Joking, Gender, Power, and Professionalism among Japanese Inn Workers

Abstract

Female workers at a Japanese inn express their identity and pride through joking about their work experience and private lives. Their joking is a discourse that reflects yet resists their employment conditions and social relations. (Japan, joking behavior, power relations, gender) ********** Studies of joking relations in different cultural contexts have been of interest in anthropology for at least a half-century (e.g., Radcliffe-Brown 1952; Douglas 1968; Rigby 1968; Spradley and Mann 1975). While acknowledging the vast domain of insights opened by those studies, an analysis of the joking among female workers at a Japanese inn, located at a hot-springs resort region called Hanayu, enlarges and deepens an understanding of the social functions of joking. (2) The women workers are the epitome of politeness and courtesy when dressed in their kimonos and serving guests, but when they are out of their guests' sight they joke among themselves and behave in an antistructural manner. That is, they drop manners and formality to be casual, use their own dialect, and omit polite forms of speech such as female markers. With a rudeness inappropriate before guests, they make cynical remarks about their working conditions and their superiors, thereby mocking the conditions of their lives that they can neither change nor escape. The female staffs of the large inns at Japanese hot-spring resorts provide the resorts' primary interaction with the public. The women serve meals, make and pour tea, set out bedding, and in other ways strive to make guests feel welcome, comfortable, and relaxed. In their relations with guests the women manifest a highly skilled professionalism. They use a formal, socially distancing style of speech, move in their kimonos in a graceful, feminine manner, and serve the various breakfast and dinner dishes with meticulous care. This rigid formality before guests is dropped when they gather among themselves away from and out of sight of the guests. Then they joke and banter with one another, relax, use informal speech in the local dialect, don regional dress, and frequently are crude or gross in behavior. Ambiguities exist in the employee structure of the inn. For example, men provide support services for the women workers, but the men's work in running the inn is subordinate to that of the women. Men in Japanese society in general have greater social status and power than women. Such ambiguities inform much of the women's joking. Because men are subordinate to women in the inn business, they frequently are the butt of jokes, and sometimes face particularly skilled jibes. They then have no recourse but to quietly and humbly swallow their pride. Another area of ambiguity that provokes joking is the strain between the most experienced female workers and the less experienced woman in charge of the female staff. The workers under her supervision contest her authority through joking and other means. The Japanese believe that virtue comes from having persevered through hardship and suffering (kuro). Overcoming suffering and hardship is one of the ways authority is contested. The more experienced workers use this moral or spiritual superiority in their joking to dispute the authority of the head of the female workers. Her power stems from her position in the organization and not from hardship and suffering. The workers' jokes point to how their own identity is constructed. The jokes convey the concept that the status of a full-fledged worker is proudly built from hardship and the women consider that they embody the pride of hardship in their work more than do their male co-workers. GENDERED TECHNIQUES In contrast to a hotel, where guests receive services mostly from male workers, at a Japanese inn (ryokan) female workers in kimonos take care of guests throughout their stay. They welcome guests at the front entrance, carry their bags, serve tea and sweets in the guest rooms, inform them about services and sightseeing, bring them robes for bathing, and serve their meals. …