May 9, 2002
My birthday has recently come to pass. (Huzzah.) I'm now 27. How should I feel? Happy? Sad? Aged? Wiser? Decrepit? "Oh rapture, I'm one year closer to death!" I just don't know how I should feel. Um... heh, okay, I'm about to reveal to you one of the most lame and pathetic secrets I'm willing to admit to... here goes... Ahem: whenever I had a birthday party in the past- you know when you blow-out the candles and make a b-day wish? Well... since age 17, whenever I had a birthday party (not every year, mind you) I would make one wish when I blew-out my candles year after year after year. My wish would always be to find a really cool girlfriend in the coming year. You can laugh now. Yeah, I know, that's a very lame thing to admit to, but it's the truth. But, I haven't made this wish in the last few years especially... after age 25, you tend to have fewer birthday parties.
I didn't tell anyone in Japan about my birthday, I don't think I really want all the attention that would've resulted. I got a few emailed cards from people at home, but that's about it. Anyways, anywhere on my site where I've written that I'm 26... that is no longer applicable. I've updated my introduction accordingly.
Enough about that. Anyhoo, I've been reading a few articles here and there about the women's movement as it has developed in Japan, and it's been quite interesting. The women of today's Japan can probably owe the legal basis for their equality to someone named Beate Sirota Gordon. Beate was a Vienna-born woman who went to college in the U.S. and spent much of her life living in Japan. After the surrender of Japan in 1945, Beate became a constitutional researcher who was asked by the occupation authorities under General MacArthur to help draft a new Japanese constitution. Specifically, she contributed the bits in the Japanese constitution that touch-on women's rights and academic freedom. She studied constitutions from a variety of different nations: among others, she studied the contitutions of the U.S.S.R., the Weimar Republic and a number of Scandinavian countries in order to create specific recommendations for the Japanese constitution. Although many of her recommendations wound-up not being implemented, certain fundamental rights of women did make it into the final document in 1947. Specifically, the rights to own and inherit property, to vote and run for office and equal legal standing with men. (And certain lop-sided laws that conflicteed with this were scrapped. For instance, before 1945, it was a crime for a female to commit adultery but not for men to do the same.)
On April 20th, 1946, women were allowed to participate in the first Japanese general elections. And 39 women were elected to public office on that day, too. In fact, one of the first consumer-advocacy groups to appear in postwar Japan was Chufuren, (the Association of Housewives). Back in the late 1940s, goods were scarce and buying day-to-day necessities on the black market was almost a full-time job in itself. Chufuren was founded in 1948 to counter the power of racketeers and gangsters who were fixing food prices in the economic turbulence after the surrender. Wives, who were in charge of their households' finances, naturally had every reason to band-together and protect themselves from price-fixers.
Nowadays, women's organizations in Japan are quite common. Every neighborhood has a fujinkai, or a women's organization, which looks-after local causes and tends to meet monthly or bi-monthly. The community cohesion in Japan is commendable; Japanese citizens appear more enthusiastically connected to community causes than do their counterparts in the U.S. I don't have any concrete number or statistics to back me up, but it's a distinct impression that I've gotten based on what different people have mentioned.
I guess my main point is: who ever said that Japanese women are necessarily submissive? Their political activities suggest something quite to the contrary, I would say.
Oh, speaking of which, there's a thirtysomething woman who I've met at a client's office... her name is Fumiyo. She's married, but I've gotten locked-into regularly going-out to rather pleasant dinners with her every other week. The set of experiences will be forthcoming in future updates, and I think they are quite interesting... I've also fine-tuned my Top 10 Criticisms to reflect ongoing feedback.
On another note, you'd think that spending about 2 months away from American women might've perhaps reduced how much white-hot loathing I feel for them... but not so. In fact, I have to say that today I have less respect for them than ever... Whenever I go to a gaijin bar, I notice that American chicks in Japan seem to love getting liquored-up. Preferably with lots of liquor, especially when a man is paying for it... This isn't anything new to me: when I was in college, I naturally noticed that a lot of female students around me seemed to get snockered on a dismayingly regular basis. Yes, it seems as if quite a few of the gaijin females can't keep their hands off the hooch. (Naturally, it would be impolitic of me to mention the President's daughters, so I won't get into that...)
To back-up what I have to say: the Journal of American College Health recently reported that between 1993 and 2001, all-women colleges witnessed a 125% increase in "frequent binge drinking". Furthermore, it has been said in a number of different articles on alcoholism that twice as many girls and women than boys and men are treated for chronic intoxication. Devon Jersild, who wrote a book on female alcoholism, once commented that "(female drinkers) associate drinking with power... They think that if they drink like a guy, they will be like a guy."
What do I think? Well, if an American woman wants to puke-up her pancreas and ruin her liver in order to show-off her masculinity, then who am I to raise a fuss over it? Yes, not all American women are boozy hags... but you could fairly come-away with the impression that most of the American women who come to Japan seem to tend that way in their spare time. I sincerely give them a big thumbs-up in continuing to drink unhealthy volumes of alcohol in hopes they suffer the nastiest of side-effects.
What can I say? It's not at all an exagerration for me to testify that these abominable skanks look nastier and nastier each time they cross my path... 'Ugly Americans', indeed.
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