Pursuing an American Accent (1)

After seven years of clerical work, Masami Terao left an electronics firm in Tokyo. Approaching thirty, she felt desperate. No career prospects. No Mr. Right. Her boss urged her to contact a matchmaker. Instead, she left for New York. She wasn’t accepted to NYU Business School as she had hoped. Instead, she was to enroll in an English-as-a-Second-Language course at a school filled with Japanese students. She nevertheless felt thrilled at the prospect of crafting a new identity in a city she had long dreamed of. She had no doubt that her English would improve substantially after a year of intensive language study. NYU Business School would accept her next year, she convinced herself. Masami envisioned landing a job with a major securities firm. She would stride down the streets of Manhattan, clutching a briefcase –like those women who emerged from the pages of Japanese women’s magazines she pored over. Or so she believed.

“OLs’ Ryugaku” (“office ladies studying abroad”) have rapidly increased since the late 1980s. The strong yen has enabled uniformed clerks to redefine themselves outside of Japan. “In America, women and men can build careers on an equal footing,” they believed. Japanese women’s magazines have given them a glimpse into American female independence. Sharp-suited women smile triumphantly in their spacious offices. Diplomas and awards adorn the walls. They are financial analysts, lawyers, M.B.As, Ph.Ds, Harvard grads. They and their husbands divide up housework and keep separate names. Glorifying this image, many women eagerly flee the Japanese workforce, aching to pursue their professional goals in America. Among them, an MBA has become one of the most popular degrees. Every year applications from Japanese women pour into business schools across the nation, from NYU to the University of Montana.

Such career-oriented women often take pride in their English. The Japanese glorify speaking English as a sort of art. Perhaps no other people have poured more energy and money into mastering the language. In a country overflowing with “eikaiwa gakkou” (“English conversation schools” where blond teachers, many of them with no formal training in language teaching, teach how to cultivate an American accent), those who can pronounce the most challenging “r” sound (which requires the curling of the tongue tip, a painstaking task for the Japanese) consider themselves members of an elite group. Pursuing an American accent, women also endeavor to absorb egalitarian concepts from America. Some adopt the sweet rhetoric about independence and autonomy. They distinguish themselves from “typical” Japanese women who quietly pour tea at work or mop the kitchen floor on Saturday morning when their husbands are out playing golf.

But once they arrive in America, they do not necessarily find the country that emerged from the magazines they studied back home. Who is the “typical” American woman? Perhaps few Americans would point to an executive who attends a board meeting or a scholar who authors a book. Some might point instead to a homemaker who pushes her cart down the aisle at a grocery store while yelling at her two young sons running around. Some might point instead to a secretary who faces her computer screen while internally moaning about the fact that her technically incompetent sixty-something boss is incapable of checking his own e-mail. (As soon as she gives him the message printout, with a pleasant face and mild manners, she plays Solitaire on the computer, eagerly awaiting payday Friday.) These are the everyday realities of America, a nation committed to equality. The one-dimensional portrait of American womanhood by the Japanese media fails to reflect such realities. Millions of American women find themselves confined to traditional roles, coping with the daily grind of making ends meet and caring for the family. Equality remains a lofty principle that does not necessarily touch the lives of ordinary people. The experience of American women parallels that of Japanese women in many respects. (...CONTINUES...)