Volume 3　「男は働き、女は家庭を守る」？


Shifting Roles

Michael Rhys: Hello and welcome to the June edition of Cultural Crossroads. I'm Michael Rhys.

Ann Slater: And I'm Ann Slater. Today we are going to talk about gender roles - meaning that men and women take in different cultures.

Michael: Right. 

Ann: And of course, that is changing a lot in Japan now.

Michael: So do you find there's a big difference to gender roles in Japan compared with the States?

Ann: Well, traditionally, yes - meaning the traditional role of the man who handles all of the work, and outside the home, and the woman who is in charge of the domestic front, that seemed very different to me when I first came here.

Michael: Right.

Ann: How about you? What do you find?

Michael: Uh, well, pretty much the same. But as you say, you come to Japan and you'll find that those particular gender roles are still in place for the most part. That's what you mean there, yeah?

Ann: Yeah, I think they are. But the reason I qualified that is I think it is really changing and you see this whole thing about, so-called herbivores. Have you seen this? Ha-ha. Herbivorous men, yeah.

Michael: Right. I've, I've heard, heard a little bit about that. Can you explain that?

Ann: Well, as I understand it, this, sort of, new type of man who kind of, translates as "grass- eating" -

Michael: Right, ha-ha.

Ann: . . . ha-ha, grass-eating men who are not very interested in sex or consumerism - you know, spending money, buying things. They prefer to stay at home. If they're together with a woman, even if they slept over at her house they would just sleep together like friends. And, they like cooking, and it's this very sort of easygoing gentle person. So that seems to be a trend recently, and that's why I was saying I think it's changing.

Michael: Right, certainly in Japan it does seem as, in the years that I've been here, this kind of - at one time we would have thought as the fundamental, very difficult to change, part of society is actually very flexible and fluid in this country. As you say, recently we've seen a y shift in what defines being male, being a man.

Ann: Yes, and on the other hand I think yes and no, because then, uh, on the other hand you have this funny expression, right, this "meat-eating girls."

Michael: But in some ways this is an extension of what I've seen in Japan for a long time. Because certainly in England the image of Japan, Japanese women especially, is that they are supposed to be very quiet, very passive, and certainly on the outside that can be true. But I think, within that, if you have a relationship between two people, I find especially in marriage in Japan the women are the dominant partner, and I think they always have been in this country. So in a way, what we're seeing here's, is just the same thing, but it's just a little more overt.

Ann: That's interesting.