From Behind the Screen
Natsuo Kirino does not like to be called a crime writer. There is plenty of crime in her novels, but few sleuths and almost no trail of whodunit. Instead, there is sociological and psychological mining as she drills into Japan’s more rancid layers in the years after the collapse of the economic bubble. There she discovers seams of poverty, violence, rage and depravity in a society that mostly sees itself as refined and orderly. Above all, she writes about how women get by in a country where they are too often treated as second-class citizens both in the home and at work. Sometimes the survival mechanisms her fictional heroines adopt are extreme.
In Out, a book about working-class women toiling the nightshift in a grimy boxed-lunch factory, Yayoi strangles her useless and violent husband to death. Driven to desperation she enlists three female co-workers to help her cut up, and then dispose of, the corpse. In a macabre plot development, the women soon branch out into business, helping local yakuza gangsters to spirit away evidence of their gangland slayings. The scene in which the women chop up Yayoi’s husband reads as much like a how-to manual as a dispassionate description. Kirino spares little detail:
Next she used her knife to cut around the hip joints. Watching the blade slip through the layers of yellow fat, she heard Yoshie mutter that it looked ‘exactly like a broiler’. When she reached bone, she braced her foot on top of Kenji’s leg and began sawing the femur in just the same way as one would cut through a log.
In a later novel, Tokyo Island, Kiyoko, a 43-year-old housewife, is washed up on an island with her husband when their cruise ship sinks. Kiyoko adapts to hardship more easily than her hapless husband, who soon perishes. Her resourcefulness becomes more necessary when she discovers that she is the lone female on the island along with more than two dozen Japanese and Chinese men around half her age. She skilfully plays one man against another to ensure her survival and even attempts to start a religion with herself at its centre. The book was inspired by the true story of Kazuko Higa, who found herself stranded on Anatahan island in the Marianas group with nearly thirty men at the end of the Second World War. The men refused to believe the war was over and continued to live a primitive existence. Higa escaped from the island in 1950. Kirino’s novel, which was later turned into a film, won critical acclaim for its exploration of group dynamics and a plot in which an ordinary woman was transformed into a sort of island goddess. ‘She controls the group through sex,’ Kirino told me matter-of-factly. ‘So much happens, but although the leaders constantly change, in the end she survives.’
Kirino was born in 1951 in Kanazawa, the castle town where I had lived briefly in my first month in Japan. Her father was an architect and her family moved around before settling down in Tokyo when she was fourteen. She studied law and later started to write pulp romantic fiction for a mainly adolescent audience. It was not until she was forty that she won critical acclaim for one of her novels, Rain Falling on My Face, and started writing more serious fiction about things she considered important. Her biggest breakthrough came with Out, the first of her novels to be translated into English.
I met Kirino one May afternoon in 2008 in the plush surroundings of the Fiorentina, an Italian café in the lobby of Tokyo’s Grand Hyatt Hotel, where large-scale works of modern art vied for attention with the beautiful people milling about. Burned once before by a foreign journalist, Kirino had brought along a female chaperone for protection, though the author of more than fifteen novels looked more than capable of looking after herself. Her face had a toughness about it. At fifty-six, she was an attractive, even beautiful, woman, though hers was not the pristine mask worn by some age-defying Japanese women. She was dressed casually in a flowery top, slacks and cork-soled shoes. Her nails were thickly painted with sparkly polish. Her voice was powerful and husky, yet of strangely low decibel.
She talked about a ‘sense of pent-up retribution’ driving her protagonists. ‘Men and women are not on good terms in Japanese society. They don’t get along,’ she said, toying with her coffee cup. ‘There is too much gender-specific role division. Men are almost like slaves in the corporate world and Japanese women are contained within the household. Their lives are disconnected. That is one of the sources of this boiling rage.’ Writing fiction, she explained, allowed her to explore this deep well of anger, often unexpressed in a society that prized smooth surface relations. ‘Writers try to cluster into words the things that lie buried in society, unconscious things. That is our duty.’
She was mindful that fiction could affect the world outside its pages. ‘Writers have to be powerful. But I also live in the real world, and sometimes I find the power of fiction frightening. After my book Out appeared – and this is scary to talk about – but I think there have been more cases of wives killing their husbands. And there may be people who found new ways of doing things because of what’s written in my book.’ Not long before we met, a case had come to court in which Kaori Mihashi, a fashionable 32-year-old, had killed her abusive husband, a Morgan Stanley employee, with a wine bottle. Like Yayoi in Kirino’s novel, she had cut him into pieces and distributed the sections among different locations. The luxury apartment where the murder took place was two minutes from my house.
If Kirino worried that she might have unwittingly inspired violence, as well as depicting it, she also thought she had performed a service by giving voice to women’s rage. ‘After Out, male readers can expect anything from me. I think I have educated them,’ she said, looking coyly at the table. ‘I was on a radio programme with a male personality once, and during the show he wouldn’t utter a single word to me. Towards the end, he asked: “What do you think of murdering somebody?” So I said: “It’s not a good thing to kill a person.” And he said: “Oh, that’s good. I’m really relieved to hear that.”’
• • •
Japan is often portrayed in the west as a society of powerful men and timid, subservient women. It generally scores poorly in international comparisons that seek to quantify equality of opportunity. According to a 2010 global study on women’s economic opportunity by the Economist Intelligence Unit, Japan came 32nd in the world with a score of 68.2 out of a possible 100. It was above all other Asian nations, apart from Hong Kong, but below Scandinavian countries, which scored in the high 80s, as well as the United States, at 76.7. Japan scored reasonably well in the legal and social status categories. Women’s rights are, after all, protected in the post-war constitution. Article 14 outlaws discrimination based on sex and Article 24 states:
Marriage shall be based only on the mutual consent of both sexes and it shall be maintained through mutual cooperation with the equal rights of husband and wife as a basis. With regard to choice of spouse, property rights, inheritance, choice of domicile, divorce and other matters pertaining to marriage and the family, laws shall be enacted from the standpoint of individual dignity and the essential equality of the sexes.1
In other categories, Japan did less well. On labour policy practice, which measured pay equality, workplace discrimination and childcare provision, it came below several developing countries, including the Philippines, Brazil and Tanzania. Even South Korea, another advanced Asian economy said to discriminate against women, did better on that measure. By contrast, Japan scored well in the ‘access to finance’ category, reflecting the fact that women still tend to control household income.2 Different surveys throw up different results. In the United Nations Gender Inequality Index,3 Japan does well, coming fourteenth in the world, below Scandinavian countries but above Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia. On the other hand, in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, Japan performs abysmally, ranking 98th. There it comes below such well-known bastions of feminism as Azerbaijan, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh and Brunei.
Clearly there is a good deal of subjectivity to such surveys.4 But there are obvious ways in which Japanese women face discrimination. In business, female managers are rarer than in other rich countries, making up a lowly 1.2 per cent of senior executives in listed companies. Women don’t get such good jobs as men, and earn, on average, about 60 per cent as much as they do. By law, married women are not allowed to keep their maiden name – unless, curiously, they are married to foreigners, who presumably rank even lower in the pecking order. Only about 10 per cent of Japanese legislators are women, putting Japan in 121st place out of 186 nations, and prompting a government committee to recommend mandatory quotas for female MPs.5 Unlike Britain, Germany or India – and now South Korea, following the election of Park Geun-hye in 2012 – Japan has never had a female leader. Nor, of course, has the US. But in Japan, there are fewer role models to emulate.
Obstacles to women having what many of their western counterparts might consider a rounded life – juggling motherhood with a career – are very real. Though the traditional employment system is eroding, women hired by big companies still tend to be placed on career tracks that go precisely nowhere. It is not unusual to see women with college degrees reduced to fragrant presences in the office, bearers of green tea and objects of gossip about which colleague they will end up marrying. If women marry and have children, few take up their old job at the same company. Many firms are reluctant to let women return, particularly after a lengthy maternity break. Sometimes women themselves elect not to go back to work, although such choices are reinforced by strong social expectations about what it means to be a good wife and mother, even what it means to be happy. (In Japanese ‘to become happy’, shiawase ni naru, can be used as a synonym for ‘to get married’.) The job of bringing up children is, perhaps, more respected in Japan than in some other countries, where women who don’t manage to have a job as well as bring up a family are sometimes looked down upon. When my wife took our young son to Japanese kindergarten, she was touched by the fact that children were taught to thank their mothers for making their bento-box lunches, something she thought might not happen in the west. (The expectation was firmly that the mother, not the father, would have made the lunch.) Still, there are undoubtedly women in Japan who would like to work but who cannot because of a chronic lack of affordable childcare, especially for very young children.
Discrimination, like pornography, can be hard to define. But you know it when you see it. Take the example of the Japanese women’s soccer team, which made history by defeating the US to win the FIFA Women’s World Cup in the summer of 2011. Coming so soon after the devastating tsunami, the victory prompted national euphoria. Members of the team, nicknamed the Nadeshiko – after a pink flower, and the idealized beauty and strength of Japanese womanhood – became national celebrities. But when the victorious Nadeshiko team members set off for the 2012 London Olympics, they flew economy class. The less successful men’s team was seated in business.
Japan’s most neglected resource is its women. In a country with no oil, gas or precious minerals, national prosperity is almost entirely predicated on the diligence and ingenuity of its people. But social conventions have suppressed the potential of half Japan’s population. Japanese women, less restrained by social convention than corporate-bound men, often strike foreigners as the more dynamic, inventive and sometimes plainly more competent half of the population. That their talents are so often sidelined strikes many as a terrible waste of national, not to mention individual, potential.
We should be wary, though, of looking only at the surface. Relations between the sexes in Japan are more nuanced than the caricature might suggest. And, as with many other areas of contemporary society, the position of women is in flux. The end of fast growth and the consequent strains at work and at home have had a profound impact on male–female relations. Richard Koo, the economist, said one of the attractions of the fast-growth period was that people didn’t have to think too much. It made for smooth, if not exactly modern, relations between the sexes. ‘Men concentrated on getting the job done. Someone would arrange a nice girl for them to get married to. The girl knows the guy will have job security, a steady wage increase, a nice house. So why not?’ The loss of that certainty had spawned angst. ‘Those guys have no idea how to date a girl or find a wife. These days the matchmakers are scared because you never know what is going to happen to this guy next, what with corporate restructuring, downsizing, outsourcing. There are a lot of men out there who never trained themselves to attract members of the opposite sex.’ Women, he said, were generally not interested in men who could not provide – one reason they were marrying later. The relative shift in power had even spawned a new take on manliness and femininity. The Japanese, forever inventing new categories to describe shifting social patterns, now talked about ‘grass-eating’ men who were not interested in sex, and ‘meat-eating’ women who knew what they wanted and how to get it. Tokyo Island, it seemed, was not entirely fiction.
• • •
Noriko Hama, professor of economics at Kyoto’s Doshisha University, did not fit the stereotype of a demure Japanese woman. She had forthright opinions about almost everything, often delivered with withering sarcasm in the upper-class English accent she had acquired when she lived in Britain as a child. She had a penchant for shockingly loud hair dye, often purple, and dressed in what I took to be designer clothes, thrown together in a manner that suggested they had been picked randomly from her wardrobe. We had known each other for years. Hama had never bought the argument that Japanese women played second fiddle to men. In important respects, she argued, they had been running Japan for centuries. It was a woman, the lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote Japan’s – and indeed the world’s – first novel, The Tale of Genji, in the early years of the eleventh century. Women had long been the powers behind its public figures and the bosses of its households, she said. ‘Women have always had control of the purse strings and had responsibility for running everything smoothly. Japanese men have been incredibly reliant on the female of the species, not knowing where anything is, not knowing how to dress. Without women they would have to go around naked,’ she told me, shooting me a look of contempt mixed with sorrow. ‘There has always been a depth to Japanese women behind the silk screen. There was never that much of an idea of being the protected, pampered species put on a pedestal in the sort of “ladies are gods” culture that predominated in medieval Europe or in Victorian times. Women were deemed to be the tougher sex, tirelessly working, physically as well as mentally, taking on anything that was remotely awkward or a strain on the male intelligence.’ Another look of contempt followed. I was reminded of something a well-known former geisha once told me when she described what she called the ‘lady-first’ culture of the west as sexist.6
Women were the driving force behind Japan’s early industrialization after the Meiji Restoration. In the first decades of the twentieth century, 60 per cent of the industrial workforce and 80 per cent of those working in the all-important textile industry were women. They were, in the words of one historian, ‘the backbone of Japan’s Industrial Revolution’.7 Today, shifting social attitudes, new economic impulses and the introduction of laws – for example equal-opportunity legislation in 1986 – were altering the landscape, Hama said. ‘What’s changed is that society has become more receptive towards women. That behind-the-silk-screen role was a very comfortable place to be. Women did not have to come out into the open to compete. Now that this on-stage performance has become open to women, they have started to feel that choosing to remain behind closed doors is detrimental to them. They have begun to think they need to communicate what they want and what they are thinking, and to make their positions verbally clear.’ That required adjustment from both sexes. ‘The virtue and talent of Japanese women used to be seen as their ability to have everything go their own way without saying a word. But that is not enough any more. They have to start making noise.’
Hama said many women would agree with Kirino that men and women moved on separate tracks. They even sometimes travelled separately since the metro had introduced women-only carriages to address the worries at the prevalence of chikan, or groping, in intensely crowded rush-hour trains. ‘But I tend to feel that’s a myth. It makes each side kind of comfortable. If you are on different tracks, your paths don’t cross and it tidies the picture up. But in reality, things are not that simple. To the extent that we keep talking about things in that way, there’s not a lot of room for change and progress. I don’t want to pigeonhole Japanese society in that way. It is not even very challenging for men. They’ll just say, “Oh yes. We’re the villains of the piece. How terrible.” But it doesn’t actually challenge them to come up with their own ideas about how things are, or where they should go. It lets them off the hook.’
• • •
Japanese women are rebelling in powerful ways. Perhaps their most subversive act is to marry later. That has directly contributed to the low birth rate that is said by some to imperil the nation’s future. Women are effectively on strike, although their participation in the labour force has edged up as a consequence of delayed marriage. But they are refusing to comply with either of the traditional roles expected of them, those of wife and mother. Until fairly recently, women who were still single at twenty-five were referred to disparagingly as ‘Christmas cake’, an item that plummets in value after 25 December. Now, some argued, women had turned the tables on men, holding out for partners who were financially stable, emotionally supportive and willing to help around the house. Machiko Osawa, an author and academic, said men’s position had weakened relative to that of women. ‘It used to be so wonderful for men in Japan. Now they’re disillusioned,’ she told me over lunch across the road from the grand red-brick building of Tokyo’s central station. Whereas women used to fawn over the most unattractive of men with a decent job, she said, now they are much more choosy. The growing ranks of men with part-time work found it almost impossible to find a partner. ‘Rather than feeling they need to do something to attract a woman, some men have just given up,’ she said.
In 2008, a 25-year-old man ploughed a two-tonne truck into a crowd in Akihabara Electric Town, a gadget-crammed district of Tokyo that is a magnet to socially awkward nerds known as otaku. He then leapt from the vehicle and went on a stabbing spree. In all, seven people were killed and several injured. Osawa said the incident was symbolic of a growing feeling of male impotence. Before the attack, the young man had posted messages on the internet from his mobile phone, complaining he was too ugly to get a girlfriend. ‘It used to be that women could not make a living without a man. Now that’s changed and men have to be attractive to get a woman,’ she said. For many younger Japanese, the shift in power relations meant better, more equal, relationships, she went on. Many married couples over fifty had a less-than-ideal setup. ‘The husband played at making money, the wife at being a mother. It’s very different from forming a real partnership.’
Yayoi Kusama, an artist who has become famous for her polka-dot-covered canvases, was also disparaging of traditional marriage. Speaking of her father’s persistent affairs with geisha when she was a child growing up after the war, she wrote in her autobiography, ‘The menfolk were practitioners of unconditional free sex, while the women had to sit in the shadows and bear it. Even as a child I was angered and repelled by the injustice.’8 Kusama felt so constrained by Japanese society of the 1960s that she fled to New York. At one point in her career, she took to covering furniture in hundreds of phalluses that she had sewn herself, an act that was intended, she said, to ‘obliterate’ her dislike of the male organ. One photograph shows her posing naked, her back to the camera, in front of a rowing boat encrusted in penises. She called it: ‘Aggregation: 1000 Boats Show’.
Old attitudes are far from extinguished. In 2003, members of Waseda University’s ‘Super Free’ club organized gang rapes of female students after inviting them to rave parties and getting them drunk. In parliament, one MP raised a snicker when he said, ‘At least gang rapists are still virile.’9 The case did, though, provoke a strong public outcry and questioning of a legal system where rape carried a minimum sentence of two years and robbery five. Shinichiro Wada, the president of the club and the ringleader, was sentenced to fourteen years, close to the fifteen-year maximum.10 Still, politicians sometimes found it hard to hide their Neanderthal attitudes. Hakuo Yanagisawa, the septuagenarian former health minister, referred to women between fifteen and fifty as ‘baby-making machines’ – and defective ones at that. Under duress, he later apologized for his remark, clarifying that what he’d meant to say was ‘women whose role it is to give birth’.11
Changed economic and social circumstances mean many more women don’t have to ‘sit in the shadows and bear it’ any more. As a result of becoming more selective, the percentage who remain single into their thirties has almost doubled since the 1980s. Many of the ‘parasite singles’ identified by Masahiro Yamada are women in their twenties, thirties or forties, living with their parents and spending their salaries on luxury goods, eating out or travelling abroad. Yamada dismissed them as ‘fantasists’, holding out for an elusive Prince Charming. In fact, only 4 per cent of women over forty-five remain unmarried, about half the rate of the US. One could just as easily interpret women’s behaviour as a refusal to bend to social pressure by settling for marriage at any cost.
Another way in which women are asserting their independence is by divorcing. Divorces have nearly doubled since the 1990s, with about one in four marriages now ending in separation.12 That is getting on for the same as Europe, though it is still about half the rate of the United States.13 Research shows that Japanese women tend to initiate divorce and, unlike men, do not rush to remarry. In 2003, legislation was passed enabling women to collect back instalments of unpaid alimony. Since 2007, women who filed for divorce have been eligible for up to half of their husband’s pension.14 In 2001, the Domestic Violence Prevention Law was passed, signalling that violence within the home would no longer be treated as a family affair. A law on the prevention of spousal violence allowed district courts to issue six-month restraining orders against the perpetrators and to evict them from the home for short periods.
The divorce rate of 45–64-year-olds rose fifteen-fold between 1960 and 2005. Since 1985, divorce among couples married more than thirty years has quadrupled. That suggests women, trapped in bad marriages by legal and social norms, are finding ways to escape. Many of the divorces take place after the husband retires and the wife discovers she can no longer stand living under the same roof with her previously absent husband. In a phrase suggesting that women are not the quietly suffering shrinking violets sometimes depicted, retired husbands are sometimes referred to as sodai gomi, ‘big garbage’, after the clapped-out appliances thrown out for collection, though the phrase can be used affectionately.
Young people, of course, get divorced too. The ‘Narita divorce’, named after the international airport, describes the phenomenon of post-honeymoon separations. These are said to occur when internationally minded, confident women discover that their monolingual, narrow-minded husbands can’t function outside Japan. More and more women are marrying foreign men. Pico Iyer, a British-born essayist who married a Japanese woman, once told me, ‘Women have everything to be gained by escaping Japan. Men are wedded in all senses to the status quo.’15
The fraying of the family structure might reflect growing female assertiveness, but it comes with problems. Contrary to common perceptions of a nanny state that looks after its coddled citizens from cradle to grave, Japan actually has a relatively underdeveloped social welfare system. Traditionally, care has been outsourced to families. Because of social and economic changes, those families are no longer always in a position to provide. Divorce has pushed more women into low-paid work, adding to the numbers of working poor and struggling one-parent families. According to Unesco, Japan’s child poverty rate climbed to 14.9 per cent in 2012, lower than the US, but the ninth worst among thirty-five advanced OECD countries. Divorced women make up a disproportionate slice of the 20 million-strong ‘precariat’ – the ‘precarious proletariat’ without full-time employment.16 Half of working women are stuck in part-time, low-paid jobs.17 The proportion of Japanese single mothers who are working is the highest in the industrial world, suggesting a lower level of state support – and conceivably a stronger work ethic – than in other advanced nations.18 The erosion of the old model, with its certainties of lifelong employment for the man and lifelong housekeeping for the woman, has brought a fluidity to male–female relations. But Kirino was less optimistic than some about the benefits of what she called ‘this big societal shuffle’. Changes in the workforce might, she said, provide greater opportunity for a narrow spectrum of educated women. But for the majority, the new ‘flexible’ employment market would mean dead-end jobs for deadbeat pay, like the women working in her fictional lunch-box factory.
I put it to Kirino that Japanese women, certainly the more privileged ones, tended to be less constrained by social norms, more worldly, interesting and daring. They were more likely than men to speak English or to have travelled abroad. As Hama had said it was still fairly common for a man to hand over his pay cheque to his wife, who might dish him out a little ‘spending money’ if he was lucky. Women also appeared to be having more fun. I remembered once having lunch in Tokyo with a Chanel executive at Chateau Joel Robuchon, an expensive French restaurant. Apart from the two of us, the diners were exclusively female, all impeccably dressed and leisurely advancing from amuse bouche to petits fours. Many were sipping wine or champagne. I couldn’t help picturing their overworked husbands shovelling down warmed-up pork cutlet at a desk piled with papers. ‘I can’t say unequivocally that Japanese women are oppressed or not oppressed,’ Kirino replied after thinking about what I had said. ‘In hidden places, Japanese women always had power, it’s true. All Japanese men also have a tendency to suffer from mazacon,’ she added, using the contraction of ‘mother complex’ to refer to the obsessive devotion men are said to harbour for their mothers. ‘That is why Japanese women are seemingly rather strong . . . You talked about running the household accounts. But this means that men don’t have to worry about how much to save. They are relieved of such worries. Once you get married, it is not a case of man and wife, but man and mother. Once they are married, mothers can have fun. That is what you saw in the French restaurant.’
• • •
Kaori Nakahara,19 a working woman in her mid-twenties, was more privileged than most. A graduate of Hitotsubashi, one of Japan’s most prestigious universities, she joined a large bank as a career-track employee. But rather than being a draw, she saw her high status as a barrier to marriage. ‘Many Japanese guys hate it when the woman does better or has a better label,’ she said. ‘The younger career women at work are finding it very difficult to find boyfriends and future marriage prospects.’ (Japanese men had told me something similar. One said, ‘There’s a preference for the traditional type of female. Men are not so confident in themselves these days, so they pursue women who are shorter than they are, who earn less than they do and who are less accomplished than them. There’s not much of a market for over-achievers.’)
Nakahara said she didn’t feel discriminated against at work. In some situations, the rarity factor – in her year there were four fast-track men for every woman – could work to her advantage. She was sometimes invited to meetings she might not normally have attended simply because it was considered better to have some women present. Still, sexism persisted. One friend was admonished for asking a pertinent question in a meeting. ‘You talk a lot for a woman,’ her boss told her later, implying that it had been inappropriate to challenge an elder male employee in public. The primary role of many women at the office was still to look good and be subservient, she said. The reception desks at many offices and department stores are staffed with doll-like women, trained to speak in an odd falsetto and to spring to attention every time a visitor approaches. Doll-like coquettishness is generally considered an attractive feature in Japanese women. ‘What they do is just take people upstairs to the meeting room and look nice and bow when someone comes in,’ is how Nakahara described it. ‘They have the perfect bow. That’s probably what they were taught when they were recruited.’
Then there was the matter of socializing. Women were generally welcome to go out eating with their colleagues after work. But office nights out often ended with niji kai, after-party drinks, or sanji kai, after-after-party drinks. As the evening wore on, the entertainment tended to get more lewd and female colleagues dropped away, leaving the men to get on with their male bonding in hostess bars or ‘soapland’ massage parlours. Some women felt this tradition was detrimental to their chances of success since they missed out on the best company gossip, which flowed more easily after a night of drinking. Kumiko Shimotsubo, the human resources consultant who missed out on the promised road, called such sessions ‘nomunication’, an amalgam of ‘communication’ and nomu, which means to drink in Japanese.
Nakahara told the story of a young male employee at the bank. ‘One day his boss took him out. The only thing he was told in advance was that they were going to one of those places with girls. Anyway, they go in and, after they were welcomed, the first thing they were told to do was to pull their pants down, underwear and everything.’ The two men, both wearing business attire from the waist up, were then ushered into the exact replica of a subway carriage. There were even straps of the sort that hang from train compartments to add authenticity. The young graduate and his older boss sat opposite each other. ‘Then these girls come out with school uniforms on and basically kept on touching them for an hour,’ Nakahara said. The most awkward thing, her colleague later told her, was that throughout the entire experience, he was sitting within feet of his boss who was naked from the waist down. And all the time, Nakahara said, bursting out laughing, ‘the boss was smiling at him’.
Many Japanese women make relatively light of such entertainment. It is not uncommon to see families go out for a stroll with their young children in the huge neon-lit red-light districts that exist in every town and city. Many of the young women who work in such places are not desperately poor, but university students seeking extra spending money. Kirino said there were fewer taboos about such things in Japan than in the US. But unlike some, who regarded the Americans as too puritanical, she was not happy about the Japanese situation at all. ‘The way the sex industry exists in Japan is something that really upsets me, especially when teenage girls are exploited. Some people say: “Oh no. They love to go and work in that industry.” But when I hear that, my heart is crushed. The existence of hostess bars is one of the reasons that Japanese men and women don’t get along,’ she said. ‘You see, there are women who will perform services for men, pour their drinks, light their cigarettes. And at home, wives will cater to their husbands’ needs. There is a separation of roles, of being kind to men in two different settings. So men feel that, as long as they pay, they will receive service in such places. And when they go home, they will receive service from their wives. Japan is truly a kind of men’s paradise.’