Tokyo's Sexual Revolution
GREENFELD, KARL TARO
TINKERING WITH TRADITION Tokyo's Sexual Revolution BY KARL TARO GREENFELD Tokyo Rika, the lead character in the television drama Tokyo Love Story, lives in a spacious, sunny studio...
...Takao's family and my family would make a good match...
...A career woman in Japan therefore finds her options narrowing quickly: She can either start her own business or get married...
...TINKERING WITH TRADITION Tokyo's Sexual Revolution BY KARL TARO GREENFELD Tokyo Rika, the lead character in the television drama Tokyo Love Story, lives in a spacious, sunny studio apartment in a trendy neighborhood...
...She gave him a playful shove on the arm...
...In the late afternoons, Mako came over from his office and they had sex on her hospital bed...
...I met him at my old job, at the Leo Burnette Advertising Agency...
...My father agrees with whatever I do," she says...
...the women in her family have been using the same Shibuya seamstress shop for three generations...
...I don't like thinking about it anymore...
...He refused to talk to me...
...The difference in this regard between today's single woman and yesterday's is that fear of spinsterism takes hold later...
...Her toy poodle, Philippe, skitters about on the parquet kitchen floor...
...She also seems obtuse and uninterested, in the way pretty young rich girls sometimes are...
...It's sad growing old alone...
...Japanese Social Security guarantees annual payments of only $5,046...
...Last year Hiroko was engaged to marry her longtime boyfriend, Takao, a rising young executive at All Nippon Airways and scion of a wealthy Kyushu samurai family...
...Because of Japan's lean Social Security payments, however, the outlook for an independent businesswoman or a retired single woman lacking a good pension plan is grim...
...She drives her Mercedes Benz 190 between her parents' house and the dry cleaner...
...She is full-figured, with long black hair, round eyes and a pretty face...
...I want to have children before I am too old...
...By age 30, 83.2 per cent are married...
...Then, after leaning back in the soft gray sofa for a moment, "I think nine...
...Gradually, over the past year, I dream about it more and more...
...Asked how many men she has slept with, she responds unhesitantly, "I have to try to figure it out...
...It is Singles Night at Geold...
...He knows about my plastic surgery idea...
...Tokyo Love Story's portrayal of the young, single, liberated career woman reflects a change in attitude here from previous generations, when the ideal was for unmarried young women to live with their parents...
...She dresses in designer outfits, is dedicated to her job as anew products developer for a sporting goods company, and enjoys an active social life...
...I had a nightmare, a terrible feeling while I was out, like somebody was trying to pull me to hell...
...That is why suddenly, at age 27 or 28, they can marry into a traditional, oppressive family environment...
...The first time it was okay...
...Actually, definitely more than my boyfriend...
...Who wants to do this her whole life...
...From Takao's family...
...I rang the buzzer...
...Her skin is chestnut brown from tanning at her fitness club's salon...
...He's too young...
...Michiru ticks off the time-honored arguments for marriage: "I am tired of dating...
...The reason for the omnipresence of condoms, though, has little to do with disease control...
...Hewas the onlyman with whom she had ever had sex...
...I watched men advance who I knew weren't as good as me," says Noriko Furuse, who now runs her own women's employment service...
...After an angry argument with her parents about breaking off the wedding, she crashed her car into the rear end of a taxi cab and was hospitalized for three days with a neck injury...
...They are from another world...
...Parental pressure to marry is still a regular part of most young women's lives, too...
...Her father and Takao both came to visit and laughed when she said she didn't want to marry...
...They acted like I was a fool...
...I never thought about marriage before...
...She lost her virginity at 15 and dropped out of high school that same year...
...They liveindependently, self-sufficiently, take on lovers, and have relationships based on equality...
...When told that Iraq had invaded Kuwait, she didn't know where Kuwait was, and she didn't bother to ask...
...Hedidn'tsay why, except that someone was there with him...
...She doesn't shop for clothes...
...Michiru Hamada, 27, smoking a long, thin Epique cigarette, sits at a table in the nightclub's roped-off VIP lounge overlooking the dance floor...
...Itwas early in themorning...
...When I had my period, I was so happy," she says...
...She didn't like the pill because she gained weight...
...Everybody seemed to have decided it was the right thing to do...
...I used to talk to Mako about the preparations...
...Michiru considers herself neither chaste nor promiscuous...
...Karl Taro Greenfeld, a previous NL contributor and a former book and film critic for the Asahi Evening News, is now managing editor of Tokyo Journal...
...Kazumi's eyes dart from the wine bottle to the dog...
...Heaskedmeout immediately...
...She is saving as much as she can for plastic surgery...
...Everybody wanted us to get married...
...Until last year...
...Well, I suppose I hope he is, but it's not necessary...
...Her mother is dead...
...I didn't mind so much...
...Michiru's parents still think she is a virgin...
...Hiroko is happily married at age 28...
...Her shoulder-length black hair glistens in the apartment's fluorescent light...
...Her family is renowned for banking and manufacturing cameras and petrochemicals...
...A Wyndham Hill cassette plays in the Blaupunkt...
...Intermittently, a flickering strobe light makes her vodka and Sprite glow...
...Other men had shown interest in me since I met Takao," Hiroko says as she steers the car around a traffic circle...
...They sell tea, a very lucrative business...
...I will never tell them about Arao, "she says...
...I didn't care for the man...
...She prefers an improvised rhythm method, but these days she is not having sex...
...But now, look around...
...Her lips are full, her nose is pert, and her brown eyes give everything away...
...Any claims of bedrock feminism are belied in the course of interviews with women approaching 30...
...And even when doctors take advantage of that loophole, the pill they prescribe has higher doses of estrogen than the safer "mini-pill" available in the United States...
...She looked so happy...
...Kazumi works as a hostess, pouring drinks for businessmen who need a place to talk outside the home and office...
...Because nobody else knew, that relationship seemed pure compared to the overwrought and complex negotiations leading up to marriage...
...But even if he were interested, I wouldn't want to marry him...
...I have been seeing him for two years...
...Mako was not invited...
...When Takao asked me I said yes because it seemed like the right thing to do...
...Although an attractive woman, she has decided that "for real self-confidence and security" she needs to change her face...
...It would have been terrible to have Mako's baby while I was married to Takao...
...And I don't want to work...
...Their lifestyle may be feminist—for a short time," says Asahi Ito of the Pacific Asia Resources Center, who is herself aconfirmed feminist...
...I was never able to answer him," Hiroko says...
...By age 26, even well-educated Japanese working women have already run into the "pinstriped curtain," that barrier keeping them off the fast track as most men annually take another lap...
...They are available at convenience stores, from traveling saleswomen or at vending machines...
...The generational gulf, or break with previous practice, is most strongly manifested between the ages of 20 and 25, and narrows considerably past 27...
...My lifestyle," she says, "doesn't allow for it...
...It was just like high school...
...The wedding party took place at the All Nippon Airways Hotel in Tokyo on November 1, 1990...
...It was like an alarm clock had gone off in my father's head when I turned 27, so it was time to send out invitations and then gifts...
...But it hardly matters...
...At the advertising agency where she worked as a planner and coordinator she met Mako, a young account executive who had grown up overseas...
...In her early 20s it may be possible for a woman to ignore such realities...
...Hiroko is beautiful...
...The prescription was obtained through a woman doctor her boss introduced to her...
...Michiru, whose boyfriend is not ready to settle down, has come to the club looking for someone to marry...
...She earns the equivalent of $60,000 a year and pays roughly $ 1,100 a month in rent for her one-bedroom apartment...
...I just felt guilty...
...And sex with Takao had become dull...
...Michiru has lived for most of those two years with her boyfriend Arao in Azabu-juban, a neighborhood undergoing the Tokyo equivalent of gentrification: rice cake and kimono stores closing, Benneton and Alain Mikli boutiques opening...
...I want someone who will always be with me...
...I've had four abortions...
...I used to drop by his apartment after going to the health club...
...Without additional corporate retirement benefits, this is a paltry sum in expensive Tokyo...
...Hiroko soon thought she was pregnant...
...In many ways, I am two people...
...She began dating him while a freshman at Sophia University...
...Takao had always worn condoms...
...We never even made it to his bedroom...
...Today many have their own places or cohabit with lovers...
...The Ministry of Health and Welfare simply refuses to allow the dissemination of contraceptive pills, except if prescribed for gynecological purposes...
...Young men in suits and ties drink and exchange business cards with their female counterparts...
...in her late 20s financial exigencies dictate marriage...
...Never before I was 27...
...During their first giddy week together, Hiroko had asked Mako if he would come to her wedding party...
...The tradition of young women living at home until they marry has essentially given way to an upsurge in promiscuity...
...Thus, while the lack of an attractive and easily obtainable alternative to condoms could be slowing the spread of AIDS, it is cited by some women as an obstacle to true liberation...
...I love him, I guess...
...So at age 301 started my own company...
...She picks up Philippe...
...In college, I didn't care about marriage so much, and when I got out of school what mattered was to have fun...
...I told Takao I didn't want to marry him and he just said I was nervous...
...Kazumi estimates she has slept with between 50 and 100 men—she doesn't remember the exact number...
...The mean age of marriage for women has risen from 22 in 1949 to 27 in 1991...
...Big corporations, the conventional route to success in this country, actually encourage women to get married by their late 20s on pain of banishment to a life as a tea-pouring "Office Lady...
...Her attitude toward sex is not Second A venu e-Manhattan-circa-1978-liberal...
...Her father drives a truck...
...I tried to talk to my father about postponing the wedding...
...As of 1990 the Ministry of Health and Welfare reported a total of 316 cases...
...I want the security...
...We were in his tiny office— he was young but he had his own small wood-panelled office...
...He answered the door but wouldn't let me in...
...I said I loved Mako," Hiroko says...
...It just never occurred to me...
...Kazumi opens a bottle of cheap red wine that she pours into unmatched glasses...
...He wasn't shy...
...The couple have shared the cost of practically everything: the rent, the 32-inch Toshiba Bazooka television, their double futon...
...By the third, I felt bad—guilty...
...The attraction was immediate and mutual...
...Her naturally straight hair is permed to kinky curls at an exclusive boutique with a private underground garage...
...The fourth abortion, they gave me total anesthesia...
...He is always positive...
...Michiru is not atypical...
...Themajority of Japanese women are wary of becoming old maids...
...I began thinking about it when my friend got married...
...We would do it right there at the entranceway...
...From my family...
...Nevertheless, the feminist movement, or what there is of it here, is embraced by young women casually...
...Then I can go to Germany or America, or perhaps stay here, and find a husband...
...She smokes a Mild Seven Light...
...I can't explain why...
...There is something embarrassing about the whole thing...
...As she interrupts her talking to take steady, small sips of wine, they dart from the dog to the bottle to her cigarette in the ashtray to her fingernails...
...I began to hate them and hate the company...
...Mako didn't...
...They could not imagine I would do that...
...Indeed, AIDS containment would seem possible, since 80 per cent of the population uses condoms as the means of birth control...
...Part of the reason the affair seemed so intense, I think, was all the wedding pressure...
...The idea of youthful sexual freedom, besides being quite novel in Japan, is less sinister than in the West at present because AIDS is spreading more slowly...
...She attended Keio University, one of Japan's most prestigious private schools, and is an assistant editor in a publishing company, probably as up wardly mobile a position as a woman could hope to hold in this country...
...That was all...
...Then she kissed him and handed him a note saying she loved him...
...Kazumi Kirishima is 28...
...On average, women's salaries are only 52 per cent of their male counterparts' (as opposed to 72 per cent for American women...
...But by their late 20s they succumb to societal, financial and familial pressures and begin dreaming of nuptial bliss...
...She also enjoys an active sex life...
...Her parents reside in rural Ibaraki...
...She lost her virginity with him when she was 18...
...As long as he has a future, he doesn't have to be handsome," shesays...
...As arrangements for the wedding proceeded, including a weekend trip to Fukuoka, Kyushu, so both families could meet to discuss the preparations, Hiroko's liaison with Mako became more intense...
...Her eyes go from her cigarette to Philippe, who is gnawing on her house slipper...
...During the affair with Mako she felt she mattered...
...He laughed and said he would bring a date...
...I guess I was getting married because so many of my friends were...
...They were in his tiny office when she asked...
...Kazumi usedthepillverybriefly...
...It was as if the only thing that mattered was the wedding and not me, the person getting married...
...But Takao and I—who cared about that...
...A lavender sweater and tight miniskirt accentuate her ample figure...
...She continues: "I like sex, maybe more than my boyfriend...
...The day I left the hospital, I went over to Mako's apartment...
...Hiroko Karube, 28, can afford to ignore banal money problems...
...But Mako was the first one I knew would be trouble...
...He would ask me why I wanted to get married...
...I didn't care about the baby...
...She began her affair with Mako in July, and the marriage was scheduled for October...
...Hive in two worlds...
...it is havingmy-own-prescription-for-birth-controlpills-liberal...
...They have no idea I live with a man," she laughs, stirring her drink...
...But looking back I think it was mainly sexual...
...The first at 19, then at 24,25 and 26...
...But the consciousness is never there...
...I snuck out of the room to call him from the hotel lobby...
...Tokyo is in the throes of a sexual revolution with built-in obsolescence...
...They are old...
Vol. 74 • February 1991 • No. 3
