Conversations with the Translator: Gender Wars

Kate: I’m reading a quite funny manga series called Otomen by Aya Kanno, which is set in the modern day. The main character is Asuka, the epitome of the stern, male Samurai-in-training—except he secretly loves cute things like shojo manga and sewing and cooking. His girlfriend is Ryo whose cop father has brought her up to wrestle grizzly bears and fight crime and who can’t cook a cake to save her life (Asuka eats what she cooks anyway). Their friend, Junta, is—unbeknownst to them—a shojo manga writer/illustrator desperate for inspiration. He is using Asuka and Ryo in his series, only in his series, Asuka is the girl and Ryo is the boy.

Despite this rather broad, almost slap-stick premise, many of the stories are downright hilarious and do (mostly) translate—it’s rather like reading a version of Die Hard where John McClane knits and pets bunnies between karate-chopping people.

But I’m not sure the entire cultural construct translates. On the one hand, the manga series I read are far more flexible in general about gender appearance than American literature (mostly because nobody cares whether a character runs around looking androgynous; American teen literature would get all serious about it and start talking about tolerance). On the other hand, the gender roles are about a billion times more conservative than anything in American literature—except fundamentalist Christian romances and those tend to be a tad defensive on the issue.

In sum, I’m beginning to think that Japanese manga might be a better introduction to the 1950’s mindset regarding gender roles than the average American textbook. Has the series referenced above exaggerated Japanese culture? Are gender wars a big deal in Japan (who stays home? who cooks? who works?)?

Eugene: The series is certainly exaggerating for effect, but not without substance. Japan really is conservative in the sense of holding onto whatever worked in the past (Chesterton’s Fence), and at the same time radically post-modern in its willingness to fuse the past with the present without abandoning either.

Not only the deep past, but the recent past. Hence the line in Fox & Wolf, “Teenage rebellion in Japan still hadn’t left James Dean and the bobbysoxers behind.”

The big difference is, while the subject is certainly debated and hands are wrung, there aren’t serious “gender wars” about it, not in the western activist sense. More like little skirmishes here and there that the press seizes on and blows out of proportion.

Rather, Japanese culture in this regard is like a rubber band, stretching out to pick up foreign influences here and there, and then springing back. Inching forward each time, but if you only pay attention to the “spring forward,” you’ll totally misjudge the direction and magnitude of the actual results.

Japanese rarely fight the status quo head-on; they augment it little by little. In the wake of the Meiji Restoration, impatient political leaders on several occasions imposed significant social changes by fiat. The disastrous unintended consequences reverberated for decades.

Kate: One romance manga series I encountered (Harlequin Pink) uses American Harlequins with Japanese illustrators. The Harlequins are from 1980! They are available on Amazon.co.jp in English.

The first time I read one, I thought, “Why didn’t they pick something more modern or at least modernize the characters/plot?” After reading several other manga series, I thought, “Ohhhhh, that’s why.” The characters are classic Harlequin tropes: the demure heroine; the domineering and protective hero. 

These tropes appear throughout many manga series. They are often challenged in manga series, but they are not belittled as they often are in American culture. For instance, I encountered a scene in The World’s Greatest First Love: The Case of Ritsu Onodera--which is mostly about the shojo publishing world--in which a female character states in a very forceful manner, “I’m going to make my husband, not my next bestseller, the cornerstone of my life.” The volume was published in 2011.

Eugene: As Peter Payne puts it:

One reality that’s hard for “enlightened” Westerners to accept is that much of the time, Japan is the way it is because both men and women prefer it this way. When a woman reaches a certain age, it’s nearly a foregone conclusion that she will quit her job to get married, no matter how intelligent or highly trained she might be. As the owner of a company in Japan, I’ve lost many a talented female employee to the evil specter of kekkon intai or “retirement due to marriage.”

Perhaps these gender roles being deeply—but not rigidly—embedded in the culture makes for such a rich trove of comedic material.

Kate: In terms of gendered comedic material, there is a very funny scene in Mr. Baseball, which involves manga reading habits! Tom Selleck’s character, Jack, is on a train seated next to a middle-class, respectable-looking woman who is reading a manga. Jack spots that the manga has extremely explicit illustrations. Yet the woman is not embarrassed.

She is reading the equivalent of a Harlequin, only in America, these “grocery store” romances are safely packaged as novels. There’s a kind of blithe assumption that romance novels for women are “erotic” but not in any way “pornographic.”

More Conversations to Follow!