Download From Geisha girl to Manga woman

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JAPAN
From Geisha girl
to Manga woman
From Geishas to Lolitas, from samurais to
herbivores: in the Land of the Rising Sun, the
ideals of men and women are changing radically.
by Francesca Lancini
114
P
ure, disembodied and as delicate as a
blooming flower. For some Japanese
men, the ideal woman is still the one
seen in traditional drawings, ceremoniously
wrapped in bright kimonos and reminiscent of
cherry blossom. Conversely, the ideal man for
these refined maidens ought to be a strong,
brave warrior. Or so a few local sociologists
would have us believe. In a country where the
word ‘crisis’ has been on everyone’s lips for 20
years now and which only two years ago – on
11 March 2011 – was physically and emotionally devastated by the tsunami and the nuclear
disaster at Fukushima, the watchwords are
transformation, research and tension.
Role models are created, adjusted, disappear and return. They intersect and contradict
each other. They reflect the anxiety that permeates all layers of society as well as a possible
antidote to the stagnation.
And so we discover that the symbolic figures of the geisha and the Yamato Nadeshiko
(an ancient personification of the ideal
woman) are considered attractive and fascinating more in the self-centred West, than in
Asian quarters. As Toshio Miyake, a Marie
Curie International Incoming Fellow at the Ca’
Foscari University of Venice, tells us: “They’ve
never been perceived as important role models
for the majority of our population, except as a
vehicle of propaganda exploited during the
Asia-Pacific War, or among traditional writers
and intellectuals”.
According to the scholar, the geisha “has
developed as a figure in the collective Euro-
pean and North American imagination for over
a century now, thanks partly to Puccini (Ed:
whose opera Madame Butterfly was about a
geisha), while the Yamato Nadeshiko has just
become a fashion among many, an offshoot of
the countless waves of neo-traditional consumerism”.
A more entrenched version of these oldfashioned role models is the Ryosai Kenbo,
the ‘good wife, wise mother’ combination.
Since the end of the 19th century, the imperial
authorities proposed or even imposed this
model on women, explains Paolo Scrolavezza,
a lecturer in Japanese literature at the University of Bologna. ”To this day, 50-year-old
Japanese women still consider this role model
important although only in a domestic context”. And as in Japan over a century ago,
Scrolavezza adds, “we still see mothers acquiring an education for the sole purpose of
raising their sons to become good citizens”.
However, the nineties’ property bubble and
the recent global economic crisis have accelerated the dissolution of these patriarchal legacies. Some women still wear kimonos and walk
behind the man, yet at the same time exceedingly garish, colourful and elusive female, male
and cross-gender clothing is hitting the shops.
The patriarchal family will only survive while
men can still secure lifelong employment, in a
society where the man is the wage earner and
the woman looks after the home. But permanent employment is hard to find. The sons of
the ‘salary men’, who dedicated their entire
lives, round the clock, to their employer, have
rebelled. Young ladies, also known as ‘working
women’, are no longer content with a secretarial job (‘office lady’), they want a career.
The social balance of the past is coming
apart at the seams. There are “gender and
lifestyle models that belong to an affluent society with advanced consumer needs, but the
labour market is increasingly precarious”,
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WILFRIED MAISY/REA/CONTRASTO
JAPAN
\ Girls in kimono in
the town of Minami
Sanriku, one of the
most heavily hit by
the 2011 catastrophe.
Miyake points out. The most striking change
was triggered by the furita, young people who
prefer freelance or temporary employment to
a traditional career. However, the furita are also
having to face up to the latest economic crisis.
Young people who decide to flout convention do so between the ages of 20 to 30-something. After that, men and women alike go
number 46 march/april 2013
back to wearing unfailingly sombre suits, just
like school uniform. This is the most interesting 20-year period for the exploration of Japanese role models. The freedom and seduction
game is played by very sophisticated and fairly
enterprising ‘Lolitas’ together with boys who,
being equally fashion conscious, are not afraid
to show their feminine side.
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LAIF/CONTRASTO
JAPAN
 Japanese figures
• Japan is shamefully ranked 101st out of
135 in the 2012 Gender Gap Report
(which measures the social divide
between men and women) published by
the World Economic Forum. Social
conformism is still very widespread,
particularly in the labour market where
very few women hold managerial
positions.
• Japanese men consider a woman’s
cleanliness to be her most seductive
asset. Their ideal woman should be no
more than 1.6 metres tall (5’2’’).
• In 2010, 47.3% of Japanese men
between the ages of 30 and 34 were
single; among men between 25 and 29
the celibacy rate rose to 71.8%. But
when they marry they prefer a woman
who’s financially independent.
• Despite the crisis, Japan can boast an
unemployment rate of 4.6% and an
average life expectancy of 84 years
thanks to an excellent health system.
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Scrolavezza confirms that these
two role models tend to seek each
other out. The working girl does not
want an aggressive male by her side,
while the young man – known as
‘herbivorous’ – is all for her getting
on in life, though he often eschews
carnality and sexuality and ends up
being more of a friend and staying
single. Disenchantment and narcissism, perhaps as an extreme rejection of tradition, can of course also
be found among Western youth,
even Italians, all brought up in a basically patriarchal and increasingly
individualistic society.
All new trends come from the
streets of Tokyo, the Japanese capital
and cultural centre. In fact young
people are hugely influenced by
Manga and the media, including
style magazines, soap operas and tel-
evision programmes that feature the
aidoru, or local celebrities. “More
specifically, in a Manga context, it
was women who first started to experiment and promote fantasies
about more effeminate, androgynous
and sensitive teenagers and young
men, even as early as the 1970s”, reveals Miyake. “And when women
gradually started entering the labour
market in the eighties, they then became the cornerstone of national
consumer attitudes and fashions”.
That said, one still has to tread
carefully. According to the Cà Foscari
professor the ‘herbivorous man’ category is exploited to fuel ‘social panic’
and turn everything into a spectacle.
“According to opinion polls”, says
Miyake, “Japanese youngsters are
not as spectacular or asocial as the
major national and particularly international media would have us believe. These tend to pay lip service
to the leading stereotypes: the internal Japanese gerontocratic tradition
(Ed: where old people are in charge),
and externally upheld Euro-centric
or oriental forms”. So it seems the
Japanese don’t “have a taste for the
kinky”, as it were. In spite of their
tendency to pigeonhole everything,
they cannot be simply viewed as herbivores or carnivores, online group
suicides, revisionists or fascists, etc.
According to the World Values Survey, they are the most rational beings
on the planet and government research from 2009 informs us that between the ages of 18 and 24, the
Japanese feel most at home with their
friends and family or when practicing
sport and hobbies.
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