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Gender roles

Although the Japanese Constitution guarantees equality in gender roles, this does not in fact exist. Japanese males do not regard women as equals and most would subscribe to the view that “a woman’s place is home”.

In Japanese companies, women are known as “Office Ladies”. Their main function is to be young, decorative and well dressed in order to brighten up the men’s workday. In the evening they are expected to engage in mindless and frivolous entertainment, while at work they are only entrusted with minor tasks like making tea for the men and doing the photocopying.

It is assumed that women will marry and leave work by their mid-twenties and, in many companies, a woman must resign if she is getting married. It is difficult for the intelligent and earnest-minded professional woman to be taken seriously; many of them have to serve a lengthy period of time undertaking mindless repetitive tasks before they can start to rise in their career path. In order to succeed, women have to be a lot better than the men at their level.

In the business world, male networks are extensive and bonding activities are commonplace, normally being held after work hours or at the weekend. They include attending various sporting activities and going out for an evening’s eating and drinking. Women have no place here: this is a hidden but powerful brake on their advancement.

Men, on the other hand, are expected to be married by 35 years of age. The function of the male is to earn sufficient money to take care of his family, which involves working hard, spending long hours at the company, and gaining promotion. There is little feeling that he should be at home, share in family life, help raise the children, or even love his wife, although he is expected to sire children. Once that has been achieved, he is largely perceived as a mere breadwinner and status-earner for the family. In general, the Japanese males are not really comfortable with modern Western views about the position and progress of women, nor the career-mindedness of modern Western women; to many it seems both alien and threatening.

Such attitudes towards women are still the most common, although there have been some relaxation and changes since the 1980s. A shortage of skilled labour is slowly eroding the traditional view that women have to resign on marriage and especially if they have a child, and a small, but growing, number of women are developing a career path. Younger Japanese in particular are changing their attitudes and becoming less “Japanese” in their views about the proper roles of husband and wife but they can still find it difficult to alter things. Over half of Japanese women are in the work force, but in the main they still occupy the lower positions.

Reward system

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