Geisha grrrls

You compare women's situation in Japan today with that of women in the U.S. circa 1974. What do you mean by that?

Think about what was going on here, with the ERA, with women getting some opportunities in the workplace but also talking more about what else they could do. Think of [TV's] Mary Tyler Moore: She was an associate producer on a news show, but she still answered her male boss's phone. In Japan, women might have a title and an opportunity to get their foot in the door, but they still don't necessarily have the power to do what men have traditionally done.

But in the U.S. in the '70s, those feelings and frustrations led to a major, organized push for women's equality. Is there an organized feminist movement in Japan?

This is a revolution without a movement. With the birthrate dropping, women getting married later and the level of women's entrepreneurship increasing, there's a feeling that things are changing. But I couldn't find the Japanese equivalent of NOW or anything like that. There's this one female media figure, Yoko Tajima, whom everyone refers to as the Gloria Steinem of Japan, but she doesn't represent an organized movement or agenda. She means a lot to a lot of women, but she's acting individually. Part of that is because Japan doesn't have a sit-in, petition, rally, movement type of culture. That's not the way that things get done there. When I first arrived, I actually thought all of this was going to grow into a movement by the time I left. I thought things were going to change, and I still do, but I'm not sure if it will be organized in a way that I or other American feminists can understand.

Do you think American women can learn from the way Japanese women conceive of work, home and success?

In the U.S., there seems to be a big divide separating women who stay at home with their kids and women who work in the office. It feels like you need to take a side. But most of us carry both of those ideas within ourselves: Women who work want nothing but the best for their children, and women who stay home still want to be intellectually engaged and challenged.

I think Japanese women are a little more comfortable taking from the old and new without feeling bad about either. Like American women, the Japanese women I interviewed were trying to construct a life with a meaningful sense of work and with satisfying relationships. But there's more of a "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" sense in their regard for tradition. Japanese women are trying to create a more modern sensibility, but there is also a connection to the past. I don't think the Japanese feel like they have to be career women or mothers; they don't feel like they have to be feminist or traditional. You can find a woman who works as a vice president at Canon and also really likes playing the shamisen, which is one of the traditional geisha arts, or a snowboarder who spends her off-season doing ikebana, or flower arranging. And that's not an embarrassing admission at all. The old is always with you, and not something to reject in order to create a new definition of yourself.

How did the women you interviewed greet the idea that they are part of a national "revolution," and that the choices they make at work and at home could impact other women's lives?

Japan is a very humble nation. One of the biggest hurdles was convincing women that they -- as individuals -- were important and interesting enough to be featured in the book. I spent a lot of time wooing women, trying to put across how important I thought they were to the project. At the same time, I was assuring them that I wasn't singling them out as "the nail that stands out and should be hammered down," to paraphrase the old Japanese saying.

It sounds like the changes taking place are positive, but they're not as earth-shattering or widespread as American feminists might expect, or want. Why should we feel optimistic for women in Japan?

It's easy to say that they are so far behind us because there's so little room for women in corporate Japan, and that corporate Japan is a chauvinistic system that locks women out. But it's more like corporate Japan is a strict and difficult taskmaster, and both sexes are trying to deal with that. At the same time, we're seeing a lot of highly educated American women, who were on the fast track in the corporate U.S., simply walk away from it all.

Which is all to say, is it possible that 30 or 40 years from now, Japanese women and American women could end up in a remarkably similar place? I think it is. It could be that Japanese women will carve a thoroughly modern existence and paths to opportunity without those early 10 or 20 years that American women spent in big corporations, feeling our way around in our skirt suits and blouses with floppy ties, some of us wanting to fast-track it in the Fortune 500. But many of us -- maybe most of us, like most men -- do not.

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