Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (39 page)

Prior to this workshop, the participants’ superiors received a questionnaire soliciting their evaluation of the participants as managers. The female subordinates of the participants were also surveyed on their views of the participants as managers. The participants received the survey results of their female staff at the workshop, and they were asked to reflect on the kinds of skill, attitude, and behavior expected both by their supervisors and by their supervisees.

The workshop was intended to demonstrate to managers how little they understood their female subordinates. They were to be enlightened about what women want and were treated to a wide range of comments about themselves as seen by their subordinates: “Don’t try to fondle me when you get drunk!”; “Don’t pick your nose hair at work”; “Don’t come closer to me than necessary”; “I want my supervisor to treat all of his supervisees equally”; “I want my supervisor to give more precise feedback and instructions. He lacks in logical thinking”; “My supervisor does not take me seriously because he thinks women have no loyalty to the company”; “My supervisor has more frequent contact with his male supervisees and gives them detailed job instructions, but he does not seem to do so with his female supervisees. For the sake of efficiency, I want him to give us clear instructions.” The participants also saw comments about themselves by their supervisors, for example, “He is too lenient with his female supervisees”; “I think he is always passionate about the effective mentoring of his supervisees, regardless of gender. But he seems to have difficulty communicating with female supervisees because of gender difference”; “Men and women have different sensitivities and habits, and their ways of expressing emotion differ. It requires more sensitive care when it comes to communicating with women”; “He seems to have little frank conversation with his female supervisees, which includes conversations about work.”

Unlike the WGW workshop, where the participants were expected to confess their personal feelings and experience, the male managers’ workshop
required the participants to be analytical and objective about how to supervise their female supervisees and how to be effective (male) managers. While saturated with business language such as “identifying and diagnosing problems” and “seeking solutions,” the workshop discussion zeroed in on interpersonal communication: how to give instructions and feedback to female workers; how to scold, reprimand, compliment, and encourage them; and how to be a good listener when they speak. At the end of the retreat, Mr. Kawai, an external consultant and authority on organizational behavior, management, and personnel training, who attended the retreat as an observer, formally closed the workshop by introducing the idea of
kyōsei
, the closest English translation of which would be “coexistence” or “symbiosis.” During my research in the early 1990s, the term
kyōsei
was widely circulated and used in the media as well as in various documents promoting the EEOL. “Gender equity” deradicalized and desocialized (individualized) as
kyōsei
entails congenial interpersonal relationships between fundamentally different
others
, in the pursuit of pragmatic working relations conducive both of productivity and of personal fulfillment; gender difference—and implicitly gender inequality in the “results” of fair competition between men and women—is inescapably naturalized here and presumed to be inevitable. I heard the male managers using the term
kyōsei
to put on an appropriately “progressive” display of their support for gender equity. As Mr. Kawai explained the reasoning (of both men and women) of the company: “It is necessary frankly [for male managers and female staff] to
recognize and respect each others’ distinct value system
. . . and to strive to move toward
kyōsei
” (emphasis added). The idea of the symbiotic relationship between the male supervisor and the female supervisee effectively depoliticized structural antagonism multiply organized by rank, age, and gender in the corporate organizational hierarchy.

Conclusion

The prevalence of the idea of
kyōsei
signaled a profound displacement of the vision of “gender equity” from the protection of women as a class to the feminization and individualization of gender inequality. It was reflected beyond the corporation in 1999, when the Basic Law for a Gender-Equal Society (
Danjo kyōdō sankaku kihonhō
) was implemented,
7
providing legal guidelines to promote equal participation (and responsibilities) in the society between
men
and women, including positive action to provide opportunities
to either women or men
. In the same year, amendments to the EEOL took effect. Major revisions included the
prohibition
of discrimination in the domains of recruitment, hiring, assignment, and promotion, which previously required only a good-faith effort on the part of the employer. Labor dispute mediation can now be sought without the employer’s consent, whereas under the previous law both parties had to agree to seek mediation by a government agency. The employers who violate the law are now sanctioned by means of publicizing their names.

The most significant amendment, in terms of the present analysis, was the prohibition of specifying gender in recruitment literature and job advertisements. But it is not illegal for the company to hire only men or only women for a specific job category. Thus, in the end, systematic patterns of gender discrimination in the workplace count for nothing in the policies promoting equal opportunity. In a neoliberal Japanese public culture, it is not the deeply historical and social structures of gender that are responsible for an individual’s fate but the individual woman’s
self
as defined by the sovereign individual. And women’s plea to be treated as an individual worker, not a female worker as defined by sexist stereotypes, came to be transformed into gender-blindness in the laws of gender equity—a passionate neoliberal commitment to be incognizant of the stubborn reproduction of gender difference.

The original EEOL’s impact on company management and labor practices and the experience of female workers are best understood in historical context: the ongoing shift away from the welfare state and its associated modes of subject formation and governing-beyond-the-state, to post-Fordism and the increasing erosion of the social by the market logic as a mode of producing free subjects given the responsibility to govern themselves. Beyond its strictly legal horizon, and perhaps beyond its intended consequences, the EEOL, in its historically contingent articulation with neoliberalism, regulated both the working life of the women at MJL and the way gender equity was to be imagined by various parties in the workplace. Before, women were simply contingent workers (in both the narrower and larger sense of
contingent
) in whom the company made no investment. They would come and go, as disposable and replaceable labor. The discourse of liberal inclusiveness, however, embodied by the EEOL, invited women to become part of the (ostensibly gender-equal) majority with the promise of “equal” access and opportunity. Women were endowed and empowered with the ideas of individual
autonomy and personal sovereignty and were promised reward for their efforts to remake themselves into self-optimizing, self-responsible, and self-disciplined subjects. I have discussed how the corporate rendition of public spheres such as workshops, surveys, and task forces mediated the EEOL not as rights-protection but as neoliberal self-actualization. These activities and events served as sites and tactics of neoliberal governmentality by producing the truth and subjectivity of the female worker and by reducing the fundamental contradiction between capital and labor to interpersonal communication skills and personal (gendered) psychology, all of which, far from protecting workers’ rights, served to normalize the ever-intensifying flexibilization of labor and liquidation of (full) employment in the “global futures” we are all now encouraged to imagine and embrace.

Notes

1
.
Freeter
,
NEET
, and
purekariāto
are all terms referring to the phenomenon of precarious labor increasing since the Japanese recession began in 1991. NEET is an acronym for those workers, primarily youth, “Not in Education, Employment, or Training.”

2
. For excellent cultural critiques on gender and its relations to Japan’s broader geopolitics in the 1980s and 1990s, see Iida (2000) and Yoda (2000). Miyazaki (2003) and Riles (2004) also offer compelling theoretical discussions on Japanese culture and society in general in an age of neoliberalism.

3
. For English translation for the EEOL, see Milhaupt, Ramseyer, and Young 2001.

4
. See also Mikanagi (1998) and Osawa (1993) for analysis on how the division of labor was further reinforced in the 1980s.

5
. Article 7 states, “with regard to the recruitment and hiring of workers, employers shall endeavor to provide women equal opportunity with men,” and Article 8 states, “with regard to the assignment and promotion of workers, employers shall endeavor to treat women equally with men workers.”

6
. For a comprehensive study of gender and work in the postwar Japan, see Brinton 1993. For comparative purposes, see Ogasawara (1998) for her thoughtful sociological study of gender politics in a banking office during in the early 1990s.

7
. A full examination of the revised EEOL is beyond the scope of this article. See Araki (1998), R. L. Miller (2003), and Weathers (2005) for the history and the impact of the revised EEOL.

Chapter
Nine

Workplace Dramas and Labor Fantasies in 1990s Japan

GABRIELLA LUKACS

In the first episode of the series
Shomuni
(General Affairs),
1
Tsukahara Sawako is transferred to the section of general affairs—the “graveyard” for office ladies (
OL no hakaba
)
2
—as retribution for her love affair with a married employee in the sales department. Located in a dim basement of a trading company known as Manpan Shōji, the section of general affairs (
shomuni
) is home to unsold and useless merchandise with employees to match: a male section chief who cannot complete a sentence without getting garbled in his mannerisms, his plus-sized cat, and four other “loser office ladies” (
ochikobore OL
) who were similarly disposed of for being too old, too outspoken, or otherwise ill suited to the more high-profile departments of the corporation. Tsukahara’s vicissitudes are far from over once she is assigned to her new post. As the seating order is determined by the number of sexual partners one has had (the more the higher the rank), she is ensconced in the lowest rank that the space entails. At the climax of the episode, when she teeters on the verge of emotional meltdown, Tsuboi Chinatsu, the spiritual leader of the section and the protagonist of the series, reveals her philosophy to her: “You don’t exist to serve your company or your male colleagues; it is they who exist to serve you. What matters is that you get some fun out of your work; the rest is irrelevant.”

Chinatsu and her unorthodox attitude toward her company made the show wildly popular, earning it a megahit status with ratings over 28 percent,
3
contracts
for three additional seasons, and two feature specials.
Shomuni
epitomized a new prime-time genre, the workplace drama (
shokugyō/shigoto dorama
), developed by the commercial networks
4
in the late 1990s in response to the sliding ratings of love-oriented trendy dramas (
torendii dorama
).
5
In the late 1990s, television producers began lamenting that producing trendy dramas preoccupied with consumer trends and packaged in trite, scripted dialogues about love was pure escapism in the midst of a nagging economic recession. They surmised that “socially responsible” entertainment (
shakaisei wo obita entāteinmento
) would appeal to broader cross-segments of the audiences as a growing number of young people were marginalized from career-track employment and often lacked the expandable income to enjoy the lifestyles that the trendy dramas propagated. These producers critiqued an overwhelming preoccupation in love dramas with the happiness of the individual and emphasized the importance of revitalizing an interest in the “social.” The effects of these dramas, however, were far less noble than the agenda producers articulated in public forums. Work dramas further promoted individualism by valorizing the autonomy of workers in ordinary workplace settings. By insisting on the importance of individualism in the realm of wage labor, these dramas played a key role in mobilizing their viewers to satisfy a volatile economy’s demand for workers who were willing to invest in their work not only their labor power but also their subjectivity: their beliefs, communicative skills, and affective commitments. Workplace dramas such as
Shomuni
marked an important milestone in the processes of neoliberal labor mobilization. These dramas acclimated workers to a recessionary economy in which employers demanded more commitment for less pay and even less job security.

An ideal subject of neoliberal philosophy, Chinatsu, as the heroine of
Shomuni
, understood that she
alone
was responsible for making her life (including her work) meaningful. Her popularity was largely due to her uncompromising insistence that no job was worth pursuing if there was nothing enjoyable about it. In the wake of shrinking opportunities for career-track employment and a growing demand for flexibly disposable labor, Chinatsu’s character is a fantasy of agency shaped by the logic of consumer capitalism. By the end of the 1990s, Japan’s economic crisis was increasingly severe. As the national economy did not seem to be recovering from the recession that had begun almost a decade before, large-scale corporate restructuring was unavoidable.
6
A key strategy for corporations to stay afloat in a volatile economy was to dismantle the system of lifetime employment. While stringent
employment
protection laws made it difficult for corporations to lay off older generations of their employees, they began excluding new employees from the system of lifetime employment. By reintroducing values such as fun and individualism into the realm of wage labor, workplace dramas such as
Shomuni
offered labor fantasies that made the massive incorporation of youth into a precarious workforce more digestible. After discussing how the genre of workplace drama evolved in the late 1990s, I trace how the new dramas mediated and capitalized on the socioeconomic changes while producing new labor subjectivities in the process.