1987. This is one of a 26-part series, “Faces of Japan,” produced for PBS by TeleJapan USA. 30 minutes. Jane Condon was a consultant for this segment, which was a finalist for a 1987 Monitor Film Award for Best Documentary.
This is a documentary about the difficult employment prospects for women in 1980s Japan and about the school-to-job transition that everyone must manage. It also offers a perspective on the “Tokyo-centrism” of the postwar decades, and the rival attractions of the capital region and the provinces.
As the documentary opens, twenty-one year-old Noriko Otsuka has been in Tokyo for three years, having come from her home in northern Japan to attend a private junior college in the nation’s capital. She stayed on in Tokyo to try to establish her own career and an independent life, attracted to metropolitan life as were many from regional backgrounds. Her first job was with the firm of the famous fashion designer Issey Miyake, but she quit after only seven months. In her search for a second job, she faces several forms of employment discrimination and subtle personnel tracking, and her profile illustrates the constraints on young people’s transitions from school to work.
Noriko is especially determined to avoid typical OL work, and she may well have in mind the experiences of OLs that Jeannie Lo described for Brother and Ogasawara Yuko described for Tōzai Bank. Compare her situation with them as well as with that of young Shimosaka, the entrant to Fuji Film Corporation. You will no doubt note a striking contrast between her interview with the male employment officer at the beginning and subsequently with the female FLASH executive. Noriko is embarrassingly awkward in explaining to him her quitting the Miyake job, but she is quite firm and eloquent the second time around with the woman. Note, too, Ms. Ishii, an older company executive who mentors her during training, including taking her out drinking. That is, the FLASH training itself seems right out of department store minion training (how to pronounce “ohayō” and how to bow politely), but the mentoring may suggest the possibility of young women like Noriko rising in the ranks of such a company.
Noriko’s younger sister is also in Tokyo in (junior?) college, and they share a one-room apartment. There is a third sister at home still in high school, as well as Mr. Otsuka’s mother. Thus, Noriko is the oldest of three girls in a family without sons. The usual presumption in this case is that she will return home with a husband to take care of her parents in their later years. No wonder her parents are so worried-about her getting married, about the evident attractions of Tokyo to her, and about the particular husband she selects (or they can help select). Adding further to their anxieties is the fact of her father being out of work. He recently had to close the family business, a saw mill, due to a downturn in the region’s economy, which reminds us how unevenly experienced was the “bubble” economic boom of the 1980s (and the generally tougher economic conditions in the regions).
It was not easy to persuade her parents to let her go, and indeed Noriko must still contend with their efforts to arrange a suitable marriage for her. Note that Noriko is now approaching her 30’s and thus falls into the metropolitan Tokyo pool of women who are resisting timely marriage. She says she wants a career and marriage, but is having difficulty in finding both. She would seem to have an unappealing choice. On the one hand is Nishiyama, her Tokyo boyfriend of three years standing, who is handsome, yuppyish, but expects that his wife will quit work immediately. Then there are the miai men, whom her parents are pushing on her, including the fellow whom she finds so comical. The scene of the interview meeting with a potential partner (called an omiai) is representative of the strained formality of such occasions, to which are added the pressures of the Otsuka family situation I outlined above.
There is a notable contrast between Noriko and her friend and age mate, Mariko, whom she visits when she returns home. Mariko is married, has a young baby, and a fulltime job in the local town. Significantly, she also has a live-in mother-in-law, whose daycare makes the combination possible. A further contrast in the friends’ life situations is the cramped, 6’x11′ efficiency that Noriko shares in Tokyo with her sister and the spacious home and car that Mariko’s family enjoys in its provincial setting. There are obvious trade-offs to metropolitan migration, and some ironies in who is better able to live the “mainstream” dream!
Commentators enjoy debating whether women in modern Japan represent “the hidden matriarchy” or “the oppressed majority.” This is an overdrawn opposition, but Noriko’s case and that of others we meet in this course do raise questions about the prospects for changes in women’s roles and gender relations in twentieth-first century Japan.