I would like to take a moment here to address something I've begun to notice that I am finding to be extremely troubling. Bear with me here guys, as this may end up sort of rant-like in nature.
Since I've been back in the U.S. I've been looking at quite a few websites that are dedicated to news and editorials about Japan. These include Kotaku's "Culture Smash" feature and far more traditional online newspapers such as "Japan Probe", "The Japan Times", "News on Japan", etc. and so forth. While I enjoy these for the most part (except for Kotaku, as I'm more and more convinced that Brian Ashcraft is a dreadfully lazy writer with a misguided superiority complex), there is something about all of them that is starting to infuriate me. The simplest, and perhaps pithiest way I have of saying it is that writing about Japan is a massive sausage fest.
That's right friends, the foreigners who are writing about Japan for major publications are overwhelmingly male. Which is not to say that it's all men writing about Japan, as there are a few women who write for these publications; however, they are disturbingly outnumbered by their male counterparts.
This is something that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, as surely I am not the only person who realizes that hearing the point of view of one gender (or one nationality, one age, once economic class, etc.) does not begin to encompass the entirety of that subject. This is especially true for a country like Japan, which is still beholden to extremely rigid gender roles and stereotypes. And as someone who has lived in Japan, I am personally appalled by the fact that the female experience of being there is vastly underrepresented. Especially considering how different my experiences there were in comparison to my male friends, friends who had even worked in the very same schools with the very same teachers that I worked at. Just like your foreignness in Japan defines you like a scarlet letter, so too does your gender. And when you're a foreign woman in Japan, it can, at times, feel like you're a goddamn unicorn: a heretofore never seen before entity, worthy of stares, whispers and gross stereotypes.
As such, having a highly visible female perspective is extremely necessary in the pursuit of understanding Japan and the Japanese. I would even argue that without it, you will never be able to comprehend Japan. That is how important it is. That's how different the experience is for men and women there. And by not directly addressing it, a great disservice is done to the Japanese, the expats that live/lived there and those that study Japan.
Now, the next question that needs to be asked to continue this dialogue is: "Why are there not more women writing about Japan?". That is a far more complicated question, and I'll admit that I don't have a definitive answer. I do have some theories though. And yes, I will be thrilled to share those with you, thanks for asking.
Here's the thing, I'm not going to beat around the bush about this, as I feel the subject deserves brutal honesty, and too often, I feel as though anyone writing about Japan is far too tempted to write only nice things about Japan and their experience there. As should be apparent, nothing can be good 100% of the time, and this is especially true of the expat experience. So here it is: Japan is fucking hard on women. Extremely. Brutally. Much, much more so then it is on men. In fact, there are times where Japan seems like a free-for-all for men, wherein they get to run free across the countryside, getting treated like Brad Pitt, invited to all the best parties, with their pick of women. And for women, well, it can feel like the worst party you've ever been to, the kind where the men sexually harass you once they get drunk, the pretty girls tell you how fat you are and all of the cute guys won't pay any attention to you because you have opinions. Now mind you, this is an oversimplification of the matter, but trust me, you have those kinds of days there, where you feel like shit that's been tracked inside on the bottom of an errant shoe.
There are moments in Japan, where you are confronted by a startlingly level of sexism, where you are expected to be something you might not be, purely based upon your gender. When you're foreign, this is compounded by negative expectations that might be held due to your nationality. For example, if you're a woman from America, you may be thought to be an overly opinionated, loud, forceful she-devil who eats men alive for breakfast. At the same time, and weirdly so, because you're a woman, men might believe that you have an inferior level of intelligence, despite that whole believing you to be overly opinionated thing. Allow me to relate to you a personal experience for illustrative purposes.
My first year in Japan I worked at one Jr. High and two Elementary Schools. Before a worked there, they had a male ALT. When that ALT gave me the rundown about the Jr. High, he told me that there were three female English teachers and one male English teacher, but that I would never teach with the male teacher, because he seemed to be afraid of having ALTs in his class.
Cut to a few months later. I have one badass female English teacher that I teach with regularly. She also happens to be my supervisor at that school, and we get along great. At this point in time, I had gone to class with the male teacher twice, and that was only to do my self-introduction lesson. But on this particular day, my supervisor comes to me and says "Ah, Nishioka-Sensei (all names have been changed) wants you to go to class with him today."
"Oh," I say, "that's strange, he's never wanted me to teach with him before."
And she replies with this doozy: "Yes, he never liked teaching with the ALT before you because he was a man. But now that you are a pretty girl, he says he wants you to come to class with him."
If you had any doubts about this being a negative experience, let me assure you, it was all bad. Once I went to class with Nishioka-Sensei, he proceeded to make me sit in front of the class, called attention to my appearance (including my figure) repeatedly, and when he did want me to do my job and give the correct pronunciation of a word, he would then proceed to make fun of me and my pronunciation.
Professionalism, amirite?
Is this an experience any of the male ALTs at that school had? No. This was the double whammy experience of being a foreign woman in Japan, where I was deemed to be stupid and nothing more than an object to be ogled by a grown man and a class full of hormonal students.
Now, I am not saying that the male ALTs do not have similar humiliating experiences while living and teaching in Japan (I can assure you that that South Park episode devoted to the Japanese thinking foreign men have huge cocks is not far off), what I am saying is that women have their own uniquely awkward and humiliating experiences as well that deserve to be represented. And from what I have noticed, those experiences and those distinctly female voices are not being fairly represented. And that is extremely troubling.
As such, I'm going to use this blog to do my part. In addition to covering culture shock, I'm also going to cover the experience of being a foreign woman in Japan. So stay tuned, won't you?
