- 【Preface】
In the 1980s, Japan launched a vigorous feminist movement, and the status of women has been greatly improved. However, after entering the millennium, Japanese feminism has rapidly declined, and even women who once supported feminism have joined the anti-feminist camp.
It even forced Japanese men to simply lie flat and rot, not to marry, not to fall in love and not to have children.
So, how did Japanese feminism go into decline? Why is the result of the call for feminism reversed by feminism itself?
Today, we will spend ten minutes talking about the rise and fall of feminism in Japan.
- 【From equal rights for men and women to women's privileges】
Japan belongs to the East Asian cultural circle, before the end of World War II, Japanese women were of low status, they were not allowed to work after marriage, they were not allowed to rebel against their husbands, and they could only teach their husbands and children at home in a virtuous and pragmatic manner.
It was not until the 1960s that the status of Japanese women improved.
At that time, Japan's economy took off, women's access to education began to increase, more and more women's universities were opened by churches and female independenceists, and many prestigious private universities began to expand the enrollment of female students. More and more women are no longer willing to be a housewife, and they are beginning to enter the workplace and earn their own money to support their families.
This means that women have independent financial resources and are no longer an appendage to men.
By the 1980s, the Japanese economy was entering a golden age. In an era of gold everywhere, Japanese women's wealth began to accumulate rapidly, and their spending power also increased by leaps and bounds.
According to the statistics of a Japanese fashion magazine, the monthly consumption of independent women in Tokyo, Japan is about 600-1 million yen, and it is normal to use 10,000 yuan bills to hail a car, eat sushi and gold leaf. With the rise of women's spending power, women such as clothing, cosmetics, luxury goods, beauty salons and other women have also ushered in a golden period in the industry.
Not only in the economic context, more and more women are making their mark in politics, and women parliamentarians are taking more and more seats in Parliament.
Women parliamentarians had a stable and large mass base, and with it, bills on women's rights came into being. These include "equal pay for men and women for equal work, non-discrimination against women in the employment of enterprises and government agencies, and the expansion of women's rights in the Marriage Law."
Most importantly, the crimes of rape and indecency in Japanese law were lifted from the "dust".
Before the 1980s, the crime of rape in Japan was useless, hindering culture and women's self-esteem, and most Japanese women who were violated could only swallow their anger. The situation later improved, and in the face of aggression and harassment, more and more Japanese women stepped forward to let the criminal men get the punishment they deserved.
So far, the feminist movement has developed well, and Japanese women have been given the rights they deserve and dare to say "no" to oppression and injustice. Japan has become a representative of developed countries not only economically, but also culturally and ideologically, which makes South Korea at the same time very envious.
But just as the Japanese feminist movement was reaching its climax, things began to move in strange directions.
First of all, capital has earned excess dividends in the japanese women's consumption boom, and in order to further promote women's consumption, marketing advertisements for products have begun to be linked to feminist ideas. The materialization of women's rights is a "cash cow" that capital is proud of.
One of the most typical examples is an extension of the definition of diamond rings, jewelry, etc. Once the diamond ring was bound to marriage, the so-called "diamond is eternal, a piece of eternal transmission", but under the packaging of Japanese dealers, the diamond ring can not only represent marriage, but also represent the broad category of urban women, unmarried and so on.
At the same time, expensive evening dresses, packaged from the "emergency products" of dinner parties as women's necessities, are so that many women dress up for both daily life and social events.
Capital encourages women to consume, and it encourages women to link material things to happiness. Restaurants in Ginza, Japan, have introduced "couple courses", and the original menu of several thousand yen has been packaged to 30,000 to 50,000 yen. At the same time, men are encouraged to choose to date at high-end restaurants, and even define it: men who don't take women to eat here are not worth trusting for life.
At that time, Japanese trends were mainly disseminated through print media such as fashion magazines, and after the magazine discovered the rise of Japanese feminism, it began to cooperate with capital to export more materialistic values to women, and the trend was crowned with labels such as "women's happiness" and "happy love", which was very catered to the taste of "new Japanese women" who were gradually independent in the economy.
Second, as women's voice in politics has grown, some overcorrected bills have also been passed. For example: increasing the time of women's marriage leave and maternity leave, prohibiting women from working overtime, and allowing enterprises to give more material benefits to female employees on Western holidays such as Valentine's Day and Christmas.
At that time, Japanese companies were doing business all over the world, and they were not short of money, and these requirements were gladly accepted.
But legally, after the crimes of rape and indecency re-entered the Japanese public eye, the definition of Japanese women who believe that they were "harassed" has gradually become broader.
In 1991, a man on the Osaka Tram accidentally touched a woman's shoulder during the morning rush hour and was accused of sexual harassment by the woman, and the woman continued to sue without accepting a settlement. Although the man's sexual harassment was not convicted due to insufficient evidence, the man lost his job in several days of litigation, received threatening letters at his doorstep every day, and was finally forced to leave Osaka.
Since the mainstream of Japanese thought at that time was inclined to women, at the social level, people were willing to believe that men really intended to harass women.
Coincidentally, in 1991, a female employee reported that a male leader would send her more than 5 emails a day, although the content was all work-related, but it was still considered to be sexual harassment in the workplace by the society at that time, which eventually led to the leader being forced to resign and replace her with a female leader.
There are many similar cases.
Of course, cases of harassing women on trams are also real. Under the collective pressure of outside public opinion and female parliamentarians, local governments in various counties in Japan have begun to introduce female carriages to ensure that women will not be harassed.
At the same time, women's parking spaces and women's dining areas have also been set up, and almost all public places have set up separate spaces that are only allowed to be used by women. This has made the confrontation between men and women at the social level more extreme, and many Japanese men have begun to deliberately stay away from women in order to keep their jobs, so as not to be falsely accused.
Stimulated by the economy and policies, some Japanese women began to make waves, using feminism as a gimmick to export deformed values.
In 1992, an article entitled "Four Boyfriends of Heisei Women" was published in women's magazine, which recounted the daily lives of women in Tokyo in the first person and proposed a new term, "love capitalism."
The so-called four boyfriends in the article are actually four kinds of men, namely "errand runners, paying bills, gift men and honmei men". These four types of men perform their respective duties to meet the needs of women at all levels.
"Running errands man" refers to a man with an average income and average appearance, who is used to run errands for women and handle various chores. "Paying for men" refers to men with strong economic strength who are responsible for paying with women when they go to high-end places to spend. "Gift Boy" is a boy who gives a surprise gift on a specific holiday, and many Japanese girls like the sense of ceremony. The "honmei man" is specifically responsible for talking about love, which is the spiritual destination of women, who can be poor, but must be handsome.
Yes, this article is very clear that "rich, beautiful, interesting, thoughtful" is unlikely to appear in the same man at the same time, so Japanese women are encouraged to find four boyfriends at the same time, so that they can enjoy "happiness" to the maximum.
Many young Japanese women who have just entered the society are eager for such values, and have followed the heroines in the article, while interacting with many men..... Became the "Sea King".
At this point, the development of women's rights in Japan has gradually moved from the initial reasonable needs to extreme and pathological.
In Japan's golden age, these demands are still in the past, but if the Japanese economy collapses, the bubble of Japanese women's privilege will also burst.
- 【Japan's Feminist Revolt】
In 1992, the yen depreciated rapidly, and the Nikkei 225 index fell below 50% in a year' time.
This marked the beginning of the bursting of the Japanese economic bubble and the entry of Japan into the "era of disappearance".
The cold winter of capital is accompanied by the bankruptcy of enterprises, and even if there is no bankruptcy, it is necessary to save the enterprise through a large number of layoffs. In Japan's large-scale wave of unemployment, the biggest injuries are Japanese working women.
Due to the limited number of enterprise positions, Japanese enterprises pursue the "law of the jungle", that is, the survival of the fittest and the survival of the fittest. Whoever can make more performance in a limited salary can stay untreated.
There are two types of Japanese women who have been dismissed, the first is the women who enjoy the dividends of the feminist movement, but they are average or incompetent, and they are the first to be laid off. Enterprises are not like before, can not raise idle people as much as possible not to raise idle people, in the past Japanese companies to recruit women with insufficient ability is for political correctness, and now when it comes to life and death, no company will "give" efficiency in exchange for political capital.
The second is women with business ability but not outstanding, they usually have strong business ability, but in the wave of layoffs, Japanese workplace men are more desperate than women, they not only exceed their own business, but also take the initiative to share a variety of physical work. Men have a natural advantage in holding multiple jobs, and women who were originally unilaterally capable are forced to be laid off by the company.
Layoffs are a devastating blow to the Japanese, and in the Japanese workplace, if fresh graduates can't find a job, or are fired in the middle of the job, it means that they will not have a chance with a large company for life, and they will not be able to enter the Mainstream of Japan for a lifetime. What's more, the majority of unemployed women in Japan have left many women struggling for urban independence completely without financial resources.
But any trend of thought is inertia, once the Japanese feminist movement has done a great job, then its inertia is also greater, even if women have been unemployed, but the "successful heisei women" consumer demand and desire has not decreased. Many Japanese women who have lost their jobs have begun to rely on their partners or boyfriends for the economy, and even if they are unemployed, they must maintain their high consumption and materialistic values.
But during the depression years, most Japanese men began to buy it.
At the forefront are ordinary Japanese men, who were once the object of feminist contempt in Japan, who recognized their status, and the economic crisis caused by unemployment made them reluctant to take the initiative to contact women. In a 2000 social survey, only 38 per cent of japanese marriageable men were willing to marry, while women were 54 per cent willing to marry.
Men's willingness to marry was lower than that of women, which represented the thinking of Japanese men at that time.
Their own lives are not yet guaranteed, and they do not have the economy and time to go in and out of high-consumption places with women. He has also become a "Heisei otaku" in the Japanese population, living a two-point and one-line life, and his spiritual needs are solved by anime games and pornographic films. They don't want to socialize with girls because they can't "mess with" them in any way.
Men with relatively high economic strength, although they still have money after the bursting of the Japanese bubble and are competitive in choosing a mate, they are not willing to take responsibility for marriage. As the proportion of women unemployed increases, women's economic incomes to men become more stringent, and these capable and financial men think: Since I have money, why not spend it on pleasing myself?
As a result, capable men also joined the army of unmarried people, who were only willing to associate with women, but not marry.
Women want to start a family in middle age, and these "scumbags" turn into exquisite egoists, and after abandoning old women, they begin to look for new young women who can meet their own needs.
The reluctance of ordinary Japanese men to reach out to women, and the reluctance of high-quality men to take responsibility for marriage, has put women who once encouraged japanese women's privilege in a very awkward situation. On the one hand, it is difficult for them to be independent, and men are not willing to make a difference; On the other hand, I don't want to give up the quality of life that was once high.
So they are still insisting, hoping to continue to defend their rights through political means.
But this time, the Japanese government also said that it could not help, first of all, the phenomenon of layoffs in enterprises complied with the regulations, and the Japanese government was also worried about the economy, and it did not have the heart to engage in formalistic equal rights for men and women.
Even more serious is the side effect of Japanese feminism, which has begun to devour women themselves after excessively pursuing female privileges.
In the anti-feminist trend of the bursting of the economic bubble, many women began to seek revenge for themselves, because they had not joined the wave of women's privileged thought, and their achievements by hard work, why should they pay for some extremists?
Unfortunately, when individual behavior rises to the level of society, Japanese men have labeled Japanese women as harsh, unworthy, and unapproachable. When extreme feminism was overexposed, Japanese men were no longer willing to spend more time and money to identify women who were normal and those who were extreme.
Just like when there are more and more incidents of the elderly blackmailing people, people will no longer identify whether the elderly need help, and they will choose not to help. After all, this is the safest thing.
In the same way, Japanese companies are reluctant to hire women again, and Japanese men are reluctant to reach out to women or are unwilling to take responsibility for marriage. Because hiring women is equivalent to taking risks, once the woman is an extreme feminist, then the company or individual will have a disaster, so at this time Mingzhe self-preservation has become the most common way to solve the problem.
What is even more excessive is that Japan's elite women, who once called for women's rights, have also begun to stand on the side of anti-feminism. They barely survived the economic crisis, and if the feminist movement is promoted again, once the wind is out of control again, their social status will be affected.
So, who are the victims of the feminist movement in Japan?
The first is ordinary women who do not participate in extreme feminism, who may be economically and intellectually independent, but are forced to pay for it because of the overcorrection of the feminist movement and the regurgitation of privilege.
The second is the advocates of women's privilege, who pay the price they deserve for over-raising many unreasonable needs. Regrettably, they have undermined the image of Japanese women as a whole, advocating unreasonable needs at specific times, making Japanese men daunted by women.
Finally, There are Japanese men, who have lost their desire to court, and are unwilling to take responsibility for marriage and love, which has also created Japan's low fertility rate and population aging crisis today, and Japanese men have begun to become exquisite egoists, unwilling to pay the responsibilities they should have paid.
The decline of feminism in Japan has sounded the alarm bell for the world feminist movement. The essential reason for today's tragedy is not because the feminist movement is wrong, men and women have equal rights, women can stand up to half the sky, which is the normal right that women should fight for. However, the lack of objective and theoretical methods in the popularization of the feminist movement has led many women to mistakenly regard women's privileges as women's rights, thus disrupting the normal feminist movement.
On the other hand, the consequences of capital's intervention in ideological innovation are frightening. When capital is in order to win traffic or promote consumption, it is very easy to flatten and materialize the feminist movement, thus deriving various deformed values and consumption concepts. Once the contradiction rises to the social level, the side effects of extreme feminism will eat back more innocent people.
Women are independent, and there is still a long way to go, but the core has never changed. Women work hard and are independent and do not need to let men give in, rely on their own efforts to strive for the fruits of happiness, and will never be pointed out by others. At the end of the article, we encourage women in the new era to live out their lives and be truly independent women.