Women in Japan

As Japan shifted from an agricultural country before 1950 to an industrialized nation in less time than any other developed country, women felt the pressure of the shift. Husbands worked longer hours, leaving all the household chores and child rearing to their wives while fulfilling their responsibilites as corporate soldiers. The economy was fueled by a diligent, well-educated, low-paid workforce, but gender role division became even more rigid. Household incomes rose and improvement in areas such as diets, transportation, and leisure were made; modern appliances also made it possible for mothers to have part-time jobs. But pollution also rose, as did prices, and crowded living conditions began to impinge on family life. Tanaka, who has spent many years looking back at her country from an American perspective, examines marriage, motherhood, employment, independence, women's movements, and old age for women in Japan over the last 50 years.

An insider's view of the world of contemporary Japanese women.

Japanese women, who comprise more than 40% of the workforce, are essential to the Japanese economy but are not typically thought of as managers. Jean Renshaw challenges that perception in this pathbreaking book. Traditional norms of lifetime employment, the seniority system, and the bureaucratic, tightly knit nature of Japanese industry all serve to restrict women's entry into management. Despite these enormous barriers, the last ten years have seen the number of Japanese women managers almost double. Renshaw interviewed over 150 successful women managers of Japan, exploring family backgrounds, personal characteristics, socialization, professional experiences, and corporate cultures to discover the secrets of their success. Showing the reader where and how this "invisible evolution" is occurring, Renshaw surveys the history of Japanese women in management and reveals the potential of the rising female managerial class to change in profound ways the male-dominated culture of modern Japan.

Helen Macnaughtan shows how during the period of the Japanese economic miracle, a distinctive 'female employment system' was developed alongside the extant employment system, that applied to men. Her focus is on the cotton textile industry, a major employer & a crucially important industry.

Representing an unprecedented collaboration among international scholars from Asia, Europe, and the United States, this volume rewrites the history of East Asia by rethinking the contentious relationship between Confucianism and women. The authors discuss the absence of women in the Confucian canonical tradition and examine the presence of women in politics, family, education, and art in premodern China, Korea, and Japan.

What emerges is a concept of Confucianism that is dynamic instead of monolithic in shaping the cultures of East Asian societies. As teachers, mothers, writers, and rulers, women were active agents in this process. Neither rebels nor victims, these women embraced aspects of official norms while resisting others. The essays present a powerful image of what it meant to be female and to live a woman's life in a variety of social settings and historical circumstances. Challenging the conventional notion of Confucianism as an oppressive tradition that victimized women, this provocative book reveals it as a modern construct that does not reflect the social and cultural histories of East Asia before the nineteenth century.

In this study, based on both historical evidence and ethnographic data, Paula Arai shows that nuns were central agents in the foundation of Buddhism in Japan in the sixth century. They were active participants in the Soto Zen sect, and have continued to contribute to the advancement of the sect to the present day. Drawing on her fieldwork among the Soto nuns, Arai demonstrates that the lives of many of these women embody classical Buddhist ideals. They have chosen to lead a strictly disciplined monastic life over against successful careers and the unconstrained contemporary secular lifestyle. In this, and other respects, they can be shown to stand in stark contrast to their male counterparts.

This title discusses the meaning of the Japanese tea ceremony for women practitioners in Japan from World War II to the 21st century. It examines such areas as: the relationship between the tea ceremony and the body; myths surrounding the tea ceremony; and body discipline.

Modern-day Japan has proven to be a complex nation struggling to combine traditional attitudes with the political and social demands of an advanced industrialized economy. This struggle to balance the past with the present has had a significant impact on the structure of human relations in contemporary Japan, particularly in the areas of the family and family dynamics, lifestyles, the education of children, the socialization of youth, women in the workplace, and the elderly. In all cases, we find a dual structure where traditional values and modern practices coexist. Based on a dual perspective that incorporates modern Western capitalism into Japan's traditional agrarian society, this book reveals a complex of cultural assumptions that determines the manners and customs of the Japanese people.