Working Lives: Gender and Society in the UK and Japan

This fifth seminar in the 2010 series, ‘States in Change: National Identity in the UK and Japan’, explored working lives in both countries from the perspective of gender issues and social change. The culture of work in Japan provided a particular focus. Against the backdrop of the economic downturn, the seminar considered current trends with respect to demographic change and career prospects for women. It also looked at the stereotype of the ‘salaryman’ and the shifting ambitions and perceptions of Japanese working men. A different gender dynamic was explored with respect to those Japanese firms that have been subject to foreign takeovers.

Summary

The chair, David Coats, in setting the backdrop to the talk, remarked that while absolute equality still eludes employees in the UK, we are still 30-35 years ahead of Japan in terms of the work and gender debate. Focusing on the UK, he remarked that legal changes have helped to improve work-related issues; public policy has been working with the grain of employers’ thinking and there has been significant pressure applied by NGOs. It is now easier for women to return to work after giving birth; flexible working hours are more common; and paternity and maternity leave have become more generous. This ultimately benefits the employers who are thus able to retain the best staff and recoup their investment in human capital. However, there is still a 22% gender pay gap, wider than in the Nordic countries, and gender segmentation (referring to the fact that some jobs are still only done by women or men) persists. It is mainly women, for example, who work in the 4 ‘c’ jobs – cleaning, catering, cashiering and caring -which tend to be low paid and undervalued. The more or less exclusively male trades include being electricians or plumbers.

Dr Helen Macnaughtan, the first speaker, analysed changes to female employment practices in Japan and the female employment system as a driver for change since the 1960s when it developed momentum. She began by describing the post-war gender-segmented system which has meant graduate recruitment, lifetime employment and seniority-based pay and promotion for men; women, in this context, have been regarded as temporary staff who, on marrying or giving birth, will either retire or return to work in a part-time capacity given old-fashioned attitudes to childcare, a lack of childcare provision and the persistence of the ‘male breadwinner’ model. Economic strains, emerging in the 1990s, have forced moves to earlier retirement, redundancy and a freeze on graduate recruitment to name a few measures.

41% of all workers in the Japanese labour force are women. A proportion will dip out of the labour force while in their 20s or 30s in order to have children before reintegrating themselves back into work. An increasing number of female workers, currently over 50%, are in non-regular employment. The number of non-regular male workers has also increased and there has been a huge growth in recent graduates taking non-regular jobs. Time will tell how this new cohort progresses and whether they will continue in non-regular jobs

While a third of female employees in Japan and in the UK work part-time, Macnaughtan remarked on differences in terms of their status and mobility. The classification, female part-timer, is far more rigid in Japan where a part-timer’s income tends to remain below about £8,000. This avoids the necessity to pay tax and ensures husbands a tax break for having a dependant. This also acts as an incentive for companies not to raise salaries.

Given the rapidly ageing population in Japan and low birth rate (1.25), there will be a shortage of young workers. By 2025, 2.1 workers will be supporting each pensioner. Fully using women in employment would redress the imbalance, Macnaughtan suggested.

In conclusion, Macnaughtan said that while women are a visible presence in the Japanese labour market, their status hasn’t changed significantly in recent decades; the pressure on the male-centred employment system seems to be economic rather than grassroots. Demographic tensions should bring about a concerted change.

Coats remarked that the Swedes are not experiencing the same demographic squeeze as Japan and the UK, very likely because of their dual-earning welfare system, which has been in place for a very long time, and flexible working hours. Unlike women in other countries, Swedish women needn’t defer motherhood given that there is no penalty for having children in one’s twenties.

Following on, the second speaker, Dr Jonathan D. Mackintosh, spoke about the decline or otherwise of the Japanese ‘salaryman’ or ‘white-collar businessman’ in what has been portrayed as a cultural crisis. This regular employee, on a seniority-based career path and loyal to the company in exchange for company benevolence, has been viewed with increasing uncertainty over the past couple of decades. During this period, economic pressures and uncertainty have had an impact on male identity and on the expectation of men as the productive breadwinners. ‘The Economist’ (5 January 2008) alluded to the salaryman ‘…the paragon of modern Japan, the white-collar hero who fashioned the world’s second-largest economy from the ashes of war…’ becoming ‘a figure of the past’.

The salaryman has been the focus of study in books such as ‘Farewell to the Salaryman?’ (Iida and Morris, 2008) and ‘Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Japan: Dislocating the Salaryman Doxa’ (Roberson and Suzuki, eds. 2003) and in recent films including ‘Tokyo Sonata’ (Kurosawa Kiyoshi 2008), ‘Tasogare Seibei’ (Yamada Yoji 2002) and ‘Shall We Dansu’ (Suo Masakyuki, 1996). A number of new slang terms have also emerged which mock ‘salarymen’ such as ‘ojo-man’, or a ‘girly’ man who is highly fashion conscious and un-competitive; and ‘otariiman’ referring to ‘soft masculinity’ by combining the work ‘otaku’ or obsessive/geek with man.

The salaryman has come to define an ethical ideal as well as an ideal representation of man and masculinity in Japan. As Roberson and Suzuki (2003) expressed it, he is ‘middle-class, heterosexual, married [and] considered as responsible for and representative of “Japan”.’ Nevertheless, remarked Mackintosh, the salaryman and masculinity have been repeatedly in crisis since the end of the Second World War in a continuing struggle over his identity.

Mackintosh proceeded to look at manifestations of the crisis surrounding the salaryman, concentrating on an animation film made by Taniguchi Takashi in 2004 called ‘Warui no o taose – Salaryman Man’ (‘Defeat the Evil One – Salaryman-man’), which parodies the salaryman – he speaks in a robotic and monotone fashion while Super Salaryman-man can fly, using his business cards as propellers. We are shown the ages of the ‘salaryman’ as well – from the younger cohort with a full head of hair to the older, jaded cohort with far less. In the film the young give up on their company president astonishingly quickly; belying the ideal of unvarying loyalty to the company and suggesting that in times of increasing unemployment, institutional support is quickly worn away. The villain in the piece is the part-timer, unable to secure a permanent job and of suspect virility as he can’t keep a girlfriend.

The third speaker, Dr George Olcott, has made an extensive study of Japanese companies taken over by foreign firms, looking at what happens to their recruitment and training, career opportunities for female employees, lifetime employment and career patterns, reward structures, the decision-making process, hierarchy and the role of the HR department. In doing his survey, Olcott looked at a trio of Japanese firms taken over by foreign firms against three Japanese firms in the same line of business.

Olcott pointed out that Japan has the lowest number of female managers (at Japanese firms) of all the OECD countries other than Korea. While the USA boasts 43% at the top end, in the case of Japan it is 5.5%. Female board members are also few and women tend to take on clerical (‘ippanshoku’) jobs rather than managerial (‘sogoshoku’) roles.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that Japanese women began making inroads into the ‘sogoshoku’ stream. Little has changed in the last forty years in terms of female employment despite the equal opportunities act of 1986. Foreign firms in Japan, however, place greater emphasis on diversity and equality which results in higher salaries, narrow salary gaps with male workers, better promotion prospects ( 12.3% female managers v 5.5%) and longer leave, supporting Olcott’s thesis that takeover by a foreign firm will lead to improved prospects for female employees.

The foreign takeover companies that Olcott studied experienced a dramatic rise in the number of female managers, primarily as a result of top down affirmative action taken by the new CEOs and active recruitment of senior female executives from outside. The foreign firms also scrapped the sogoshoku/ippanshoku distinction, abandoned uniforms, introduced crèches and introduced diversity development and initiatives to encourage clerical staff to move upwards and into managerial roles.

These initiatives only worked because of the foreign Chief Executives’ extraordinary energy. While dramatic in impact, the results were, surprisingly, not perceived by a large number of women; the ones who did notice the changes were those who were older or had been at the firm for a longer period of time. Female workers tended not to seek promotion as actively as had been anticipated and some left, opposed to their own promotion. Male employees, on the hand, often found it difficult to report to a female boss – all this demonstrating that merely changing policy is not enough and that gender equality in the work place is still at a distance.

The questions and comments following the talks covered a range of issues including reasons why salarymen might be afraid of taking all their holidays; the need to scrap the tax break given to married men; the suggestion of a tax break for working women with dependent husbands; the likelihood in Japan of a strong social grassroots’ push for change; the fact that Japanese female graduates of four-year universities are less likely to work than those who graduate from two-year universities; and the fact that unions are not doing much for irregular employees.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/print/nb20100706a5.html

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