Posted on 12/06/2004 9:12:18 AM PST by MississippiMasterpiece
TOKYO – The Japanese government wants women like Taeko Mizuguchi to get married and start doing something about the nation's plunging birthrate. But she's not interested.
At least, not if her prospective husband is Japanese.
A growing number of Japanese women are giving up on their male counterparts, and taking a gamble that looking abroad for love will bring them the qualities in a partner that seem rare at home. Mr. Right, as the hope goes, is often an American or European, a man appreciative of a wife's career and more of a partner in daily tasks.
"They treat you like equals, and they don't hesitate to express mutual feelings of respect - I think Western men are more adept [at such things] than Japanese men," says the 36-year-old Ms. Mizuguchi, who works at a top trading firm. "They don't act like women are maids - I think they view women as individuals."
Underscoring that Japanese women are losing hope with the local boys, dating agencies to help snag a Western husband have sprung up in Tokyo, some with branches in the US and Europe. Such companies rigorously vet their clients, screening for education, family background, occupation, and life goals.
The kind of women who sign up for such services include doctors, lawyers, and other professionals - women who have delayed marriage to concentrate on careers and who aren't keen to give up hard won gains to become a housewife, as many Japanese men expect.
Japanese women have come to consider traditional marriage roles as "disadvantageous in terms of time resources - they have to carry the burden of domestic chores as well as lose their free time," says Chizuko Ueno, a professor of sociology at Tokyo University.
Normally, married Japanese women have not only to look after their own parents during old age, but also to care for their parents-in-law. When it comes to raising kids, "they can't expect much cooperation from their partner" because of the long work hours required at many Japanese corporations and because of established gender roles that assume that the woman does the child-rearing, Ms. Ueno adds.
A generation of women who are now entering their 30s don't want to give up single life unless prospective partners are willing to break from traditional gender roles.
Government polls conducted to find out why women have put off marriage until well after 25 years of age - known as a woman's " 'best before' date" - show that economic independence is key to the change. As most Japanese women have their own income, marriage is no longer a financial necessity and women want to find companionship in a husband.
That is where Japanese men have come up short. There is "a wide gap in men's and women's attitudes and expectations toward marriage" vis-à-vis traditional gender roles, says Sumiko Iwao, professor of social psychology at Musashi Institute of Technology in Yokohama. For instance, coming home later than your Japanese husband is a no-no.
Having ruled out an old-fashioned Japanese husband, many women here think the solution is a Western man. Indeed, some seem so enthralled with the idea that they are willing to spend thousands of dollars to inspect the wares personally. Of the more than 2,000 women on the books at one large matchmaking agency, about 200 travel to the US or Europe each month to meet prospects.
Sentimental projections have recently been extended to Korean men also, due to romantic Korean soap operas.
In 2003, Japanese women marrying American or British men outnumbered Japanese men marrying American or British women by 8 to 1. The total proportion of Japanese marrying foreigners each year has crept up from around 3.5 percent in 1995 to just over 5 percent. Japanese men are actually more than three times as likely as the women to take a foreign spouse, but this is mostly rural men marrying less well-off Chinese and Filipino women. "Such cases are elderly farmers not popular among young Japanese women," says Yuriko Hashimoto, a local government employee in the remote northern prefecture of Iwate.
To be fair, not all the blame for female angst here can be laid on Japanese men. The government has been slow to enforce equal opportunity laws, and both pay and the glass ceiling in most Japanese corporations remain low for women. Recession has hampered longer maternity leave and other family-friendly policies.
As Japan's fertility rate drops to new lows - at last count it was 1.29, well below levels required for population replacement - the ruling Liberal Democratic Party is anxiously drawing up plans to make it easier for young couples to raise children, through such measures as the provision of cheap public housing.
Mixed marriages in Japan
Japanese men marry: Chinese 10,242 Filipinos 7,794 Koreans 2,235 Americans 156 British 65
Japanese women marry: Koreans 5,318 Americans 1,529 Chinese 890 British 334 Filipinos 117
Source: 2003 Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare
By the way, did you choose your name because, while in the Philippines, everyone called you Joe? If I had a dollar for every time I got called Joe, I would be rich.
Full exposure. I lived on the local economy while I was there so I was in the markets haggling, in the bars drinking, in the movie theatres, etc.
Not evil, neurotic. Evil is easier to put up with.
I got my Filipina.
You sound as though you just obtained a new car.
You are exactly right - mostly what I saw was dirt and rubble and pigs wondering down the streets and trucks using charcoal for fuel.
In that desperate situation one certainly couldn't blame the little Japanese lass and as young as I was at the time, I fully understood it wasn't "love at first sight."
P.S. Nice pictures of present day Japan - quite a contrast. We managed a cultural tour during our brief visit, to the Buddha of Kamakura (?). Is he still there? I have an old B&W snapshot.
I take your word for it that the married people you know are unhappy, but that may not be her experience with the people she knows.
He's (still) there alright. He'll be sitting there for the next 2000 years, too, provided there isnt a massive earthquake there.
Unfortunately, wave upon wave, generation after generation of young American came back to the US after a couple of years posted to Asia...having 'sewn' quite a bit of 'oats' there. problem is, many, many of them only with transcient, obscene or crass relationships (often for money) with Asian women who were generally gravitating within a five mile radius of the military base front gate, leeching off the PX and GIs, and ergo, a high percentage of the Asian females in the total universe(in the GI's minds with limited exposure)simply ='wh*res' and 'sl*ts'.
This would be anything but the truth. The US military were meeting only a relatively small, unrepresentative, bastardized/jaded tip of the social iceberg, not mainstream Asian females. Many US GIs would come back with a highly aberrant, skewed and limited impression of Asian women so totally unrepresentative of the whole..but it fueled a whole cottage industry, urban legened of the image that Asian woman = wh*re = all too easy.....such as popularized by the overused "love you long time"....this is a bum rap for the great majority of Asian women....i agree there are vast segments of Asian women who would have nothing to do with American military or bases or bars nearby them...and have and had just as conservative morals if not more conservative than the average American blonde teenage girl back stateside in the 1960s or 1970s.
That's what I had heard at the time - earthquakes, floods and the old guy lives on!
I'm all ears. What advice would you offer?
You think this approach will drive women away? Convince them you are a jerk? It's just the opposite, my friend.
Tell her she's beautiful and she's just going to think: "Yeah, right. I know what this guy wants. What a loser. Maybe I can get him to buy me things for a while." ;)
Convince them you are a jerk...Has this approach worked well for you?
Let's just say women don't think I'm a jerk. ;)
Go get em killer.
BTW nice pic on your profile page.
It is a pretty simple language actually, at least Tagalog, Cebuano, and similar are. Others, like Ilicano are tougher. There are many languages and dialects, some of which are quite divergent. My skills have actually more or less rusted away at this point.
One thing that makes Tagalog easy to learn is that many of the words they use are Spanish transliterated into their alphabet/soundset. I discovered very early on that if I was reading a Tagalog word that I did not know that was not obviously pure Tagalog, I would try to map the sound of it to Spanish in my head to determine its meaning. This works far more often than you think it would. I don't really know much Spanish, but I knew enough that I bridged a lot of gaps with it. The structure and form is not Spanish, but many of the words in the language were taken from Spanish.
I laughed out loud when I read that. That is exactly what my husband did with me and it worked wonderfully. He was never mean or arrogant, just playful. And I responded in kind. And we still do it now.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.