, which is very good for a 20-something but not extravagant.) Most acknowledge that they only have a limited time in this particular industry and are trying to create a nest-egg for the future. Some even send money home to their parents. Although this parallel is a bit loaded, the idea of sending money back to parents almost perfectly echoes the pre-war system of prostitution where poor farmers’ daughters would be sold off to brothels to help their parents pay-off debts. Surely cabaret clubs are not as extreme in terms of labor duties as brothels, but children earning money for the household has been taboo amongst the middle-class for at least the last 100 years.

Miura’s profile of hostesses also clearly delineates the cultural tastes of the profession’s leading demographic group. We receive the rich detail that hostess-wannabes read the magazine Egg — a glimpse into pre-kyabajō cultural affiliation. Egg is the quintessential “deep gyaru” magazine — for the ganguro yankii wing of the fashion movement rather than the part that touches upon middle-class mass style (like Popteen). Egg readers are disproportionally based in places other than Tokyo, so the profile of the kyabajō seems to almost perfectly match that of the female yankii — women with a particular set of cultural and sexual values who mostly live in non-urban prefectures. Girls who read softer fashion magazines like non•no or arty high-fashion magazines like Spur are apparently not hostess material, which makes logical sense. The values of the gyaru subculture — in terms of sexuality, future hopes, and gender dynamics — are much more conducive to mizu shobai than any others.

Miura describes the cabaret club itself quite pithily as “theme park of traditional gender roles.” In an age where men have to actually make an effort in personal presentation and manners to win over possible girlfriends and can no longer sexually harass secretaries in the workplace, the kyabakura provides men with a chance to return to a much simpler time, before women became educated, independent, judgmental, aggressive, and demanding. Kyabakura and hostess clubs offer men increasingly-rare female adulation for a simple payment. They can be drunk, loud, obnoxious, and speak with toxic tobacco-scarred breath, but the hostesses are required to treat them like kings — just like an idealized recreation of the good ol’ days.

Many women, however, consider the hostess job no harder than desk work, and in particular, enjoy the fact that their job allows them to dress up in a glamorous way and find constant “acknowledgment” from the opposite sex. Miura suggests that kyabakura provides these women, who never succeeded at school and had a rough home life, the self-confirmation that they are good at something for the first time. They feel respected by customers and can work towards finding a wealthy spouse in the customer base.

Most hostesses — perhaps in a reflection of classic yankii values — want to marry at a relatively young age, and the pages of Koakuma Ageha are filled with perky confessionals from divorced 20-something mothers with multiple young children who work at kyabakura to support their families. For the hostess looking for a husband at work, however, things are not always so easy. Miura claims that one of the reasons so many mizu shobai girls spend their hard-earned money on host clubs is that hosts are the only men in their lives who will promise to marry them. Of course, promising matrimony is a core duty of the host job, but the hostesses can walk away sated that night at least.

Miura sees this rise in the number of hostesses as part of a broader trend for society: youth’s desire to continue their cultural lifestyle into adulthood. In his survey comparison between Generation Z and Generation Y, he found that the latest crop of young men and women are desperate to become singers, actors, and models. Generation Y was much more realistic and seemed content on more “serious” jobs. In the past, Japanese society’s high toleration of youth culture stemmed directly from the social contract that youth would abandon all cultural activities at employment (usually aged 23 for white collar, earlier for blue collar). Now that companies cannot offer youth the previous level of benefits for “going straight,” most youth without long-term career prospects are choosing to bring their youth style into adulthood. The gyaru pioneered this social change, and now one of the few growth fashion markets is gyaru brand clothing made for mothers and their young children. Oddly, the gyaru still believe in early marriage and early childbirth, but they have abandoned the lack of fun and glamour formerly associated with adult responsibility.

So there is a “kyabajō segment” of young women, mostly corresponding to the gyaru/yankii subculture. Young college students and daughters from “good families” are well-known to work part-time or occasionally at cabaret clubs, but the “career girls” most definitely fit a specific subcultural affiliation. That understood, does this really mean something for society? Haven’t the working and lower classes been historically been the suppliers for the sex industry and the mizu shobai? If we believe the Miura evidence and analysis, economic conditions have deteriorated to the degree that a certain segment of women are electing to work a relatively-degrading job in order to maintain a middle-class level of income. But as the book suggests, the profession itself is not as dire or exploitative as say, the pre-war brothel system. Girls make the choice to join and can essentially quit whenever they want. Prostitution is less ambivalently bad; hostessing can be dangerous and demeaning, but in theory, there are protections in place to keep it from being sexual slavery.

That being said, the high salary for hostessing — in light of low education and no skills — should be our first clue that employers are compensating for something negative in the work duties. First and foremost, the job leads to no long-term career nor builds any portable skills. So while a clerking position pays little in its 20s, women can move up the ladder to a certain degree in their 30s and 40s to make a better salary. Hostesses have at most, a decade at the job and then cannot use that experience for anything else (other than being a “mama” perhaps). And exceptions aside, the hostess work generally degrades the labor and social value of the woman. The stigma has been reduced in recent years, but in most cases, hostessing can be a “scandalous” past background in a way that “secretary” never could. The kyabajō job also does not build strong social capital: working in Kabukicho means running around with yakuza, touts, and pimps, who are low on valuable social capital themselves. (There is also the issue that being a “kept woman” rather than a wife, which we can assume is a common path for many hostesses and kyabajō, means no legal rights to property from their partner.)

These facts tends to discount the “economic empowerment” argument, that the hostess business is a nice welfare system that transfers money from corporations (through entertainment budgets) and middle-class men to working-class women. And even in this model, those with power and capital are abusing their position to win special conditions from the recipients. Women can only receive these funds if they are young and willing to act out a form of sexually-charged subservience. In a more “fair” economic system, there would be high-paying jobs for women not conditional on indulging men. Yes, any job in the hierarchical white collar Japanese corporate system means hiding personal feelings to please the whims of the boss, but in an office atmosphere, this is not predicated on sexual gratification nor strict sexual division (women pleasing men).

But could the popularity of kyabakura amongst men be a good sign? The fact that men must pay high fees in order to receive unconditional treatment from kyabajō means that women are not willing to act accordingly in “real life.” The better solution, of course, would be a mass move away from the kind of childish misogyny that fuels the hostess industry, but Japanese men have shown long-term resistance to the new gender values (or at least tolerance) that have come to be strongly rooted in the rest of the post-industrial world. The word “feminist” in Japan does not even mean “one who believes in gender equality”: it means “one who is nice to women.” It appears that kindness to the second sex is still a radical idea.

Miura’s research has been and will continued to be challenged. Some times for legitimate reasons, but there will always be serious resistance from men to a re-conception of the hostess/kyabakura industry as a site of class exploitation. Flirting is more fun when you don’t think the girls are sending the money back home to support their poor family in some tiny Hokkaido fishing village. The “greedy girls who want Louis Vuitton bags” myth created a comfortable equality of sin: men would go to hostess clubs out of lust, women would work there out of avarice. But nothing about Miura’s research should be surprising or controversial. Japan has a long history of hostess-like institutions — from geisha to the cafe waitresses of the 1920s — and the lower classes have always been the main supply of labor. But now thanks to magazines like Koakuma Ageha, these girls are no longer invisible. They have their own world, own style, and own values. The only thing new is that they are succeeding in making this lifestyle seem appealing for those not predestined to end up there.

Fujoshi kanojo 腐女子 (“Fujoshi girlfriend”) is a new movie based on a blog by “Pentabu” that rode the original post-moe fujoshi boom to bestselling book status a few years ago. (Pentabu is currently blogging part 2.) I don’t have anything in particular to say about the movie itself, but the way it is being marketed is an excellent example of how the media misunderstands — or at least misrepresents — fujoshi.

Media treatment of the fujoshi concept has always been problematic. The root of the problem is, as usual, otaku culture. When the Akiban hordes first spread across the steppes of the mass media, triumphant cat emoticons unfurled, they brought their own women with them: maids, underground idols, voice actresses, cosplayers, and underage cartoon characters. That virtually all of these women were either personae played for cash or entirely imaginary did not prevent these ideals of womanhood establishing themselves in the public mind as a badly-needed feminine yin to Akibacentric otaku culture’s hypertrophied yanginess.

As a result, when media attention eventually turned to actual fujoshi, the elevator pitch — “They’re otaku, except girls!” — was more or less accurate (granting a broad reading of “otaku”), but the implications were misunderstood. If fujoshi were girl otaku, they must be the girls usually appearing alongside otaku in those TV specials and magazine articles, right? You know — the maids.

But no. As you might expect, although fujoshi and otaku often turn to the same texts for raw cultural material, they have very little to do with each other as cultural actors. There are fujoshi stores in Akihabara, but the main fujoshi center is in Ikebukuro — and it developed around a core of bookstores, not transistor hustlers.

“fujoshi syndicate”, a group of self-described “fujoshi OLs” from Tokyo (the only named member is one Ōta Maki 大田真樹) address this exact point in their recent book Naze, fujoshi wa danson-johi na no ka?『なぜ、腐女子は男尊女卑なのか？』 (“Why are fujoshi male chauvinists?”), discussing the cover of another book from 2007: Bokutachi no ki ni naru fujoshi 『僕たちの気になる腐女子』 (“Those fascinating fujoshi”), which also featured maid imagery on the cover.

Let’s start with the “face” of the book, its cover. The cover of Bokutachi no ki ni naru fujoshi is a girl in a maid outfit. — So at this point, it’s already failed. It’s true that there are a few fujoshi among the girls working in Akihabara’s maid cafes, but most of the staff there are not fujoshi but “Akiba girls” (アキバ系女子).

What are “Akiba girls”? By this we mean girls who love the anime and manga subcultures, but who also go to Akihabara to be made a fuss of. [...] They are otaku, but they don’t do the earthy “Let’s party, just us girls!” thing; they’re on good terms with male otaku too. One representative example would be Nakagawa Shōko (Shokotan).

In other words, otaku girls who wear maid outfits are not part of fujoshi culture, but rather Akiba culture. [...]

The syndicate then relate an apparently true story about how they once asked a maid cafe employee where they could find Messe Sanoh, a specialist retailer of woman’s video games, and that maid didn’t know: incontrovertible proof that she, at least, was no fujoshi.

The fujoshi syndicate actually spend more of Naze, fujoshi wa on this and other misconceptions of fujoshi by non-fujoshi (especially men) than they do on the title question. One argument they keep returning to is that the cosplaying, go-shujin-sama-ing media fujoshi addresses a deep psychological need within post-Bubble men. High salary, highly respected alma mater, and physical height: two of these three Bubble-traditional status markers are much harder to obtain than they used to be, and the idea of a secret caste of women — maybe there are some right there in your office! — who prefer the company of low-status, sensitive, intellectual types, and will even play along with their fantasies — this is bound to have appeal.

(Ironically, argue fujoshi syndicate, real fujoshi are just as status-conscious as ever, and have no interest in otaku as a rule. The syndicate traces this state of affairs to fujoshi reading material and its emphasis on status and power differentials as a source of eroticism.)

The argument here is not that there aren’t any otaku women who genuinely enjoy cosplay and Akiba culture, or that this is somehow inauthentic. Arguments about terminology and authenticity are a dead end. The question is to what extent the prominence given to these individuals impedes understanding of broader “fujoshi culture.” There is also arguably a political element involved: you can see this as the co-option of the idea of the fujoshi to reinforce sociosexual norms, the replacement of a uniquely female culture identity with one defined only in relation to male interests.

Unfortunately, though, it’s not a fair fight. As long as keen interests in fancifully-depicted gay romance and other distinguishing features of non-Akiba fujoshi don’t show up in photos, the media will always prefer the women dressed as frilly maids.

As evidenced by this poll of “Perfect Mothers” and the recent appearance of multiple magazines dedicated to being a stylish “gyaru mama,” we seem to be living in the midst of a “young mother” boom in Japan. The domestic-yet-glamorous lifestyle of famed young moms like 22 year-old Tsuji Nozomi (ex-Morning Musume) has become prime-time television fodder, and the most prominent heroines in the gyaru subculture — namely, Popteen‘s Masuwaka Tsubasa and Koakuma Ageha‘s Momoka Eri — flagrantly balance busy careers with child-rearing. The Japanese slang yanmama (ヤンママ) has lost its original pejorative context, no longer meaning delinquent “yankii mother” but now just “young mother” in a politically-neutral tone. Yanmamas are not just heartwarming — they’re fashionable.

Many of these young women surely owe their bold new maternal identities to the consequences of barrier-free reproductive activity. Everyone loves to excuse a total and thorough disinterest in birth control pills and patches by claiming a “widespread use of condoms”, but I think we all secretly know that Japanese young people cannot be bothered to use any form of contraception at all. So you end up with a substantial amount of babies, and with the Japanese traditionally relying on social obligation to chart all life courses, most of these teenage moms end up getting properly married to their boyfriends before the water breaks. (These stats call all pre-marriage babies “out-of-wedlock births” but I would guess most get married after conception.)

At least in my understanding, the unplanned and hasty move into parenthood has always been a major part of Japanese rural working-class culture. The curse of late childbirth mainly afflicts educated working women who cling to selfish “life goals” and want trivial things like “careers.” So even if yanmama have become a media boom, the young mother phenomenon strikes most directly amongst women outside of the traditional “good girl” white-collar (or white-collar husband finding) career path: whether than means “reader models” for gyaru magazines like Masuwaka, young pop idols like Tsuji, or high-school drop outs in Ibaraki. Tokyo University is not ravaged by pregnant students. These days, however, Japanese society has dropped all pretense of being a nation of “universal middle-class sexual values.” In fact, mainstream pop culture now looks more to previously-ignored working-class subcultures than to snobby Tokyo art-school kids from good families. The mainstreaming of young mothers is most likely not a trend in itself, but a subsidiary trend in the larger mainstreaming of yankii values. There were always women who had kids at 18 or 19, but it’s no longer something to hide or dismiss as deviance. It’s a cause for celebration, and those celebrations are taking place out in the open.

So there had been young mothers, but the new “cool factor” seems to be dependent upon the changes in the meaning of child-rearing within the paradigm of youth. In the past, having a kid was the ultimate sign of “graduation” from adolescence. Even the yankii bad boys would hang up their tokkofuku at 20 to get a soul-crushing job and support the new family. This is 2009, however, and the entire idea of “responsibly-timed youth deviance” feels a bit old-fashioned. The latest growth market in the gyaru style community is gyaru children’s clothing, because young delinquent mothers want to dress their future-delinquent babies in identical outfits from their favorite Shibuya 109 brands. There is no longer a need nor requirement to “graduate” — only a journey of self to find the perfect balance between individual expression, work, and child-rearing. In the recent issue of Brutus on gyaru culture, Masuwaka Tsubasa claimed that she spends “99% of her time on family and home, and only 1% on work.” This ratio is not physically possible, seeing that Tsubasa is always up to some new cross-promotional activities and magazine modeling, but her style leader status faces no threat from the fact that she defines herself first and foremost as a mother. Being both a mom and a model perhaps has come to embody the Japanese ideals of perseverance and hard work more than dedicating solely to just one single identity.

For whatever reason, the “young father” oddly does not seem to be part of this particular phenomenon. In most gyaru media, boys vaguely exist somewhere off-screen — whether because girls want a repose from constant sexual advances or just take male interaction for granted. It is also worth mentioning that many of the Koakuma Ageha hostess-model heroes are “single mothers” (シンママ), whose young marriages fell apart almost instantly. In most post-industrial societies, early marriage has a much higher rate of failure than later marriage, and anecdotally-speaking, there is not a lot of promise: almost all the Japanese celebrities who trail-blazed the young mother boom — Amuro Namie, Shiina Ringo, Tsuchiya Anna, etc. — divorced within a few years. Current celeb moms like Saeko and Tsuji are happily married for the moment, but the odds are against them. I assume that the de-emphasis on “young fathers” unconsciously takes this harsh reality into the equation. More likely, the potential dad pool is not daydreaming about sacrificing the peak years of libertinage for a single woman and sober family life.

Of course, any talk of baby boom pricks up the ears of social policy planners and amateur pundits, who are eager to know how this pop culture moment impacts Japan’s apocalyptically-low birth rate. I am not sure there are enough Shibuya 109 yanmama to make up for the older cohorts’ abject failure to adequately reproduce, and more critically, I am not sure 19 year-old moms are pumping out the kind of dedicated worker drones required by the bureaucratic blueprints of Kasumigaseki. Many will have a hard time avoiding the question, are the wrong kind of Japanese reproducing? The American film Idiocracy took up a similar topic and expounded a predictable moral panic on the impending dominance of lower-class values. For better or worse, the same population principle could be applied to contemporary Japan: the least elite kids are churning out lots of babies, and apples don’t fall far from the tree.

According to Japanamerica author Roland Kelts, Patrick Macias is “an American otaku and blogger extraordinaire.” More accurately, he is the author of multiple books in both English and Japanese and currently the Editor-in-Chief of Otaku USA. Mr. Macias was in Tokyo a few weeks back, and we met over a discount tonkatsu lunch to talk about the state of Japanese recession and the current yankii cultural takeover. Luckily, a recording device captured our dialogue (and my total inability to enunciate words or complete sentences).

So please enjoy the hour-long mp3!

Download: The Tonkatsu Tapes: Marxy vs. Patrick Macias on Japanese Recessionary Culture
General Néojaponisme Podcast RSS Feed: .rss

Tsumura Kikuko 津村記久子 – 『ポトスライムの舟』 (Potosu Raimu no Fune, The Lime Pothos Boat). 2009. Winner of the 140th Akutagawa Prize, for late 2008.

The title story is the winner: a novella that could be translated as “The Lime Pothos Boat.” This title (despite sounding like something Angel Investigations might have fought in Season 2) combines two of the key motifs in the book: a lime pothos plant the narrator has growing in her garden and a Papuan outrigger canoe she sees in a travel poster.

The protagonist — rarity of rarities, an Akutagawa Prize-winner written in the third person — is a thirtyish woman named Nagase. She’s working four jobs, all of them low-paying and part-time, taken after quitting a corporate career due to harassment from her boss. Neither the details of this harassment nor the trauma it inflicted on her are ever quite spelled out, but it still affects Nagase several years later when the book begins, and not just because the event ruined her chances to make it as a career woman. In fact, we come to suspect that she works four jobs not just to make ends meet, but also because she’s made herself a workaholic, trying to escape the thoughts that come to her when she’s idle.

This idea puts the story into the stream of recent Prize-winners examining the lives of women in the workplace (see Aoyama Nanae, Itoyama Akiko, even, in a way, Kawakami Mieko and Daidō Tamaki). But it goes in a different direction from those stories, partly in that the book is not entirely focused on the protagonist Nagase.

One of the things Tsumura gains by breaking away from the first-person fixation of most A-Prize bait is the chance to create more than one actual character. The story is seen through Nagase’s eyes, but we get to know several of the women around her, including her mother, three of her college friends, and one of her coworkers. The result is a sort of composite portrait of two generations of women living in the age of divorce and more-or-less full female participation in the economy.

They show a diversity of experiences when it comes to love life. Nagase and her college friend are single. Nagase’s mother is divorced, and another of her college friends separates from her husband in the course of the story. A coworker is contemplating divorce. The third friend stays silent, but is clearly feeling trapped as a full-time homemaker. Everybody but the last-mentioned is working. But Nagase is really working.

We follow Nagase for a whole year. As the story starts she sees the aforementioned travel poster — an advertisement for an around-the-world cruise that catches her imagination. She works out that it would cost the equivalent of a year’s wages from one of her jobs, so she decides to save those earnings and live on what she makes from the other three. If she can save the money in a year, she’ll take the voyage, she tells herself, although it’s likely that the trip itself is less important than the idea of having something to work for.

In the meantime, one of her college friends, Ritsuko, leaves her husband and brings her kindergarten-age daughter to live with Nagase and Nagase’s mother in their large Nara home. Much of the story concerns Ritsuko working through her problems, and Nagase’s mother bonding with Ritsuko and her daughter. A lot of this happens just out of Nagase’s ken, as she’s always working and is therefore somewhat shut out of the lives of the other people in her house. These sections of the novella are deftly handled, conveying Ritsuko’s situation without weakening our sense of Nagase’s work-imposed fog.

The story climaxes with Nagase collapsing from overwork, which forces her to take time off for the first time in years. We might expect that this would also force her to confront her own reasons for overworking, but she does not really dwell on the issue. She does begin to despair about saving enough for the cruise, but eventually gets a couple of lucky breaks, allowing the story to end on a note of hope. (Although we don’t find out if she actually goes on the cruise.)

What about that lime pothos? As I mentioned, this and the boat motif tie the work together — the story works on the renga logic of Kawabata as well as on the teleology of plot. The boat motif clearly comes from the travel poster and reminds us of what the narrator desires. The pothos is harder to identify. It’s an extremely hardy plant: you can clip off stems and put them in a jar of water and they’ll just keep growing. Nagase does this repeatedly, until there are pothos clippings at two of her workplaces as well as all over the house. I think this hardiness is the key: like Nagase, her mother, Ritsuko, and many of the other women in the book, the pothos can thrive without much encouragement.

They’re survivors, in other words, although that makes the story sound more clichéd, and in fact, more decisive than it is. Nagase, at the end, may or may not actually be thriving. Maybe having enough money will allow her to take that trip — but will it do her any good, if she can’t get over whatever trauma was driving her to work herself half to death?

As I wrote earlier, the story ends on a note of hope, but also on a note of irresolution — a typical strategy for Japanese Serious Literature. This, however, works in Tsumura’s case: The story captures a snapshot of its characters at a certain moment, with only bare hints of what comes before or after. These hints, however, are carefully chosen, highly suggestive, and aesthetically rich.

But “Potosuraimu no fune” significantly differs from the typical A-Prize story in other ways. The plot is more linear than most, with fewer flashbacks and far more plot events. In fact, this story offers a variety of novelistic pleasures we don’t always expect to find in Japanese fiction — vividly realized secondary characters and carefully constructed scenes — as well as pleasures we do expect to find there — delicately modulated moods and intriguingly open-ended use of poetic motifs. In fact, this the best written Akutagawa story in some years. All the way through, you feel as if you’re in the hands of a master writer of fiction, somebody who knows precisely what she’s doing.

The omake story in the volume, “Jûnigatsu no madobe 十二月の窓辺” (At the Window in December), is quite complementary. It’s about a woman named Tsugawa working in a company for a difficult boss, and how she decides to quit. There’s no formal connection with “Potosuraimu,” but we might as well be reading about how Nagase ended up where she is in that story.

Like “Potosuraimu,” “Junigatsu no madobe” is third-person, long on plot, and short on flashbacks, with several neatly suggested characters (almost all of them female). It feels very timely, given the renewed interest so-called popular culture has taken in the last few years in exploring the work environment — particularly from a female point of view and often with an eye toward revealing the bullying and abuses that take place there. Think Haken no hinkaku and Hatarakiman.

“Junigatsu no madobe” is closer to the former than the latter, with none of the suck-it-up-it’s-good-for-ya of Hatarakiman. Rather, it’s a gripping exploration of the bruised psyche of a bullied employee. What does it do to her? What does she do about it? The focus is always so tight on Tsugawa that we never get any distancing perspective. We don’t know, for example, if she’s really incompetent at her job, or if her boss is really unreasonable, or both; we only know how it makes Tsugawa feel to have to face this situation day after day. It gets claustrophobic; it gets painful. That’s the point.

As with “Potosuraimu,” Tsumura gets her point across through carefully constructed scenes and a plot that features far more suspense than you might have thought proper in junbungaku. There’s a subplot about a series of assaults taking place in the area around Tsugawa’s office, and while the story never quite turns into a mystery, the violence in the background serves nicely to enhance the depressed, desperate mood of the story.

The piece is ostensibly about women in the workplace: Tsugawa’s a would-be career woman, and her boss, the bully, is a woman too — real Devil Wears Prada stuff. But really, this story is universal, just like Haken no hinkaku and Hatarakiman. Men have to put up with their psyches being systematically crushed by the company hierarchy, too. Maybe it just takes a fresh perspective to see it.

Both stories make a strong case overall that Tsumura’s one to watch.

A mini-documentary about sexual assault on the Tokyo subway.

(If you have trouble viewing video in our lightbox player, please go directly to the video here.)

Directed by Ian Lynam
Research by Ariki Rie
Featuring Ito Aki
Music by Copy (courtesy of Audio Dregs)

English / 日本語

Sumie Kawakami is a Japanese journalist and the author of the English-language book Goodbye Madame Butterfly: Sex, Marriage and the Modern Japanese Woman, recently published by Chin Music Press. (Sample chapters are available at the book’s website.)

Kawakami extensively interviewed a wide range of “normal” Japanese women (and one not-so-normal Japanese male “sex volunteer”) and then transformed these conversations into engaging narratives. The portraits range from young bar-owner Chami — who endures chronic mutual cheating, an abortion, and the death of her biker boyfriend — to the 58-year old Mitsuko — a big fan of Korean male celebrities who only recently lost her virginity. Some of the protagonists’ marriages work out and some do not: Fumiko has an affair while contemplating a divorce from her workaholic husband, while Shoko manages to find happiness as the wife to a Shinto priest. Although not a specific theme, adultery ends up playing a large part in most of the stories. Both landowning princess Emi and housewife Misa are forced to personally confront their husbands’ mistress in order to restore the family unit.

Kawakami’s work attempts to more realistically portray the institutions of love and marriage in Japan through offering a worms-eye view of how actual women interact within their communities, families, and society at-large. In this interview, we discuss recent trends in Japanese socio-sexual life and the structural reasons for the specific cultural patterns in Japan.

I have to admit that the most general impression I got from the stories in your book was that modern Japanese women are unhappy. Did you intend for the book to express that?

No, no. Tell me why you think they are unhappy.

Maybe “unhappy” is too strong of a word. But the women are mostly divorced, or their marriages have failed, or they are estranged from their husbands within the marriage. The story about the Shinto priest’s wife is a bit happier, but for most of these women, the marriages or relationships did not work out or are not working out.

It was never my intention to show that Japanese women are unhappy. If you asked American women, how many of them would say they are really happy in a relationship? Less than half? Ask any woman. I don’t think it’s just Japan. I’ve never done any research but how many of them would say, “I’m really happy”?

But that may not have anything to do with them being a man or a woman. It’s just the nature of relationships. There may be lots of people who are happy when thinking about work or other personal relationships. But I think there are only a handful of people who would say they are super lovey-dovey in their relationships. I don’t think everyone’s happy, but I didn’t set out to capture everyone being unhappy.

Even if they are not “unhappy,” there was definitely a feeling of how the system of marriage in Japan may not be best serving Japanese women.

I lived in Canada and had lots of friends from lots of countries. I have watched lots of different couples over time. And if you just take the idea of the “marriage system” very broadly, the Japanese system is certainly not very open. Compared to the West, marriage has a very large impact on a woman’s lifestyle. Getting married creates extremely high expectations, and the marriage system ends up constricting Japanese women. However, this is not just true for women — I think men are also bound by the marriage system. In Japan, the couple is not bound just by love, but an economic bind between two families.

But compared to the past, I would guess that almost all Japanese men and women choose their marriage partners through love now — and not from the perspective of inter-family relations. And even if marriage is eventually reduced to economic ties or just acting out the roles of family, that’s not unique to Japan. So why is there more social pressure in Japan on those married than seen in other countries, even if the man and the woman are choosing partners through “love”?

The employment system in Japan is still very inconvenient for women. If you look at the shape of female employment — and this is not just Japan, but also Korea — the statistics show an M-shape. Around 18-22, they start working, and then at 35-39, employment drops off. Once women finish raising their children and are in their 40s, they come back to work. Basically, many women are dropped by the employment system when they raise their children.

It’s just too difficult for women to tend to their children while they work. A lot of companies say they want to create nurseries, but the reality is that women have to pursue their careers just like men, and on top of that, do housework. This would be hard even in America or Canada. Some women may try it, but there’s still a glass ceiling. There is still a wage gap. If you ask, who will bring home the bacon in the next ten years, the answer is men.

Compared to the United States, I think there are still lots of women in Japan who must rely on their husbands even if they continue to work after childbirth or become a full-time mother. So that’s one economic reason: there is a glass ceiling for women and the situation is not particularly friendly to women.

Are there not also political reasons behind these economic factors?

I started working in 1987. That was the first year they implemented the Equal Employment Opportunity Law (男女雇用機会均等法). I started working at a Japanese newspaper. It was the first time the newspaper had recruited over five females in one hundred years. But why did they pass that law at the time? It was because the Japanese economy has just entered into the Bubble and there was going to be a labor shortage unless companies started to employ women. So, it’s not like politicians just suddenly decided to start being friendly to women. There was a specific labor situation in Japan.

A lot of women, including me, were employed during this time, but those who had survived the “Lost Decade” from the early 1990s endured a lot of hardship. Even though companies at the time decided to employ women as much as possible, the government didn’t do anything for them once the economy got weakened. In the ‘90s, companies were forced to start laying-off men, so they didn’t understand why they had to support these new women employees. As hard as women worked during those years, they got little support from their companies nor the government. But thanks to those particular women who struggled at that time, working condition for women have improved a lot.

I think that women’s position will grow stronger from here on out, but there are still inconsistencies in the policy. In general, most would agree that women should be promoted, but is that message being consistently applied? When an actual economic downturn came, the first to be fired were women and older aged men.

There are fewer jobs these days that put employees on a clear path to the middle class. How does that impact how women choose their husbands?

For the generation before the people now, the father would work all the time and protect his family. It was a generation of work, work, work. But now they wonder, can my husband really attain that suburban dream of the husband going to work, buying a house in the suburbs, having two kids and two dogs? Since the economic circumstances aren’t the same as before, the husband is no longer able to support the family in the same way. As much as the husband wants to support his family, there is going to be an expectation gap now.

Japanese men’s expectations about marriage do not seem to have changed in 100 years. They are the breadwinners, so they don’t need to help out with the housework or child-rearing. But don’t women now want their husbands to help out more? Since they are marrying for love, they have much higher expectations than before. They see the ideals of the West and notice that nothing has changed in Japan in this regard. Is there not a real expectations problem at the heart of Japanese marriages?

If you look at young men these days, I think they’ve become better about helping around the house. However, I think men are also in a pitiful situation. For example, they can’t go home at 5 p.m. like in the West. As hard as they work, they have to go out after work with their bosses. If everyone is working until 10, they can’t just go home at 5 because they have a wife. Work hours are long. However much men want to commit to helping out at home, they just can’t do it. Awareness may not have changed, but in order for men to actually be able to help at home, broader social support is necessary.

There is still not enough awareness about these issues, and the system has not changed enough. So it’s not just women who are caught between a rock and a hard place.

A couple will tend to see themselves as equals before getting married. But suddenly, when the wife is left to carry around the child, she notices the inequality. Men of course also know things were more equal, so they want to do something to help, but their jobs don’t let them. So you can’t say that men alone are the reason.

Do women who work at home want to have jobs?

From what I have heard, women wish to come into their own and contribute to society as well. But they have stability with their husbands. They want to do a fun and meaningful job, even if it doesn’t earn much money. But the real world is not so easy. I talk to women who don’t work, and they say they want to work. But, there is a big gap. These are not people who have worked hard to break through, so they are jealous of those who have worked outside the home. It looks to them like freedom. But that’s only because they have little experience in the workforce. There is a price to be paid for freedom, but they don’t see that. They have no idea what it is really like to work. This may sound rude, but there are lots of people who say things like, “Wow. It must be so freeing to work like that.” On the opposite, the single women in their 40s who have worked all this time all say, “I want to get married, I want to have my husband support me.”

But they have no experience of knowing whether they can put up with being in the home, taking care of children, caring for the sick and old, and putting up with in-laws who may not be very nice. Being in the home is also really hard. They don’t see that and just think it will be fine if they get married. So it’s a very hard thing to balance.

However, I have seen women in their 30s, who worked hard through the Lost Decade, and are getting better in balancing the two. But I think there is a big gap between individual experiences.

In the book, adultery plays a very big part in almost everyone’s life. Obviously, adultery is universal, but it’s often said that Japan lacks a strict sexual morality that would create simple guidance for this issue. But even if we ignore morals or ethics, adultery does have a big influence on Japanese marriages in a structural way. It obviously causes emotional pain to the women, for starts. In the book, this is often a cause for the marriage to fall apart. Decades ago, Japanese men had more freedom to have quiet affairs, and this principle still seems to remain.

There is a double standard. There’s a term 「浮気は男の甲斐性」 — like, cheating is a symbol of a man’s wealth. So adultery on the part of men is not a good thing, but there’s nothing you can do about it. What Japanese women say a lot, is something like, “It’s probably okay as long as it’s a professional woman. If it’s a prostitute it’s okay — as long as I don’t know about it. But if it’s somebody else and he actually falls in love, then that’s a problem.” The physical is different from emotional attachment, so if it’s just physical, it’s fine. There are many people who told me this.

But it’s not like these rules about “men can cheat but women can’t” or “I guess I have to put up with it” were decided democratically by women. They were just told to put up with it.

Yes, that’s probably true. Until 1947, it was technically illegal for women to cheat on their husbands but it was not illegal for married men to cheat on their wives. Both the women — and the men who were having affairs with these women — were held legally responsible. This is because the woman belonged to the husband — as property — so adultery with a married women was considered as if this property was violated. So I think this idea has a legacy: even if you are cheated on, you have to put up with it.

Is there not an unavoidable psychological issue that most Japanese men cease to see their wives as women after they give birth to children?

Many Japanese men say that if their wives have children they are no longer lovers: they are mothers. In Japan, there are only mothers or lovers. Nothing in-between. In a way, wives with children become special because they are given a special status beyond lovers. But the physical relationship often gets neglected.

If you go back to the employment issues we were talking about, after a family has children, the father may work around two hours away from home and he may not come back home until midnight. So he has a life outside of their house, but the wives also have their own lives. The woman’s life has a total radius of 3km with the kids’ school in the middle. Her life is established there, right? And she won’t probably go beyond that 3km unless she really needs to.

After many years of this lifestyle, the married couple have nothing in common. She is focused on daily activities — PTA, neighbors, school — while he is totally committed to his work. Even if they both think family is very important, they forget how to do things together. Maybe on the weekends they will go out together as family but that’s about it. It gets very difficult for them to actually talk together and understand each other.

They had been lovers, so they had totally understood each other at one point, but by the time the child is ten, they feel a ten-year gap between them. The wife and husband have spent ten years in different worlds, and to be as passionate and loving as before is very difficult. If the woman works, it’s even more difficult. The wife becomes even more uptight. She has to work so many hours at her job and also do all these things at home. So neither parent has any time, and they just barely pass each other everyday.

Employment is just taking too much time. I think there is no longer any room for the family to develop their life as a family.

Most of Japan’s social problems seem to be byproducts of the overly long labor hours.

For example, if you come home at 8, you eat with your child, put them in the bath, and by the time they go to bed, it’s 10. So the couple has two hours to talk — between 10 and 12. However, if the husband comes home at 12, it’s impossible, right? And if this continues for a long time, the married couple just becomes more and more separated.

Today kids are very busy too. They go to juku (Japanese cram schools with classes held after school or at night) and then swimming lessons or whatever. Kids’ sleeping time is also decreasing. Families are being constrained time-wise and cannot function as a family.

I think the communication problem for families is born from this time problem. But if you just took at the communication problem alone, even if there is time, families have become really bad at communicating.

Japanese men often talk about how they may not express their feelings through words, but they use a kind of tacit communication. What exactly are they doing if they are not specifically speaking their feelings to their wives and families with verbal means?

I think they have a different communication style. Their wives are theirs, so to a certain degree, they recognize that it’s natural that their wives already understand. In Japan, there’s an expression 「男は背中でものを言う」— “Men speak with their backs.” They can’t say anything with their mouths. It is a Japanese aesthetic thing to show your attitude with action. Just acting with your mouth is not masculine. So, even if you don’t say it, the other person should understand. But actually, if they don’t say it verbally, no one understands.

They come home, don’t say anything, so the wife and the husband have no idea what the other is thinking. While I was interviewing women for this book, I often heard them complain about their husbands. When I ask, “Why don’t you say that to your husband?” they would simply answer, “Oh, it’s nothing I would need to actually say” or “It’s not their fault either.” The assumption is that even they don’t say it, the partner will still understand, but that is a flawed assumption.

Even if Japanese divorce rates are rising, they are relatively low compared to other countries. Is this proof that Japanese marriages actually work better?

Aren’t Japanese people just better at putting up with it? Not just women, but men. There is a word「仮面夫婦」 (literally, “masked marriage,” meaning a couple who only go through the motions of being husband and wife.)

People often say in Japanese, “Well, it’s because we have a ’masked marriage.’” Then, others may reply by saying, “Oh, we are too.” People are okay with the fact that they only have relations as these masks. They are not particularly embarrassed by it

I found it odd in the book that there are multiple stories of Japanese women easily calling up the women who are having an affair with their husbands and talking to them directly.

These days, wives will sue the other woman. If your husband cheats on you, you then sue the woman on the grounds of compensation for psychological damage. Even though it’s a problem between the husband and the wife, the other woman will have to pay.

Why does the other woman — and not the husband — have to take all legal responsibility for the cheating?

The wife can put up with the fact that she has been cheated on, because she believes, or tries to believe, that it’s just men’s nature. So the wife will tell the husband, “I will negotiate this for you.” It becomes a discussion of woman-to-woman. Instead of trying to improve the marital relationship, the idea is to pull the family together.

If the relationship is the problem, you just talk to the husband, right? But the woman’s aims do not include the relationship, but are to maintain the marriage, and thus, the family. So the wife needs to get rid of what’s getting in the way of things. If the other woman goes away, problem solved. Certainly the wife also tells the husband he’s been bad, and he may apologize. “Sorry, I was bad. Forgive me.” And he will say to the woman, “Since he has apologized, you also should do us a favor and go away. Your relation with my husband was just physical.” This is how the wife can cut out the other woman and let her know that the problem does not involve her. If you cast her away like that, of course she’ll be hurt. Telling her that her relationship with the husband was only physical is poking her where it most hurts. Obviously, the other woman doesn’t want to realize that.

Does the idea of a physical relationship with another woman not hurt the wife’s feelings?

She tries to make it so it doesn’t hurt her.

So she has to put up with it?

One other important thing is that sex is not seen as a very “pretty” thing in Japan. Your heart is purer than the physical relationship. As a married couple, your hearts are bound together, but your physical relationship is on a lower plane.

Physical relations are not a symbol of a deeper relationship?

Well, if you think about what I said just now, that idea is really just an excuse for men. But since the husband and wife are still “family,” this is the natural response, no? “Because we are family, we love each other and that’s not open for argument.” This kind of familial love is not open for argument. The Japanese concept of love is not the same as the word “love” in English. It’s the bond of family.

But it’s not like the idea of Western romantic love hasn’t also gotten mixed in there.

Yes, so Japanese women now also cheat on their partners. And there are women who follow Johnny’s Jimusho talent or Yon-sama as a way to satisfy themselves with a kind of ersatz love. There are women who fall in love and then cheat on their loves, and there are people who delude themselves with fake love. They are all lonely in their hearts. In their heads, they know they have the bonds of family and have lots of pride. But they don’t have anything in reality.

In your experience, have you talked to people who patronize host clubs? What kind of people go?

Rich, I guess. Normal women can’t go since they can’t pay for it.

Lately, the host has been somewhat legitimized in mainstream society. Is there an active effort to make hosts more acceptable?

Those kinds of bars are respected to a certain degree. Not just hosts — being the “mama” of a bar is a respected profession. It’s not about sex, per se: these bar workers help smooth out social relations. So they are seen as important. I don’t think it’s just “fuuzoku = sexual entertainment.” Instead of going to therapists, the Japanese go have the bar mama listen to their stories. Or uranai fortune-tellers. They are what people use instead of professional therapists.

I think that the men who go drink at those bars want to be comforted. The bar mama may not be young, but she’s really good at listening to people’s stories. There are lots of gay bars, but it’s not like you have to be gay to go there. They go there to get their stories heard. So I don’t think it’s just sex behind this.

Isn’t Dr. Kim’s sex clinic mentioned in the book a kind of prostitution tailored towards women’s needs?

I think Dr. Kim’s service is very unique. I have never heard of anything else like it in Japan. But how is it really? I didn’t follow up and talk to people after they used it. Of the women I met, they would request men for a short amount of time, but they said they stopped using it after a while. You can’t know the real effects unless you did follow up research.

But these men have a sort of “volunteer” spirit — opposed to being gigolos.

But if they didn’t want to do it, they couldn’t. They don’t know these women. And they have to satisfy them everyday. That must be really hard work…

You have a story in the book about a woman who’s into the hanryu Korean boom. Do you think there is a deeper meaning in the current popularity of this culture with older Japanese women?

I don’t know but it’s just something for them to do. They are cute boys, and everyone is having fun screaming at them.

But they are different from Johnny’s Jimusho idols?

I think they are similar. But Koreans seem like the Japanese of old. They are strong and a bit macho. Johnny’s idols lately are a bit neutered. More than “men,” they are “cute” and “pretty.” There are no men in Japan like those in the past. But in Korea, they still have a bit of that old strength. I don’t mean to say that Korea is like an old version of Japan, but they have something that modern Japanese men have lost.

Do you think young Japanese women have been inspired by the previous generations of path-breakers?

I just don’t think there are any good role models for young women. Women who work hard are often viewed as “not so cool” (kakko yoku nai). I mean, there are women in Japan who work hard — like politicians. But people say they don’t look particularly stylish. Others may say “They may be great, but I don’t want to be like them.” Japan just needs to have more “cool women.” For example, Matsuda Seiko continued to be a singer even after getting married and changing men. Things may change more quickly if there were more people like that. But they’re a minority right now. On the other hand, there are quite a few women, especially in the entertainment industry, who go right back to work after having children, so I don’t know.

Right now, it seems like “dekichatta kekkon” (shotgun weddings) are a very visible part of the reason Japanese young people get married. Isn’t that also a sign of passivity towards commitment?

There are a lot of annoying things about getting married, so there are very few people who actively try to get married as fast as possible. Like, “We want to get married at some point, but not now.” Statistically, people are getting married later and that’s why there are less children. But that’s not all women’s fault: it may be because men have stopped wanting to get married. They don’t want to take on the responsibility. They don’t have the confidence.

Why did you choose “Goodbye Madame Butterfly” for the title?

I would have liked a more modern title, rather than a traditional Japanese one. But when you think about what people overseas know about Japanese women, they are not interested unless it’s the traditional Japanese image. Most Westerners — who have never been to Japan — if they are going to ask about Japanese women, they’ll just think, “Isn’t that a country where geishas are?” People with interest in Japan are obviously different, but for those who have never seen real Japanese people, Japan is still the land of geisha and samurai. They won’t read the book if you don’t bring them something traditional to a certain degree. And I mostly wanted that group to read this book.

Even if you think the “traditional Japanese” image is anachronistic, it seems like the Japanese system of marriage today is just the old system intact — but the women’s expectations have changed.

That’s a good point. Japanese systems are really resilient. They seem like they change, but they actually don’t. As much as Japan modernizes, that doesn’t mean that the basic policies completely change.

Was there anything that surprised you when writing this book?

When I set out to write this book, I wanted very “normal” stories. I wanted to write stories just like I would hear when I would have long discussions with my friends. Because that’s the reality I live in. So I didn’t want to focus on very alien things to me, like the sex therapist. To a certain degree, I did put stories like that in the book, but I wanted something really ordinary. When I asked them for their stories, most people said, “I’m really ordinary. Is that interesting?” For me, the stories were very obvious and natural. Any Japanese person who reads the book should feel the same. But there is a lot of drama in the ordinary.

I don’t know if people who live overseas will find these stories normal, but I came to the conclusion after reading this book that Japanese women are very strong. They are not powerful like, “This is me, and I do it this way.” They tend to work their way out of a situation. They persevere. They just want a comfortable life, and they will do anything to keep it. In a way I felt, oh my gosh, these women are really powerful and strong.

But it’s a strength with kind of depressing undertones.

I have been well-educated, have lived overseas, and have been married to a non-Japanese, so I personally believe that women can grasp their own happiness themselves. I don’t think work and happiness are things given to you by your husband.

But the women of the book show a strength that does not fit this form. They have a lot of strength to preserve the most important things. These women never give up — no matter what happens. They will always persevere. “That is my happiness. I will not solve the problems with my husband: I just want to persevere this situation.” In a way, I admire them.

In the December issue of OL fashion monthly CanCam, the editors provide a useful guide called「モテ子の習慣 vs. ブス子の習慣」to delineate the lifestyle differences between girls who attract boys — the so-called “moteko” — and those who do not — “busuko.” The article has sparked a bit of backlash on the internet with CanCam readers who were shocked to find out that they weren’t in the proper athletic club in high school nor drink the right alcohol on a date. (Hint: never start the night with a beer.) Apparently based on “survey results,” some of the findings are pretty on-message and obvious — “hot girls look like Ebi-chan!” — but some of the critiques may speak painful truths to readers — “bejeweling your iPod is probably not appealing to boys.”

Here is a translation of the guide to that thin blue border between being an attractive moteko and a completely worthless busuko.

(Bonus: pictures of the actual pages here.)

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Moteko
• Otsuka Ai “Sakuranbo”
• aiko “Kabutomushi”
• Ayaka “I believe”
• Dreams Come True “Love Love Love”
• mihimaruGT “Koi suru kimochi”
• Do As Infinity “Ever…”
• HY “Nao”
• Otsuka Ai “Planetarium”
• Kōda Kumi “Taisetsu na Kimi e”
• Matsutoya Yumi “Yasashisa ni tsutsumareta nara”

Busuko
• Akikawa Masafumi “Sen no kaze ni natte”
• The Toraburyuu “Road”
• Ishikawa Sayuri “Amagigoe”
• DJ Ozma “Age Age Every Kishi”
• Kahala Tomomi “I’m Proud”
• MISIA “everything”
• Morning Musume “Love Machine”
• Shiina Ringo “Kabukicho no joō”
• Cocco “Tsuyoku hakanai monotachi”
• Britney Spears “Baby One More Time”

Busuko
• Judo
• Going Home
• Table tennis
• Track and field
• Hiking (ワンダーフォーゲル部)
• Softball

Moteko
• Reading a book you’re into
• Dozing
• Talking to friends
• Looking at the advertisements
• Looking out the window
• Writing mails on phone
• Listening to music on iPod
• Reading documents for work
• Staring off into space
• Holding the strap and doing small diet exercises

Busuko
• Putting on lipstick or makeup
• Staring at people
• Playing mahjong on phone
• Making out with boyfriend
• Eating sweets
• Cleaning out your bag
• Reading a manga magazine
• Passed out asleep!!
• Looking at your own face in the window reflection
• Sitting with your legs crossed

Moteko
• Ebi-chan: Ebihara Yuri
• Itō Misaki
• Kanno Miho
• Shibasaki Kō
• Sawajiri Erika
• Henmi Emiri
• Leah Dizon
• Takashima Aya (announcer)
• Takeuchi Yūko
• Andō Miki
• Chihuahua

Busuko
• Ebi-chan: Ebisu Yoshikazu
• Matsui Naomi
• Tamura (Tani) Ryōko
• Members of Morning Musume who quit early on
• Gachapin
• Pug (dog)
• Oda Mudō
• Devi Fujin
• Takanohana Oyakata

Moteko
• Spices for cooking
• Antique accessories
• Analog records
• Sunglasses
• Swarovski crystal
• DVDs

Busuko
• Baseball cards
• Rocks
• Dragonballs
• Antique dolls
• Video games
• Cosuplay (costume play) outfits

Moteko
• Studying to be a “color coordinator”
• Surfing
• Making pizza from scratch
• Doing yoga for at least 10 minutes a day
• ’60s European films
• Doing nail art yourself

Busuko
• Henro Pilgrimage to Shikoku shrines
• Tarot cards
• Blogging your own poems
• Obscure rules in martial arts
• Gambling, pachinko or horse racing
• Still being into “Yon-sama”

Moteko
• Sweet cocktails
• Wine
• Champagne
• Imported “o-share” beer
• Sours

Busuko
• Makkoli
• Whiskey, bourbon
• Ordering a beer for a starter
• Awamori
• Anything related to the idea of “regional sake” (地酒)

Moteko
• Small dogs like chihuahuas
• Foreign cats like the Bengal
• Hamster
• Tropical fish
• Strange pets like mini pigs

Busuko
• Lizards
• Goldfish bought at a shrine festival
• Strong dogs like a Doberman
• Chickens
• Crayfish

Bandō Mariko’s book Dignity of Women『女性の品格』 may be piggybacking on the immense popularity of Masahiko Fujiwara’s 2005 bestseller The Dignity of the Nation 『国家の品格』 but the former somehow manages to discuss the abstract concept of “dignity” in a way that avoids diatribe and provides practical information for the reader. A self-help book for women who would not admit to reading self-help books, Dignity of Women offers Japan’s second sex a total of 66 to-do lists for becoming a “strong, kind, and beautiful woman.”

A Tokyo University graduate, author Bandō Mariko’s first-rate credentials are the key to establishing the credibility such an authoritative self-help book requires. She led a 34-year career as a civil servant, beginning in 1969 at the Prime Minister’s office, while commanding a role as a working mother and a behind-the-scenes champion of women’s rights in the male-dominated world of Japanese politics. In addition, Bandō served as General of the Bureau for Gender Equality and Consul General to Australia before taking on her current position as professor at the Graduate School of Showa Women’s University. In other words, Bandō perfectly embodies the kind of woman that tickles the fancy of successful young career women. Yet rather than writing a biographical success story about being a professional woman with an indomitable spirit, Bandō has instead concocted a guidebook for the modern woman with a single crucial point: just because you may reach the very top tier of Japanese society populated mostly with “undignified” businessmen that doesn’t give you the right to start acting like them.

Ms. Bandō begins her book by recognizing the existence of the aforementioned The Dignity of the Nation but argues that dignity of an entire nation is not attainable without the dignity of every individual belonging to that nation. While she admits that courage, responsibility, sense of logic, integrity and resilience are attributes that must belong to dignified men and women, responsibility for the dissemination of dignity falls on the female.

Bandō’s tutelage is divided into behavioral and philosophical tactics, and it is the combination of the two, she writes, that brings about true dignity. The seven chapters — entitled “Manner and Dignity”, “A Dignified Way to Speak”, “A Dignified Way to Dress”, “A Dignified Lifestyle”,“A Dignified Social Life”, “A Dignified Behavior”, and finally, “A Dignified Way to Live” — can be grouped systematically into those that apply to a woman’s professional life and those that apply to a woman’s personal life. The over-usage of the word “dignity” on every page, however, quickly becomes grating, especially since a brief scan through the first few lessons is really all you need to comprehend what a dignified woman would and would not do. Throughout the course of the book, the dignified woman reveals herself to be a female social organizational construct as palpable as fashion subcultures like Kogyaru or O-nee-kei.

Personally-speaking, as a Japanese woman working for a Japanese company, just a week of employing Bandō’s Japanese Business Manners 101 quickly succeeded in raising the gray eyebrows of men ages 50 and up. Most Japanese corporate environments still operate according to the dusty rules of propriety, the most important of them being the “sempai/kōhai” respect-your-elders routine. From correct deployment of honorifics to the skillful exchange of platitudes and greetings to the formalities of phone reception and a dedication to resolute punctuality, these daily rituals often transcend any functional use to become almost tea-ceremony-esque courtesies that define the Japanese sense of business professionalism. For the first few chapters, Bandō takes the time to first spell out these critical rules for grown-up girls that their mothers most likely failed to instill.

Bandō’s insistence on propriety as the founding virtue of “dignified women” is no doubt conformist at heart. Yet what Bandō accomplishes in her book is to turn propriety into a cunning game tactic. Playing by the rules should be seen as neither subjugation nor resignation. At one point, Bandō writes that, as stupid as it may seem, men still feel irked when they are not respected by women. Furthermore, men are often uncomfortable with informal speech from a women. So, she asks, why cause unnecessary altercation? To rise above the men and their infantile needs of masculinity is essentially the core message that Bandō wants to relay to women hoping to beat Japanese society at its own game.

Bandō admits that as a young woman she believed brains would trump looks in the real world. But the hard cold truth is that physical appearance speaks volumes, and women are appreciated for their beauty. Bandō rejects an overly flashy or trendy fashion sense, but as a compromise, she dispenses advice on how to apply make-up, how to dress, and how to do hair in a dignified manner. Preventing extra fat from seeping up to your waist is equally important, as she mentions that in American society, overweight workers are ruthlessly deemed unfit for managerial position because they lack self-control. Faced with these confounding rules of society directed at women, Bandō’s suggestion is never to roar against it, for the premier characteristic of a well-groomed, pedigreed woman with a good posture and manifest dignity is not to make a fuss.

As the book progresses into more philosophical advice, Bandō increasingly struggles to keep her bourgeois snobbery from bubbling out of control. Bandō’s requirement for a dignified woman outside of the office is meticulously detailed — from being able to recite the names of seasonal herbs and flowers native to Japan to being an aficionado of the classical arts, both Kokin Wakashu (古今和歌集) and Mozart. She definitely assumes a universality to her rules, and many of them — like a disavowal of stinginess and a culinary flair in the kitchen — are quintessential codes of upper-class women. Yet Bandō’s idiosyncratic dislikes also materialize in rules such as “receiving free giveaways, such as makeup and shampoo samples, is undignified.” While the definition of a dignified woman may be inspiring so long as it remains flexible with a minimal number of ground rules, the more specific her definition becomes, the more Bandō displays her intolerance for lowly women who go to bargain sales only to pick up pocket tissue on the street on the way back home.

For all its snobbery, however, Dignity of Women does not lose sight of the wide demographic it targets. Bandō’s advice for the most part is egalitarian — in that the rules are applicable for women of any social status. The dress code for dignified women is achievable without breaking the bank. Bandō takes great pains to include women of all social and professional standings by insisting that there is a dignity to be weaned out of every menial task, even xeroxing.

Throughout the book, Bandō laments that it would be a shame if the ascendancy of women in Japanese society solely results in the production of “できる女” or capable women, who are just as ruthless and conniving as powerful men. What Bandō offers instead is an alternative to the market-driven desire to succeed, win and profit at all costs. In the chapter entitled “A Dignified Social Life,” Bandō predicts that in the face of an increasingly utilitarian society, Japan does not need obsequious women who can flatter their way into the hearts of men with clout, but instead, dignified women to lend a helping hand to people in all sectors of the social ladder, regardless of whether or not gestures of propriety will directly lead to promotion in status or position.

In the last chapter “A Dignified Way to Live,” Bandō writes that when she was young, she revered the typically American sense of entrepreneurship. But in hindsight, Bandō concurs that the Eastern philosophy of passivity against insatiable desires will make for happier human beings. Although there are no specific nationalist statements in Bandō’s work, the sudden draw of the word “dignity” in Japan may be related to a national realization that internal values must be embraced to counteract a waning status as an economic and technological powerhouse. Dignity of Women lacks the screed of The Dignity of the Nation, but Bandō’s gentle words do seem to be intended to comfort tired women run down by the spectre of Western capitalism. In the wake of China and India’s rise to ascendancy, Japan’s last line of defense may be something entirely different from fiscal or political power — a likability that comes from “dignity.”

In Dignity of Women, there is a certain sense of possibility that permeates the book: not everyone can become a “winner,” but they can surely attain dignity. This message may be the biggest appeal of Bandō’s work and explains its sales of 1.6 million copies. The need to be loved plays against the need to succeed in today’s Japanese society, and Bandō strongly suggests that what Japanese women need is to love, not to be loved. The ability to love others and help others unselfishly, she teaches, is the secret of being loved by all at the end of the day. While Japan’s male-driven society has evolved to beget profit-driven organization men like Livedoor’s “Horiemon,” Bandō believes that women will be able to instill an entirely new sense of value into corporate culture.

Ultimately, Bandō’s association of propriety with dignified women may strike many as old-fashioned, stifling or confining, but she believes that women can actually play a progressive role in society through the use of these traditional, conformist tactics. Fundamentally, however, her vision is hinged on the somewhat naive assumption that their agency in social change will come solely from a better, more moral selection of men — choosing husbands on criteria other than financial or hierarchical position and condemning the otherwise “undignified” males around them. As a book written by a political and social champion of women, Dignity of Women is flawed at a core level: the author expects Japanese women to somehow limit their fomentation of change to passive roles. But also, she wants readers to approach these techniques of “dignity” for moral reasons, even though she clearly spells out they can be used to attain greater social standing. The central question about the success of Bandō’s book is then, how are women actually appropriating the lessons? If an unselfish morality is the mark of dignity, then the book’s true success would come when female readers employ Bandō’s teachings on dignity for selfless reasons. The irony of the book, however, is that the author would probably see nothing dignified about a woman attempting to become “dignified” following the advice of a hit bestseller called something like, Dignity of Women.