Urban Middle-Class Japanese Women and Their White Faces: Gender, Ideology, and Representation Author(s): Mikiko Ashikari

Source: Ethos, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Mar., 2003), pp. 3-37 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3651863 . Accessed: 24/06/2011 03:54
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Urban Women

Middle-Class Japanese and Their Faces: White and Ideology, Gender, Representation
MIKIKO ASH IKARI

ABSTRACT There are multiple gender discourses and gender representations in contemporary Japan, but a "traditional"gender ideology-men working soto (outside the home) and women its dominant position among managing uchi (home)-keeps them. Japanese women care about their complexion and put foundation on their faces when they go outside (soto). This article illustrates how the women's white faces serve as a symbolic language, which communicates gender relations. Women present the whiteface in public, performing the subjectivity of ideal women based on the gender ideology. The practice offace whitening enacts the gender ideology of the tradition and the past, and this bodily practice itself is a mode of knowledge about the gender ideology. In other words, the gender ideology is authorized through the public representation of "ideal" gender relations. n Japan, the majority of women wear foundation that makes their faces look whiter than they really are, whenever they go to public places, both in the day time and in the evening. This article is about middle-class Japanese women as they have experienced and represented their gender in relation to their white faces. The fieldwork research was undertaken in Osaka and Kobe between September 1996 and July 1997. The fieldwork consisted of participant-observation in several settings; life histories of women; unstructured interviews with women and men; structured interviews with representatives of cosmetic companies; observation of women in the street; and a survey by questionnaire. I worked with 42 women in total and took a detailed life history of six women. I also ? 2003, Ethos Association. 31(1):3-37. Copyright American Anthropological

4 ? ETHOS

conducted unstructured interviews with 15 men. My research suggests that the face-whitening practice is related to the public representation of ideal womanhood based on the ideological division by gender-soto (outside the home)/men and uchi (home)/women-within Japanese society. Women's white faces serve as an item of vocabulary in a symbolic language, which communicates gender relations. Through the representation of ideal image of gender relations, women learn how to negotiate not only a better position within gender relations but also the power that is tied to thegender ideology. 1 Both my street observation and questionnaire survey suggest that the vast majority of women wear foundation in public places (see Tables 1 and 2). However, middle-class Japanese women do not often wear foundation at home, and they usually decorate their faces with foundation before they
Table 1. Numberof WomenWearingMakeupon Weekdays in an UrbanArea in Japan Total Casual Uniform Dressed-up (%of group group group no makeup/ no makeup/ no makeup/ un-made-up women) makeup makeup makeup Grocery Store (1996-11-11 12:00 p.m.) (1997-6-23 12:00 p.m.) Department Store (1996-11-18 2:45 p.m.) (1997-6-23 4:35 p.m.) Office Building (1996-11-11 12:15 p.m.) (1997-6-26 12:00 p.m.) Total 0/20 2/32 4**/25 5/36 0/20 2/7 13/196 6*/76 0/71 0/73 0/106 0/121 0/48 6/439 0/0 0/0 0/6 0/0 0/79 0/57 0/142 6/96 2/103 4/104 5/142 0/220 2/112 19/777 (2.4%)

*Five out of six were women who looked over 70 years old. * One out of four was a cleaning lady with a mop and a bucket.

Table 2. Numberof WomenWearingMakeupon Sunday in an UrbanArea in Japan Uniform Total Casual Dressed-up (%of group group group no makeup/ no makeup/ no makeup/ un-made-up makeup makeup makeup women) 3/43 0/132 0/0 3/175 (1.6%)

Department Store (1997-6-29 2:45 p.m.)

Japanese Women and Their White Faces ? 5

go outside. They claim that they put on foundation before they go to soto because wearing foundation in public places is "etiquette" or "common sense" for mature women. Wearing foundation in public places appears to be the norm for middle-class women in contemporary Japan. A middleclass woman who happens to go to work without makeup one day is irritated to find herself being questioned by her colleagues, both male and female, who want to know what is wrong with her, why she is not wearing makeup, and whether she is feeling ill. Middle-class men and women take it for granted that a woman will wear makeup in public. In other words, since the great majority of women-more than 95 percent of them according to the results of my own survey-wear makeup in public places, if a mature middle-class woman appeared with an unmade face in public, she would inevitably be making a statement. An informant told me that such a woman gave the impression of being a grassroots activist, a feminist activist, or a non-Japanese. The tone of her voice revealed that she did not want to be mistaken as any of them. Numerous anthropological studies of middle-class Japanese women suggest that there is a gender ideology among urban middle-class people: men work outside the home (soto) and women manage the home (uchi). These studies conclude that the "typical"and "average"middle-class woman orients herself primarily toward her family (uchi) and that her life centers in and around the domestic realm (see, e.g., Hendry 1993a; Imamura 1987; Iwao 1993; Lebra 1984; Lock 1988; S. Vogel 1978). However, many of the studies illustrating how middle-class people conform to the division based on the gender ideology in everyday life do not question why this should be so. For example, Suzanne Vogel, in her article "Professional Housewife" (1978), claims that being a middle-class Japanese housewife is a job, a profession that gives her "purpose in life," and even her selfdefinition. Vogel suggests that the middle-class women are willing to stay in the home because Japanese people believe that "the housewife's place is central to the family and basic to the society" (1978:42). Sociologist Anne Imamura, in her Urban Japanese Housewives, also points out that "for the full-time housewife, obviously the motivation to be a good housewife as defined by society is predominant" (1987:138), and she explains that the division by gender reflects "social structures and values" (1987: 140). Both Vogel and Imamura take it for granted that the middle-class women act in the way they do in order to benefit society and to maintain social structure and values. Iwao's analysis, in her book The Japanese Woman (1993) (which is, in fact, a book about middle-class Japanese women's lives), reveals that women can gain practical material benefits by their compliance with the division of labor by gender. Iwao Sumiko, a Japanese psychologist who conducts research into the lives of contemporary middle-class women,

6 ? ETHOS

refutes the traditional image of the Japanese women who are confined to the home by the division of gender, emphasizing the more liberated reality of the lives of these middle-class women. However, she also suggests that it is only through this division of labor that the women can wield their power. She argues that middle-class women keep on conforming to the ideological division that is the base of the women's affluence and freedom because of the practical benefits they themselves derive from it, rather than for the general social good. She concludes that even if the reality of gender relations is changed, the ideological division will survive (1993:282). Sociologist Ogasawara Yoko develops Iwao's idea about the connection between the women's power and the division of labor. In her study Office Ladies and Salaried Men (1998), Ogasawara argues that the sex segregation of status and roles in the workplace provides the female workers with leverage over male workers. Ogasawara, like Iwao, assumes that the middle-class female workers think and act rationally and are willing to conform to the ideology to gain their informal power. The emphasis on rational choice often blinds us to the individual's emotions and self-satisfaction and blurs the existence of women who make no such "rational" choice. Takie Lebra, who collected life histories of women for her Japanese Women, proposes that the women's "inner feelings and thoughts, aspirations and frustrations, and an awareness of a unique self-identity" (1984:3) must be taken into account in the ethnography of women. Lebra emphasizes the fact that individual Japanese do not always conform to the social values, saying that some of the life histories show the individual's strong determination toward gaining self-fulfillment in the face of social pressures, including the pressure on women to stay at home. However, she concludes thus: "The point is that, whether in accepting or rejecting a social demand, one's decision or action is coded in such a way as to reflect some aspect of 'social structure' or of the 'role' which one is supposed to play" (1984:295). This conclusion implies that the women's actions toward self-fulfillment in spite of social pressures cannot have an impact on "social structure." Lebra draws attention to the individual's emotions and thoughts but leaves it unexplained why the ideological division by gender is powerful enough to displace the individual's resistance. A recent study of female college students by Brian McVeigh (1997) attempts to explain the pervasive power of the gender ideology by examining the process by which young women acquire a female identity. McVeigh argues that the women's junior college is the place where the students learn about "appropriate dress, proper speech, an enthusiastic attitude toward work, and dealing with colleagues and superiors in such a way that male-dominated hierarchical structures are privileged" (1997:217). McVeigh, citing Foucault's ideas, suggests that the gender identity based

Japanese Womenand TheirWhiteFaces ? 7

on the ideological division is for both sexes constructed through bodily management and experiences and used for sociopolitical and economic ends. McVeigh provides a picture of the way in which the gender ideology is produced and reproduced among middle-class women. However, in his analysis, femaleness is assumed to be equally and autonomously inscribed into the women through the body. If so, why are some women willing to conform to the ideology, while others are not? Rather, why does a woman who usually conforms to the ideology resist it under certain conditions? The analysis based on Foucault's ideas about body and power cannot explain the differences and diversity among middle-class women and within any individual woman. Indeed, the women I encountered during my fieldwork show considerable differences in their feelings and attitudes toward their gendered experience of everyday life as urban middle-class women. Most of the data presented here derives from the women's life histories. I did not select the women for any particular reason. They happened to become my most important informants due to their willingness to share their experience with me and probably their desire to be recognized by me (and potentially with "Western" Others). I met most of them at least once a week, and if I did not, either the woman or I made a phone call to have a long chat. The women often claimed that they made sense of themselves and their lives while they were talking to me about themselves. However, I need to emphasize that the women made sense of themselves in their narratives to me. This means not only that their narratives were selective accounts of themselves but also that the narratives depended on my presence as their Other (see also Crapanzano 1980; White 1980). Thus, the life history as an anthropological narrative inevitably includes my narrative. In the women's life histories, however, I do not eliminate myself as their Other in order to make clear the relationship between the women and their Other. Crapanzano suggests that the elimination of the form of a narrative "I"renders the life history timeless and static, precluding both clinical and cultural evaluation (1980:9). I am aware that my narrative is very limited but always "self-conscious" or "self-critical" (Crapanzano 1980:11; Moore 1994:127). My informants are women who are so-called urban middle-class women. In Japan, as elsewhere, it is very difficult to describe exactly who constitutes the female middle class. Since Bourdieu (1984) showed that class can be determined by taste, the definition has become vaguer than ever. Furthermore, there is also a contextual difficulty in defining the middle class in Japan: there is a great tendency (a popular 90%-middle-class myth) to see the middle class as a universal class, representing everyone in contemporary Japan. In my article, I use the term middle-class women to refer to those married to-or expecting to marry-a sarariman (literally,

8 ? ETHOS

salary man: a male white-collar worker) and living in an urban setting according to my empirical definition based on my fieldwork. My informants consist of various kinds of women: full-time housewives, career women, OL (Office Ladies: female non-career-track clerks), a single mother, university lecturers, and housewives with part-time jobs. Every woman exhibited her own individual taste in clothing and makeup. Some preferred to dress casually, others elegantly. Nevertheless, all of these women agreed that women are expected to wear foundation when they go to soto, and most of them did so themselves. The women's narratives suggest that there is an ideological division of labor and space by gender and that the model of "superior men" and "subordinated women" derived from the central ideology is the ideal and dominant model of gender relations. Both middle-class men and women refer for maleness and femaleness to the ideology and try to construct and represent themselves in relation to the ideal images in public. However, it does not mean that their "actual" relations always correspond to the ideal gender relation. Both my participant-observation and the women's life histories reveal that the actual personalities of many women are, in fact, very different from the image of "subordinated women." Nevertheless, these women want to represent their images as the "subordinated women" who respect the gender ideology in public. In this article, I explore why and how the gender ideology can keep its dominant position in relation to the white face, although the ideal image of men and women does not always correspond to the actual relations of men and women in everyday life. First, I explore what the white face symbolizes in contemporary Japan, and I examine how the white face is adopted by middle-class women in everyday life. Then I illustrate how both men and women try to represent themselves along with the ideal gender relations in public and how they experienced their gender differently through the ideological representation. Finally, I analyze the pervasive power of the ideology in relation to the dominant representation of gender relations in public.

THE WHITE AND FACE TRADITIONAL VIRTUES FEMININE

Recent anthropological studies of dress (including veils) focus on body decoration as a means of communication (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1986:159-167; Barnes and Eicher 1992; Eicher 1995; Hendry 1993b:70-97; Macleod 1991). These studies show that body decoration serves to communicate about gender and ethnicity in various societies. In contemporary Japan, the white face seems to have become a norm for the Japanese woman and serves as a symbolic language of gender relations. Here I will explore exactly what the white face symbolizes, by examining both where the symbolic

Japanese Women and Their White Faces * 9

meaning originated and how the white face was adopted by contemporary woman (see Ashikari 2003).

TheOrigin theWhite of Face

Most Japanese people believe that white faces are "traditionally" women's faces; however, in the premodern period (that is, before 1868), it was the social norm for the male nobility, as well as the female nobility, to paint their faces with heavy white powder. The white face became the woman's face when the representation of the male body and of the female body were differently modernized and Westernized in the course of the Meiji Restoration (1867-).2 It is through the Meiji Restoration, which is a nationalist project as well as a process of modernization and Westernization, that the meanings of the white face of middle-class women were reformed and invented, and the white face came to be one of symbols that represented ideal womanhood for all Japanese women and men. The Meiji government strongly encouraged men to stop wearing white powder and to crop their hair knot and copy Western men's short hairstyle. By contrast, the government made it illegal for women to have their hair cut short. Nihon-gami (nihon, Japan; gami, hair: women's native hairstyles in the Edo period) remained the most popular style for women's hair, supported by the native reaction triggered by the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), whereas the "Western" hairstyle for men was naturalized, and their native hairstyle with the knot was totally abandoned. This difference is based on the gender ideology invented by the Meiji nationalists, which assigned middle-class women in the home to protect the traditional native culture from Western influences, whereas it assigned middle-class men to learn about Western culture and technology outside the home in order to catch up with Western countries (cf. Chatterjee 1986, 1989). As a part of the Meiji nationalist project, a traditional, ideal image of women, which was based on the samurai-class women, was invented and imposed on women of all classes. The Meiji government propagated a particular image of all Japanese women by making middle-class women into models of "good wives and wise mothers" for lower-class women, in order to promote Japaneseness and Japanese identity and to combat other forms of femininity originally associated with other classes or other ethnic minority groups.3 Compulsory education was introduced, and at school, girls of all classes were educated to believe that the feminine virtues of middle-class women were among the most important qualifications for a good Japanese national. Middle-class Meiji women became an essential symbol of tradition and native culture, not only as distinct from Western women but also from lower-class "indigenous and backward" women. However, this does not mean that all Japanese women came to embody the ideal womanhood in

10 * ETHOS

their lives. Lower-class women had to keep working outside the home, as farmers, miners, or factory workers, and some of them kept their "indigenous and backward" attitudes, being coarse, vulgar, loud, quarrelsome, and sexually promiscuous, from the middle-class point of view. Nevertheless, since the Meiji period, the other forms of gender meanings and of gender representations were subjugated to the feminine virtues of middleclass women. Lower-class women now came to know what kinds of femininity were formal, public, and Japanese. The representation of Japanese women was standardized and unified into the image of middle-class women, and women of any class, who did not always conform to the dominant gender ideology, learned how to represent themselves as Japanese women in public. In the Taisho period (1912-26), as Western clothing became widely available for urban middle-class women, the Meiji style of white makeup and native hairstyle came to appear only on some special formal occasions. The Taisho period was the turning point when kimono consolidated its function of representing tradition, by being separated fromfashion. As fashion lives on change, Western clothing continued to change according to fashion from Taisho on. By contrast, kimono froze into the one we see today, and thus kimono became more powerful as a representative of tradition (see Dalby 1993:129). Although the domain of kimono in Japanese women's daily life was shrinking, kimono, which preserves its original style as a garment of Meiji middle-class women, gained power as an icon representing the "traditional" ideal image of Japanese women with their feminine virtues. Meiji women's makeup styles and hairstyles were also separated from fashion in the Taisho period and have since been preserved as a part of kimono "tradition." In everyday life, Western hairstyles became popular among Taisho middle-class women, and many of them started to use nonlead white powder, which produced a more transparent, pure white complexion, giving up the Meiji white-lead powder, which completely hid women's real skin tone.4 Thus the white face as everyday makeup and the traditional white face were separated. However, this does not mean that the everyday white face of middle-class women was freed from the task of representing feminine virtues in everyday life. The debates concerning shokugyo-fujin (shokugyo, occupation; fujin, women: middle-class working women) revealed the way in which the need for middle-class women to present the ideal feminine virtue in public arose as the number of middle-class women who took paid jobs and worked outside the home increased. The economy needed middle-class women in the labor force, but public discourse was generally critical of shokugyo-fujin, stereotyping them as "new and progressive women." Women's lifestyle magazines regularly introduced new styles of Western clothing and makeup styles for shokugyo-fujin but

Japanese Women and Their White Faces * 11

simultaneously warned that a shokugyo-fujin needed to choose her Western clothing and makeup style more carefully than a katei-fujin (katei, home; fujin, woman: middle-class women who do not work outside the home) in order to display her "modesty and chastity" through her appearance in public (Tsuda and Murata 1993:44-48). These articles suggest that shokugyo-fujin should show their respect for the dominant model of "good wives and wise mothers" by choosing the right clothing and makeup style or the right manners in public. The makeup style that copied Western actresses, involving the application, for example, of eyeliner, eye shadow, or false eyelashes, was popular among bar hostesses and dancers, but it was regarded as the "wrong" makeup for middle-class women. There was a certain style of makeup that made all women look like katei-fujin, proper housewives. It was the "right" makeup for middle-class women. This everyday white face, which was separated from the traditional white face, came to serve as a symbol of the traditional ideal feminine virtues in everyday life, as the traditional face did on the special formal occasions in women's lives.

The White Face in Contemporary Japan

In 1990s Japan, the everyday white face was still and even more widely adopted by middle-class women in their everyday lives, while the traditional white face has remained and served as a sign of Japaneseness and traditional feminine virtue on special occasions, such as wedding ceremonies and coming-of-age ceremonies. The everyday white face has greatly changed its styles according to fashion. For example, skin-color foundation, which was introduced in the Meiji period, finally became popular among Japanese middle-class women after World War II, and the "white" face changed in color from pure white to skin color, assimilating to Western women's made-up face. Nevertheless, my fieldwork from 1996 to 1997 suggests that the everyday white face is still used as a means of representing the dominant forms of femininity based on the gender ideology in the everyday life of contemporary Japan. The function of makeup in the West is alleged to be to improve an individual's appearance, and women are said to wear makeup for social satisfaction (see Brain 1979; Lakoff and Scherr 1984; Wolf 1991). Lakoff and Scherr, in their study of the meaning of female beauty in the contemporary United States, suggest that cosmetics in the West may be divided into two types according to their function: those that merely enhance what is already there and those that actually change the appearance (1984:142). Foundation for Japanese women does not seem to belong to either group. Japanese women seem to be using it in order to achieve the standardized white face that is believed to be the "normal and right" complexion of the Japanese woman. My informants always concentrated most on how to

12 * ETHOS

"improve their complexion" through the use of foundation. At the same time, they also focused on the complexion more than anything else when they looked at other women's made-up faces (see also Ishida 1995:26-28). Achieving the appearance of a "right"complexion is the basis of the Japanese art of makeup. The major Japanese cosmetics makers admit that foundations are the central cosmetics in the everyday makeup of most Japanese women (see also Ishida 1995:32-34; Women'sReport 1995:54-55).5 Also, the results of my survey suggest that Japanese women have a kind of "obsession" for wearing foundation: 93.7 percent of my respondents answered that they always put on foundation when they wore makeup. Wearing eye makeup or lipstick without facial foundation is common among women in the United Kingdom and the United States, but this is rarely seen in Japan (see Table 3). For most mature middle-class Japanese women, "making up" actually means putting onfoundation. Foundations produced for the domestic market are available in six or seven subtly different shades that are based on a standard color. The differences in shade are not to enhance one's natural skin tone but to obliterate it. For example, if the natural color of one's skin is more reddish than the standard color, she would be advised to use a yellowish foundation, so Table3. Number Women of That Products on Answering TheyWoreParticular Makeup a DailyBasis
Tokyo Kansai

n = 59 n = 12 n =47
Foundation Finishing powder Lipstick Lipliner Lipgloss Eyebrow pencil Eye shadow Eyeliner Mascara Cheek blush Highlighter Noseshadow 12/45 4/16 12/47 4/8 1/0 10/20 7/30 5/7 3/9 2/12 1/1 1/1 Single/Married

n = 68
Single/Married Total (%) 119 42 126 371 4 75 71 29 28 36 5 4 (93.7%) (33.1%) (99.2%) (29.1%) (0.3%) (59.1%) (55.9%) (22.8%) (22.0%) (28.3%) (0.4%) (0.3%)

n = 29

n = 39

27/35 7/15 28/39 10/15 1/2 19/26 12/22 5/12 6/10 4/18 1/2 1/1

Perfume
Manicure

6/5
3/2

9/10
9/9

30 (23.6%)
23 (18.1%)

Other Note:N= 127.

2/0

1/1

4 (0.3%)

*Lip salve, false nails, and concealer.

Japanese Women and Their White Faces * 13

that the reddish tone of her face would be weakened. In this way, my informants' complexions created by Japanese foundation inevitably looked closer to the standard color, regardless of whether the women intended it or not (see also Kesho bunka 1987:6-7). This is not to say that presenting a particular skin tone as a standard color is important. According to the domestic cosmetics firms, the standard color of foundation is not fixed but, rather, changes every few years according to fashions in makeup. What is important is to present the same face color as the other women do. For middle-class Japanese women, making their complexions look the same as other middle-class women's complexions and, through this standardized white face, making themselves look "normal" in public is one of the important functions of everyday makeup. As presenting the white face in public became normal, not just ideal, for Japanese women, the power of the white face as a symbol of traditional feminine virtue became more pervasive. An informant, a university lecturer in her forties, who rarely wears makeup, provided me with a good example. When she was working in a laboratory as a researcher at a big pharmaceutical company in the late 1980s, she had never been in the habit of wearing makeup at work. One day she attended a meeting without makeup where there were a lot of employees, both men and women, from different sections of the company:
I did not realize that I was the only woman who was not wearing makeup at the meeting. Rather, I paid no attention to whether other women wore makeup or not. Next day, my male boss came to me and told me in a serious tone of voice to wear makeup when I next attended a meeting. According to my boss, several male departmental managers who saw me at the meeting had criticized him because I had not been wearing makeup. One of them told him, "You are indulging [amayakasu] her!" I was really shocked and from then onwards I began to wear makeup whenever I had to see somebody from outside my group.

Two other informants who worked for big companies told me that they had had the same sort of experience, being asked to wear makeup by their male bosses, because they looked "cheeky" or "rude and asocial" if they did not. In fact, most of my female informants themselves felt little antipathy toward the social norm of wearing makeup in the soto domain, saying, for example, "Wearing makeup at work is common-sense for mature women" or "Women who do not wear makeup are likely to be eccentric persons." The un-made-up middle-class woman in public gives the impression, regardless of her intentions, that she does not appreciate the values of traditional feminine virtues and that she is challenging not only social norms in general but also the gender ideology. On the other hand, if a woman presents a "feminine" made-up white face, this means she is being polite and respectful toward the people she meets, especially the men. Presenting the white face is to represent certain gender relations that middle-class women are expected to and willing to play their part in.

14 * ETHOS

WOMEN THE MIDDLE-CLASSAND SOTO/UCHI DIVISION

There is an ideological division by gender-soto/men and uchi/womenthat middle-class women share. My informants try to represent the ideal image of gender relations in public, although their actual gender experiences vary according to individuals, situations, and stages of life. The women's practice of decorating the face for the soto domain works as one of the elements that emphasize the division into soto and uchi, confirming the dominant representation of gender relations. The ideology of gender relations exists as a pervasive symbol, on the one hand, while, on the other hand, the gender ideology is also produced and reproduced through its connection with the material world. Middle-class women feel that they need to put foundation on only when they go outside their home. Interestingly, the ways in which my informants explained why they wore makeup were identical. Most of them stated that women should put makeup on when they go to "soto" (literally, outside), using precisely the same term-soto. Soto can mean everything outside the physical structure of the house. However, the idea of soto cannot be understood in isolation. The term immediately calls to mind the other term with which it is paired-uchi (literally, inside). Indeed my informants explained that they did not usually wear makeup when they stayed "uchi." Middle-class women somehow distinguish the soto space from uchi by putting on foundation for the soto domain. The uchi/soto distinction has been extensively used as one of the main concepts in many studies of Japanese society. Most classic studies suggest that the distinction is embedded in Japanese culture and Japanese people's behavior. These studies discuss the uchi/soto division as modes of emotional orientation and action, focusing on the context of psychological aspect. Most of them commonly focus on the relation with other paired sets of terms, such as ura (back)/omote (front), honne (real feeling)/tatemae (social surface), and ninjo (the world of personal feelings)/giri (social obligation) (e.g., Doi 1973; Lebra 1976; Nakane 1970). On the other hand, a recent study of the "Japanese sense of self" argues that soto and uchi are contextually defined, pointing out that the uchi/soto division reflects a located perspective of the self toward the world (Rosenberger 1992a). The soto space, as the physical sphere where a middle-class woman feels that she needs to wear makeup, varies according to persons and contexts in everyday life. This does not devalue the fact that the notion of the distinction between soto and uchi does exist among the middle-class women. However, it proposes that the examination of the distinction should focus on what the dichotomy of soto and uchi created by the standardized white face means for the middleclass women, instead of seeking the physical boundary between soto and uchi.

Japanese Women and Their White Faces * 15

Anthropological studies of Japanese society point out that the terms soto and uchi are frequently used to describe gender relations, for example, "men work soto and women manage uchi." First, E. Vogel (1963) and Plath (1964) employed this dichotomy to describe the division of labor and space by gender peculiar to the sarariman's family in the late 1950s, during which time the number of sarariman rapidly increased. According to Vogel and Plath, the wives of sarariman families became the focus of the aspirations of other women because of their clearer distinction of soto and uchi in everyday life. If husband and wife manage an independent business or a small shop, or if they are farmers or factory workers, the wife has to some extent to cooperate with her husband in earning money. On the other hand, the wives of the sarariman in a big firm are able to stay at home, relying on the regular salary earned by the husbands outside the home. Since then, many anthropologists have come to focus on the uchi/soto distinction by gender in contemporary Japanese society (e.g., Allison 1994; Edwards 1989; Kondo 1990; R. Smith 1987). These studies illustrate that the gender ideology of soto/men and uchi/women, which originated in the Meiji nationalist gender ideology, still dominates gender relations in postwar Japan, regardless of drastic changes in the social, political, and economic domains. The gender ideology is most explicitly represented by the ideal image of husband and wife acted out in the wedding ceremony. As described by Walter Edwards (1989), who conducted participant-observation at a wedding hall in the early 1980s, the format of weddings became identical throughout Japan and consisted of several elaborate ceremonies created by the wedding industry, which started to develop during the 1950s: first the Shinto ceremony, then the opening speeches, the cake-cutting ceremony, the congratulatory speeches, the candle service, the entertainment, the flower presentation, and finally the closing speeches. Edwards points out that the "performance" (1989:14) of the wedding ceremony is designed to publicly reconfirm the notion of formal male-female relations shared by all the participants, including the bride and groom. The ideal image of marital harmony as a partnership of two persons of unequal status is repeatedly manifested:
in the wedding hall's narrative script the bride happily declares her willingness to follow the groom's silent lead; the bride who wrote her own narration . . . celebrates her happiness at having found someone on whom she can be dependent. Wedding speakers frequently remind brides of their duty to devote themselves to their husbands, injunctions often translated into ideal images of the division of labor: men are charged with the important task of going out in the world to work, women with the subordinate role of supporting their husbands by running the home. [1989:114]

The reality of the ideological division of soto/men and uchi/women appears in a formal discourse of marriage.

16 * ETHOS

On the other hand, in everyday life this ideology fosters dominant and pervasive gender stereotypes-a hardworking sarariman husband and a lazy shufu (housewife). Many of the English-language anthropological studies of the postwar Japanese middle class stress that the primary role of Japanese men is to work very hard for a company, while that of women is to care for their families (e.g., Allison 1994; Imamura 1987; S. Vogel 1978). The stereotypical image of the middle-class Japanese woman as the selfless, devoted "Professional Housewife" (S. Vogel 1978) repeatedly appears in the Western media as well as in the Western literature on Japanese society and culture. Nevertheless, the gender stereotype of middle-class women that prevails within Japanese society is totally different from that of the professional housewife (see also Lock 1993:116). Housewives are frequently portrayed as "lazy shufu" in the Japanese mass media and even sometimes in academic writings. The term shufu should be translated as "housewife" in English. However, it may be applied to any married woman of any age and any social or economic status, and the term was used especially when my informants talked about a woman's "idleness" or "selfishness." Indeed, most of my informants were keen to make themselves fit this stereotype and to project their images as such in public. For example, Kaoru, who was working as a computer officer for a university where I had a part-time job, graduated from one of the exclusive universities and had reasonable knowledge of computers. While this 26-year-old woman was helping me install some program on my computer, she was chatting with me:
I want to be a full-time housewife-that's what I always talk about with my women friends. After all, I'm so lazy. I want to be something. But, in reality, even if a chance comes along, I don't have the nerve to go for it. I always think everything would soon become too complicated and difficult for me to handle. I really want to become "dependable and reliable," but I don't seem to be able to manage it. I mean, I'm so slow and make so many mistakes.

Later, I found out that she is a very good koto (Japanese harp) player who could become a professional player, according to her good friend. Nevertheless, this kind of thing was never mentioned to me. The stereotype of the housewife is associated with two popular stereotypes, that of the female university student and the OL. The stereotypical life course of a middle-class woman was often depicted using all three stereotypes. She first becomes a female university student, whose main interest is what she does in her spare time. Then, after graduation, she works as an OL, whose main task is brightening up the office life of men as "an office flower." Then she becomes a housewife, whose job is "lifetime employment" with three free meals and a nap. Some women were not entirely happy about this stereotypic view of women. Nanako, a 35-yearold housewife, is managing to lead an "ideal" middle-class life, by graduating from a good college, getting a job in a big company, finding a good

Japanese Women and Their White Faces * 17

spouse, and buying a detached house. Nanako explained that none of these things was achieved overnight and that it had taken a lot of effort to achieve them. Thus she has secured her position as a middle-class woman. However, she is lumped together with other women in the strictly defined but broad category of "only a housewife." She seemed to be frustrated by this, but she somehow took it for granted that people saw her as only a housewife. Nanako expressed her feelings thus:
Unlike men, women change their identities quite frequently and easily in their lives, starting off as a female university student, then becoming an OL, and then a housewife ... though, some become career women. Or rather, women are forced to change their identities because mawari [literally, surrounding; the people around them] start to treat us differently according to their status.

Nanako rarely talks about fashion or makeup. Nanako, who has her own style of dress, does not mind too much if her styles look fashionable or not. She never wears jeans or trousers, which many housewives of her age wear in their daily lives. She prefers to wear a "proper" skirt and puts makeup on before she goes out. Last year, she went to a reunion party at her old college, wearing a feminine suit. A woman friend, who works as a journalist, came to her and said, "Wow, you have turned into a realMisesu [Mrs., a nice way to say a housewife]." However, Nanako is not interested in making herself look like a career woman or a single woman. She thinks that she should not look like anything other than afutsu-no (ordinary) housewife, because she says, that is what she really is. Women who look like they are willing to engage themselves in this life-course are referred to as "ordinary" (futsu-no), whereas those who do not as "not ordinary" (futsu-janai). When it comes to describing men, on the other hand, the word futsu-no is used differently: the expressionfutsuno sararlman (ordinary salaried men) is very common, but the people do not say futsu-no isha (ordinary medical doctors),futsu-no bengoshi (ordinary lawyers), orfutsu-no jieigyo (ordinary self-employed men). For a middle-class man, it is "ordinary" to be a sarariman, as it is for a middleclass woman to be a housewife. In daily conversations, my informants, especially the married ones, often used the expressionfutsf-no to describe other women favorably, for example,futsu-no o-josan (unmarried women), futsu-no OL, or futsu-no housewives, implying that such women were willing to center their lives on the family as housewives or future housewives. In contrast, the women who devote themselves to their career are categorized into another gender stereotype, that of the "career woman." The "career woman" provides the stereotype of women who are not "feminine" and thus not desirable as wives. Images and representations of three gender categories of "ordinary" women-female university students and OL as well as housewives-have appeared widely and constantly in the Japanese mass media, TV and magazines, and they have come to be well-

18 * ETHOS

known and pervasive gender stereotypes in contemporary Japan. These women often become the targets of jokes that make fun of their "idleness," "selfishness," and the fact that they are "extravagant consumers." These gender stereotypes of Japanese women are perpetuated by women themselves as well as by men. The stereotypes of women exaggerate their "idleness," "selfishness," "irresponsibility," and "extravagance as consumers." However, since my married informants were responsible for and manage almost all work related to uchi, including the financial management, these stereotypic images have, in fact, nothing to do with whether women are actually lazy or not. Nevertheless, the powerful stereotypes promote the idea that women as a group distinct from men are lazy. The pejorative descriptions of the stereotypes propagate the idea of women's incompetence at making money or achieving a higher status in the soto domain, putting these women down. At the same time, middle-class men are almost always portrayed in the Japanese media and in literature as hardworking sarariman, and they tend to project such an image in public. These gender stereotypes about the different qualities, attitudes, and behavior of women and men are generated and used to give hierarchical order to the two opposing but complementary gender discourses. The gender stereotypes represent the notion that men and their task of making money are more important than women and their task of managing the family. The power of gender stereotypes derives from the fact that they have a material reality in terms of their strategic use in the day-to-day context of interaction between women and men (see Moore 1986:64-71). In the stereotype of "lazy" women, women are perceived as inferior to men, and their inferiority is based on their incompetence at making money in the soto domain. The stereotype not only gives the reason why men are superior to women in the soto domain but also helps to reinforce the idea. Gendered pay differentials for employees in Japan are the greatest among the developed countries, and these differentials increase as women employees get older.6 A government survey conducted in 1991 shows that a female teenager earns an average 91.2 percent of her male counterpart's wage; this falls to 82.3 percent when she is in her late twenties, to 62.6 percent in her late thirties, and finally to 52.4 percent when she is in her late forties (Ohashi 1993:102). With the exception of a small number of professionals, middle-class women not only want but still need to be dependent on their husband's income, even if they themselves work. Middleclass women also suffer from discrimination in the areas of employment status and promotion, especially in recruitment and hiring. In the 1990s, women constituted nearly 40 percent of the employed population; nevertheless, only 1.0 percent of all employed women had achieved managerial status by 1993 (Women's Data Book 1995:111). An Equal Employment

Japanese Women and Their White Faces ? 19

Opportunity Law, which was put into effect in 1986, has not been particularly effective. One countermeasure used by many employers is to offer women a choice of so-called tracks when they apply to a company. Consequently, middle-class women are now forced to choose between two extremes. One is the "standard-job" track, which is offered to women who prefer to work as assistant clerks, and the other is the "general-job" track, which all men have traditionally entered. The jobs for the standard-track women are usually less demanding. Their promotion is slower and more limited, but their job does not involve potential transfers to branch offices in other cities. The "standard-job" track women are treated separately and differently in the "masculine" business world of the company, and they are expected to be "womanly" employees who are referred to by the wellknown title "OL"-"Office Lady." The "general-job" track women, on the other hand, are treated exactly the same as men and are expected to accept transfers and put in overtime, as well as benefit from promotion. The "general-job" as the traditional men's track, particularly in large corporations, entails almost total control by the employer over employees' lives, and they are expected to devote themselves to the company. Women who choose the "general-job" track are usually warned by their employers that they are, to a greater or lesser extent, putting their prospects of marriage in jeopardy (see also Saso 1990:65). Furthermore, due to their "non-feminine" attitudes, they are often "harassed" by not only male colleagues but also the OL women, who greatly outnumber them and make up the majority of female employees in a large company. Many studies of Japanese companies suggest that the whole realm of the company-the work and the workplaces, as well as both the play and the "night work" done at the hostess club-is culturally and ideologically masculinized in Japan (see Allison 1994; Clark 1979; McLendon 1983; Ogasawara 1998; Rohlen 1974). In postwar Japan, the college enrollment rate for women has dramatically increased (from 5.5 percent in 1960 to 45.9 percent in 1994 [Women's Data Book 1995:133]), as has the number of women who take up professional jobs. Nevertheless, ironically, it is still virtually impossible for a middle-class Japanese woman, who could through her own efforts become a doctor or a lawyer nowadays, to become a sarariman without losing her "femininity." A middle-class woman who chooses the OL track is actually choosing a life course that leads to her becoming a full-time housewife, most likely a sarariman's wife. As Moore (1986) argues, the spatial order is a product of both the reflection of cultural codes and meanings and the reflection of practical activities and functional requirements. The "rigidity of the institutional sex segregation" (Ogasawara 1998:166), represented by the hardworking sarariman and the lazy OL, still exists, regardless of any formal or informal changes in women's employment conditions (e.g., Brinton 1993; Ogasawara 1998;

20 * ETHOS

Saso 1990). The logic of the Japanese company is that it cannot take women seriously because women quit the job when they get married, whereas women argue that they cannot be serious about their work in a company, because the company expects them to quit the job when they get married. The division of soto and uchi by gender appears to be not static but, rather, to be "rigid"in its connection with the material world.

MEN THE AND WHITE FACE

A lot of studies of Japanese white-collar workers have documented how the sarariman are expected to commit themselves totally to their companies and put work before their relations at home (Allison 1994; Ogasawara 1998; Rohlen 1974; E. Vogel 1963). Middle-class men try to project an image of themselves as hard-working sarariman and often speak of this in front of women. By doing so, men seem to construct and represent their identities in public as middle-class Japanese men, in opposition to the image of "selfish," "idle," and "extravagant" women. However, the representation of dominant masculinity is not simple and easy because in order to represent the ideal image of "superior men," men need women who take the role of "subordinated women" to them. Middle-class men are not hard-working sarariman without the ordinary OL or housewives. Lila Abu-Lughod (1986), in her ethnography of Awlad 'Ali society, where one's power depends on morality, suggests that the superior need "voluntary" respect from others. According to Abu-Lughod, the values of honor and modesty are at the heart of their moral system. In order to achieve honor, the superior have to demonstrate that they command voluntary respect from their dependants in the public domain of everyday. Abu-Lughod points out that forced obedience would be worthless since "morality is by definition voluntary" (1986:165). As a result, "figures of authority are vulnerable to their dependants because their positions rest on the respect these people are willing to give them" (1986:103) (see also Scott 1985, 1990). It is also important for middle-class Japanese men to be seen to be the recipients of women's voluntary subordination in public, in order to represent their own proper identities as mature middle-class men. An enforced subordination is not appreciated as much in the middle class, as when the process is voluntary. Middle-class men's good reputations and their own identities rely on women's cooperation in subordinating themselves to them. It is in this context that middle-class women, who accommodate to soto by taking a subject position of "subordinated women," can gain power over men. One 30-year-old female informant, Mayumi, who had just got engaged to her boyfriend, told me her philosophy of marriage:

Japanese Women and Their White Faces * 21

I want to be part of a couple which makes people who see us ask-"How come such a goofy-looking man has such a pretty wife?" I don't want people to think the opposite-"How come such a handsome man married such an ordinary-looking woman?" I know people only see the wife's looks when they meet a couple. If you see a man with a pretty wife, by which I mean, not with kao (the [beautiful] face) but wearing smart clothes-if a man dresses his wife up smartly, spending a lot of money on her, people will think the man must be capable and dependable. People think the man must have something going for him. That's why such a pretty woman is willing to be seen with him. In this way, he will get a good reputation and people will trust him more.

Mayumi accepts her boyfriend because he guarantees her enough money to keep her high-class tastes, as the reward for being a "pretty" housewife who adores her "rich" husband. In accordance with her own philosophy, she will project the image of a pretty wife with a sophisticated white face and high-class tastes in clothes after she gets married. That is how she constructs and represents her identity as a middle-class woman in public. At the same time, her husband, by buying expensive clothes for her, will also confirm, in public, his own class and gender identities through his "pretty wife" who is dependent on his money. However, this kind of ideal relationship may not always be the case. Mayumi told me that she chose partners according to whether they were generous to her or not, never according to merely whether they were rich. She used to go out with a man whose father was the owner of one of the biggest supermarket chains in Japan. But she found the ex-boyfriend was good at spending money on himself but not on her. She was really disappointed by this attitude and looked down on him, saying that the man did not know what men should do. Mayumi, who refused to take on a subordinate position with him, began to suffer in the relationship, and they were always quarrelling over little things. Finally, the man became violent, trying to dominate her, and she broke up with him. Ogasawara (1998), who focuses on the power relations between the sarariman and OL in a large bank, provides a perfect example of how women wield power at the workplace by using male workers' dependency on women workers. According to Ogasawara, men need the OL's support if they are to hold managerial positions in Japanese organizations. In order to climb the organizational hierarchy, a man must prove his competence as a manager. One of the key requirements of a manager is the ability to supervise his subordinates, including OL. Failure to gain cooperation from OL is often regarded as a sign of a man's weakness as a manager. A man's potential as a manager will be questioned by company executives and personnel directors if he alienates many women. Therefore, it is often the case that Japanese men in positions of authority care more about the feelings of subordinate women than subordinate women do about the feelings of men in authority. The sarariman in Japanese organizations are, in a sense, far more dependent on OL than OL are on the sarariman. In order to rise from the ranks, a man must take heed of what women think of him.

22 * ETHOS

Furthermore, even when he does get into a position of power, he cannot enjoy control over women as he can over other men (Ogasawara 1998:160). Ogasawara reports that OL express their opinions of the men they work for through gossip and through what amount to popularity polls at the workplace. Most men care how they are regarded by women and fear that a bad reputation will make it hard to gain the cooperation of female workers. Once OL decide to resist a man, they can annoy and trouble him at the workplace through various acts of resistance: OL can refuse to take the initiative to help him; they can decline to do him favors; they can refuse to work for him; they can inform the personnel department of his disagreeable behavior; and they can cut him off by subjecting him to total neglect. Since men rely heavily on women at the workplace, the act of OL's resistance to men will be a huge obstacle to men's success at work and eventually to their promotion. Furthermore, OL cater to the needs of men at the workplace. Middle-class men depend on women's "nurturance" at the office as well as at home. Ogasawara introduces the term office wives, which compares the OL's role to that of the wife who takes care of her husband at home. A Japanese man often cannot find his socks and handkerchiefs when his wife is away because she looks after all of his daily needs. Similarly, in the office, men are often at a loss if OL are not there to help them. Men are often incapable of making a copy, finding a file, or serving tea to their guests. Rather, since these jobs are regarded as "womanly," a man who does these jobs might face the risk of failure to represent the dominant masculinity. The white face of middle-class women is not only a woman's matter but, in fact, involves men's lives as well. Middle-class men were quite sensitive to whether a woman wore makeup or not. One informant, who is working for a large company as an OL, said there was only one OL who did not wear makeup at her company, as far as she knew. She found that many male workers realized this, identifying the woman as "the girl who doesn't wear makeup." The un-made-up OL, who was my informant's senior, was a nice woman with a boyish personality, and she acted the same as other made-up OL. The male coworkers joked about her un-made-up face, but she was accepted by them as she was. Nevertheless, according to my informant, most men who saw her for the first time seemed to be suspicious of her, wondering how they should treat her. Indeed, the informant herself thought that she might not get along with her because she looked different. Mature women's un-made-up faces cause a sort of fear among men, and women also, because un-made-up women appear indifferent to the gender ideology and look as though they may refuse to negotiate for the voluntary subordination to men. On the other hand, middle-class men feel easy about women who present their white faces in public and especially about those who are willing to dress up in nice clothes, paying a lot of

Japanese Women and Their White Faces * 23

attention to their appearance. This is because men can easily place these women in a familiar category-that of the "extravagant" ordinary woman, with whom men can negotiate by using the gender discourse on making money for women. The ideal image of "superior men" and "subordinated women" based on the gender ideology of soto/men and uchi/women is formal and public. It is in the "public" domain where both middle-class men and women try to represent the ideal image; women present the standardized white face, whereas men try to project an image of themselves as hardworking company people. Erving Goffman describes in his Relations in Public that the public space is where "the individual does not go about merely going about his business," but he "goes about constrained to sustain a viable image of himself in the eyes of others" (1971:185; see also Gregor 1977). Goffman also points out the importance of the representation of the body in the social relations in public, introducing the notion of "normal appearances" that the majority of people have come with time and practice to learn that they can cope with comfortably and that therefore do not cause them alarm (1971:258-259). People have to be concerned with "normal appearances" in order not to be excluded. Middle-class Japanese men and women, through interactions with others in public space, make sure that what they are representing is proper, normal, and public. At the same time, they negotiate which representation is proper, normal, and public through the interactions. Abu-Lughod in her study of a Bedouin society suggests that the representation of the self that is tied to ideal values in society is ultimately tied to politics in its broadest sense (1986:34). Through the representation of the ideal image, middle-class men and women try not only to avoid being conspicuous and being excluded but also to present the subject positions along the gender ideology, which are socially rewarded.7 The white face, for middle-class men and women, helps to negotiate the power that is tied to the ideology in the course of everyday interactions in public space.

AND WOMEN'S STRATEGY SUBJECTIVITIES

Recent works on gender emphasize not only that gender discourses are variable cross-culturally but also that there exist multiple gender discourses within a single social setting (Connell 1987:167-190; Moore 1994; Sanday 1990). The pervasive middle-class notion about gender relationsmen work soto and women manage the uchi-is a definition of the world, which allows them to understand and act. Both middle-class men and women construct and represent themselves in relation to the notion of what is male and soto, and what is female and uchi. However, this does not mean that there are no other gender meanings and gender representations

24 * ETHOS

in contemporary Japan. The ideal image of women based on the gender ideology is just one of many representations of femininity, though it is definitely the dominant one, to which other gender representations are subjugated. For example, middle-class people share an idealized image of feminine beauty based on the dominant forms of femininity, which is also repeatedly represented in the mass media-a feminine woman with a clear complexion, slim body, and sophisticated clothing (see Clammer 1995). The majority of middle-class women work at making their body and complexion fit this image. However, there are some opposing ideal models of women among them, such as that of "wild" women. The image of "wild" (wairudo) women is popular and often used in mass culture, as a counterimage of "cute" (kawaii) women, who celebrate "sweet, adorable, innocent, pure, simple, genuine, gentle, vulnerable, weak, and inexperienced social behavior and physical appearances" (Kinsella 1995:220). By the expression "wild," my informants meant that the woman looked like a person who was passionate, strong, independent, and, most importantly, sexy (sekushii). One 22-year-old female graduate student explained what "wild"meant for her: " 'wild' women do whatever they want without caring about what other people think. They live their own lives and make their own choices." My informants said that "wild" referred to attitude rather than appearance, but they had a particular image of how "wild" women should look: dark skin; strong, dark eyebrows; wide but "sharp" eyes; sculptured features; dark curly hair or very long straight hair; a strong, well-shaped body; big breasts; long bones; and so on. What was emphasized in the physical image of the "wild"woman was that she looked sexy. The sexual attractiveness of "wild"women is characterized by the fact that their sexuality is not passive but provocative; they do not deny their sexual desires, and they are open to relationships with men that will not necessarily lead to institutional marriage in the future. As sexual purity and chastity are one of the most important features of traditional ideal womanhood, "wild" women conflict with the dominant femininity. Nevertheless, the image of "wild" women does not float free of the dominant femininity. The image of "wild" women conveys forms of femininity and sexuality that are antithetical to the dominant femininity and sexuality. Therefore, the image of "wild" women is only comprehensible in contrast with the ideal image of women, which most middle-class women support. Indeed, only through the overt reference to the "cute" women in mass culture do the "wild" women appear to be appealing to middle-class women. Yet middle-class women know that the traditional ideal image of women is more "proper"and socially valued than that of the "wild" women. One 25-year-old informant said, "I adore women with a deep tan. They are 'wild.' But the thing is that there are very few Japanese

Japanese Women and Their White Faces * 25

women who look right with dark skin." Another 27-year-old woman explained, "Women with a deep tan look really sharp and cool, but tanned skin never suits me." By insisting that dark skin did not suit them personally, middle-class women seem to be implying that they are not "wild" as regards either their femininity or their sexuality. To take another example, younger middle-class women sometimes get a tan as a result of taking part in leisure activities, but even in these cases, most of them take a lot of trouble to avoid tanning theirfaces. When they go to work, they wear the standard color of foundation, instead of a darker tone, even though their bodies are now tanned. As a result, you can see in office buildings in summer many young OL workers whose faces are white even though their bodies are tanned. Those young middle-class women, who might enjoy presenting themselves as "wild" women in private, know, consciously or unconsciously, that they should represent the dominant femininity and sexuality in public. In this way, femininity based on the gender ideology becomes "public" and keeps its dominant position among other forms of femininity. Other gender meanings or gender representations are not eliminated but subjugated to the dominant representation of femininity. There are multiple gender meanings and considerable differences among my informants in their gendered experience of everyday life. Nevertheless, most of my unmarried informants wanted to project an image of themselves as a lazy OL, and most of the married informants wanted to project an image of themselves in public as an ordinary wife. Even though some women had ambitious plans for their profession or career, these topics usually did not crop up in everyday conversations of public. Any woman who does not hide her ambition in public might be treated very badly and can be teased by both men and women. One unmarried informant, Shoko, was suffering at the hands of her new colleagues. She recently transferred from the main office in Tokyo to a small local office and became the only career track female employee in the office:
At the main office, women are requiredto think logicallyand speak clearlyso that they can talk with men on equal terms. But here those abilities are useless .... When I showed confidence in myself at a meeting, saying "Ican do such and such a thing,"all my male colleaguesturned to me and screamed, "Weknow you are smart. Keepyour mouth shut!"or "Don'tshow off. We know you are reallygood."

Unlike Shoko, most informants tried to accommodate to soto where the gender representation of "superior men" and "subordinated women" was dominant by presenting themselves as ordinary women and wearing the white face when they go to soto. However, this does not mean that they actually became "subordinated" women. Takako, who is working for a small trading company as a part-time accountant, always carefully represented herself as a "lazy" housewife to everybody. She told me that she

26 * ETHOS

had been offered a full-time position a few years previously, but she had turned it down.
I don't want to lose my freedom. Now I can take a day off whenever I need to, saying that I have to go to my child's school meeting; I want to go to lunch with my friend or even that I want to do the laundry because it's a sunny day. Sometimes, my boss even begs me not to take a day off. I like my situation. After all, my husband brings home more than enough money.

Recently, some anthropologists try to explain the problem of accommodation and resistance by focusing on the multiplicity of selves, subjectivities, and identities (see Kondo 1990; Moore 1994). By 1959, Erving Goffman had already pointed out that "everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role" (1959:17). However, there are considerable differences among women who involve the same role. Goffman's ideas cannot explain these differences. In the introduction to Japanese Sense of Self, Rosenberger suggests that Japanese self is constituted by a multiplicity of self, or multiple and changing subject positions (1992a:14). The authors in Japanese Sense of Self show how Japanese people define and redefine their subject positions in relation to the distance or difference from other people or other groups (see Bachnik 1992; Kondo 1992; Kuwayama 1992; Lebra 1992; Rosenberger 1992b; Tobin 1992). Moore, in herA Passionfor Difference (1994), a critique of anthropology, argues that it is necessary to deal theoretically with the multiple nature of subjectivity, in order to analyze the relationship between cultural gender discourse and the individual's daily experience of gender. Moore suggests that resistance and accommodation should be considered as a problem of forms of subjectivity as well as types of agents (1994: 49-50). There was no single, fixed subjectivity that involved my informants' strategies to accommodate to soto. Women seemed to shift their subjectivities according to particular situations in order to accommodate to soto, and various different emotions and interests were involved in their strategies. They can be a career woman and a lazy housewife at the same time. There are multiple subjectivities of and for Japanese women. However, the process of accommodation by taking up a particular subjectivity should not be understood as one of simple choice. Moore, introducing Wendy Holloway's notion of "investment" (Holloway 1984), suggests that to choose a subjectivity is a matter of emotional satisfaction, which has a subconscious nature, but also of very real material, social, and economic benefits. Holloway conceives of an investment as something between an emotional commitment and a vested interest. Individuals take up certain subject positions because of the way in which those positions provide pleasure, satisfaction, or reward on the individual or personal level (1984:238). The ideas (or subconscious ideas) about not only the kind of

Japanese Women and Their White Faces ? 27

person one would like to be but also the sort of person one would like to be seen to be by others motivate the individual to choose a particular subjectivity. In addition, Holloway emphasizes that to position oneself is always to position oneself in relation to others, and thus, one's interrelations with other individuals will also determine what positions the individual takes up. It is at this point that modes of subjectivity and questions of identity are bound up with issues of power, and with the material benefits that result from that power. There are more rewarded persons to be and specific sorts of ways to interact with others. The differences are created and supported by the institutional power of the dominant or hegemonic ideologies. There are very tangible benefits to be gained from such subject positions. Moore (1994:65) points out that it is the dominant or hegemonic discourses on gender and gender identity that play an important role in determining the socially sanctioned subject position in a social situation, such as the senior man, the good wife, the powerful mother or the dutiful daughter. Some individuals do challenge or resist the dominant representation of femininity or gender relations in public, but they frequently find that this is at the expense of such things as social power, social approval, and even material benefits. In contemporary Japan, the most socially sanctioned subject positions are the hardworking sarariman and the professional housewife, which represent the formal image of husband and wife in the urban middle class. As I have already explained, my informants described the women who project the ideal image of women in public, taking up the subject position of devoted housewife (or future housewife) asfutsu (ordinary), talking of the futsu-no OL or the futsfi-no housewife. The reward for an ordinary OL or an ordinary housewife is economic security and proper representation for herself and her family in the soto world. On the other hand, subject positions in opposition to it, which might emotionally satisfy the woman with pleasure and satisfaction, rarely provide her with social rewards and material benefits. Some subject positions for middle-class Japanese women, which are based on the dominant gender ideology, carry more social reward, but other subject positions, which are against the ideology, are negatively sanctioned. Kumiko, who was a career-track employee in a big corporation, complained that full-time housewives (sengyo-shufu) tended to tease women who did anything different from what they did. Kumiko, who had recently become a section manager, worked as hard as the male employees, doing overtime almost everyday and going on a business trip at least once a month. At the same time, she was a housewife with two children at primary school. She told me that it was very difficult to participate in the PTA (Parent-Teacher Association) because all the PTA meetings were arranged for the convenience of full-time housewives. PTAs in Japan usually consist

28 * ETHOS

of just mothers, not fathers or grandparents, and so there was no way to ask somebody to go as her substitute. She tried to manage to attend the PTA meeting, which was actually the mothers' meeting, as often as possible. Yet, according to Kumiko, other full-time housewife mothers were critical of her attitude, and they had made an attempt to force a committee job on her at the last meeting. Kumiko said:
I envy men. Men are never discriminated against because of having a job. It is normal for men to have a job. For women, it is normal not to have a job. The whole of this society, including TV, the newspapers, and the schools, assumes that all married women are full-time housewives.

Kumiko, who did not usually wear makeup at work, decided to put on foundation before she went to the PTA meeting. Then she suddenly looked like any "ordinary" housewife to my eyes. Representing themselves as ordinary women by taking a socially sanctioned subject position in public appears to be one of the most effective strategies among middle-class women. To repeat, the majority of middle-class Japanese women wear foundation in public. However, this does not mean that all of them are actually ordinary women. There were considerable differences among the women who presented the standardized white face. Middle-class women can present themselves either as ordinary women or nonordinary women through their representation of the self in public. Middle-class women who center their lives on their work can present themselves as ordinary women by the representation of the dominant femininity in public. On the other hand, women who actually center their lives on the family can present themselves as nonordinary women through the representation of the opposing image of ideal women in public. In other words, being ordinary women does not depend on whether women actually are ideal women who center their whole lives on the family or not but, rather, on whether women adopt this formal image of women in public or not. In this sense, there are no ordinary, average, typical Japanese women among my informants, but there is a dominant representation of ordinary women in public for them. I argue that being an ordinary woman is one of the strategies middle-class women use in order to negotiate better positions within gender relations, and that the representation of dominant gender relations is involved in this strategy. The white face, which serves as a sign of the traditional femininity in the everyday lives of middle-class women, plays a part in their strategy of accommodating to the soto/men's world.

BODY, KNOWLEDGE GENDER, AND

The pervasive power of the white face as a symbol should not be understood as if the ideal image of women is equally and automatically

Japanese Women and Their White Faces * 29

inscribed into all middle-class Japanese women through their white face, nor as if a middle-class woman has been "normalized" into the dominant gender ideology, by a singular or deliberate act of presenting the white face in public. Recent theoretical work on the body by anthropologists and other scholars has argued that the body is not only a practical, direct locus of social control or power (e.g., Butler 1990, 1993; Foucault 1977, 1978) but also a vehicle of history and knowledge (e.g., Bourdieu 1977, 1990; Connerton 1989; Comaroff and Comaroff 1992). It is in this connection between the body and power, the past and knowledge, that the white face can be a pervasive symbol and that the gender ideology of soto and uchi becomes powerful enough to keep its position. Paul Connerton, in his How Societies Remember (1989), articulates the relationship between the body and social memory, examining many different examples from diverse sources, including Victorian England, the Trobrianders, Easter and Islamic festivals, and so on. Connerton argues that the images and knowledge of the past are conveyed by performances and that performative memory is bodily. Connerton argues that social anthropologists should focus on the importance of performance for emphasizing, marking, defining a continuity from the past, not for "making explicit" the existing social structure (1989:102-103). Connerton explains how the dominant ideology is defined by performances in a community, implying that "every group" has its own style of "bodily automatisms." Nevertheless, his analysis fails to consider distinctions within a community, such as gender difference. Bourdieu, who tries to integrate the self-image or the representation of self-image with dominant cultural ideologies, also emphasizes the importance of the body for "enacting" the continuity from the past (Bourdieu 1990:73). Unlike Connerton's analysis, Bourdieu's analysis always takes gender into account, focusing on a notion of position and positionality in the analysis of society. For example, in the case of the Kabyle, Bourdieu points out the different positions of women and men that are concretized through "the male point of view" and "the female point of view" on the house (Bourdieu 1977:91). Bourdieu explains that the actors' perceptions and interpretations of the world, and the kinds of bodily practices the actors are involved in, are controlled by their particular position within society (1990:53). Bourdieu also acknowledges the possibilities of the distinct experiences for each individual actor (1990:60). However, he concludes by focusing on the difference that derives from a class difference. Bourdieu explains that "each member of the same class is more likely than any member of another class to have been confronted with the situations most frequent for members of that class" (1990:60), and does not raise the question of differences within the same class or the same gender. Moore, who tries to explain the differences within the same gender using the notion of "multiple subjectivity," points out that Bourdieu's

30 * ETHOS

concept of positionality is limited to what she calls the materiality of the subjectivity, because he insists that the schemes of perception and conception that form the habitus are derived from the conditions of existence, and particularly from the social divisions of labor (1994:80). Moore argues that this emphasis on the materiality of subjectivity in fact allows Bourdieu to link the subjective and the objective, the individual and the world, and the body and culturally dominant ideologies. In Bourdieu's analysis, the subject is never separated from the material conditions of its existence, and the world is never free of the representations that construct it. In this sense, the question of cognition and symbolism is not one that is independent of the conditions under which people actually live. Based on the materiality of the subjectivity, Bourdieu attempts to establish a link between the body and knowledge. Moore suggests that although Bourdieu does not take account of differences within the same class, his theory of body contains a method for understanding the pervasive power of symbols and of the social distinctions on which they are based.
Praxis is not simply about learning cultural rules by rote; it is about coming to an understanding of social distinctions through your body and recognizing that your orientation in the world, your intellectual rationalizations, will always be based on the incorporated knowledge. [1994:78]

Choosing a particular subjectivity is not only a matter of real material benefits but also of emotional satisfaction for middle-class women. The different representations of gender among women do not directly relate to class difference. However, it is still true that middle-class women's experiences of gender are more similar to those of women in the same class than to those of women in any other class, as Bourdieu suggests. In addition, there is a dominant representation of the self-image, a subjectivity that is supported by the majority of middle-class women and that is more socially rewarded in the middle class. The majority of middle-class women present the white face in public, performing the subjectivity of ideal women based on the dominant gender ideology. The act of presenting the white face in the soto domain is formal, public, and performative. The performance of middle-class women with the white face enacts the dominant gender ideology of the tradition and the past, and this bodily practice itself is a mode of knowledge about the dominant gender ideology.

CONCLUSION
There is the dominant gender ideology of soto/men and uchi/women, to which both middle-class men and women refer for maleness and femaleness. The ideology is produced and reproduced through the dominant representation of gender relations in public. Middle-class women understand, construct, and represent themselves in relation to the ideology: they plan

Japanese Womenand TheirWhiteFaces * 31

their lives with reference to the ideology, and they use the ideology in order to negotiate better positions in their relationships with men. However, this means neither that there is only one model of gender relations for middle-class women nor that the middle class has a single model of gender or a single gender system. On the contrary, middle-class women live their gender relations by engaging with multiple gender discourses, some of which are in opposition to one other, but all of which are subordinate to the dominant gender ideology. Gender has often been seen either as a symbolic construction (e.g., Ortner 1974) or as a social, economic relation (e.g., Leacock 1978) in anthropological studies of gender. More recent studies of gender try to provide a framework for combining cultural ideas about men and women with actual social relations, in realization of the fact that these are neither independent nor directly derived from one another (e.g., Collier and Rosaldo 1981; Moore 1994). I have argued that what men and women do is organized into, or subordinated to, the gender ideology and that simultaneously, the gender ideology is renegotiated in the course of the social economic relations between men and women in the material world. In this sense, gender among middle-class Japanese should be understood as the product of both the reflection of a dominant symbolic construction and the reflection of the actual relationship between men and women in everyday life. That is, although the gender ideology is pervasive and dominant, gender in Japan is neither static nor unchanging. Many different gender meanings are constantly contested, and new forms of gender representation are produced or imported, often purveyed through the mass media and consumer culture. Furthermore, the changes in the social and economic conditions often directly affect the actual relations between men and women and can cause a shift in interpretation of the gender ideology. The gender ideology is learned and understood through the body and through its representation in public, rather than simply being imposed. In other words, the ideology is authorized through the articulation of representation in public, and hence, there is always the possibility of its changing through a cumulative shift of representation in public. Many anthropological studies of gender among middle-class Japanese tend to draw the stereotypical picture of middle-class women who embody the gender ideology of soto/men and uchi/women. However, many studies point out that there is a wide gap between the ideal model of men and women-which is both hierarchically ordered, because of differences ascribed to men and women, and harmonious-and the actual relations (e.g., Edwards 1989; Iwao 1993; Lebra 1984; Ogasawara 1998). Most studies see gender in Japan as a single social system or a social role based on social values that are largely peculiar to Japanese society, and explain that individuals are socialized in a single gender system or acquire gender

32 * ETHOS

identity based on the ideology. But this approach fails to focus on and explain the reasons for the aforementioned gap. There are not only many different gender discourses in the middle class but also multiple subjectivities of, and for, middle-class women. For example, a woman can shift from career woman to devoted mother, or from "cute" woman to passionate "wild" woman, within a single day; simultaneously she is consciously or unconsciously learning that she should represent the dominant model of gender relations in public. Lebra's observation (although she also sees gender as a single structure) underpins my argument: "A man and woman as individuals might prefer to relate to each other in more equal terms or more flexibly, but in public, where the structural pressures for asymmetry are felt, they are likely to act as if the man were superior to the woman" (Lebra 1984:301, emphasis added). In this way, the other gender meanings and representations are subordinated to the ideal model of men and women. Middle-class women are socialized to understand the ways in which they live their relations with men by engaging with multiple gender discourses that can vary according to the context of everyday life as well as the stage they have reached in life. It is here that both differences between and within women and the pervasive power of the dominant ideology can be focused upon and explained.

ASHIKARI is a postdoctoral associate theDepartment Anthropology University MIKIKO research at ofSocial inthe of Cambridge.

NOTES
Acknowledgments.I would like to thank the people who kindly gave me their time and experiences. My fieldworkin Japanwas funded by the MatsushitaInternationalFund and the JapanEndowmentFoundation. 1. In this article, some key terms used to discuss genderissues, gendermeaning,gender and workBeyond representation, genderideologyare taken fromSandayand Goodenough's
the Second Sex: New Directions in the Anthropology of Gender (1990). Gender meaning is

the general term, conveyingthe idea of what is indicatedor implied by how the two sexes are perceived,evaluated,and expected to behave. Gendermeaningcan be inferredor imwe plied from the symbolicformsof gender representations experience, such as myth, stories, television, ceremonialenactment, other models of or for behavior,and of course the white face. Gender ideology is sometimes used synonymouslywith gender meaning, but gender ideologycan be tied more specificallythan gender meaningto agency and political process, on the one hand, and to cosmologicalconceptionsof the social order,on the other hand. Sandayarguesthat genderideologyoperateson two differentlevels: In some usages of the term, ideology refers both to a system of thoughtthat guides and legitimatessocial action and to attemptsto create a transcendentalorderby legitimating the power of that order (Bloch 1987:334-335). Viewed in these terms, gender ideology can be defined as (1) the system of thoughtthat legitimatessex roles and customarybehavior of the sexes, and (2) the deployment of gender categories as metaphorsin the

Japanese

Women and Their White Faces

* 33

production of conceptions of an enduring, eternal social order. The difference between these two levels of gender ideology can be seen by constructing cultural conceptions of appropriate sex-linked behavior with cultural conceptions of the social order based on gender representations. [1990:5-6] 2. In the narrow sense, the Meiji Restoration means the movement that overthrew the Edo shogunate and transformed the Emperor from a ceremonial head into the head of a modern family-state. In the fall of 1868, Edo was renamed "Tokyo," and the era name "Meiji"was proclaimed. The Emperor moved into Tokyo from Kyoto in the spring of 1869. In a broader sense, the Meiji Restoration means a whole process of state-crafting, economic, and cultural reforms conducted by the Meiji government in order to catch up with the Western powers. The exact dates of the Meiji Restoration in this sense may not be determined. 3. Before the Meiji period, tattooing, which involved coming-of-age ceremonies for women, was widely adopted by both Ainu women and Okinawan women. In the 1890s, the Meiji government banned their custom of tattooing bringing in several laws against it. By the early Showa period, it is alleged that tattooing had been abandoned by the Ainu and the Okinawan people. 4. In the 1880s, lead poisoning from the white-lead powder became publicly recognized and thought of as a social problem. Debates on the prohibition of white-lead powder among female college students attracted a lot of people's interest. Some intellectuals, including female ones, argued that women's virtue was more important than their health: it was immoral for women to abandon this "women's art" because of their fear of lead poisoning (Tsuda and Murata 1993:20-21). 5. The data is based on interviews with people working in the public relations departments of three cosmetics makers, Kose, Pola, and Kao, in November 1996. 6. Women's average earnings as a percentage of men's are as follows: Japan-58.9 percent in 1992, the UK-70.2 percent in 1988, the United States-70.3 percent in 1992, France-80.8 percent in 1990, Australia-90.9 in 1992 (Women's Data Book 1995:113). 7. The experience of being a woman or being middle class or being a Japanese can never be a singular one and will always be dependent on a multiplicity of locations and positions that are constructed socially. The terms subject positions and subjectivity are used here because they create a space in which it is possible to talk about differences in the individuals' experiences as a Japanese woman. The term gender identity implies a fixed and singular gender identity. On the other hand, gendered subjectivity can be conceived of a series of subject positions, such as that of career women, lazy housewives, self-devoting mothers, some of which are conflicting or even mutually contradictory.

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