The Too-Good Wife: Alcohol, Codependency, and the Politics of Nurturance in Postwar Japan

Abstract

When I published Office Ladies and Salaried Men in 1998 (Ogasawara 1998), somebody mentioned we already have enough English books on Japanese women. Yet, a decade later, literature on women in Japan continues to mushroom. Today there are far more books written about Japanese women than men. This is at first somewhat puzzling, because Western interest in postwar Japan has been driven first and foremost by its miraculous economic performance. Was it not men, and not women, who were the bankers, industrial workers and bureaucratic elites responsible for bringing about the miracle? Largely confined to the domestic sphere, women were regarded as at best supporters behind the scenes. Much attention has been paid to Japanese women owing to the fact that the majority were excluded from market activities, yet were able to lay claim to autonomy, support and stability to a far greater extent than most housewives in other industrial countries. Many Western observers reported on how Japanese women defined their experience as housewives as both valuable and fulfilling, and how they found the basis of social participation through their domestic role to be a means for exercising some sort of influence over the public.