Dilemmas of Adulthood

Front matter

Japanese Women and the

Nuances of Long-Term Resistance

NANCY ROSENBERGER

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Major Characters

What Is Long-Term Resistance?

Ambivalence and Tension: Data Meets Theory

Living within the Dilemma of Choice: Singles

No Children despite Running the Gauntlet of Choice Planning and Cocooning: Mothers at Home Working and Raising Moral Children

Appendix Notes References

Index

Acknowledgments

Inexpressible thanks go to the Japanese women who have continued to open their hearts and minds to me and have made this book possible. I am also very grateful to the people in Japan who support me beyond the call of duty in my work there; I value their friendships and insights: Ogawaguchi Teruyo, Takagi Mizue, Ota Sachiko, and Sarukawa Shinichi.

I extend my appreciation to the Japan Foundation, the Northeast Asia Council of the Association of Asian Studies, and Oregon State University’s Humanities Center, Department of Anthropology, and School of Language, Culture, and Society for supplying the money and time to accomplish this endeavor. Thanks to my colleagues in anthropology for their support and to my editor at the University of Hawaiʻi Press, Pat Crosby, whose flexibility and patience I appreciate.

I am grateful to my children, Elise, Ted, and Laura, who always give me ideas to chew on and helped me with the title for this book. Perhaps they realize that because of my experience with these Japanese women I understand the paths of my children as emerging adults a bit better. Last, I am forever indebted to my husband, Clint Morrison, for his affection over forty years and his good-humored endurance and support of my academic pursuits.

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CHAPTER ONE What Is Long-Term

Resistance?

Aoo ANTHROPOLOGIST like me talks with many people, in this case over many years. Her main aim is to give voice to these people’s stories and experiences through a process of listening closely and thinking about them in relation to almost everything else she reads and does. The final result is her tale of these stories, for in their retelling the anthropologist also recounts a tale of herself, of her encounter with these people, and of the meaning that she understands in these encounters. This is truer than ever in this globalized age when these Japanese women and I are influenced by similar ideas and goods. Yet the tale is precarious in the telling. Simultaneously, we all still live in our local histories, knowledge, and behaviors. When I, U.S.-born and -raised, enter wholeheartedly into living in Japan, I feel deeply the differences, even as the similarities increase.

My tale of these stories begins with my own expectations in 1993 when I first sought out these women to interview. I expressly hunted for women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five who were not yet married. I asked friends and coworkers whom Ї had first met in the 1970s when I taught English for two years in Tohoku (northeastern Japan). I requested introductions from people I had interviewed in the 1980s during my four years of dissertation work in Tokyo and Tohoku. I started with sixty women, half from Tokyo and half from Tohoku, the northern part of the main island of Japan—now famous for the earthquake and tsunami that took place there. The women from Tohoku lived in two places: Morioka, a regional city of almost 400,000, and ten from a small village about an hour away.

I was interested in them because they were “delaying marriage” past the then normative marriage age of twenty-five. Media and government

I greeted them with celebration as consumers, and the 1986 Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEOL) promised women equality in the workplace. Yet both the government and the elder generation worried about their role as future reproducers of family and nation.

This group of women also caught my eye because they seemed to indicate a trend among Japanese women toward more self-determination. In the story of national statistics, increasing singles, falling marriage age, and a decreasing fertility rate implied that women were resisting the status quo. The government was quite concerned as singleness among women increased. While in 1975, only about 10% of women were single in their thirties, the number started to climb precipitously from 1980. By 1990, 40.4% of women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine and 13.9% of women thirty to thirty-four were single. By 2000, these numbers had increased to 54% and 26.6% (Shakai Jitsujo 2005). By 2005, 32% of women thirty to thirty-four and 18.4% of women thirty-five to thirty-nine were single, with 7.3% of women single at age fifty (Naikakucho 2008, 7). In 2010, the big change was in the older groups, with 23% of women thirty-five to thirty-nine single and 17% of women forty to forty-four single (and never married; Statistical Survey Department 2012).

Ages at marriage and childbirth rose. The mean age at first marriage for women increased from 24.2 in 1970, to 25.9 in 1990, and to 28.6 by 2009. The mean age of mothers at first childbirth also rose from 25.6 in 1970 to 29.7 in 2009—with 22.5 percent of those giving birth for the first time over age thirty-five (Statistical Handbook of Japan 2011).

The government was and is most upset by the plummeting fertility rate: from 2.13 in 1970 to 1.54in 1990 and 1.37 in 2009 (Statistical Handbook of Japan 2011). The nation’s population is not reproducing itself, its economic labor pool shrinking.

In 1993 I began interviewing the women I met with open-ended questions and long conversations about their lives: family, work, friends, entertainment, loves, pressures, and dreams for the future. I took everything down, trying to listen not only for what I wanted to hear but also for their “pushback”—what they wanted to tell me (Rosaldo 1989). As anthropologists do, I formed relationships, using my own self, feelings, and form of interaction as part of the path to understand people in their surroundings.

On one hand their stereotypes of overly strong American women entered into our conversations. They were always surprised, or even shocked, that my husband was caring for my three children or that I left him at home to cook for himself. Some doubted my virtue, but most just marveled at how strong American women are to get away with this.

On the other hand I brought my own stereotyped suspicions that Japanese women were stronger in determining their own lives than they had been in the past. I had been raised on popular American mythologies that idealize change toward increasing individuality as progress, and I came of age among feminist ideas that women should determine their own fates and resist patriarchal norms if necessary. I carried with me an interest in individual action, resistance, and empowerment— ideas that appeal to American scholars because of our cultural insistence on individualism and democracy (Ortner 2006).

My prejudices became clear when I asked questions such as what they saw as the advantages and disadvantages of singlehood as well as the advantages and disadvantages of marriage, or whether they felt discriminated against at work. In anthropological parlance, I was looking for agency and resistance: “agency” understood as thoughts for one’s own path and actions by one’s own will ina cultural context (rather like the agency given to avatars in video games); and “resistance” understood as intentional beliefs and practices meant to change the status quo of the larger society.

The Japanese women in this study have had to interact with my underlying assumptions. All the more interesting, then, that ultimately my ideas did not work as I thought they would!

My research grew into a longitudinal study based on my personal situation: I was in the midst of years dense with teaching and raising three children. I could use my research time efficiently, building relationships over time rather than constructing new ones. Longitudinal studies are valuable but relatively rare in anthropology even though we often ask questions about change in people’s lives.* Following people over time helps us to understand the process of change in individuals’ lives and in the group of which they are а part. This study would enable me to track the process of change among these young women in the context of social change in Japan and show how people have fared in the 1990s and 2000s.

In 1998 and 2004 I contacted these women again and returned to interview them. If they had moved, I followed them south to Kyushu or north to Hokkaido, but lost a few: sixty in 1993, fifty-eight in 1998, and fifty-four in 2004. By 2004, twenty-three were living in Tokyo and thirty-one in regional Japan outside of large metropolitan areas. About half were single and half married by 1998. By 2004, approximately one-third were single and two-thirds were married. Five of the nineteen singles did not work; seven lived with parents, mostly mothers. Eight of the thirty-five married women did not have children and three of them did not work. The twenty-seven mothers were all married and were just about evenly divided between stay-at-home and working mothers. They are a highly educated group, and because of that doubly interesting for the questions about self-determination that I was asking. Of the fifty-four interviewees left in 2004, four had MAs, twenty-five had four-year university degrees, eighteen had vocational or junior college degrees, and eight had high school degrees.

Finding the interpretation that fits

In fashioning my tale, however, I became concerned. To what extent could I tell this story in terms of agency and resistance and still be fair to the stories these women were telling me? I spent most of 2007-2008 in Japan leading a group of Oregon study abroad students, teaching at Waseda, a private Tokyo university, and working on my book. During this time I met and talked with two budding anthropologists, both Japanese grad students; I call them Kana and Ауа.? Both were in their early thirties—younger than the group I was studying by about ten years—but involved with analysis of Japanese people as I was.

I remember walking with them down a narrow street in search of the best Indian restaurant around Waseda as I told them of my search for a concept that would fairly represent the experiences of the women I was studying. When I mentioned agency and resistance, Kana did not listen long before explaining: “Those words are hard to translate into Japanese, especially agency. Words exist but they are awkward.” Over Singha beers, we puzzled over the best Japanese words to use for “agency” and “resistance,” words that they were familiar with from studying American anthropological texts. Finally Kana said softly: “I am sorry, sensei (teacher), but these words just don’t fit my sense of Japanese women anyway. It doesn’t fit the women I am studying.”

Aya, given courage by her friend, who knew me better, echoed: “I think so too. They don’t fit my feeling of what it is like to be a woman in Japan now. It’s too hard to resist in Japan.”

Kana followed up: “And agency? The individual, me . . . I am not strong enough to act clearly on my own without always thinking of social pressures.” I filled their beer glasses once again to commend them for their courage in telling me what they really felt! We laughed, but my laugh was a bit more rueful than theirs: What was I going to do now if even these younger women in grad school felt this way?

Kana reminded me about an article that we had read in class. “Remember that woman anthropologist who said Americans have a romance with resistance?”

“Abu-Lughod?”

“Yeah. It’s because Americans have all these ideals about how individualistic they are. They want to see individuals as strong and free. She said resistance tells us mostly about power. Like you could say that I am resisting by getting a doctorate ‘cause not many women haye, but it is really hard for women to get jobs and sometimes professors ask women to do secretarial type of work that they wouldn’t ask men to do.”

“It’s dangerous to be seen as а resister ог even as having too much strong will in Japan. People will pull you down,” said Aya.

I saw what she meant, but I was not ready to give up. Between bites of the fried samosas we had ordered, I tried to persuade them that agency and resistance could work to analyze these Japanese women. “Okay, but there are women anthropologists who have modified these ideas of agency and resistance. They realize that women aren’t entirely free to choose, but they adapt the idea of agency. Like, Mahmood who works in Egypt. She works with Muslim women who are really modest—they cover all but their faces and even become second wives. But she claims they have agency because they cultivate themselves with great effort to have spiritual humility. They get together to study and interpret the Koran themselves, which women couldn't do before. She says that freedom from patriarchal systems is not necessarily the goal of agency all over the world.”*

They both listened politely as they sipped their beer and ate samosas. I was the sensei after all. Kana tried to help me out.

“Remember, we read Ortner,” said Kana. I noticed that both nodded their familiarity. “She sees how ambivalent agency can be. I love that story she tells about the Indian woman who after divorce sues in court for support from her husband—even though the Muslim law says she shouldn't. So that was amazing agency, even resistance. But then, when she gets the support from the court, she doesn’t take it. I guess all her neighbors and men in the Muslim community were criticizing her and the tension must have been too much for her!”¢

“So is that agency or not?” asked Aya.

“Ortner says it’s agency but agency with a lot of ambivalence in it.”

Aya sighed, “People are looking in two directions. That’s all we have in Japan, I think. Like have you seen those teenagers who dress up and play in bands and dance in the park? On Sundays they totally flout the norms of Japanese life, but they live with their parents and do their part-time jobs on Monday.”

“A lot of Japanese women like us are like that. They live at home while they work and their mothers cook and clean for them,” said Kana. “I thinka woman named Dales writes about it and she thinks they are kind of replacing their fathers as the main workers in the family, but also they are dependent on their mothers, who cook and clean for them. She said they have agency, but it is kind of limited agency.””

Aya responded. “I still live at home with my father. My mother lives elsewhere for her job, so I cook for my father sometimes. I don’t know if I have agency. I don’t feel like I do. Like my relatives still ask me when I am going to get married. It’s conflicted if it is agency.”

Kana ran with this. “And we want to get married, but we don’t want to just marry anyone and now... We might be too educated! We scare men off! We can’t afford to have too strong an identity or like what you might call agency. We have to fit in, especially over the long term. I could rebel once and go to the U.S. to study, but I can’t keep rebelling or else I won't fit in with Japanese universities.” Kana laughed her big laugh. We all shook our heads and chuckled with pained expressions on our faces, glad to see the waitress coming with the hot curry and rice to cheer us up.

The heat of the curry impressed itself upon us with a vengeance, and we felt the righteous anger of having been abandoned by the academic literature. What concepts should we use? We groaned and ordered another round of beers. Staring into the amber foam, I saw that I needed to refocus and try again.

“I think Japanese prefer to have more ambiguous identities. It’s safer,” suggested Kana. “Like kids when they study for university exams. They have to study so hard, but it is really tough. I remember from high school that some kids would go out and fool around with friends who invited them, but then their parents would haul them in to make them study. They were kind of glad that their parents came and got them cause they actually wanted to pass the exams, but they also wanted to show that they were cool.”

“Yeah, the same holds true for these kids who are dancing out in Yoyogi Park on Sundays,” followed Aya. “You should go see them. Some girls dress like boys and watch boys sing, and then afterwards you can see that they are romantically involved with each other. But they like the ambiguous gender identity that this gives them, I think.”

“Hmm. Okay, I have to think about this.” Chin on fist, I was looking disheartened, and they laughed. “Keep trying! There must be another way!” We were quiet for a bit. I had to admit that they were right. Agency implies individuals full of will and desire, aware of themselves, and able to follow through on their ассіопѕ. But what they were talking about was more like people just wanting to keep a space for ambiguity or difference apart from the mainstream in their lives. Agency seemed to imply movement against people dominating you, but that wasn’t always possible or desired. Even the young people cross-dressing in the park were still dominated. And resistance carried the idea of changing the status quo, or at least trying to, which Kana and Aya didn’t feel that they had the power to do at all. Yet looking at these women graduate students in front of me, I realized that over the long term this very ambiguous resistance they talked of was gradually changing things.

We left the Indian restaurant and went to their favorite late-night haunt, a tiny hole-in-the-wall off the street with bar and stools. Kana mused: “There are places where you can express yourself and places where you can’t in Japan. Like here at this bar people often talk about what they are really thinking. We just have to have different ways of dealing with things. You want us to talk about our real feelings, but our professors want us to think like them and our parents don’t want us to say anything shocking! We have to be а bit ambiguous!”

“Right, you shift,” I replied. “I like the idea that these days people have different ways of belonging in different places, especially with the changes from globalization. Like in Sri Lanka, Gunewardena writes about young factory women who in the factory can’t talk or even go to the bathroom, but outside in the city they use really rough men’s language. Then they go home to the village and show off their jewelry from the city. The younger girls think they are models of success. They aren’t fully conforming to things, but they aren't completely going against things either.”

“Different ways of belonging. That fits. So what do we call that?”

“Well, these different writers use words like tensions and ambivalence, conflicted, limited. I like the word you keep using too—ambiguous,” I said.!°

“Especially because you are interviewing these people over such a long period of time, they get pulled this way and that. So what if you did something with those ideas—ambiguity, tension, ambivalence?” Kana proposed.

Gazing at the bottles lined up behind the bar, I began to see my book taking on a new pattern.

“Let’s see. What are some of the words that these women I have interviewed used? There’s mayotte iru (feeling of being confused ог lost)—like when a woman is confused as to whether to have arranged meetings with prospective men like her mother wants her to or to wait to meet some guy she feels a special connection with. Or they feel fuan (a feeling of discomfort and insecurity) like about whether this is the right job for them or not.”

Kana and Aya joined in easily. “Oh yeah, how about zayande iru (worried)?” Aya groaned, “That’s me! And yureugoku (shakily moving, not sure which way to go)—that’s one we use a lot.” I had heard them all in the interviews.

“Talso hear people say they are aimai na tokoro ni iru (in an ambiguous place),” I added. “Also people use the phrase nantonaku—like I broke up with my boyfriend wantonaku. What’s the best way to translate that?”

Kana said, “Maybe ‘somehow’ or ‘for whatever reason.’ It’s really vague.”

Aya giggled uncomfortably. “Oh, these are too real!” Okay, I must be hitting on something, I thought.

“Komatte iru (in a fix and not sure what to do),” I said. “I hear that and that’s me right now!”

We sipped our drinks for а moment. I tried to reason it out. “All of these are about tension and ambivalence, like people are puzzled, pausing, uncertain which way to go. Maybe it’s about seeing several paths all at once. What do you think? Could these be central concepts for a book about women who are struggling with some kind of vague long-term resistance in their lives?”

“Why not? Long-term resistance in Japan for women will take as much conformity as change. It’s definitely ambiguous.” Kana and Aya were both egging me оп.

“You know Foucault?” I asked suddenly.

Both of them hid their faces in their hands at the mention of the French writer, so famous for his ideas on power and resistance, but so infamous for his difficult-to-read books that they had had to slog through. “Sorry to mention him!” They grudgingly listened to me.

“Well he says there are always points of resistance but they never go anywhere.”

“They never really change the system ‘cause they are within the system,” parroted Kana. I gave her a thumbs-up.

“That feels like Japan!” said Aya.

“Okay, so these other anthropologists took а little footnote of Foucault's in which he says that even though resistance is ineffective it leaves its mark on people and their relationships. So over the long term, people who act out their will or challenge norms .. . kind of Ке you two...”

“Ha-ha, don’t say it. That feels dangerous.”

“They don’t change the basic premises of society .. .”

“That’s for sure!”

“But just by even a short experience of resistance, they get hammered into a different shape, and so do their relationships. So even if resistance is ambiguous and doesn’t make big changes, it leaves its mark of tension on people. It cuts across individuals and fractures relationships, Foucault ѕауѕ.”!!

“Whah!” Kana pantomimed a sword cutting across her abdomen and down between her and Aya. “Yeah, that’s sort of what it feels like to resist in Japan,” she laughed. “That’s heavy. Гуе drunk too much for that! But it’s like ‘cause I insisted on going to the U.S., lam hammered out differently and now I get along with Aya but don’t have as much in common with my sister or mother as before. And that’s cool but it is also a tension.”

“Or I am not sure that I want to marry a Japanese man anymore,” said Aya. “That’s a tension for sure!!” We all laughed.

We left the bar and came out into the cool night air, which cleared my brain. “Here’s my plan,” I told them. “I have to give a talk to the other professors in the International Division at Waseda. I'll use these ideas of ambiguity and tension to think about the way these Japanese women are going about changing things in Japan. They don’t show a strong, intentional agency ог resistance, but over the long term it is a kind of slow resistance with lots of constraints. I’ ll call it long-term resistance and emphasize the ambivalence in it, and see how it goes.” We all started to bow good night to each other, then laughed and hugged in a non-Japanese way. I walked to my apartment along the busy street and then into the quiet back streets of Tokyo. I felt exhilarated after our conversation, because there seemed to be a way out of my conceptual morass. I couldn’t wait to get back to the stories of these women themselves and see if these new concepts made better sense of the data.

I went back to reading over the interviews in my little Tokyo apartment. Between green tea and walks in the nearby parks, I found that these ideas of ambiguity, tension, and ambivalence felt quite comfortable as tools of analysis. Why not put the spotlight on these aspects of agency and resistance that others had already pointed out as part of the process? It would be an extension of others’ work, a refocusing of the lens on the space in between conformity and resistance, neither all negative nor all positive, but real life with its inevitable ups and downs over time.

I set to defining terms. Tension expresses the action or the condition of being stretched to stiffness, taut like a wire between two forces of energy that can be in balance with each other or asymmetrical in strength. A person can be stretched between two balancing forces or have a sense of imbalance causing stress. Japanese have told me that stress can be good or bad, and indeed that tension can be exciting or uncomfortable.

Ambivalence is an experience of two strong forces that are contradictory to each other; people can feel both at once or in fluctuation. Ambivalence allows people the important ability to see in at least two directions at once. It is a dynamic state of thinking or seeing doubly, of acting from two or more different perspectives. But ambivalence can also result in mixed-up feelings of uncertainty and indecision. “Ambivalence confounds calculation of events and confuses the relevance of memorized action patterns,” yet it gives us a vantage point to “take a cool and critical view of modernity” and question the effects of an order so strong that it is intolerant of difference (Bauman 1991, 2, 271).

That brings us back to “ambiguity,” a word that comes from the Latin verb ambigere, to wander. I thought of it as wandering in an area of doubt because the games of life are changing and yet not changing, or maybe there are two games going on simultaneously, or the same game is open to various interpretations (Bourdieu 1990).!? At any rate, these women seemed to be “wandering” in this space between games and also “wondering” how to play in this new situation.

These ideas fit the experience of these Japanese women who often talked about searching for or trying to develop “self” (jibun). Cultivating or polishing self by doing tea ceremony or being a good mother, for example, had a good connotation for Japanese because it meant that you were trying to go beyond your narrow self and connect self with the larger world beyond social norms. But developing self in the new way these women used it meant to develop self according to just what you want to do or in a way that enhances your own possibilities in the world. Would others see choosing a life for self as selfish? These women had to maintain some ambiguity because they were wandering into dangerous territory when they wanted to travel just to enjoy themselves, or keep working and not marry. In a society that honored the cultivation of a larger self, would they themselves someday suffer for having chosen the self-centered way?

What Is Long-Term Resistance? Il

Along with their generation, the women І interviewed were dissatisfied with the social system available to them and found themselves dancing on the margins of the accepted norms of Japanese society in 1993 by not marrying yet, enjoying themselves, and working. Keep in mind that all of them could have married if they had been willing to have enough arranged meetings with prospective husbands and then to choose one. But this practice has been one of their generation’s main points of contention—a kind of emergent feeling that was forming but had not yet become structured into a norm (Williams 1981).'3 They wanted to wait for someone with whom they felt a connection (ет) and they wanted to use the time and space left to develop themselves by working, travelling, and taking advantage of entertainment that had been reserved for men.

Thus, in looking at these women’s dissatisfaction and uncertain resistance over the long term, I see a range of acts of conformity and acts of agency or resistance but much uncertain, thoughtful puzzlement as they cast about Юг а different life from that of their mothers and grandmothers. Their lives unfold in the space between the perception of risk and personal insecurity (fuan) and the wish for peace of mind or stability (anshin), with powerful discourses and people as much a part of them as their own desires and insights.

This is what long-term resistance looks like, I realized. Although they have caused dismay and concern in their families and government, these women’s long-term resistance is full of ambigere—wandering in space and time—and wondering in the ambivalent reaches of their hearts and relationships.

Between the said and unsaid

My research turned up another study of long-term resistance by anthropologists in Africa that fit my own study and gave me some apt phrases to use. It was this study that persuaded me to continue to use the concept of resistance to maintain the meaning of push against the cultural code that I found in these women, but to refer to it as long-term resistance, a term that captures the fragile ambivalence played out over time that nonetheless makes a difference in the long run. Jean and John Comaroff did not trust the term “resistance” entirely either, because it did not ring true for the “murky” thoughts and actions that they witnessed among people in Zimbabwe who were reshaping the religion brought to them by colonialists. The Comaroffs wrote about a tense “middle ground between the said and unsaid” before thoughts are organized and spoken, full of silence and unmarked actions (1991, 31). They saw much of what was happening as “tacit”—implied, unstated—expressions that only vaguely confronted the “hegemony” or power of the system that permeated this world. The phrases they suggested resonated with me as descriptors for the sense of the women in my interviews, so I excitedly sent an e-mail to Kana and Aya listing these phrases. When Kana answered, she wrote, “I don’t quite understand these all, but they seem good! Keep trying, sensei!” So I added some definitions of this middle ground and sent them back.