Abstract
Female empowerment is a prerequisite for a just and sustainable developed society. Being the most developed non‐western country, Japan offers an instructive window onto concerns about gender worldwide. Although overall gender equality is advancing in Japan, difficulties remain, especially in achieving equality in the workplace. We draw on theories of ontological commitment and the psychology of fiction to critically analyse the role of popular culture — in this case manga — in the reproduction of gender inequality in the Japanese workplace. We present examples of four of the most popular mainstream manga aimed at working men and women in Japan and show how women are depicted. We argue that the hyper‐mediated fictional realism of representative tropes generates an ontological commitment to characters and narratives among consumers that reinforces the reproduction of a culturally exceptionalist national political economic space, one of whose essential defining characteristics is a gendered workplace. Our research suggests important implications for researching the relationship between culture, in all its forms, and spatial variation in persistent institutional biases among varieties of capitalism.
Highlights
Female empowerment is a prerequisite for a just and sustainable developed society
We argue that the hypermediated fictional realism of particular representative tropes in Japanese popular culture ‘transports’ (Green and Brock, 2005) consumers into developing an affective sympathy for, or ‘ontological commitment’ (Quine, 1953; van Inwagen, 2003) to, characters, identities and narratives — and the norms and behaviours they evince — that recursively reinforces the reproduction of a culturally exceptionalist national political-economic space, one of whose essential defining characteristics is gender inequality in the workplace and a gendered division of labour in society
Our spatial and cultural context is distinctly Japanese, discussion of popular culture and the workplace is relevant across many analytical fields and geographical domains (Rhodes and Parker, 2008, p. 628). This is because critical research increasingly emphasizes the reflexive interaction of media and work in contemporary society, arguing that workplace reproduction is discursive, retrospective and episodic (Hassard and Holliday, 1998; Lipschutz, 2010; Rhodes and Westwood, 2008; Robichaud et al, 2004; Weick, 1995). Building on these and other approaches, we argue for the existence of a recursive relationship between the individual and media, the workplace, and the national political economy, which is emblematic of contemporary socio-political life worldwide; especially when popular culture depicts elites enacting claims to power and legitimacy, suggesting that these claims are often vigorously contested, they may remain comparatively impermeable
Summary
Female empowerment is a prerequisite for a just and sustainable developed society. Overall, gender equality in the developed world is advancing, with the UN Gender Inequality Index showing an average reduction of 30.71 per cent between 1995 and 2011 (UNDP, 2011). Much has been achieved in the workplace too. We propose that manga aimed at working people, through its ‘transportation’ of and ‘collaboration’ with the reader (see Green and Brock, 2005; Oatley, 2011) generates an ‘ontological commitment’ (see Quine, 1953; van Inwagen, 2003) to character identities and narrative tropes that conflate stereotypical assumptions about working people with defensive exceptionalist critiques of western modes of capitalist organization The outcome of this is a recursive reinforcement of patriarchal and nationalist attitudes, identities and behaviours, and the further entrenchment of gender inequality as a normative condition within a sharply delineated national political economic space. This coexists alongside a knowing and ironic critique of organizational power, we argue that this remains peripheral to hyper-mediated mainstream narratives that defend, even advocate, gender inequality as an essential, even desirable, characteristic of a distinctively Japanese regime of political economy
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