Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (42 page)

Viewers loved the new bohemian working heroine, Tsuboi Chinatsu, who became a cultural icon.
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The scriptwriter Takahashi Rumi, who drafted the drama series and wrote the first episode, played a crucial role in creating the character of Tsuboi Chinatsu. Takahashi recounted to me that she did not follow the original
manga
closely. First of all, she could not avoid readjusting the characters because of the cast. Although in the original version Tsukahara was the protagonist, the scriptwriter was more inspired by a supporting character, Tsuboi Chinatsu. Takahashi was convinced that this character was a better match for the lead
tarento
, Esumi Makiko. This is why she decided to place the character of Chinatsu in the center of the drama.
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The other plotline in the original
manga
that the scriptwriter kept for the television drama was the opposition between Chinatsu and an elite office lady, Misono. What turned these women against each other were their irreconcilable philosophies. Misono believed that the value of a woman was determined by the status and financial background of the man she dated, while for Chinatsu it was the
number
of men a woman has dated that defined her worth. This conflict was reminiscent of the antagonism between the heroine of love dramas and her rival in their competition for the attention of the hero. While the heroine was the epitome of the
shōjo
(the young girl whose life
centers
on fun and consumer culture), her rival was the traditional woman, who conformed to postwar gender ideals and became a stay-at-home mother. In the workplace dramas, the role of the traditional female character is very similar and provides a foil to emphasize the freshness of the new bohemian character. This conflict, however, did not become the central theme in the serial but degenerated into catfights, which some viewers found particularly sexy, as expressed in comments on fan sites.

The conflict between women is not completely abandoned in workplace dramas, but it is subordinated to a new conflict arising between a progressive young female and older male employees (
oyaji, ojisan
), “mainstream, reactionary, middle-aged men who cannot grow out of their old-fashioned identification with a work-centered life” (Yoda forthcoming). The
ojisan
is also the enemy of young men (among them
freeters
), who prefer a more consumerism-driven lifestyle. The protagonists of this conflict occupy starkly opposed positions: The older male employees believe that young women should follow the path of early retirement because women’s place is in the home. The young women claim that stupid geezers should all retire (
Baka oyaji inkyo se yo
) because they are good for nothing. What is important to note here is the gendering of an antagonism that is not between men and women but between the values of the high-growth economic order and those underlying neoliberal restructuring.

The opposition between young progressive women and old retrograde men is the key conflict in the serial that survives not only from one episode to the other but also from one season to the next. This conflict translates into the basic narrative framework in which Terasaki, the manager of the human resources section, is determined to liquidate the section of general affairs. To prove that the section is an unnecessary expense to the company and that its members are incompetent, Terasaki and his assistant Nonomura keep cooking up new challenges such as health exams, crime prevention campaigns, and fire drills, which they assign to the office ladies in the section of general affairs. Terasaki deliberately schedules these drills for days reserved to host precious potential business partners when it is crucial that company executives impress their guests with a cleaned-up version of the company. As planned by Terasaki and Nonomura, the company is turned upside down, but the representatives of the human resources section do not succeed in getting the office ladies fired because these women always end up cleaning up the mess with admirable efficiency and they always impress
the
guests with their capability for organizing the company into a single, task-oriented body. In each episode, when they get their new assignment, the women start panicking and begin to talk retirement. Chinatsu, however, looks at the fun side of the new challenge. She stays levelheaded, folds her arms, and concludes: “It sounds like a good adventure. Let’s get some fun out of it.” According to the show’s director: “These women turn upside down the traditional structure of the company, but they win the hearts of not only women but male viewers as well with their message to have a little more fun with life.”
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What was so compelling about this character? What kind of new agency did she represent that so closely resonated with the imagination of a positive role model by male and female viewers alike? As scriptwriter Inoue Yumiko’s quote has already illustrated, in workplace dramas the representation of the heroine has undergone significant changes. The producers wanted to make more realistic dramas by featuring characters that develop through their struggles with workplace problems such as conflicts with bosses. The typical heroine of workplace dramas no longer finds the meaning of her life in love and marriage. Some of these female protagonists devote themselves to their careers (as in the series
Kirakira Hikaru
); others work because of financial necessity (as in
Dear Woman
) or simply because they find their work entertaining (
Shomuni
). Marriage does not bring an end to the development of female characters as happens in love dramas.

Chinatsu is an extreme character in the original
manga
. Her life story only sporadically comes to the surface in the drama. From the original graphic novel we learn that her family disowned her after she embarked on a career in the adult video business. She entered the corporate world as a career-track employee, but she was soon transferred to the section of general affairs after having knocked out her male boss for smacking her butt. A scene from the first season illustrates her brashness. Tsuboi and Tsukahara are having dinner at a ramen stall, when a group of gangsters joins them. Tsuboi bets one of them that if she loses in arm wrestling, the gangster can spend the night with Tsukahara. Tsukahara runs off, while Tsuboi (not surprisingly) loses. The next day she tells Tsukahara that she owes her big time because she had to sleep not only with the gangster she lost to but also with his friends. Tsukahara responds that she cannot believe what nonsense Chinatsu is capable of saying without shame.

The
only thing that Chinatsu values is freedom and occasionally solidarity with those of her colleagues who are also disadvantaged in the corporate system. She often confronts Tsukahara for letting her male colleagues order her about and for not having a strong sense of self. She is also at odds with Misono, who spends her time in the company searching for a potential husband. Chinatsu criticizes these women for not being independent and for relying on men to define who they are. But what unites these women is that they share an archenemy in Terasaki, the manager of human resources. When Terasaki picks on the twenty-nine-year-old Misono and starts pressuring her to get married and retire, Chinatsu stands by her.

This bohemian protagonist becomes a mature manifestation of the love drama heroine, which, I argue, is also a stand-in for the male
freeter
. What is new about Chinatsu is that she does not expect anyone else to make her happy but relies on herself to define who she is and how she imagines happiness for herself. This character fully internalizes a sense of self-orientation that marketing and social scientific discourses associate with
freeters
in the late 1990s. Moreover, while the selfishness of the love drama heroines invited criticism from male viewers, Chinatsu turns this personality trait into an attractive role model. She justifies it as a source of the freedom, autonomy, and entrepreneurial spirit that she advocates as necessary to survive in a recessionary economy. She represents a new type of labor subjectivity in that she rejects the highly hierarchical and group-oriented corporate structure, for it represses individualism
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and forces employees to give up their freedom and autonomy.

In the late 1960s, the social anthropologist Nakane Chie (1970) argued that the frame (institution, place) was the principle for group formation in Japan, as opposed to a common attribute of individuals that constituted a group in Western societies. She stressed that this principle of group formation came from the household structure (
ie
) of the Tokugawa period (1603–1867), which still persisted in various group identities such as villages, educational institutions, and business corporations. This social structure was based on the principle of groupism (
shūdan shugi
) and the minimization of individual autonomy. She saw proof in the fact that Japanese employees identified themselves not by their occupation but by the institution (that is, the frame) itself. Her study legitimized the postwar ideology of corporate management, which required employees to commit themselves to their companies, by arguing
that
the frame-based pattern of group formation was founded on historical precedents in Japan since the beginning of the Tokugawa period.

This is exactly the ideology Chinatsu defies by constantly reminding her colleagues that this frame of groupism no longer offers employees a stable sense of belonging and a meaningful future. Chinatsu becomes the superego of the company in the era of corporate restructuring. Her responsibility is to replace lightbulbs, so she carries a ladder as a work tool in every episode. But this is not just a ladder; it serves as the “corporate ladder,” the old socioeconomic order of Japan, Inc. (
kigyōka shakai
). She carries this symbol around as a reminder of its existence and its impact on employees. She herself denounces any effort to climb the corporate ladder because she equates such efforts with abandoning one’s self.

For example, in one episode the
shomuni
staff vow to help a career office lady win a competition for the position of project manager against the star male employee Ukyo Tomohiro. To devote herself to her work, this office lady had abandoned her baby to the care of her divorced husband. The husband, unable to take care of the baby, leaves the child with a note addressed to the mother in the lobby of her company. The mother denies that the baby is hers because her being a single mother would severely reduce her chances to win the competition. In the end, Chinatsu tells the young career woman that their efforts to help her are a waste if it means that she has to become a man and compete like men who abandon their families for the sake of their work. If the
shomuni
women were to help her become a soulless corporate cyborg in the process of building her career, then their mission would be a failure.

When Chinatsu claims that no career is worth it if the person is lost in it in the end, one may wonder about this insistence on a right to freedom in a time of shrinking opportunities for career-track employment. Chinatsu’s character should be understood in a context in which young women had come to symbolize social change. To identify with them was to approve the values commonly associated with them such as individualism and self-centered lifestyles. By the late 1990s, however, social discourses had lumped together young women with male
freeters
, who came to epitomize the same values in the popular imaginary. This is why
Shomuni
could so seamlessly blur the line between the identities of office ladies and male
freeters
. Chinatsu is garbed in the uniform of office ladies, but she has the spirit and attitude that sympathetic portrayals attribute to
freeters
. This is curious, as
freeters
and corporations occupy the opposite ends in popular discussions of Japan’s future
in
the 1990s.
Freeters
represent the new Japan, while corporations stand for the postwar order, which ended with the recession in the early 1990s. By introducing a
freeter
attitude into the corporate world, Chinatsu becomes a reminder that a symbiotic dependence between corporations and employees is at odds with the demands of the new economy for entrepreneurial spirit, mobility, and flexibly reconfigurable work skills. By representing these values, Chinatsu epitomizes a new kind of worker subjectivity. Yet the answer she offers is nothing more than a labor fantasy; an uncritical celebration of freedom obliterates the fact that neoliberal economies thrive on a liberal rhetoric recognizing freedom as an unalienable property of individuals. In the context of economic deregulation, freedom is not only the freedom of the worker to flexibly employ or redefine her skills but also the freedom of the company to dispose of workers as market and labor demands fluctuate.

Scriptwriter Takahashi Rumi recounted to me that she thought of
Shomuni
as a recession drama in that the main preoccupation of the characters was to redefine themselves in conditions where they could no longer count on their companies to provide them with job security and welfare benefits. The message that “no work was worth doing if there was nothing enjoyable about it,” however, reads not so much as a realistic strategy for youth but rather as a fantasy of agency and desire to be entitled to the freedom of choice in the wake of shrinking prospects for secure employment. Political scientist Steven Vogel has argued that in the 1990s both the Japanese government and corporations aimed to reform the employment system not by completely abandoning existing institutions but by cautiously modifying or even reinforcing them (2006). These choices, however, were more to protect an aging workforce (to comply with stringent employment protection laws) than to allow youth to enter the system of secure employment (Genda 2006).
Shomuni
’s suggestion to link work and enjoyment is thus discrepant with the demands of the new economy for flexible labor, which is, one may argue, often not all that enjoyable. Often, irregular work requires the same commitment from workers as career-track employment, but this commitment is not equally justified for employers and employees who will not equally benefit from the product of the worker’s labor. Takahashi has commented: