This is the first essay in our Her Voice series, which publishes essays from Japanese women about pressing issues they face as women in modern Japanese society.
My semi-quarantined days here in Tokyo amidst the COVID-19 turmoil reminds me of days I had spent under mild house arrest back in 2011.
I was raising my then-toddler during the radiation panic that ensued in the aftermath of the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami. High-level radiation was detected in Tokyo’s water system and officials deemed the water unsafe for infants to drink. My city distributed “safe” water to make baby formula for children less than a year old. I was later told by a ママ友（mamatomo、as in mom-buddy, or more “mom-quaintance”) that the water provided by our particular municipality didn’t even come in bottles — it came in plastic bags.
Everything was unprecedented and bizarre. My daughter was already one year old back then, so she wasn’t eligible to receive “safe” drinking water. What did that one-year-old threshold mean? Did children suddenly develop sturdy enough thyroids to survive potential radioactive water at the age of one? I wonder to this day. I knew there had to be some kind of threshold. But any scientific evidence would still have been cold comfort for a newbie mom.
In contrast to those days of claustrophobia and solitary panic, there are more uplifting moments today. Back then, my husband was too busy with work to help with raising kids. Now, he helps our daughter with her math homework. I’m immensely grateful for such tender moments. (It can be a royal pain in the backside to make a child do homework all by yourself. If you’ve had to try this with your own child, you know how energy-draining it can be.)
One must be reminded that there are many dipshit husbands in this country who dump all of these painstaking child-related tasks and responsibilities onto their wives. (But they’re content with dictating how to do it from the sidelines when it suits their fancy.) Tired of attempting to confront these male-privileged husbands, many Japanese wives simply give up on them and treat them as mere ATMs. I’m a typical, properly sexless Japanese woman in a Japanese marriage myself. But I simply refuse to allow that level of apathy.
Believing in Communication
My husband is a quintessential, inherently good-natured, mild-tempered Japanese, who dislikes confrontational wrath a la Greta Thunberg, if not Greta Thunberg herself. Fair enough. So I take a deep breath and try to articulate my point in a calm, level headed manner.
My husband displays an allergic reaction to most of my gender-related arguments. It’s been that way throughout the years we’ve been raising our first and only child. Once our kid was born, his sense of male privilege began crawling out of the woodwork. But I’m a hopeless romantic. I still have faith in my husband. His sense of male privilege has the innocent air of “let them eat cake”, which is always so slippery and impossible to counter.
I continue to believe in the power of communication. Unlike a lot of Japanese wives, I refuse to give up on the idea of trying to communicate. Unlike many of my fellow second generation baby boomers, I refuse to manipulate my husband “in the palm of my hand” (掌の上で転がす). I refuse to treat my husband like a boy that I can easily manipulate. I refuse to be his mom (something you see a lot with older couples). Instead, I always lay all my cards out on the table.
My very Japanese won’t acknowledge that I’m expressing myself honestly and sincerely, without any self-censorship. I’m a Japanese national myself. My straightforward communication style certainly has something to do with the fact that I’m a so-called “returnee” (帰国子女; kikoku shijo) from an English speaking country. But I help people communicate professionally. Why should I give up communicating in my private life, to somebody I love and trust, of all people?
Women: Japan’s “Adjustable Labor Force”
In stark contrast to 2011, when I was a stay-at-home mom, I now have a part-time job translating, which I am allowed to do from home during this elementary school shut-down due to the COVID-19 outbreak. The government had “asked” elementary schools to shut down. By teleworking, I could still keep an eye on my daughter at home – an arrangement that I am extremely grateful for.
Many fellow moms don’t enjoy this privilege. They have had to give up work for a while to take care of their kids, all because their husbands told them, “I make more money than you do, so naturally, you should stop working care for the kids.”
Women in Japan are treated as a convenient “adjusting valve labor force” （雇用の調整弁）, both at work and at home. Laid off and put back on the game, then laid off again, when something like COVID-19 happens. Work, breed, halt for childbirth, then back to work at a mommy-tracked lower wage while raising their kids. Japan’s dependent status tax breaks (第3号被保険者制度) reward housewives and part-timers while punishing full-fledged working wives. Working women are forced to compromise and settle for a McJob. Many housewives and part-time moms in my neighborhood once had gleaming careers with impressive academic credentials. Mottainai (how wasteful).
Why do they give up on their careers? I think women who graduated from prestigious universities were able to pass the exams because they were often raised by stay-at-home moms. Their moms supported and encouraged their studies. But they also subconsciously sent out a conflicting message: “Work, because we weren’t allowed to. But also breed, just like we did. Don’t say we were bad examples.” So my fellow moms study diligently, work diligently, and raise their children diligently.
It can be suffocating. I mean, even after all this effort, look at our social status now.
After six long years of being a stay-at-home mom, I landed a translating job that saved my mental state. As fulfilling as child-rearing is, it’s also a roller coaster ride of euphoria and utter insanity. To make matters worse, mothers are mercilessly judged from 360 degrees here in this diligent-bordering-on-uptight Japan. We’re judged by both genders young and old — and, sometimes, even by their own children.
Some fellow moms have told me that they had felt that their working moms gave them little attention while growing up. These moms never complain that their fathers gave them little attention, even though fewer dads engaged in childrearing back then. Sure, those were the times, but should we remain blind to this discrepancy? Why are we judging our mothers more harshly than we do our fathers? Should we brush our internalized misogyny under the carpet, and tell each other to “Suck it up for the sake of the kids?” Be woke, and stay woke, I say.
Most of my mamatomo’s own moms were stay-at-home moms of the first baby boomer generation. The oppression that these first baby boomer moms faced, and their pent-up negative energy that some of them harbored and unleashed onto their daughters, has led to a whole new genre of books about toxic parents and toxic moms （毒親）. We need to end this vicious mother-daughter cycle by first acknowledging what is wrong with our society and what, exactly, is stressing us out.
One-Way Criticism
Such is my life. My mood alternates between a) feeling immensely grateful for my good fortune and b) simply wanting to kill my husband. Like recently, when I explained how often has to climb steeper slopes than men do just to earn the same money. He responded as he usually does (this time, in front of our daughter), “I think women are not really good at delivering in the IT sector.” Et tu, Brute? I had to remind him her teacher considered our child one of the best programmers in class.
It really deflates and defeats me when all I’ve been explaining to my husband about living as a woman in Japan throughout 20 years of marriage has fallen on deaf ears. Do I have to repeat myself until my tongue bleeds?
With society’s constant discouragement of women -– at school, in the working world, in academia, and even at home — how could one blame women for “giving up too easily”, like my husband frequently suggests? Why do we keep coming back to this same old argument?
On multiple occasions, he’s told me, “Be my guest. If you’re so dissatisfied with the status quo, then try to earn more. Try half as hard as I did. Your lifestyle isn’t convincing me.” As much as I appreciate him providing for me and our daughter, busting his ass working impossible hours, commuting on sardine-packed trains for hours a day – even still, how many times do I have to remind him that it’s only possible for him to work because I do the household chores and look after our child? He is practically suggesting that unpaid household chores and child-rearing are not “heavy lifting”; only “rice winning” is proof that one is making a real effort.
This argument has been such a cliché, even in Japan, the land of the generally un-woke. He tells me that my household work is sloppy. I can’t disagree with that, to my chagrin. You see, I personally find unpaid labor dull and unfulfilling. All the more so when people don’t appreciate it. (More kudos to those who like it or carry on with it regardless of whether they like it or not.) Why am I even putting away his beer cans for the thousandth time? His socks that he leaves lying around? He never acknowledges this accumulation of nameless tasks (名もなき家事; na mo naki kaji).
But I can’t turn around and tell him his work is sloppy. I can’t even observe his work. How fair is that?
It’s a Man’s World (But Even Men Shouldn’t Want It)
Why do women not “try hard enough” as some husbands suggest?
Most women here do not want to play by the macho rules of stepping on top of one another to get ahead at work, all the while taking care of the kid 100% of the time. That arrangement only means a double whammy of hitting the glass ceiling at work while simultaneously forced to do all of the household chores and all the child-rearing. We instinctively knew that something was fishy, that we were going to get ripped off. So most of us simply didn’t fall for that.
Still to this day, at the nursery school in my area, more than 90% of parents that bring and fetch the kids are moms, not dads — even though both parents hold a job. Most women here don’t find this losing game appealing at all. We sure as hell don’t aspire to have the same suicide rates as these poor, overworked men do. These men have no notion of the concept of toxic masculinity that’s strangling them to death. It’s a lose-lose situation for both genders. Most of us women just silently refused to operate by those macho rules, whenever we had the choice and economic privilege. We were simply choosing to preserve ourselves.
My husband would keep telling me “What has society’s flaws have to do with our household issues and your sloppy housekeeping?”
Everything has to do with it.
Everything is intertwined.
How can you even start to topple the patriarchal system that would inevitably affect the course of your own daughter’s life when you can’t even convince your own husband? I feel as if I could face such adversity if only I had a close ally. If only the one adult that I love the most in the whole wide world would understand me. Then I would feel invincible. But this doesn’t change the fact that I would have to stand up for myself, and in turn, for my daughter. How can I expect my daughter to rise above adversity if I can’t?
Always Shining
We live in the dawn of the Reiwa era. Our government wants more moms to get back in the labor force, probably mostly as cheaper labor that conveniently supports the men, and pay taxes, while simultaneously have us breed and do all the housework, like back in the Showa era. Bottom line, most men here expect women to provide what their moms provided for them all along. They expect the same self-sacrifice of us. Where is any hope and incentive for women in all of this?
My husband’s message has been practically the same as the government’s.
The government’s slogan is: “Creating a society in which all women shine” （すべての女性が輝く社会づくり）.
“Be my guest and out-shine me, I won’t ever feel emasculated,” my husband has goofily said to me on many occasions. He can say this because he has never actually been in years of isolation away from society, alone with a wailing baby, with a deteriorating sense of self-esteem. He’s never been deprived of a paid job, deprived of his former surname, deprived of even his first name and just called ”X’s mom” （〇〇ちゃんママ）even by fellow women, and made to feel like an unproductive member of society.
Try walking in our shoes.
Politicians talk as if we women have never shone, while we women have been raising our country’s children, protecting them, ensuring day to day that they are safe in our neighborhood, doing PTA work whether we liked it or not, wiping our parent’s bottoms whether we liked it or not. For generations. Some of us have been beaten or verbally abused by our husbands. All of this, unpaid. And generations of women have told each other to “suck it up” when husbands cheated or took off with another woman. We have carried on for the sake of our children. We gave, and gave, and gave, nurturing even the boys that would later grow up as men to oppress and marginalize us. Nurturing even the girls that would silently strangle us with internalized misogyny.
They talk as if we’d never shone.
Our torch has always shone in the darkness. We’d been burning all along, in every sense. Waiting to erupt. I burn with rage, Greta Thunberg style. Take it or leave it.
Even today, a lot of boys and men innocently shoot us down, without even noticing. Throwing us daggers of words that nullify our effort. These daggers are an accumulation of insults like “Girls/women aren’t good at XX.” These daggers are the snickers, in the classroom, in the boardroom, in the meeting room, even in the bedroom from loved ones, as if to say, “Here she goes ranting again, that crazy Feminazi.”
I refuse to be gaslighted by this daily force, refuse to be defeated. I refuse to second-guess myself. Not anymore. I pledge to kill my internalized misogyny and unlearn what I have been duped into believing. I matter as much as the men in the boardroom because I have contributed. To my household, to the economy, to the child-rearing community. I don’t have to be a boardroom member to prove my self worth or have my voice heard. They told me to smile, and smile I did.
Like many of my fellow women, I have been the glue that stuck together macho ego of men at the workplace for things to run smoothly, smiling. I shall carry on smiling, but will no longer conceal my wrath. I refuse to conform and let down future generations of women who are becoming more and more courageous in pointing out the long-term, detrimental effect of sexism, both hard and soft.
This situation has got to change. It will change. For our daughters, our sisters, our friends. For the sake of men too, whose suicide rates are higher than women for good reason. Win-win is the only way to go. If men can breathe, so can women. In turn, so can the children, who will learn new norms, new possibilities. They shall no longer second guess their potentials. Whether boy or girl, they should not have to worry about being “too sissy” or “too rowdy.” Most importantly, we will make change, for ourselves. I don’t want to be like our mother’s generation who kept on grieving “After all the sacrifice we have made”, and vented all of their inarticulate frustrations onto their daughters. Our daughters are not our tools to prove our self-worth. Let’s not take that same path. We matter, rice-winner or not.
I am with you.
Are you with me?
Revolution starts in the home.
ｰ Inspired by the book “Ueno-sensei, Teach Me Feminism 101,”（上野先生、フェミニズムについてゼロから教えてください！）written by Ueno Chizuko （上野千鶴子） and Tabusa Eiko (田房永子)
