Excerpts from my novel, Warriors and Flowers: Girlhood in Contemporary Japan

 

(For the overview and prologue of the novel, please click “Novel (Prologue)” on the menu.)

           Childhood Landscape

 

           In a sea of taxis and skyscrapers, women wearing Channel lipstick and clutching Gucci bags stride down the streets of Sannomiya, Kobe’s main shopping district.  I grew up in Terada --a town filled with hazy industrial fumes thirty miles west of Sannomiya.  My childhood home is located in a working-class community with iron and steel factories, chemical plants, and textile mills.  It is a one-story wooden house that stands on a narrow street strewn with plants and bicycles.  My family and I endured utter lack of privacy in our household, managing to fit ourselves within the confines of an usagi-goya –“rabbit hutch” as Westerners jokingly call the average house in land-scarce Japan.  We all slept together in the living room, which we converted into the bedroom at night by laying out futons we took out of the closet.  My mother cooked meals in a closet-sized kitchen, where pots, pans and bamboo colanders lined the shelves on the wall.  A washing machine sat in a corner of the kitchen, too.  (Page 9)

         “Salaryman”

 

        We were a corporate family living in a rabbit hutch.  Surrounded by children of mom-and-pop store owners and carpenters at Shiroyama Elementary School, I gloried in my own clean-shaven father, who hoisted the leather attaché case and commuted to his office on the thirty-sixth floor overlooking the Osaka skyline.  I grew up believing that my family and I belonged to an elite group called Japan, Inc.  In what they call the Company-is-God Japan, lawyers, doctors, and teachers remain hidden in the shadow of a powerful group of people called sarariman (salarymen) –a common word referring to male white-collar company workers.  (Page 11)

            Alone

 

          My sense of differing from others may have stemmed partly from the profound sense of isolation I had felt at my own home.  Every New Year’s Eve, for instance, the rest of my family would gather in the living room and watched, like millions of other Japanese, Kohaku, a four-hour TV program featuring popular singers.  Refusing to participate in this ritual, I stayed shut in my small and cramped room, where I escaped to the world of books.  I especially devoured the Japanese translations of Western books, from Wuthering Heights to Little Women, and from Les Mise’rables to Anne of Green Gables.  Within a few pages, I was transported in time and place to an exotic landscape, feeling an unarticulated desire to create a new life for myself across the ocean.  In the privacy of my room, I had withdrawn into an internal dialogue with fictional characters, trying to fill a void that ached to be filled.  (Page 28-29)

       Hotel Versailles

 

        As I waited for the bus, carrying a shoulder bag, bulging and heavy with texts and notebooks, my twelve-year-old eyes were fixed on a five-story building directly across from the bus stop.  It was called Hotel Versailles.  More than twenty years later, I vividly recall the purple letters outlined in black that spelled out Berusaiyu (Versailles in Japanese), shining almost too brightly against the dark sky.  The almost eerie calm surrounding this deliberately ornate, castle-like building in a busy commercial district struck me.  I wasn’t too young to know that it was a rabu hoteru (“love hotel”).  Japan is filled with these hotels with dazzling neon signs and billboards, featuring fancy-looking rooms that couples can rent for short stay –a few hours during the day or the whole night.   I had heard enough about housewives who sneaked into these hotels with their lover at midday and later went home carrying grocery bags.

As the hotel’s bright glow of neon confronted me, I pictured a woman who prepares school lunches in the kitchen, hair in curlers.  After sending her children off to school, she takes a sip of coffee at her kitchen table and reads Bishou, a magazine for housewives.  She then unties her ponytail, puts on her eyeliner, stands in front of the mirror, inspects her forty-year-old smile underneath layers of makeup, and walks out the door.  This sharp contrast of a white apron and red lipstick vividly demonstrates the gap between illusions and reality.  To this day, I can only feel cynical about the cherished image of the soft-spoken Japanese woman devoted to her family –an image that fails to reflect the realities of a complex nation caught between tradition and modernity.  I didn’t grow up in a Japan that exists in Westerners’ imagination, filled with pagodas and rice paddies. (Page 36-37)

Month of Parting

         

March is called the month of parting; it marks the end of the school year.  A graduation ceremony was held at my school as well.  As the graduating students, stiff and self-conscious in their finest clothes, entered the auditorium decorated with red and white stripes, the fifth graders performed a song for us, representing the younger grades.  The principal and guest speakers delivered inspirational speeches on the stage, the yellow school flag in the background.  Then, one by one, the sixth graders got up on the stage and received graduation certificates from the principal. 

At the closing, all participants sang Hotaru no Hikari (The Light of the Firefly) –the Japanese version of Auld Lang Syne.  Decades ago, a Japanese poet added sorrowful farewell words to this Scottish folk tune.  Since then, millions of Japanese students have sung it at graduation ceremonies.  

            Hotaru no hikari

            Mado no yuki 

            Aketezo kesa wa wakare yuku           

                        Those days when we read books in the light of fireflies

                         And snow by the window 

                        This morning we open the gate and part

 

           We were escorted out of the auditorium by our homeroom teachers as everyone else clapped and gave a standing ovation.  Cheerful and congratulatory, the new graduates walked onto the school grounds.  Some smiled and squinted in the soft sunlight while their kimono-clad mothers busily snapped photos.  March would soon give way to glorious April days when people gather under cherry trees, drinking rice wine, singing and dancing.  The air moist and warm with the scent of spring evoked a sense that new possibilities were stirring in one’s life.  I looked toward the pale blue sky and breathed in deeply, taking it all in.  (Pages 45-46)

             Corporate World

The unbearably hot and humid Japanese summer marked the beginning of the job-hunting season in Japan.  During this season, trains were filled with immaculately tailored college seniors carrying manila envelopes stuffed with company brochures.  These job seekers constantly captured media attention.  Television broadcasted lively images of students lining up in front of large firms on the days of informational sessions.  Until October, when acceptance letters were mailed, students visited one firm after another, interviewing and taking exams.  Discarding faded jeans, students slowly faced the reality of the working world beyond the ivy-covered halls: a company anthem, morning calisthenics, obligatory karaoke sessions, Sunday golf, in-company matchmaking services.   March would arrive soon, marking the end of carefree campus life.  On April 1, a sea of new faces would fill company auditoriums across the nation, proudly proclaiming their new identity and pledging an all-embracing loyalty.

As soon as I embarked on my job search, I sat for a portrait in a photo studio.  Pink lipstick.  Softly curled shoulder-length hair.  I crafted the look that would please middle-aged male recruiters.  I pasted a copy of the photo on each of my resumes.  Peculiar rules govern the Japanese resume: It must be handwritten.  It must include information such as hobbies, family relationships, and which elementary school one attended.  And it must have a photo attached to it.  Which is not wholly surprising in a country where female students turn to cosmetic surgery to enhance their job opportunities.  Also importantly, the photo is a quick way to screen out applicants of wrong age or race. 

Preparing for interviews, I pored over job search guides for women.  I studied the sections on questions most often asked: Do you have a boyfriend?  When do you plan to get married?  Will you quit working upon marriage or pregnancy?   No woman would seriously challenge these apparently sexist and intrusive questions that never appeared in job search guides for men.  It was years before the word sekuhara (sexual harassment) entered the Japanese language, partly triggered by a well-publicized lawsuit launched by a woman who had been told to wear a miniskirt for her job interview.  To enter the corporate world, women perfected the art of acting with grace and charm.  They smiled serenely even when a recruiter on the other side of the desk leaned forward and inquired into their love life or marriage plans.  Like other Japanese women, I learned not to question these questions.  Why didn’t we reply firmly, “It’s an invasion of privacy”?   Why did we stay calm even when we were groaning inwardly?  We were all desperate to land jobs in the male-dominated world. (Pages 66-68)

         

 Sensei by Night

By day, I was a college senior who wore pumps to recruitment meetings.  By night, I was an English teacher, who entertained my students by teaching idioms such as “pie in the sky” and “once in a blue moon.”  Three nights a week I taught at a language school in Osaka, where many of my students were businessmen on their way home from work.  One by one, they would arrive in the classroom, holding briefcases and looking tired after a long workday.  

So-called eikaiwa gakko –“English conversation schools” – flourished all across Japan.  The competition remained fierce especially in big cities such as Osaka, where countless such schools made their presence known with neon signs and billboards advertising their “native teachers” –often meaning Westerners.  These schools carefully selected teachers, keenly aware that many students, especially young women, were eager to learn English from blue-eyed teachers.  Nonetheless, I found my job easily; this particular school that hired me had just started to offer several new courses for middle-aged businessmen.  Fearful of Westerners (“too tall” and “too intimidating,” they complained), they preferred to learn English from a fellow Japanese.

I was amused by the fact that some of my students were almost my father’s age or even older.  In Japan, one is required to use honorific expressions when speaking to an older person; but this rule instantly changes in teacher-student relationships.  My students respectfully bowed their heads and called me Sensei –Honorable Teacher.  “You studied in America, Sensei?”  They would say admiringly.  Though they had previously learned the language at school, they all spoke broken English.  He breaked his leg.  I eated my lunch.  These mistakes were common. 

Break-broke-broken.  Eat-ate-eaten.  I would explain the conjugation of verbs on the chalkboard and glance over the classroom.  “Repeat after me,” I called out in my teaching voice.  “Break-broke-broken.”  My students repeated in unison.  (Pages 72-73)

  

“Office Flower”

            In March, a one-week orientation began at Shoei Company. About a hundred female recruits were divided into groups of five to six.  Learning how to work well in a group, we made crafts and played games.  We also practiced how to serve tea and listened to lectures on proper makeup and hairstyles.  While we were practicing how to serve tea properly, our male counterparts participated in a six-month orientation, during which period they learned about various aspects of the firm’s business operations.  On the last day of the orientation, a woman from the human resources department stood in the center of a circle formed by the new hires, waving her hands as if to conduct an orchestra.  We practiced singing the company anthem.  Go on, go on, Shoei. 

           I envisioned pursuing a career in international marketing.  But as it turned out, I became a shokuba no hana (“ office flower”) whose presence was felt only when men needed someone to pour them tea.  Every morning I put on the uniform consisting of a blue smock and a black skirt, reminiscent of school days.  An unwritten rule required women to show up at eight o’clock, an hour before the official business hours.  We put on water for tea and wiped off desks.  An avid anti-smoker, I detested the piles of ashtrays that awaited me by the sink every morning.  Smoking, as well as drinking, was a symbol of manhood; virtually every man in the office smoked all day. 

          When men walked into the office, tired from the commuter rush, we greeted them with a warm smile and a cup of green tea.  At 8:50, the music started playing over the public-address system, announcing the arrival of calisthenics time.  As men stood up and stretched their arms and legs, other women and I retreated into the office kitchen.  Occasionally, Mr. Tazaki, a chubby chain smoker, sent me to a typing room.  I looked forward to those times when he handed me his hastily handwritten letters to the firm’s European branches.  The typing room, full of women, temporarily gave me a smoke-free environment.   (Pages 77-78)            

             Graceful Exit

            Dreading the prospect of just racking seniority as an unappreciated office flower, many women felt an urge to make a graceful exit after a few years of service.  Women were disposable workers whose tea-pouring role no longer earned an appreciation once they reached their mid-twenties.  For them, the phrase kekkon taishoki (resignation upon marriage) conjured up hope, a way out into the larger world.  One woman after another quit and crafted a new identity in the domestic realm while men glittered in the limelight. 

              Some women managed to flee the secretarial pool via marriage –with the help of a matchmaker.  Arranged matches still accounted for one-third of all marriages in Japan.  A matchmaker could be a professional who charge high fees for introducing physicians and CPAs to well-bred ladies.  Or she could be a silver-haired socialite who lived around the corner and loved to couple up singles.  Many young women looked through stacks of resumes in search of a sanko (“three-Hs”) husband with height, high income, and a high academic background. 

               Their quest for thriving husbands reflected their own inability to sustain an independent existence. Every morning office clerks inspected their hair and applied eyeliner, pondering a new life beyond the secretarial office.  Frequenting nail salons and buying Channel lipstick at duty-free shops, women strove to craft flawless looks that would help them find Mr. Right while in their twenties. (Page 84)