Leaningoutfor the long span: what holds women back from promotion in Japan?

Abstract

Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In advised women to seize opportunities to climb the ranks of a corporation. Yet many of Japan’s growing cohort of corporate women warriors deliberately opt not to lean in. This article, based on ethnographic interviews with a group of these women, explores their survival strategies of building a career while embedded in still traditional gender roles over marriage and childrearing. Will these strategies evolve as companies are pressured to increase the percentage of women in management under Prime Minister Abe’s policies? How much are ‘neo-liberal’11 By ‘neo-liberal’, I refer both to notions of independent autonomy and ideals of self-responsibility at the personal level (Alexy 2011 Alexy, A. 2011. “Intimate Dependence and Its Risks in Neoliberal Japan.” Anthropological Quarterly 84 (4): 895–917. doi:10.1353/anq.2011.0051.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), and privatization, free markets and de-regulation in the economy and firms (Fu 2012 Fu, H. 2012. An Emerging Non-Regular Labour Force in Japan: The Dignity of Dispatched Workers. Oxford, UK and New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]; Okura-Gagne 2017 Okura-Gagne, N. 2017. “‘Correcting Capitalism’: Changing Metrics and Meanings of Work Among Japanese Employees.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 48 (1): 67–87. doi:10.1080/00472336.2017.13811984.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2019 Okura-Gagne, N. 2019. “Neoliberalism at Work: Corporate Reforms, Subjectivity, and Post-Toyotist Affect in Japan.” Anthropological Theory 1–29. Published Online 6 February.[Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). notions of career-building and self-responsibility affecting Japanese salarywomen?22 The term ‘salarywoman’ is my own. It refers to Japanese white-collar women who are full-time career-employee status. It highlights that today, there are such women unlike before the Equal Opportunity Employment Law (1986), when regular women employees were referred to as ‘office ladies’. They were neither expected to have careers nor to stay on until retirement (Ogasawara 1998 Ogasawara, Y. 1998. Office Ladies and Salaried Men: Power, Gender, and Work in Japanese Companies. Berkeley: University of California Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). While the ‘salaryman’ has been an iconic image in the post-war period along with his ‘professional housewife’ (Vogel 1963 Vogel, E. 1963. Japan’s New Middle-Class: The Salaryman and His Family in a Tokyo Suburb. Berkeley: University of California Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Roberson and Suzuki 2003 Roberson, J., and N. Suzuki, eds. 2003. Men and Masculinitites in Japan: Dislocating the Salaryman Doxa. New York and London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]; Das Gupta 2012 Das Gupta, R. 2012. Rereading the Salaryman in Japan: Crafting Masculinities. London and New York: Routledge.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) their female counterparts, while increasing in number, do not occupy the same niche in the cultural schema (Aronsson 2015 Aronsson, A. 2015. Career Women in Japan: Pursuing Identities, Fashioning Lives. New York and London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]; Roberts 2016 Roberts, G. S. 2016. Japan’s Evolving Family: Voices from Young Urban Adults Navigating Change. Honolulu, HI: East-West Center. [Google Scholar]). Data come from a longitudinal set of thirteen Japanese women in the same large Tokyo multinational corporation, whom I have been interviewing at 2–5-year intervals since 2003.33 Naruse (a pseudonym) is a large, multinational corporation with manufacturing, sales, and R&D divisions. This is a longitudinal study of the work/life balance of full-time, regular employee women who entered the firm upon university graduation, and who were married, with at least one child, when I began the research in 2003. Top management initially gave me access to the women in this study (but not to internal corporate data). Each interviewee has given me permission. This study is based on the representations of the interviewees themselves. I follow the ethical guidelines of the American Anthropological Association. I use pseudonyms for all my interviewees and I do not mention details that could identify them.

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