Career Women in Contemporary Japan

Career Women in Contemporary Japan PDF Author: Anne Stefanie Aronsson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317686985
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Since Japan’s economic recession began in the 1990s, the female workforce has experienced revolutionary changes as greater numbers of women have sought to establish careers. Employment trends indicate that increasingly white-collar professional women are succeeding in breaking through the "glass ceiling", as digital technologies blur and redefine work in spatial, gendered, and ideological terms. This book examines what motivates Japanese women to pursue professional careers in the contemporary neoliberal economy, and how they reconfigure notions of selfhood while doing so. It analyses how professional women contest conventional notions of femininity in contemporary Japan and in turn, negotiate new gender roles and cultural assumptions about women, whilst reorganizing the Japanese workplace and wider socio-economic relationships. Further, the book explores how professional women create new social identities through the mutual conditioning of structure and self, and asks how women come to understand their experiences; how their actions change the gendering of the workforce; and how their lives shape the economic, political, social, and cultural landscapes of this post-industrial nation. Based on extensive fieldwork, Career Women in Contemporary Japan will have broad appeal across a range of disciplines including Japanese culture and society, gender and family studies, women’s studies, anthropology, ethnology and sociology.

Career Women in Contemporary Japan

Career Women in Contemporary Japan PDF Author: Anne Stefanie Aronsson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317686985
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book

Book Description
Since Japan’s economic recession began in the 1990s, the female workforce has experienced revolutionary changes as greater numbers of women have sought to establish careers. Employment trends indicate that increasingly white-collar professional women are succeeding in breaking through the "glass ceiling", as digital technologies blur and redefine work in spatial, gendered, and ideological terms. This book examines what motivates Japanese women to pursue professional careers in the contemporary neoliberal economy, and how they reconfigure notions of selfhood while doing so. It analyses how professional women contest conventional notions of femininity in contemporary Japan and in turn, negotiate new gender roles and cultural assumptions about women, whilst reorganizing the Japanese workplace and wider socio-economic relationships. Further, the book explores how professional women create new social identities through the mutual conditioning of structure and self, and asks how women come to understand their experiences; how their actions change the gendering of the workforce; and how their lives shape the economic, political, social, and cultural landscapes of this post-industrial nation. Based on extensive fieldwork, Career Women in Contemporary Japan will have broad appeal across a range of disciplines including Japanese culture and society, gender and family studies, women’s studies, anthropology, ethnology and sociology.

Motherhood and Work in Contemporary Japan

Motherhood and Work in Contemporary Japan PDF Author: Nishimura Junko
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317372727
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 131

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Book Description
This book explores the employment of Japanese women born in the 1960s and 1970s who experienced childbirth and raised children in the 1990s and the early 2000s. During this period, the Japanese economy experienced a severe recession. It has affected the firm-specific internal labour market and on employment practices, which in turn are thought to have greatly influenced Japanese women’s employment. On the other hand, the fertility rate declined and social policies to support women’s employment began to be implemented after the 1990s. This book explores how these labour market structure and social policies interact to affect Japanese women’s employment. The book first analyses the employment patterns of women born between the 1920s and 1970s and examines how they have varied among different birth cohorts. Then, the employment behaviour of women before and after childbirth through the post-child-rearing period, as well as the working career of single mothers are explored for women born in the 1960s and 1970s. Based on the data analyses, the concluding part of this book discusses how the labour market structure and social policies during the 1990s and early 2000s interactively influenced employment behaviour of Japanese women, and some suggestions are put forward for changing women’s employment during the child-rearing years.

Gender and Career in Japan

Gender and Career in Japan PDF Author: Atsuko Suzuki
Publisher: Trans Pacific Press
ISBN: 9781876843632
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
This volume probes the nature and ramifications of changing gender norms in Japan from a multidisciplinary perspective incorporating sociology, social psychology and economics.

Staying on the Line

Staying on the Line PDF Author: Glenda S. Roberts
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824845633
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
The traditional Japanese ideology of ryosai kenbo--good wife, wise mother--has relegated women to the home after marriage and childbirth. But in increasing numbers, Japanese women are choosing to remain in the workplace long past those milestones, despite the uneasy and sometimes hostile response of management to their persistence. Glenda Roberts spent a year at a large garment manufacturer in the Kansai region of Japan, working on the assembly line and documenting the lives of her female coworkers. The result of that study is this persuasive, multilayered analysis of a vital but little-examined sector of the Japanese workforce--the female permanent blue-collar worker. Through the workers' personal accounts and vignettes of factory life, Roberts examines why these women work, what satisfaction they find in remaining in the workforce, and how they meet the demands of work and household, caught in a contradiction between traditional sociocultural ideology and modern economic reality. Roberts' portrait gives us the clear voices of these women, who work with quiet determination to achieve the culturally radical goal of lifetime employment, a goal traditionally available only to men.

Capturing Contemporary Japan

Capturing Contemporary Japan PDF Author: Satsuki Kawano
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824838696
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
What are people’s life experiences in present-day Japan? This timely volume addresses fundamental questions vital to understanding Japan in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Its chapters collectively reveal a questioning of middle-class ideals once considered the essence of Japaneseness. In the postwar model household a man was expected to obtain a job at a major firm that offered life-long employment; his counterpart, the “professional” housewife, managed the domestic sphere and the children, who were educated in a system that provided a path to mainstream success. In the past twenty years, however, Japanese society has seen a sharp increase in precarious forms of employment, higher divorce rates, and a widening gap between haves and have-nots. Contributors draw on rich, nuanced fieldwork data collected during the 2000s to examine work, schooling, family and marital relations, child rearing, entertainment, lifestyle choices, community support, consumption and waste, material culture, well-being, aging, death and memorial rites, and sexuality. The voices in these pages vary widely: They include schoolchildren, teenagers, career women, unmarried women, young mothers, people with disabilities, small business owners, organic farmers, retirees, and the elderly.

Japanese Women

Japanese Women PDF Author: Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow
Publisher: Feminist Press
ISBN: 9781558610941
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
In 22 original essays, experienced scholars and writers describe and analyze the historical background, current status, and future prospects for Japanese women living in Japan today. "A truly remarkable volume".--Mariam K. Chamberlain, Founding President, National Council for Research on Women.

The New Japanese Woman

The New Japanese Woman PDF Author: Barbara Sato
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822330448
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
DIVA study of the "modern" woman in Japan before World War II./div

Contemporary Portraits of Japanese Women

Contemporary Portraits of Japanese Women PDF Author: Yukiko Tanaka
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313389977
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
As Japan shifted from an agricultural country before 1950 to an industrialized nation in less time than any other developed country, women felt the pressure of the shift. Husbands worked longer hours, leaving all the household chores and child rearing to their wives while fulfilling their responsibilites as corporate soldiers. The economy was fueled by a diligent, well-educated, low-paid workforce, but gender role division became even more rigid. Household incomes rose and improvement in areas such as diets, transportation, and leisure were made; modern appliances also made it possible for mothers to have part-time jobs. But pollution also rose, as did prices, and crowded living conditions began to impinge on family life. Tanaka, who has spent many years looking back at her country from an American perspective, examines marriage, motherhood, employment, independence, women's movements, and old age for women in Japan over the last 50 years.

Women and Politics in Contemporary Japan

Women and Politics in Contemporary Japan PDF Author: Emma Dalton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317554191
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
This book looks at the gendering of the political system in Japan and the effects of that system on gender equality in national-level politics specifically and wider society more generally. It examines the approach taken by the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to issues of gender equality in Japan, and the repercussions of that approach on women’s political experiences and representation. This book covers a range of themes including the role of the LDP and other major political parties in constructing the modern Japanese political system, the under-representation of women in Japanese politics, women’s experiences in party politics and the gendering of government policies. Using in-depth interviews with women members of the national Diet, the book sheds light on how political women negotiate the male-dominated world of Japanese politics.

Staying on the Line

Staying on the Line PDF Author: Glenda Susan Roberts
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Women
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Using women's personal accounts and interviews, and vignettes of factory life in a large garment factory in the Kansai region, examines why these women work, what satisfaction they find in remaining in the workforce, and how they meet the demands of work and household, caught in a contradiction between traditional socio-cultural ideology and modern economic reality.