"Excuse me, but is your company employing any female graduates this year?"
I turned round and beside me on the platform at one of Tokyo's larger stations was a young woman, smartly dressed but looking frankly a bit desperate. I was a bit surprised as normally young women in Japan did not accost total strangers. I suppose my business suit and general air of having just got out of the office caused her to overcome her normal scruples. It seemed she had just graduated from a good university in Tokyo, but despite trying several companies, hadn't had a sniff of an offer of a job of any kind - and 1 April was only a few days away! Looking back on it, I now realise that another reason she might have singled me out was so that she could show off her ability in conversational English.
Unfortunately I had to tell her that compared with the 60 office ladies we'd taken in 1993, Mitsui OSK was going to take none at all in April 1994 (and only 60 men compared with 80 the previous year). I also said that I understood that with the bursting of Japan's 'bubble economy' other companies were probably in the same boat.
It seemed as if women were the first to feel the recession, especially perhaps the better educated ones. But, despite the problems of my platform friend, I had already noted some improvement in the lot of the working woman compared with my earlier spell of working in Japan. This had been in the 1960s and 1970s - some 20 years earlier. In the earlier period girls were expected to marry at 25, and at that point they were also expected to stop working. Hence the female workforce experienced a total turnover every 3 years (if they started as graduates at age 22, perhaps 5 years if they started at 20 after 'junior college' - a 2 year kind of finishing school).
What they did in the office in my earlier spell in Japan was also very limited. They were secretaries, accounts clerks and receptionists. Generally they were expected to leap up and serve tea to their bosses, especially when - a frequent occurrence in Japan - visitors dropped in bowing deeply and proffering business cards. The girls were supposed to smile sweetly with their eyes cast demurely downwards. They never worked late, and never joined their male colleagues in a drink after work. They had recently been termed 'office ladies', having before that been called (rather unfortunately) 'business girls'. Strangely these terms were always in English.
So how about the 1990s? As said in my earlier blog, the age of marriage has risen, but more important, women don't now leave their jobs automatically on marriage. I also noticed in Mitsui that when we went out for a drink after work some of the more daring ladies did now join, although they were less likely to catch the midnight train back home to Yokohama so drunk that they lay over 3 seats and forget to get out at their destination.
Although in the 1990s women still occupied few positions of responsibility, they sometimes managed to get into a kind of niche. The Mitsui 'jogging club' - which met on the first Tuesday of each month and ran one lap around the Imperial Palace (5k) was headed up by a Miss Suzuki, a 45 year old office lady in the passenger department. The male runners seemed to have no problem in deferring to her in matters athletic, even if they outranked her in the office.
In short, even in the 1990s women still had a pretty raw deal; they still weren't employed for life, and those that hung around to middle age - like Miss Suzuki - were something of an embarrassment as they were unlikely ever to get promoted to a 'man's' job.
My impression is that today things have moved on. I don't think a Japanese firm would have sent a young woman executive for language training at OISE in the 1990s, and certainly not in the 1970s.
I turned round and beside me on the platform at one of Tokyo's larger stations was a young woman, smartly dressed but looking frankly a bit desperate. I was a bit surprised as normally young women in Japan did not accost total strangers. I suppose my business suit and general air of having just got out of the office caused her to overcome her normal scruples. It seemed she had just graduated from a good university in Tokyo, but despite trying several companies, hadn't had a sniff of an offer of a job of any kind - and 1 April was only a few days away! Looking back on it, I now realise that another reason she might have singled me out was so that she could show off her ability in conversational English.
Unfortunately I had to tell her that compared with the 60 office ladies we'd taken in 1993, Mitsui OSK was going to take none at all in April 1994 (and only 60 men compared with 80 the previous year). I also said that I understood that with the bursting of Japan's 'bubble economy' other companies were probably in the same boat.
It seemed as if women were the first to feel the recession, especially perhaps the better educated ones. But, despite the problems of my platform friend, I had already noted some improvement in the lot of the working woman compared with my earlier spell of working in Japan. This had been in the 1960s and 1970s - some 20 years earlier. In the earlier period girls were expected to marry at 25, and at that point they were also expected to stop working. Hence the female workforce experienced a total turnover every 3 years (if they started as graduates at age 22, perhaps 5 years if they started at 20 after 'junior college' - a 2 year kind of finishing school).
What they did in the office in my earlier spell in Japan was also very limited. They were secretaries, accounts clerks and receptionists. Generally they were expected to leap up and serve tea to their bosses, especially when - a frequent occurrence in Japan - visitors dropped in bowing deeply and proffering business cards. The girls were supposed to smile sweetly with their eyes cast demurely downwards. They never worked late, and never joined their male colleagues in a drink after work. They had recently been termed 'office ladies', having before that been called (rather unfortunately) 'business girls'. Strangely these terms were always in English.
So how about the 1990s? As said in my earlier blog, the age of marriage has risen, but more important, women don't now leave their jobs automatically on marriage. I also noticed in Mitsui that when we went out for a drink after work some of the more daring ladies did now join, although they were less likely to catch the midnight train back home to Yokohama so drunk that they lay over 3 seats and forget to get out at their destination.
Although in the 1990s women still occupied few positions of responsibility, they sometimes managed to get into a kind of niche. The Mitsui 'jogging club' - which met on the first Tuesday of each month and ran one lap around the Imperial Palace (5k) was headed up by a Miss Suzuki, a 45 year old office lady in the passenger department. The male runners seemed to have no problem in deferring to her in matters athletic, even if they outranked her in the office.
In short, even in the 1990s women still had a pretty raw deal; they still weren't employed for life, and those that hung around to middle age - like Miss Suzuki - were something of an embarrassment as they were unlikely ever to get promoted to a 'man's' job.
My impression is that today things have moved on. I don't think a Japanese firm would have sent a young woman executive for language training at OISE in the 1990s, and certainly not in the 1970s.
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