Customer Reviews

Office Ladies/Factory Women: Life and Work at a Japanese Company

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A Chinese-American Harvard undergraduate works in a factory and an office in Japan and discusses the differences between the employment dynamics of women and men. This book is heavy on detail and a bit short on analysis. It's not as sophisticated as a Ph.D.'s work. Still, it is impressive that an undergraduate student could put this together. Lo says she majored in East Asian studies, but she must have taken many anthropology classes because this book takes much from that discipline.

Being a Westerner and wearing my feminist cap, it was very hard not to condemn much of what Lo describes. She said a male manager would pinch her and other women's butts. Granted, Lo visited Japan just when the U.S. Supreme Court validated sexual harassment laws. But it is amazing to see what men can get away with in any office. The women are encouraged to be childlike. This reminded me of who anime includes many women characters that seem like bratty girls. How this forced role-playing helps rather than hampers an office, I don't know. It just seems incredibly inefficient to me that women who have college degrees have no promotion potential and are forced to serve coffee. Finally, Lo never mentions compulsory heterosexuality. Basically, she implies that the Japanese purposely make employment terrible for women so that they will want to be married and become housewives. Lo never asks or answer what happens to female workers, or males for that matter, that don't want to create heterosexual marriages.

Supposedly, the West centers the individual and the East centers the group. This book gives great examples of that. Here, women tolerated boring jobs for the good of the company. Women were willing to live in crowded housing situations just to have others around. Lo never repeats the Japanese cliché "The nail that stands out the most gets hammered hardest." Still, the sense of Asian connectedness is verified here.

Though Lo works in a blue-collar setting and a white-collar one, I thought she could have said much more about class distinctions in Japan. This book may be a bit dated now. First, the yen is worth more now and second Japan has been in a huge economic slump for some years. Also, the birth of the Princess and the modification to allow her to rule rather than a son will hopefully help Japanese gender relations.

I am also skeptical that Japanese women, and society, are so chaste. Just like moneyed people in the United States and Europe, I think the Japanese like to get down, if you know what I mean. When I visited I saw a store that just sold condoms and many adult video stores. In Japan, abortions are not stigmatized and the rate of HIV is low, so I highly doubt that young Japanese are waiting until marriage to get busy, again if you know what I mean.

Supposedly, only Americans see race; others just see nationality. However, here the Japanese admit that the author looks like them. They state that it's hard to think of her as American. I actually think Lo could have spoken of her ethnicity more. Because Japan has had imperialist tensions with China, did her interviewees in some way think of themselves as better than her?

An interesting ethnographic account of women in the workplace. Its also a good read.