Perspective of a Young Japanese Woman

The following stories, cultural anecdotes, and beliefs of modern Japanese people were related to me by Sayaka(not her real name), a twenty year old college student from Japan, during her brief visit to the U.S. I had met her in Japan a few months previously.-John Shea O'Donnell

Looking West

A Japanese affinity for certain Western goods and practices is constantly being interwoven with long held traditions. Women have learned by example that when they answer the phone at home it is proper to speak with strangers a high pitched voice. A telephone conversation usually begins with a traditional "moshi, moshi" (hello), but the English "bye, bye" is used when ending a telephone conversation. Other English words that have found there way into common colloquial use in Japan are "okay" and "hi". It is common to see Japanese men and women dressed in Western style clothes ­ the Western business suit is now ubiquitous in Japan ­ but it is still possible to see women dressed in kimonos which are worn by geisha, some hostesses and are worn by the general populace for special occasions like Shichi, Go, San (7-5-3 Shinto ceremony); coming of age at twenty-years of age; graduation; and at weddings though less so due to the expense(in more expensive Japanese weddings the bride will wear both a white, Western dress, and a white kimono ). A trip to a Japanese department store will reveal the tastes of Japanese people more clearly than anywhere else. A department store usually consists of seven or eight floors with the top floor reserved for restaurants and/or entertainment for children, and one floor set aside for traditional Japanese kitchenware, and women's fashions. The five or six other floors are where people shop for electronics, kitchenware, and clothing that is indistinguishable from similar goods found in the West.

Purity and Discrimination in Japan

In seeming contradiction to the Japanese affinity for Western goods, the people do not like their kind to marry gaijin (foreigners), even Westerners. Sayaka's parents have told her that they will disown her if she marries a gaijin despite the fact that she is their only child. Their reasoning for this is to keep Japanese blood pure. Her parents also explained to her that they want to understand their daughter's husband, but if he is a gaijin hey cannot understand him. Sayaka told me that Japanese hold deep prejudices towards two other specific groups: Koreans and burakumin. Koreans are the largest, non­Japanese segment of Japan's population whose residence originates from the time of Japan's colonization of Korea at the beginning of the century. Many Koreans have returned to Korea, but others have chosen to stay in Japan because it is the land of their birth. When why Japanese dislike Koreans, Sayaka could not explain it. She said it is not something that her friends and her discuss and when she asked her father he would not explain why he dislikes Koreans.

One day when Sayaka was a young girl, she returned home from school and mentioned to her aunt the route she took. A look of concern fell over her aunt's face and speaking softly, she said that Sayaka should never pass through a particular neighborhood that she had that day. The young girl was never told why she should avoid the neighborhood the neighborhood, but Sayaka later learned that it was because burakumin lived there. Burakumin are Japanese, but are considered "polluted" or dirty in a society where ritual purity is an important tenet of Shintoism, a native Japanese religion, because of the professions that they have traditionally been relegated to entering. Characteristic of these polluted professions are: makers of tatami mats and shoes because the feet, which are unclean, touch them, and butchers of four-legged animals because traditionally this is also considered unclean. During the Edo era, burakumin could only reside in burakumin areas (the name buraku translates as "area" and min as "people"). Today the term burakumin has become more problematic because these traditionally defined professions are not solely restricted to burakumin so non-burakumin may live in burakumin neighborhoods. Parents in Japan often hire detectives to investigate the man their daughter may marry. Sayaka believes that if the parents of a woman found out that her prospective husband was descended from burakumin or lived in a burakumin neighborhood it is unlikely that they would agree to the marriage, but if he worked in one of these traditionally "unclean" professions and he was not a burakumin, they might still agree to the marriage. Often when I would ask Sayaka about Japanese attitudes, she would differentiate between older and younger Japanese. On the issue of discrimination towards burakumin and Koreans she did not make this differentiation. When I asked Sayaka to place a prospective burakumin-, gaijin of African descent-, gaijin of European descent-, and Korean- husband in the order that she believed her parents would find most reprehensible to least reprehensible she did so this way: burakumin, gaijin of African descent, Korean, and gaijin of European descent.

Where the Army of Occupation Still Resides

Sayaka's parents are both from Nagasaki, the sight where the second atomic bomb was dropped, and her childhood years were spent in the town of Sasebo where a U.S. naval base is located. I met Sayaka around the time three Americans were being tried as suspects in the rape of a twelve-year old Okinawan girl so her thoughts about American servicemen in Japan was of timely interest to me. Sayaka's father had told her how one time a U.S. serviceman was seen in one of Sasebo's downtown bars firing his gun into the air for his own amusement. She had also heard that one of these servicemen exploded a hand grenade in town. Because of events like these and a natural fear of an armed force of foreign people whose customs and language is different from their own, the citizens of Sasebo who do not believe there is any great justification or need for the American base to be in Japan are fearful of the servicemen and would like the base to close. When Sayaka returns to her parent's house during breaks from her school session, her father still reminds her not to go outside at night because of his concern that she may have some sort of bad encounter with a U.S. serviceman. When the newspaper reported the sentences given to the three American servicemen who had raped the Okinawan girl (two of the rapists were given seven year sentences and the third was given six and a half years which are considered neither to be short or long sentences), I asked Sayaka what she thought. She said she believed they should have been given ten or fifteen years each(the maximum sentence accorded such an offense in Japan is ten years). Sayaka thought that the Okinawa rape case was an important departure from previous incidents of rape or other incidents of violence by American servicemen in Japan, because it received more media attention and she now believes that Japanese law will be applied to the foreign soldiers more strictly in the future. --March, 1996

[The Daily Yomiuri, December 5, 1996: A U.S. sailor was sentenced Wednesday to 13 years in prison for the robbery and attempted murder of a Japanese woman in Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture, by the Sasebo branch of the Nagasaki District Court.

Terrence Swanson, 20, a crew member from the U.S. guided-missile frigate McClusky, assaulted the 20-year-old Sasebo bar employee in a parking lot July 16, slashing her throat with a knife and fleeing with her purse, which contained about 13,000 yen in cash (~US$130.00).

"The accused committed the brutal crime when the need for tighter discipline among U.S. military personnel stationed in Japan was strongly sought, after the rape of an Okinawan primary school girl by three U.S. servicement in September 1995," presiding Judge Kiyomi Yano said in handing down the sentence.]

Japanese Valentine's Days

Non-professional, consentual-sexual relations are concealed from public view but allusions to them are not. Valentine's Day is a unique event in Japan when girls and women give a boy or man they are attracted to chocolates and a note expressing their interest (female subordinates are also expected to give their superiors sweets on this day). Exactly one month later, on March 14th, the boys or men are expected to answer with sweets in kind and a note responding to the female's inquiry though the Valentine's Day note is sometimes ignored.

The Subtlety of Attraction

Japanese attitudes towards sex are no doubt confusing to Americans. I was surprised when I went to Japan to see how popular it was for high school and college girls to wear very short skirts. Sayaka told me that schools usually regulate the length of skirts and they are suppose to be down to the top of the knee or lower. Teenage female students roll up the top of the skirt to show off their legs because they know the boys will be attracted. When I told her that women that show off so much of their legs in America are often considered to be sexually loose and preyed upon by American men, she said that this wasn't at all the case in Japan. Japanese boys or men may look, but even this is done subtly. It would be very unusual to see a Japanese couple holding hands, hugging, or kissing in public, but this puritanical approach to public displays of intimacy belie other aspects of Japanese attitudes towards sex.

The Osama Game

The Japanese high school and college version of spin­the­bottle or truth­or­dare is called the osama game (the king game). In this game where at least four people play, we'll use Sayaka's example of six people, enough chopsticks are gathered so that each person will have one. The chopsticks are numbered from one to five, and the sixth one has a crown written on it to represent the king. Then everyone in the game secretly chooses a chopstick and the person who chooses the crown chooses two numbers without knowing who is holding which number. The king then orders the two numbers to kiss eachother. If two boys are called they cry out their dissatisfaction, but must kiss eachother. So it goes if two women are called on, but everyone agrees that it is the person from the opposite sex they are hoping to kiss and the boys will not hide their pleasure when this is the case although the girls may. When I asked if the boys told to kiss eachother would just say "no," she said that they would do it even if they didn't want to because it was just for fun. This game is often introduced after a party has gone on for some time and a bit of drinking has already started. Sometimes this game may be used to bring the couples of a double-date closer together. Kissing is the general point of the game, but passing ice cubes or candy from one person's mouth to the other is also an option for the crown. When I asked Sayaka if anything heavier is added to the game she said that sometimes the crown may tell the two to hold eachother, as in hugging. When I told Sayaka that this did not seem to heavy, and that it is common place for Americans of the opposite sex or two women, to hug eachother if they haven't seen eachother in awhile, she told me that this is quite unusual in Japan and was much more embarrassing to a Japanese person than kissing. Sayaka explained participants of the osama game are often quite drunk when they play the game and so they forget what occurred the previous night. When one participant encounters another at school the following day the meeting is embarrassing for both of them.

Sarariimen & the Other Guy's Daughter

I have read about Japanese women being groped or fondled by sarariimen (salary-men) on crowded commuter trains*. I have also ridden on these trains, but never noticed this sort of activity despite the high profile it is given in the Western media so I asked Sayaka about it. She explained that a man had grabbed her ass once while she was on a train. When it happened she looked round her with a disdainful face, but could not discover the perpetrator and moved to another car on the train. When I asked her if she had discovered which man grabbed her, would she have yelled at him she answered, "Probably not." She explained that the humiliation the man would have experienced in a crowded train would have been too severe a punishment for what he had done. On another occasion she had walked to within a couple of dozen steps from her house when she heard a motorcycle stop behind her. She thought it might be her cousin whom she lived with, and turned around, but it was a stranger. The motorcyclists got off his bike without removing his helmet, stepped forward and slid his hand down her shirt to grabbed her breast then he ran back to his motorcycle and left. She tried to scream, but the shock kept any sound from escaping her mouth. When I asked her if any of her friends had had a stranger touch them in a sexual way on a train she replied that they all have experienced this sort of abuse at one time or another. Then she added that men, on two different occasions, had exposed themselves to her from their cars when she was between the ages of seventeen and nineteen.

[*From an article appearing in the New York Times ("'Threatened by Older Women, Tokyo Men Chase Schoolgirls," by Nicholas D. Kristof, April 2, 1997): "Groping of teen-age girls on crowded subways is very common in Japan - 69 percent of high-school girls said in a recent poll that they had been abused in that way - but most other crimes are much rarer in Japan than in other industrialized countries."]

Japan: A Man's Country

Love motels, where couples and businessmen can rent a room for an hour or two for sexual relations; hostess bars, where sarariimen get inebriated and use sexually charged language, or fondle hostesses; striptease shows; and soapland, various massage oriented sex parlors are frequent sights in certain areas of Japanese cities. I asked Sayaka to translate some small sex ads (about 1 1/2 x 1 1/2 inches) I found in telephone stalls and on telephone poles in Japan. Sarariimen are enticed with phrases in these ads like: "immature female college students", "nursing students", "office lady", "21, 22, 23 years old, young girls", "fresh girls", and/or "wife"; "variety menu", "please sit down on her lap", "twice o.k.", "blowjob, 69 o.k".; "'F' cup"3, "glamorous", "body conscious" [tight-fitting clothes] and "patent leather"; and "80 minutes for ¥20,000", "120 minutes for ¥30,000". Sayaka told me that school girls always avoided public phones where these ads were hanging and areas where these ads were found in general. I also asked her about the large number of magazines found in Japanese stores with numerous naked girls and young women in them. We had seen men that looked as if they were soliciting people to pose for these pictures when we were at a Buddhist temple (groups of school students were visiting) and an outdoor mall. One of her friends has been approached at least three times in Osaka shopping areas by a "scout" who asked her to model. She would listen for a few minutes only for the conversation to end when he finally explained that it was modeling for nude photographs. Then I asked Sayaka if she knew anyone who had posed for any of the numerous magazines which have so many nude photographs of young women in them and what she thought of the women who posed for these magazines. She said that she knew of no one who had posed for these type of magazines and would feel contempt for anyone who did, but acknowledged that she was probably prudish by Japanese standards.

The extreme to which Japan is a male dominated society is no where more apparent than in world of the sarariiman. Office work for women is usually limited to serving coffee or making photocopies. These same women are expected to quit by the time they are in their mid- to late-twenties when in Japanese society they are expected to get married and stay at home. Extramarital affairs happen in Japanese society, but the business culture that requires men to get married by a certain age if they expect to be promoted also encourages infidelity. Sarariimen are expected to attend informal after ­ hours entertainment sessions with co-workers and their bosses (often male-only events) at karaoke bars and hostess clubs where women are paid to encourage the men to have fun while the sarariiman's wife waits anxiously at home. Host clubs for women are rare, and the patrons at these clubs are typically hostesses rather than the wives of sarariimen. Some Japanese women may consider divorcing their husbands after learning of an extramarital affair, but the social stigma of bringing the affair out into the open is so damaging to the wife that she is unlikely to do so.

Interviewing Sayaka, even everyday conversation with her was difficult because she wouldn't say much. When I asked her "why?", she said that Japanese people are shy. She may have been uncomfortable speaking English because it was difficult for her, but there was something more. After a couple more attempts, she explained that Japanese people feel it is impolite for an individual to express their opinions. Certainly opinions are expressed but the expression of one's opinions is more strictly regulated in Japanese society. Japanese audiences will not express displeasure by booing and even laughing and applauding may be noticeably absent during performances where an audience is in attendance. In a classroom, a Japanese student does not raise his or her hand to show that they would like to answer a question posed by the teacher because to do so would show that they believe their opinion is more important than other classmates. A student will only answer a question if called on.

Your Nose and Good Manners

To be sure politeness has its own unique attributes in Japan. We had read and noticed by its absence that blowing your nose in public is considered rude. Then we noticed several individuals picking their nose in public with no apparent regard for those around them. When I asked Sayaka about this she said that picking your nose in public is not considered bad, but blowing your nose is because it makes noise.

Konjo & the Sensei-Seito Relationship

The most unsettling conversation I had with Sayaka centered around her experience as a high school volleyball player. She had mentioned to me once that she had tremendous respect for her volleyball coach because he had taught her many things about life. I had no reason to question this respect until one day she told me he had hit her and other teammates several times. He had slapped her in the face, struck her in the stomach with his knee, and even punched her in the face. When I asked if he had done these things more than once, she replied "yes." In the three years that she was on the team that he coached he had hit her about once a month for her failing to perform as well as he expected, and she was not unique. When Sayaka went to her mother to complain about the coach hitting her, her mother advised her to quit the team. Sayaka's teammates were advised to do the same by their parents. Many of the students like Sayaka stayed on the team anyway. Physical punishment of students is illegal in Japan, but the parents of these high school volleyball players apparently never considered trying to pressure the school administrators to replace this volleyball coach. Sayaka explained that konjo, or having "guts", is important to Japanese people. When I told Sayaka that I felt the violent actions of the coach against his students was not unlike a husband beating his wife, she argued that the relationships were different. This may illustrate something about the importance of the sensei-seito relationship. The sensei is the teacher, or master who is to be respected and obeyed by the seito, the pupil. Sayaka countered my argument by explaining to me that the husband is not the wife's sensei who teaches the seito, that a husband and wife are equals. Ironically, Sayaka's volleyball team had one of the worst records of all the high school volleyball teams they played. Sayaka defended her sensei by arguing that her team would have been better if the coach had taller, better players to work with. She added that he was not necessarily a good volleyball coach, but was respected because he was hard on his players and because he was "an excellent teacher of life." Some of her teammates hate this coach to this day, but others like herself think that being hit by him was okay because he was teaching them something.

Pressures not to do something that will make you conspicuous, a belief that it is rude to express your feelings, that one should possess konjo, and to respect and the commitment to obey your sensei creates unique stresses on individuals in Japanese society that are also dealt with in a unique way. Men frequent karaoke and hostess bars where these rules no longer apply once they are drunk. Hostess bars are especially unique because they provide an environment, a companion to talk with for the night, where repercussions for saying something wrong are non­existent. Hobbies also serve as a way for Japanese men to release stress. Sayaka believes that Japanese housewives are subject to more stresses than men, but have less ways to release it. The outlets for Japanese women are restricted to conversations with other women friends and a rare visit to a neighborhood bar (perhaps once a month) where it is not permitted to get falling-down drunk like her male counterpart.

Please remember that these are one person's interpretations of the events in her life and her views on life in Japan in general. The value of what she has to say is limited as such, but her thoughts still give us an insight into Japanese culture that many of us would not otherwise have.