1- Panel 1

Gender (2)

S. Baiton: Looking for the Bright Life: Consuming Modernity in Late 20th-Century Japan.

The late 20th Century in Japan, particularly the 1980s, was a period in which personal and household consumption converged with discourses surrounding individual and collective, and cultural and national identity. This paper examines how certain patterns of consumption came to be subsumed into conceptions of Japanese national identity. While I discuss Japanese consumption from a general standpoint throughout the paper, I place particular focus on the roles of women within consumer history. In order to get a sense of varying attitudes toward consumption as a performance of modernity, and the roles of women in both the production and consumption of modernity, I examine several pieces of media and other popular literature from the 1980s, including magazine articles and advertisements, TV advertisements, novels, and a film.

S. Matsui: Sexual Discrimination in Japan

Sexist comments of Mr. Yoshiro Mori, the former president of the Tokyo Olympic organizing Committee, that women talk too much in the discussion, caused tremendous furor in the world and he was forced to step down. It was reported that there were too few women on the organizing committee and the number of women was increased. But many Japanese people didn’t react as foreign critics did. They just tend to believe that Mori’s comments, apparently inappropriate, is not so outrageous to force him to leave the post and the small number of women somewhat inevitable due to difficulty of finding appropriate candidates. This incident manifestly showed the challenges for gender equality in Japan. In this paper, I hope to elucidate to what extent sex discrimination is legally prohibited and to what extent there has been an effort to secure gender equality in Japan. It will also suggest necessary improvements for the future.

JP Roy: Managing Japan’s Labour Shortage: An Assessment of the Japanese Government’s Efforts to Utilize Women

Japan’s quick ascent to “super-aged society” status has caused an alarming labour shortage in the country. Recognizing the serious threat that such a labour shortage poses to the country’s economic sustainability, the Japanese government has adopted a variety of strategies to elevate the country’s labour supply. The strategy often cited as offering the greatest potential benefits is to increase the labour force participation rate of women in Japan. Recognizing this fact, over the past decade the Japanese government has implemented a variety of measures designed to support that strategy. Unfortunately, to date these measures have been far from successful. Presented within this paper is an in-depth examination of the measures taken by the Japanese government to utilize more women in Japan to manage the escalating labour shortage. The effectiveness of the specific measures is assessed and the key factors undermining the success of these measures are identified. The paper concludes with a discussion of the key lessons learned, which hopefully will inspire policy changes that are more effective and advance research.

N. Yabuki-Soh: Portrayals of women in advertisements in present-day Japan

Commercial advertisements are a powerful tool to promote and reinforce specific gender stereotypes and ideologies. Japan has recently been experiencing some social and political change in terms of the improvement of women’s rights, but do the portrayals of women in advertisements accurately reflect such change? Konstantinovskaia (2020), who examined language and visual images in Japanese “beauty ads,” concluded that the visions of femininity observed in recent advertising reflect complex ideologies that primarily reinforce traditional values and are simultaneously heavily influenced by kawaii “cuteness” cultivation. The present study further investigates the language used in the media that promotes products aimed at women in present-day Japan. Data were collected from advertisements for cosmetics and hygiene items of major brands that appeared on Japanese television in the spring of 2021. The use of metaphors, mimetics, sentence final particles, and other linguistic devices together with accompanying visuals was analyzed based on Konstantinovskaia’s framework. The findings were also compared with those of equivalent advertisements aired in North America. The results showed that despite some effort to incorporate postfeminist values in their messages, women were typically portrayed in Japanese advertising largely as staying “cute” and being submissive to the men around them rather than as being independent and having their own opinions. This is in sharp contrast to North American advertisements that present much more liberated and individualistic portrayals of women. The study suggests that language use in such media reflects uncertainty with regard to positive change in the roles of Japanese women in the future. 

Reference Konstantinovskaia, N. (2020). Creation of femininity in Japanese televised ‘beauty ads’: traditional values, kawaii cuteness and a dash of feminism. Gender and Language, 14, 305-325.