Osakatomebaby

The title of this article caught my eye. Interesting but quite difficult to interpret. For one thing, I've always been fairly oblivious to "gender differences" myself. For another, I have a hard time seeing my own culture in the kind of definitive terms that come so naturally when dealing with an "other".

I guess I'm mostly reacting to the comment that,

Cultures emphasizing manliness and femininity are in the West. Those kinds of ideas are traditionally weak in Japan.

I wonder if this is really true or if this is looking at it from a Western chivalrous perspective. In terms of gender roles and expectations, Japan is certainly more strict insofar as business is till male-dominated and images of feminine domesticity abound as an ideal. No, nobody's going to hold the door for you here on account of you being a female, but they're going to look at you askance if you use "male" language.

There might be at least two other things going on here. One is that the large-scale women's liberation movement in the Western world brought some of these issues to light in a way that hasn't happened in Japan. The higher attitude of role importance could be interpreted as generational backlash or simply an idealization of a concept that doesn't entirely exist in reality.

This can't be quite right, because certainly Americans do still act on these ideas, but is it just made more conscious by the politics of the last 40 years?

The other thing is that from what I can tell, many of the questions were based on affirming or denying traditional gender role assumptions (defined in large part by the Western idea of chivalry). But I wonder about what other questions were asked. For example, how should childcare be divided among the sexes?

Sidenote: I wonder why the translator twice used awkward expressions/vocabulary rather than the word "masculine"? I don't know the Japanese question, but "Do you think men should act in a manful manner?" is just wacky.