Good Morning Blog!
I have just finished the very long read of Out by Natsuo Kirino. It was definitely a very good read, I really liked the book. A topic I found interesting from the novel is the idea of women in the Japanese workplace. All of our main female characters (Masako, Yoshie, Kuniko, Yayoi, and Anna) hold some sort of job in the novel, yet none of them seem to be the most thrilled about their work. The workplace environment presented in the novel shows the layers of gender discrimination found in Japanese society.
To begin, after WWII and during the economic boom, women were given more legal rights, but they were still treated as a second-class citizen in society, “Although they were now legally equal to men, women still occupied a different position in society.” (Goto-Jones 106).
In the novel, Out, women are looked down upon in the workplace and they are judged heavily on their age and appearance. For the women at the packing factory, they can only manage to afford part-time jobs with little pay. It’s difficult for them to find jobs that pay well or even full-time jobs. Even if a woman does manage to secure a nice job, she will often be treated as an “office wife” and be rejected for promotions, “Women in the traditional Japanese employment system had a very limited role. They were usually confined to routine jobs with little or no training and were expected to leave upon marriage or childbirth.” (Bishop 108-9)
For example, Masako worked at her finance company for years and years, yet she was never promoted or given a higher pay, “What bothered her much more was that the effort she put in all the other days was never recognized and after all these years she had never been promoted or given more than the rudimentary clerical work she’d done since the day she first came to work.” (Kirino 156) Masako was reduced to cleaning up after her male coworkers and making tea for them all the time. She was the oldest woman in her company, yet her bosses choose to promote younger, more inexperienced men over her.
When Japanese workplaces do hire women, they put high value in age and appearance. For example, Yoshie is stunned to hear that her young, high-school age daughter is getting paid nearly the same amount as her, “‘High school students get 800 yen an hour.’” Her mother was silent for a moment, absorbing the shock: that was 70 more yen per hour than they made on the day shift at the factory. Was it just being young that made them worth so much?” (Kirino 26). It didn’t matter if a woman had a lot of qualifications or not, what mattered the most was that she was young and pretty.
I think it’s interesting to see the different elements of gender discrimination in different societies. Though women are also discriminated against in the American workplace, I think it was interesting to compare and contrast the discrimination in Japanese workplaces. It’s a sad thing, but I am hopeful that things will get better for women everywhere in future generations, and especially my own generation!
Bye for now!
Works Cited:
Kirino Natsuo, Out: A Novel, trans. Stephen Snyder (New York: Vintage, 2005)
Beverly Bishop, “The Diversification of Employment and Women’s Work
Christopher Goto-Jones, Modern Japan: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2009), 89-150
Hi! Thank you for this enticing, easy-to-follow read. I could not agree more with literally all of your points--I too had the same thoughts while reading OUT. Japanese women did not enjoy their jobs, their jobs themselves were often unenjoyable (all of them seemed to involved pleasing men in some way), and, like you said, appearance and age was key (so that they were pleasing to men). I think another example of the latter is at the bar--all the pretty 19-year olds had already applied.
ReplyDeleteHi, thanks for writing this blog post! I enjoyed reading your perspectives on Out. I thought your analysis about the workplace environment as it relates to gender inequality was really valuable -- it made me think of certain aspects of Kitchen that revealed similar ideas of gender inequality as a contemporary issue in Japanese society. When reading Out, based on the commentary that the novel provided on gender inequality, what similarities and/or differences did you see compared with Kitchen?
ReplyDeleteHi, thanks for this blog post! I also was thinking about the inequalities that Japanese women face in the workplace while reading Out! I really liked your focus on how women are valued for age and appearance and how younger women were valued more than older women. I thought about the section in Out where Masako was forced to work in the kitchen warming Sake at an office party while younger women went out to serve it, and how that even demonstrated how much less she was valued because of her age.
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