JAPANESE TRADITIONAL MARRIAGE AND GENDER ROLES IN “THE PAPER ARTIST”

BY RYE JOHNSON

According to the 2020 World Economic Forum rankings of gender-based gaps in countries, Japan was ranked 121 out of 153 in economic and political empowerment for women (Omori and Hiroshi 1). Japan at present is struggling to achieve gender equality due to its organizational culture, set expectations for men and women, communication issues, and the legal system put into place there (Omori and Hiroshi 1-2). “The Paper Artist,” by E.K. Ota, is about Muneo’s and Masako’s relationship with their daughter Mana after she married and had a child with an American named Charlie. In response, Muneo shuns his daughter due to seeing this marriage as throwing her life away while Masako is secretly supportive of her while going behind her husband’s back. “The Paper Artist” is about how limiting Japanese gender roles and traditions around marriage are for women and men by pushing them to act in certain ways that cause inequalities in power and privileges for both. By adhering to gender expectations, Japan, like Muneo, is stunting its ability to grow cultural and political wise in the future.

In “The Paper Artist,” Japanese marriage is demonstrated as being unequal towards women and promotes a patriarchal power system that make women become reliant upon their husbands and men dependent on their wives while out of the house. Marriage in Japan puts women as stay at home wives and caregivers while men the breadwinners and heads of the house, for how these gender roles came to be in Japan is due to the country’s economic collapse in the 1990s leading to pressures that cause women to have dual-careers in both the household and the workforce while men are still the breadwinners, despite being hit with decreased wages caused by the country’s economy becoming inflated during that decade (Kaori). In “The Paper Artist,” Muneo’s “father had expected him to be a surgeon” instead of the career he chosen as a paper artist, which help motivated him into “the man he was today” thanks to the daily routine he set himself and his wife to follow along with creating an “appetite for excellence” thanks to his “father’s disapproval” (Ota 83-4). Each day, Masako is put to task in securing Muneo’s pride by following the “traditional convections in their marriage” where she’ll “manage the household” which in turn will free up her husband’s time to “work and think” on his paper masterpieces which are exhibited around the world (89). The pressures that Japanese traditional marriage puts onto women and men are punishing for both by preventing them in exceling in various aspects of life, irrespective of their gender and marital status. Because of traditional marriage, Japan must come to terms with the consequences of enforcing for so long to learn how to become an egalitarian society in the future.

Because of the restrictions placed upon by traditional Japanese marriage, many Japanese women are forgoing getting married altogether due to them being expected to give up many of their freedoms in return so that they can become mothers and caregivers for their aging relatives (Rich). In “The Paper Artist,” Mana goes against her father and culture’s traditions by marrying her American boyfriend Charlie and moving to New York City with so that they both could start a whole new life there. Over time though, Mana “divorced her husband” where those signs of  marital decay are shown in the “messages and emails” Masako received from her like the address being changed three times, Mana not mentioning later on Charlie and his family, and the “melancholy note” that began appearing in her “stories and observations” about what life is like in New York City (88, 96). Mana’s marriage turned out to not be the path towards newfound freedom but instead a trial, testing Mana her desire for liberation from her father and birth culture by seeing if she could handle the individualist culture of America along with seeing if she can gain economic security without the help and support of a husband. According to many women in Japan, singlehood has saved them from a life of domestic imprisonment and into one of self-reliance, which is what Mana did by working at a Japanese restaurant after her divorce and before her death in a car accident so to support as a single mother her daughter Rina (96) (Rich). Marriage even outside of Japan is still repressive towards women by making them rest upon the laurels of their husbands instead of learning how to value their own self-worth. It seems that for women who crave personal freedom, singlehood is the solution due to marriage having shown itself to bring the opposite of what it said to promise.

With Japan ever aging as a country, it still hasn’t dealt yet with its own issue and history of gender inequality in culture and language. Each culture has set gender expectations with Japan being no exception, following after WWII a “hegemonic masculine tradition” with a family system that makes up “a corporate salaryman” and a “full-time housewife” (Omori and Hiroshi 4). From the 1990s and onwards, Japan’s traditional patriarchal structure was becoming harder to uphold because of people having to “choose less stable jobs due to societal employment customs” with as a result wives now having to work outside of the household and husbands having no choice but to get “involved with domestic work and childrearing” (Omori and Hiroshi 4). Muneo in “The Paper Artist” attempts to preserve traditional Japanese marriage by having his wife Masako tend to domestic duties and disavowing her daughter Mana after she went against his authority by marrying Charlie. All that toppled down after Masako had succumb to cancer in Japan and Mana had passed away from a car crash in New York, leaving Muneo to have left of his blood family being his granddaughter Rina, who was sent to him after his daughter’s death so that she could be looked after under the care of him. With Rina around, Muneo now had to do domestic chores like cooking despite not knowing how to, with them during their “first night together” having “instant noodles” flavored from a “packet that came in the package,” along with feeling “sickened” that his wife “had gone behind his back” upon finding out from her that Rina with her mother and husband have been meeting her grandmother when still alive all while under his nose (97, 99). Muneo learning that Rina had met Masako on multiple instances before even setting eyes on him for the first time was the moment that the gender roles he has longed lived by have now been made obsolete. The relationship between Rina and Muneo is representative of Japan’s paradoxical positions on gender along with both of their perceptions towards each other emphasizing the importance of looking towards the future instead of retreating into the past.

Despite women today being given more freedoms than they have been in the past, Japan still hasn’t achieved gender equality within its society due to still holding onto traditional ideas about gender and marriage that have proven to be itself incompatible for the modern day. Muneo’s reliance upon traditional Japanese gender dynamics has caused him to become blind to his wife’s and daughter’s condition until it is already too late for him to interfere, leaving him to have as an only reminder of them his granddaughter Rina. Like Muneo, Japan is realizing that its strict ideas around gender are holding them back in evolving their ability to communicate, taking role in society, and behavior with women specifically. Japan as a culture needs to think about the way it genders language and roles so to see how its set expectations have created more problems rather than solve them due to there being a load of disadvantages given towards women based on the abuses of power from men. Several ways to help bring in gender equality in Japan is to put into place gender dynamics that don’t value patriarchal values and ideals along with increasing the number of roles and positions for women in the economy so then they can be on equal footing with men.

Works Cited

Kaori, Okajima. “Dividing the Sexes: The Modern Evolution of Japanese Gender Roles in Marriage.” Nippon.com, Nippon Communications Foundation, 6 Dec. 2018, www.nippon.com/en/features/c05604/. Accessed 11 Nov. 2024.

Ota, E. K. “The Paper Artist.” Ploughshares, vol. 48, no. 3, Fall 2022, pp. 80–100. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1353/plo.2022.0114.

Omori, Kikuko, and Hiroshi Ota. “Japan’s Struggle to Improve Gender Equality: Japanese Culture, Gender Role/Expectation through Family, Social Societal and Media Dialogues.” Journal of Asian Pacific Communication (John Benjamins Publishing Co.), vol. 33, no. 1, Jan. 2023, pp. 1–11. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1075/japc.00097.int.

Rich, Motoko. “Craving Freedom, Japan’s Women Opt Out of Marriage.” The New York Times, 3 Aug. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/08/03/world/asia/japan-single-women-marriage.html. Accessed 11 Nov. 2024.