New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. xxv, 273 pp. (B&W illus.) US$90.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-230-34031-2.
Ofra Goldstein-Gidoni’s new book is a welcome addition to the growing English-language literature on Japanese housewives. Grounded in feminist ethnography, this study examines the social and cultural constructions of the “professional housewife” (sengyō shufu) in postwar Japan. Employing her “anthropological interpretation” of the concept of the “State,” Goldstein-Gidoni contends that it is the Japanese state that has through its various agents and agencies—such as the government, the corporate sector, the media and the market—actively promoted and sustained this role. Uncovering this process, the book “offers a reflective perspective on the ‘real life’ of women and their narrations about it, but also situates their lives and ideas within ongoing cultural and social debates that shape women’s social roles, experiences, and expectations in Japan today” (xvii).
Housewives of Japan is divided into three parts. In part I, the author unpacks her research methodology (chapter 1), critically evaluates the historical process of “housewifization” (shufu-ka) of Japanese women, and summarizes Japan’s “housewife debate” (shufu ronsō) (chapter 2). Part II introduces the study’s ethnographic data, gathered mainly among housewives of a suburban community near Osaka. This data was collected thanks to collaboration with Mariko Ishikawa, the study’s coauthor and key participant. The reader is presented here with the women’s narrations of their assumed social role as full-time housewives (chapter 3) and their “salaryman” husbands’ position within this “gender contract” (chapter 4), as well as accounts of their increasingly diverse and insecure lifestyles (chapter 5). In part III of the volume, Goldstein-Gidoni departs from her research site to take a closer look at the processes behind changes in housewives’ roles in postbubble Japan. She analyzes the images of housewifery as portrayed by the media (chapter 6) and sums up recent trends and government initiatives that she sees as having taken a “reactionary direction” (chapter 7). The book’s Afterword offers a reflection on the post-March 11 lives of the research participants.
Based largely on extensive observations, interviews and informal conversations, as well as e-correspondence and other tools of virtual ethnography, this book offers an excellent window into the “real lives” of Japanese housewives. It is impossible to summarize all its insights here, but suffice it to say that the issues discussed range from the central theme of the “professionalization” of female homemakers, identity formation and social class, to such mundane chores as manoeuvres involved in making the husbands take out the garbage. Goldstein-Gidoni also does a good job in elucidating a dazzling diversity of housewife types, including “charisma housewife” (karisuma shufu), “model housewife” (shufu no kagami), “working housewife” (kengyō shufu), “beautiful housewife” (utsukushii shufu), “ugly housewife” (minikui shufu), “second-class housewife” (nitō shufu), “first-class housewife” (ittō shufu), “special-class professional housewife” (tokutō sengyō shufu), and “delinquent housewife” (furyō shufu). Indeed, throughout the book, the reader finds an abundance of revealing Japanese vocabulary in addition to thorough reviews of debates that have emerged in Japan in relation to womanhood and housewifery.
The study is fairly well balanced, although some of its analytical conclusions seem to fit too readily with the author’s ideological stance. For example, the discussion of domestic power and control of the family budget would have benefited from more insights from an ethnographic inquiry into the male side of the “gender contract.” Furthermore, particularly in view of the popular Japanese saying that “women’s enemies are women” (onna no teki wa onna),the apparently often strained relations among housewives themselves—that is, within the “inside group” (nakama)—seems to be a topic that is under-explored.
The book is timely, given recent findings (not cited in it) showing that Japanese females, unlike their American counterparts, prefer not to work outside the household and are happier if they embrace marriage based on specialization (Kristen Schultz Lee and Hiroshi Ono, “Specialization and happiness in marriage: A U.S.-Japan comparison,” Social Science Research 37, 2008: 1216–1234). This latest “backlash,” the author contends, is, for one, stimulated by cultural constructs delivered through such “state agents” as the market and the media. What is somewhat unsettling in this picture, however, is that it paints the Japanese woman as a passive consumer of images created with a sole purpose of domesticating her in one form or another. To be sure, media’s attempts to engineer gender relations have been well known since Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew and father of modern advertising/propaganda, embarked in the 1920s on creative campaigns of “liberating” American women from societal shackles through cigarette smoking. As such, Goldstein-Gidoni’s discussion of Japan’s consumerist culture is illuminating (although limited by the emphasis on the specialized genre of women’s magazines, despite the important role of TV programs and commercials in Japanese consumerism); yet, its actual causal effect on the specific life choices needs to be demonstrated rather than assumed. This could potentially be achieved with more systematic data, such as surveys or in-depth interviews with various age and socioeconomic groups, including women before they marry.
The major weakness of this study, however, is its research design. Basing the argument on a view of the “State” that blurs boundaries between the state, market and society is problematic. There is, of course, nothing intrinsically wrong with broadening the narrow Weberian notion of the state, and the author is free to work from her own definition. However, the problem in this case is that such an all-inclusive variable, which comprises the government, the bureaucracy, the corporate sector, the market, the media (including privately published magazines), as well as the college system and some (read: “conservative”) academics, lacks precision. These agents, both individually and especially as a cluster, are by no means a monolith. Indeed, their interests have often conflicted and varied over time. Thus, although the book leaves no doubt that various agents have attempted to render Japan’s social reality, lack of analytical rigour causes this holistic approach, in which everything is deemed equally relevant and all vectors are pointed in exactly the same direction, to obscure more than it clarifies. It is for this reason that this work struggles to make predictions about the future of Japan’s “gender contract.”
Notwithstanding its shortcomings, the book is worth reading if only for its rich empirical content. It should appeal to a wide audience, including both specialized academics and general readers in particular.
Konrad Kalicki
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
pp. 604-606