From Modern Girls to Parasites: The Enduring Discourse of Women in Japan

(Tsushin, Vol. 7, No. 2, Fall 2001)

· Professor Andrew Gordon, Director, Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University, 1998-2004

Once again, America’s authoritative keeper of public record has discovered the new Japanese woman. In the New York Times Magazine of July 1, 2001, Peggy Orenstein offers a snappy appraisal of the current generation of Japanese young women in their 20s and 30s, the so-called “parasite singles.” She suggests they are either harbingers of a feminist revolution, or maybe just selfish (wagamama in romanized italics). Certainly there is much that rings true in this account. My niece by the accident of marriage fits the definition of the “parasite single” to a T: age 30, living at her parents’ Tokyo home, working as a free-lance writer, consuming, traveling and enjoying life, no sign of a wedding on the horizon though she has a boyfriend of several years’ standing..... Probably many or most Tsushin readers can conjure up their own examples (or offer themselves?).

So why not praise Ms. Orenstein as a journalist with cutting edge insight? Perhaps most importantly, because this report of a new wave phenomenon is, with just a little scratching of the historical surface, so very familiar. We might call this the “discoverer’s fallacy.” The observer decides that her first encounter with a phenomenon is in fact the moment of origin of what she observes. Like Columbus’s “discovery” of America, Orenstein discovers a group of people who have actually been around for some time but presents them as today’s news. The sharp increase in the age of marriage of Japanese women, the corresponding decline in the birth-rate, the young female office worker’s pitiful gaze upon senior male colleagues caught in the corporate rat-race, the flamboyant spending and playful behavior of young adult women living at home at their parents’ expense: at least since the 1980s, all these trends have been prominently noted in the media of Japan and abroad.

But the amnesiac problem is, in fact, of longer duration. Although the particular buzzwords have changed with the decades, images of “modern girls,” of “new women,” of self-centered female seekers of fun, have in fact been constant features of commentary on social life in Japan at least since (and to some extent before) the 1920s and 1930s, when the “modern girl” burst onto the scene with her jaunty fashions, her apparent promiscuity and her flaunting of expectations that she play the role of “good wife” and “wise mother.” And across the postwar decades, various sorts of new women—not all cut from the exact same mold but all seeming to challenge something called convention or tradition—have been part of the cultural and social scene. Then, as now, observers wondered whether the modern girl was a harbinger of a transformation with profound political implications, or just a selfish and shallow parasite. Then, as now, the new woman was counterposed to an image of a timeless tradition of “woman’s role” as if such tradition existed and as if it were only now for the first time being challenged.

And then as now, it was difficult to separate the media fantasy from the everyday reality. The “modern girls” who actually worked and played in the cities of the 1920s were more complicated and varied than the media images which celebrated or condemned their lives. And it is clear from the very examples Orenstein offers that the young women of 2001 sit uneasily in the media mold. She admits that her first example, Ms. Arai, is in fact “somewhat unusual” as a parasite single since she is very close to her father. We are told that the next woman introduced to us, Ms. Izumi, is not a parasite at all, because she has been married for seven years, since age 24. And the third woman introduced in the article, Ms. Kashiwagi, “is not strictly speaking a parasite single” because she has her own apartment. What is a reader to make of the fact that the very writer who is introducing the phenomenon of “parasite singles” to American readers can do no better than begin with three imperfect versions of the genuine article? At the very least, we can learn that the society is more complicated than the pundits suggest, and that women (and men) negotiate their lives in an uneasy relationship to the swirl of media images that seek to define them.

Tension between trendy images and the variety of lived social experience is certainly a problem not limited to American observation of Japan. American commentary on Americans is full of stereotypical baby-boomers and “generation-X”-ers. But the crudeness of observation seems to reach new heights (or depths) when cross-cultural dimensions creep in. I do better complaining about this situation than offering alternatives, but one thing is clear enough. Stark binary divisions are the curse of simplistic culture-talk. We need to move beyond dichotomies of traditional wife versus modern single woman (a binary that ignores how modern the “good wife, wise mother” was in her time); frozen pasts versus changing presents; a United States imagined as somehow wholly different from Japan. One might, indeed, argue that a more important fact than a U.S.-Japan contrast is the commonality of elevated average age at marriage in both societies—just over 50 percent of Japanese women and a full 37 percent of American women are single at 30, Orenstein tells us. If one held education or social class constant across the two societies, the gap might diminish or disappear. Or it might not. But the possibility should at least be examined.

In any case, it would be refreshing to read more nuanced stories of ongoing and varied processes of social change, whether global or local. Much fine academic work on Japan offers such perspectives, including Miriam Silverberg on 1920s culture and the “modern girl” or Yuko Ogasawara on the feisty “office ladies” of the 1980s. A task for scholars and students such as Tsushin readers is to figure out ways to communicate to a broader public stories that go beyond the usual binaries, and transcend the fallacy of uncovering the new Japan yet again.