It's been two years since the pandemic, and most people have escaped the disease, but not the threat of poverty.
Not long ago, Japanese journalist Junhiko Nakamura's "Poor Women in Tokyo" was published, telling the story of these lives that cannot be seen by many people.
After coming to Tokyo, she can't afford to pay tuition and living expenses and eventually enters the custom industry, a former working woman who quits her job for her family but goes bankrupt due to her sister's investment mistake and borrows illegal usury, a young girl who cannot survive normally in society because she married prematurely and divorced quickly... The long and endless life in front of them was particularly vicious, and bad luck followed one by one with the first twists.
And the end of every story about poverty is always gray, telling the women they experienced are usually facing a future of being trapped in customs and mental illness, and they can only engage in some informal labor and odd jobs, and most of them have no expectations when asked what they think their life will be in ten years, "Although it is quite dark, I may have committed suicide." 」 ”
In Junhiko Nakamura's book "Poor Women in Tokyo," dozens of women tell stories about their lives. These women from different backgrounds may be just a component of cold data in social news, but they are seen for the first time in the author's pen.
When the Chinese edition of "Poor Women in Tokyo" was finalized, the editor of the book mentioned that a colleague in the publishing house saw a picture of the girl on the cover and said, "I don't feel that she is poor either." But it is these women who may not seem to conform to people's stereotypes of "poverty", but in the cracks of society and the loopholes of the system, they gradually can no longer have the ability to generate income and live a normal life.
People who are trapped in poverty often consume a lot of time and energy because they are busy maintaining basic livelihoods, which makes it impossible for them to improve their income through learning and other means.
What may have been a tuition debt, a sudden illness, or a favor to the family has become a turning point in fate, and when these women fall into the blind spot of the social assistance mechanism, their lives fall into a hidden and inextricable poverty.
Junhiko Nakamura has been concerned about the living conditions of marginalized people since his college days, and as a former writer for men's adult entertainment magazine, he has interviewed thousands of women who make a living in related industries.
Because of his contact with customs practitioners, he discovered the exploitation of women in the industry and discovered some commonalities among them that could not be ignored, so in the two decades after becoming a freelance writer, Nakamura chose to focus on interviews with adult film actresses and female nurses who are located downstream of the professional circle.
In 2016, Junhiko Nakamura co-curated the feature story "The Reality of Women Struggling in Poverty" on the Toyo Economy Online website, which attracted more than 120 million attention, and then he began a column with this theme in 2019 in todayo Keizai Shimbun.
In the final book, "Poor Women in Tokyo," women's stories are often lamented and hopeless. In Japan, there are many university students who need to repay the unreasonable structure and interest provided by the university, and they immediately fall into debt as soon as they graduate, so the debts will increase in the unsolvable delays, and at the same time, it is also a huge expense to study and live alone in a big city such as Tokyo during their studies.
One of the interviewees in the book is a medical student who has a heavy workload and two younger brothers in her family, and her parents' meager income is not enough to support her tuition and living expenses in Tokyo. From high school to college, although she is nominally a student of a prestigious university, she actually has no actual survivability and skills, and can only rely on squeezing out time to do odd jobs to support her daily expenses.
Part-time work, schoolwork, club activities... She was soon overwhelmed by such an overloaded state of life, and eventually chose to socialize with assistance that could be paid a lot in a shorter period of time.
There are also some women who make their financial situation take a sharp turn in order to take care of their families, and the subsequent chain reaction not only makes themselves trapped in poverty and unable to get out, but also makes the next generation fall into the same cycle.
The story of the wife of a 32-year-old business executive told in the book is like this, because her mother was suffering from cancer, she spent all her savings to save her mother, but her husband divorced her after that. After the divorce, the maintenance paid by her husband was barely enough to support her son's tuition at a private high school, but as her husband's work change income declined, she herself could not afford it because she had no savings and the difficulty of finding a job after the age of forty, and her son eventually had to rely on student loans to attend college.
In a follow-up interview with Junhiko Nakamura, it was found that the woman could only barely afford her basic living expenses, and sometimes even the electricity bill. Family members are sick, resigning to take care of the family, divorcing, children going to school... These turning points that can happen to everyone have the potential to push women into poverty, fall off the track of normal life, and never return to ordinary life.
The unkind employment environment for women may also cause women from well-off families and strong working ability to fall into poverty because of unfair systems. A single mother interviewed in the book is from a middle-class family, has a good education, and after graduation, she worked in a public company, and even after her divorce, she quickly found a job with a good annual salary, and her life was not affected.
However, when she quit her job three years later to take care of her sick sister at home, she found that as a middle-aged woman, no company was willing to hire her again, even if she had a prestigious school background and excellent work history. In order to make ends meet, she had to find a job as a supermarket cashier who barely made it to the minimum wage, and her daughter was forced to drop out of school.
These stories are often not mixed with the subjective views of the author in Nakamura Junhiko's account, and he only faithfully records the narrator's story. However, in the continuous visits and follow-up, Nakamura Junhiko also gradually found that the causes of female poverty cannot be simply and rudely attributed to "because they are too lazy to be so poor" or "because they love vanity will put themselves in the wrong career choice", in this group of "people who want to be interviewed are hoping to see can help themselves confirm that they have not actually done anything wrong in the trajectory of life that slides into poverty", most people when they first enter or are thrown into society. In fact, I just want to live a simple and plain life.
As an East Asian country where women's living environment is not friendly, although Japan has implemented the Basic Law on the Participation of Men and Women in Society as early as 1999, there are still various hidden discrimination and disadvantages against women whether it is in further education, employment, marriage and family.
Women are significantly more at risk of survival than men who may be able to survive even without a job and may be able to survive on social assistance. This inequality has begun since the entrance to higher education before entering the society, and the admission data released by the University of Tokyo, Japan's top university in 2021, shows that the acceptance rate of female candidates is only 21.1%, which is the highest female admission rate in the history of UTokyo.
In 2018, Tokyo Medical University was even more exposed by insiders, because considering that in the future, female graduates will leave its affiliated hospital due to marriage and children, etc., resulting in a shortage of manpower, since 2011, the Medical Department of Tokyo Medical University has begun to deduct points for female students in the admissions examination, artificially reducing the proportion of female admissions. The admissions attitude of the above two universities is not unique to Japanese universities, and many Japanese families also believe that because their daughters will marry sooner or later and take care of their families, they do not need to make too much effort in further education, as long as they can go to a short-term university. Many capable and gifted girls lose the same opportunities as men when they grow up in the family and enter the school screening.
Although the employment rate of women of school age has already exceeded 70%, in fact, due to social climate and implicit discrimination against female employees by enterprises, more than 60% of women are engaged in casual work in non-regular or manual labor.
There is no stable and sufficient income from such jobs, women's economic situation is largely dependent on marriage, and most of the money earned from casual work is used to subsidize the family. Even women with a good educational background who have obtained formal employment may face problems in the workplace such as unequal pay for men and women for equal work, difficulties in promotion and further advancement, and difficulty in finding a job after resigning or when they re-enter society because of the end of their marriage.
The price of the dating
The social atmosphere affects not only the difficulty of women's survival in the workplace, but also the "brainwashing" of women, so that they think that whether they are admitted to prestigious schools or find a good job, the ultimate goal is to find a suitable marriage partner in this good environment. When society's expectations of women are reduced or even deliberately devalued, women's cognition of themselves will also be biased, thus giving up their willingness and opportunity to improve themselves. When family and marriage become the only foundation of women's survival, the group's ability to resist risks is also greatly reduced.
The lack of social assistance system in the protection of some rights and interests of women makes many women have to choose usury when they are in trouble, which will further deepen their poverty. Customs and industries that come quickly and take up less time often become the abyss that women involuntarily slide into after poverty. Although it is not legal to trade neutrally in Japan, due to the huge scale of the industry and the contribution of many increments to GDP, all kinds of "customary business" that wipes the edge ball are allowed. Custom shops such as liquor, bubble baths, and dancing rings attract consumers who trade in sex under different names.
Society's acquiescence to the customs industry, the formal workplace environment is very bad, and the imperfection of the rescue and support system makes many women unaware of the gender exploitation they have experienced when engaging in the customs industry. When poverty involves women like a whirlpool, society as a whole cannot be blamed.
Source: Nana
Author: Potted plant
Edit: Sebastian
The pictures in this article are from the Internet
Ownership is owned by the original author