On Being a Foreign Woman in Japan

Synchronicity can be so weird. Less than a day after discussing how different the experiences of foreign men in Japan are from those of foreign women, I came across this passage in Kickboxing Geishas:

The truth is that in many ways, it was my own loneliness that drove me to write this book. Before I went to Japan, I heard a million stories about how every night my Japanese colleagues would take me out drinking, how I would be forced to drink whisky after whisky, and how they would try to test my mettle by having me eat blowfish (a fatally poisonous dish, if not prepared correctly). It never occurred to me that these stories were told to me by men. A sign, I guess, to how equal I feel in my American workplace. But when I got to Japan, I discovered that the Japanese men I met during the course of my workday did not invite me drinking, to hostess clubs, out for blowfish. I spent each night alone.

-Chambers, 267

And this is true, even if you aren’t in the business/journalism world that she was in. Even in education, which at the upper levels, especially senior high, where I was teaching, is hugely dominated by male teachers, female ALTs (Asst. Language Teachers) end up having very different experiences than male ALTs. I personally didn’t mind all that much, being an introvert who needs her downtime, but it can be very isolating. The male teachers don’t know what to talk to you about outside of work; the few female teachers there are need to go home to their families.

What’s more, there is an assumption that foreign males arrive in Japan without many basic living skills, such as how to do laundry or cook. They are often painstakingly instructed in these things, sometimes taken under the wing of a female teacher or someone’s wife for cooking lessons. Foreign women conversely are expected to know how to do these things on their own. The women I did know who ended up with Japanese women friends usually got there through private language partners found outside of school entirely.

I’m not saying that we were excluded on purpose. If anything, I was treated like a Japanese woman in the workplace, in that it was expected I would have things to do outside of work, and I was grateful for it. One of my friends there was working for an architecture firm in Tokyo, and his life completely revolved around work, to the point that the only reason he was allowed to leave the office before midnight was because he lived on a train line that shut down for the night at a certain time, and he had to catch it. But foreign women working in Japan rarely get the same entrée into what is considered the typical Japanese working world, complete with required nightlife. Chambers’ point that she had never considered that the stories told to her beforehand were all from men is quite telling and very accurate.

I think it’s a point that is so often overlooked, even by ex-pats who are living there. Certainly amongst JETs, there is a mantra of, “Everyone’s situation is different,” meant to remind us all that there’s not much point being jealous or pitying when we hear about other JETs’ schools and co-teachers, because the JET experience varies so much. (There’s even an online comic called “esid” about this, but it’s on such a hideous page, I’m not linking to it.) Because I expected the differences, I didn’t really think too much about how, for example, my friend Richard’s experiences may have been different from mine, not just because he was at a different school, but because he was male.

I started thinking about it just a couple of months ago, though, after reading Bruce Feiler’s Learning to Bow (1992), which recounts his experiences teaching in Japan, probably with the JET program, although he never names it. Given that he was there more than 10 years before I was, one of my initial impressions was that some of the things he talked about were a little dated, but overall, his portrayal of life as a teacher in a Japanese school was pretty good. But as I read and thought about it more, I also saw distinct differences in his experience that I knew were due to his being male. (As an immediate and obvious example, the book opens with him getting naked with his colleagues at an onsen and then bonding over all the ensuing comments and getting drunk. I went to an onsen about mid-way through my time there, but all my female colleagues, none of whom were English teachers, did what all Japanese woman at onsen do, and basically ignored the fact that we were naked. Nor did we get drunk.)

I think this is why, in many ways, I felt like Kickboxing Geishas was telling my story. It was talking more about the side of Japan that I had experienced, despite the fact that it concentrated on the business community rather than education (and referred to Sendai as a small rice-farming community, despite the fact that it’s the largest city between Tokyo and Sapporo.) I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Read more of the musings reading this book inspired in these posts:

On the Pervasiveness of Sumimasen
What makes a role model?
On the Opinions of Celebrities