ジェンダー研究第 22 号

2019 年◆ 書評 ◆Swee-Lin Ho

Friendship and Work Culture ofWomen Managers in Japan Tokyo After Ten（Routledge 2018, ISBN: 9781138099029, US$155,50）

Annette Schad-Seifert（Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf）

For many years, Japan’s government
policies have planned for the structural
improvement of women’s employment andhave set a quota system for female empowerment. By implementing female-friendly
labor policies under the title “Womenomics” (Dalton 2017) the Japanese government is responding to concerns expressedby various international economic organizations such as the World EconomicForum, the International Monetary Fundand the OECD with regard to Japan’s low
gender equality scores. Obviously, Japan’s
workplaces and the wider society are stillinfluenced by cultural traditions and conservative gender regimes.
The book under review provides a very
detailed ethnographic account of how
these traditions and gender regimes influence the lives and biographies of working
women. The author is of Singaporean origin and lived in Tokyo as a corporate executive for an international company in theearly 2000s. In this position she came into
close contact with two female after-workdrinking groups of Japanese female managers and business women. What began asa privately fuelled curiosity about the situation of working women and after-worknightlife eventually became her graduate
studies research. Given the scarcity of information in English on the lives of female
white-collar workers in management positions in Japan, the study is highly appreciated for filling a gap in the literature andfor providing a dense description of all aspects of the social world and cultural practices of this female demographic.
The first chapter deals with the social
status of Japan’s working women from anhistorical perspective. While in pre-warJapan women usually worked as membersof family businesses, post-war Japan’s
gender regime has structurally discouraged women from taking up gainful employment. The social contract benefited
those married couples that consisted ofa male breadwinner and a female housemaker. Female jobs were mostly assigned
as part-time, temporary or assisting non-217

書評managerial work. Due to improved educational opportunities and growing labordemand the rate of regular female corporate workers significantly increased during
the bubble era of the 1980s. Meanwhile‘salaried women’ have become an indispensable asset for Japan’s corporations,but are still structurally disadvantaged interms of payment, career prospects, job allocation and contract termination. Women
who, against all odds, are able to find jobs
in higher-ranking management positions,face greater challenges and struggle withcultural expectations of femininity that“engender women through their association with domesticity” (p. 35).
The remaining chapters undertake adetailed ethnography of the two female
groups. Ho describes them as “leadingexceptional lives” (p. 46). What make thewomen unique are both their positions as
top senior executives as well as their status as married or divorced family womenwith children. Statistically, career women are usually single, and being a working mother in a demanding job in Japanis definitely one of the most challenging
roles to tackle (Nishimura 2016). All ofHo’s informants define their work as theirmain source of identity. The main characteristic they ascribe to themselves is their
being “children of the bubble” and the first
generation of women who could choose acareer while having children. The bubble
era has brought about the nation’s mostimpressive economic achievements and asuper affluent consumer society. Without adoubt, the “bubble identity” influences all218

the groups’ after-work activities that are
meticulously described by Ho. Drinking
wine at special places is one of the groups’
main pursuits. Sometimes the book veers
into a cultural history of alcoholic beverage consumption in Japan, which is no
surprise, given the extremely high cultural
worth that is ascribed to drinking liquor
in this country. Alcohol consumption has
traditionally been a male privilege of thehigher classes, but during the Meiji era it
also became associated with being modernand westernized. Meanwhile, female alcohol consumption, particularly beer drinking, has become common in Japan and isadvertised regularly in television dramas
for female audiences. But the drinking
habits of the informants are exceptionaland non-feminine, imitating to a certain
degree masculine behavior. Not only is theamount of alcohol that is consumed extraordinarily high, but also the price thatis sometimes paid for the products—such
as US$1,800 per bottle of French wine—
is far above average. Ho analyzes the activities of these middle-aged urban professionals by applying Bourdieu’s theory ofsocial distinction. Through the display ofcultural capital, individual preferences andformulations of taste are turned into symbolic signs of social differentiation.
I appreciate the work’s coherent focus
on cultural studies analysis, and due to its
gender-sensitive approach the study is always well informed about the many ways
social institutions and cultural traditions
have an impact on the conflicting livesof women in Japan. It provides valuableジェンダー研究knowledge about how female professionals critically view themselves relative toothers, how female economic resources
are utilized to indicate social recognitionand self-respect, and how career womenencounter the loss of traditional gender第 22 号

2019 年

role models, even while new social models are not yet available to replace them.
The range and scope of Ho’s work makes
it a valuable contribution to the academic
study of working women’s social worlds
and cultural practices.

References:
Dalton, Emma (2017): Womenomics, ‘Equality’ and Abe’s Neo-liberal Strategy to Make Japanese WomenShine. In: Social Science Japan Journal, Volume 20, Issue 1, 1 February 2017, pp. 95–105, https://doi.org/10.1093/ssjj/jyw043 (accessed 18 March 2019).
Nishimura, Junko (2016): Motherhood and Work in Contemporary Japan. Abingdon: Routledge.

（掲載決定日：2019 年 5 月 29 日）

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