Diary of "OKAASAN BENGOSHI" (Japanese Mommy-Track Lawyer)

Shokuba no Hana ("Office Flower")

2005-10-18T10:42:00.000-07:00

(The following is an excerpt from one of my novels.)

Every Wednesday morning, at a kiosk of a train station, Noriko would buy the latest issue of Trabayu ( a job hunting magazine targeting at women), fresh from printers. She would even leave home at six, almost an hour earlier than usual. She scanned the magazine’s help wanted ads at a nearby coffee shop, knowing that she would be facing ample competition.

Having hit thirty, she felt deeply ambivalent about her future. Male superiors and coworkers tirelessly inquired into her marriage plans. You’re still single? This question would haunt her as long as she remained confined to the secretarial pool. She ached to craft a new identity outside the corporate world on the thirty-sixth floor, where challenging jobs remained beyond women’s reach. Smaller firms may be more willing to take women seriously, she tried to convince herself as she poured tea in a dark corner of the office.

Perusing the ads, Noriko sighed. Her age posed an obstacle in her job search. Virtually all ads set age limits, sometimes as low as twenty-three; openings for women past thirty were few. Many ads also contained pictures of attractive female employees in their twenties. Below each smiling face were the woman’s age and message: I love my job. We need your smile. Why don’t you join us? How could Noriko ignore those youthful smiles that belong to twenty-somethings who painted their nails pink every weekend? It was as if these ads collectively had conveyed a message to older women: Stay away from the job market. The door was slammed in her face.

Once, Noriko saw an ad of a small public relations firm seeking two or three employees “thirty-five or younger." She immediately called the firm from a pay phone at a train station.
“We have been already bombarded with phone calls,” replied the receptionist.

When Noriko arrived at the firm for the informational session, she found the room overflowing with nearly a hundred women, many in their thirties. She handed in her resume to a recruiter who promised to call that evening. At home, she sat frozen by the phone, which never rang. When she called a few days later, still clinging to her optimism, the receptionist coolly announced that the positions had been closed. Several weeks later, a thin envelope arrived containing an obligatory rejection letter.

Noriko tirelessly sent out her resumes. One start-up software company invited her for an interview. Soon afterward, she donned a suit and climbed the stairs to the second floor of a rundown building, where the company was located. The next morning she took an elevator to her office on the thirty-sixth floor and shook her head. What was I thinking? She asked herself as she faxed a document to the firm's Brussels office. When a job offer arrived in the mail a few days later, she ripped the letter.

How ironic, she thought. She worked with men who toiled at the cost of private life in exchange for a status symbol as members of the glittering corporate world with branch offices scattered across the world. I work for Sumida, these men gloried in that name as they handed out their business cards. What they did within the company did not matter; it is a sense of belonging to a powerful institution that mattered. Unable to break away from the corporate mold, they chose to ignore what lay in the shadow of the big name: long hours, periodic transfers including overseas assignments, work-related socializing and other constraints that could totally absorb one’s personal freedom.

These men are products of a brand-oriented Japanese society, where names matter --where people flock to France to buy Louis Vitton bags and Yves St. Laurent dresses. Noriko found herself part of the big-name culture. Like corporate warriors who proudly wore their company’s lapel pin, she, too, had been poisoned by elitism of an establishment corporation. Trapped in a thankless job, she nonetheless clung to the public image of Sumida Trading Company.

One Afternoon

2005-10-13T17:38:00.000-07:00

I took a bus from the courthouse to a law school, where I was going to spend a couple of hours doing research for an employment discrimination case. Dressed in a silky blouse and clutching a briefcase, I sat down on a hard chair on Metro Bus 74. This dusty old bus almost made me feel nostalgic for immaculately clean buses I used to take back in Japan, replete with soft a female voice announcing each stop and politely thanking passengers.

As soon as I took a window seat, I pulled out the draft of the memorandum on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which I was supposed to give my boss the next day. I started reviewing it while savoring the afternoon sunlight streaming through the windows.

But I was unable to focus, feeling a little tired from attending two pre-trial conferences that morning. Looking up from the stack of papers in my lap, I studied a handful of passengers on the two o’clock bus. A plump woman wearing an orange wide-brimmed hat. A young father cooing to his toddler. A blond girl chewing gum in her Seattle Central Community College sweatshirt.

“How old is she?” The woman in the orange hat asked the father, who was sitting across from her. He was starting to tickle the red-haired girl on his lap.
“How old are you, sweetie?” He repeated the question in an overly sweet voice. The girl giggled.
“She’ll be two next month.” He said. “We’re gonna have a big birthday party for you, aren’t we, Madeline?” He told the woman about his mother and stepfather in North Dakota, who planned to attend the party. His mother was sewing a purple mini dress for her only grandchild. Purple was Madeline’s favorite color.

The bus soon left the downtown area full of skyscrapers. It eventually started driving through the B. District. It is known as the hippiest and strangest place in town, filled with ethnic restaurants, antique shops, tattoo shops, cafes, taverns, theaters. I saw a group of twenty-something men with spiked hair drinking coffee outside a Starbucks. I smiled to myself. I found it both refreshing and amusing to leave the world of lawyers temporarily and place myself in the larger society, where almost no one knows what Res Judicata or the Fourteenth Amendment is –and couldn’t care less.

Looking at my blouse and briefcase, I laughed at myself soundlessly. The first year of law school, when I had repeatedly consulted a physician, who ultimately prescribed a tranquilizer for my sleep disorder triggered by stress. The muggy summer afternoons when I had sat frozen at my computer, typing cover letters to law firms while my forehead glistened with sweat. Suddenly, those days felt impossibly distant. Even the employment discrimination case, which had come to dominate my life, seemed to have slipped out of mind. I felt a new longing for simple things in life –maybe fixing a sandwich, maybe setting flowers in a vase.

But the moment the law school building came into view, I was pulled back into reality. I put on the face of a lawyer as the bus approached the stop in front of the seven-story C. Hall, where aspiring lawyers analyzed the Uniform Commercial Code and practiced for mock trial competitions.

Pain: Fourth Grade Memory

2005-09-15T19:28:00.000-07:00

One secret suggests an emotional distance I kept from my parents, even at a young age: I took money from my mother’s purse and bought things for Hitomi (not her real name).

I started to notice Hitomi when she sat two seats ahead of me in Miss Nakaue’s fourth grade class. First, I noticed her rich, dark hair that almost reached to her waist, clustered in natural curls. Sometimes it was pulled back into a ponytail or braids, adorned by a barrette or a ribbon. Admiring her hair from behind, I would picture Hitomi, sitting still in front of the mirror while her mother brushed it carefully every morning. She must have a box, I thought, which was filled with all kinds of hair accessories, from which her mother pondered the day’s selection.

Her hair looked far more feminine than my chin-length straight hair. Studying my own reflection in the mirror, I felt a twinge of sadness. My mother didn’t allow me to grow my hair long. “It would look messy,” she would say. Every month she spread out a large plastic sheet over the concrete floor of our small entrance hall and cut my hair. Draped in a cape, I sat still on a stool and watched my mother mercilessly clipped away at my hair.

One evening I pulled some sponge rollers out of my mother’s vanity and tried to add some curls to my short hair. My father saw me standing in front of the mirror with the pink rollers in my hair. His face flushed furiously. “You’re way too young to act like that!” He hit me in the face. I fell to the floor, bleeding from my nose.

But it was more than Hitomi’s hair that captured my attention. I admired the ease with which Hitomi smiled at others and made friends. Posing for a photo during a class trip, she didn’t hesitate to put an arm around another girl while I shyly stood in a corner. At her birthday party, her small apartment was filled with friends, who eagerly took turns singing for her. Behind a tower of gifts, Hitomi beamed in her purple dress with lacy collars. It didn’t matter to me that she was barely a C student who often failed to turn in her homework in time. It didn’t matter, either, that her mother smoked, face pale underneath thick foundation.

I was even captivated by the sound of her name; in English, Hitomi could be Tiffany, Brittany, Heather –one of those names that belong to soap opera characters. Kiyoko, on the other hand, sounded too plain, too old-fashioned like Susan or Nancy. No script writer would go out of her way to pick my name, especially for the main character.

I felt elated when Hitomi suggested that we walk home together after school. Her family lived in a three-story apartment building within a short walk from my house. That afternoon we detoured through a Shinto shrine on our way home. We washed our hands at the pavilion, proceeded to the sanctuary, clapped our hands, and bowed our heads solemnly. We had both grown up in typical Japanese homes where our parents proudly called themselves atheists but still burned incense sticks and pressed their palms together at the altar in our living room. Praying prevents bad things from happening, they would say. It was the concept of bachi (divine punishment) the Japanese had perpetuated for centuries.

After leaving the sanctuary, Hitomi and I sat on the stone steps by the entrance gate. She pulled two rice crackers out of her backpack and held one out toward me. “Who’s your favorite boy in our class?” She asked casually as she unwrapped her cracker. “I won’t tell anyone,” she assured me.

I whispered the name of a bespectacled boy, a member of the Ping-Pong Club, thin, pale, and easy to overlook. My eyes searched for Takashi Yanase, who played Ping-Pong in a corner of the school gym as my friends and I, members of the folk dance club, whirled on the stage every Tuesday afternoon.

The next morning Hitomi threatened me near the fish-shaped pond in the school grounds. “I’ll tell Mr. Yanase that you have a crush on him.” She grinned wickedly. “In fact, I’ll tell everyone. I’ll say, ‘Miss Kamio is in love with that Ping-Pong-playing boy!’”

Panic-stricken, I begged her to keep quiet. Until finally, she agreed as long as I would obey her commands. That weekend, she took me to a shopping mall, where I bought her a barrette trimmed with rhinestones.

“I’ve never seen such a pretty girl before,” exclaimed my mother when she first saw me coming home with Hitomi, a rosy-cheeked girl in a red corduroy skirt who smiled her irritatingly sweet smile at my mother. Hearing her praise her beauty, I felt on the verge of telling my mother about what was happening –on those afternoons when Hitomi and I strolled in the mall. At a records store, she would eye a cassette tape of her favorite singer and look at me encouragingly. I would rummage around in my purse for the wallet, take out my mother’s money, and buy it for her. “I’m thirsty,” she would say, turning toward me while leaving the store. We would stop in front of a vending machine, and I would buy her a can of orange juice.

A couple of weeks passed. Finally, I mustered up enough courage to share my problem with my teacher. One night I labored long to describe my torment in writing. When I sealed the thick envelope addressed to Miss Nakaue, a sense of relief washed through me. She would rescue me, I thought. When I arrived at school the next morning, I pulled the letter out of my backpack before heading for the teachers’ lounge. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Hitomi march up right to me. I groaned inwardly.

Unable to contain her curiosity, she pointed to the envelope in my hand and said, “Is that a love letter or what?” I tried to ignore her. But perhaps I acted too defensively, clutching the envelope tightly. She grabbed the letter from me while I vigorously protested. She ripped open the envelope. As soon as she began to read it, she stiffened. “What’s this?” She said, looking up. My heart froze.

Fortunately, before she read any further, Miss Nakaue entered the classroom and announced the beginning of the homeroom period. I managed to take the letter from her. She took her seat reluctantly. We all stood up with our arms straight down to the side and bowed to Miss Nakaue. She took attendance and made announcements as usual before starting the algebra class. Even now, after a distance of all these years, I can picture myself sitting in that still and quiet classroom: steam rising from the stove in a corner, the January sunlight streaming in, Hitomi’s mohair sweater I gazed at from behind. I covered my face with my hands. I knew that at recess, Hitomi would demand that I hand the letter over to her.

After writing down some new formulas on the blackboard, Miss Nakaue passed out worksheets, told us to work on our own, and sat down at her desk. While my classmates labored over the problems, I looked at the clock alarmingly. The bell would ring for recess within half an hour.
I stood up and walked down the aisle toward Miss Nakaue, who was inspecting her fingernails. “I feel like I have a fever,” I blurted out. “Could I go to the nurse’s office?”

At the nurse’s office, I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes. Mrs. Hamasaki, the school nurse, handed me a thermometer and stepped out of the room briefly to run an errand. The moment she left, I got up and held the thermometer to the stove. When the nurse returned and removed the thermometer from my armpit, it read 103.

I was sent home, sitting on back of the bicycle a school aid pedaled. I felt an enormous sense of relief. I took solace in the fact that I would be absent from school at least for a while. At home, too, I employed the same tactic: I held the thermometer close to a kotatsu (an electric foot-warmer underneath a table covered with quilt.) Then I happily lay in my futon, reading books. Until my mother discovered the tactic a couple of days later. “I thought something was strange!” She shouted.

The next morning I returned to the classroom. Hitomi demanded in her authoritative voice that I keep running around the school building during recess for the entire week. I obliged.

I desperately longed to feel someone’s protective embrace. I ached to scream my pain at her: Mother, this girl is hurting me. Mother, I’m terrified of going to school. But I held back the words, knowing my mother. She would call me a coward too fearful to confront a mean child, a liar who not only played hooky but also stole her mother’s money.

Even in kindergarten, I had already become somewhat of a stoic figure in my little brown uniform: one day, when a few other children and I were playing on a jungle gym, one girl pinched the palm of my hand so hard that it bled. At home, I didn’t utter a word about this, acting as if nothing had happened at all. At age five, I had already learned to conceal my inner turmoil and marshal my own strength.

Of course, I never considered confiding in my father, either. He was a corporate warrior too harried to take my unhappiness seriously. Every morning I stuffed my backpack and headed out the door, pretending that I was a confident, straight-A student. “Kiyoko does so well in school,” my mother would gush. But her words often reminded me of my unspoken anguish. I had never been the confident and articulate child my mother saw from a tranquil distance. In the midst of family, I had craved a sense of family. I had carried this sense of isolation forward into my adulthood.

Homecoming

2005-05-20T23:09:00.000-07:00

“Let’s talk about O.J. Simpson’s trial.” As soon as the professor announced the topic in our Constitutional Theory seminar, several hands flagged in the air. Quick to express their empathy for the Black community, my blue-eyed classmates applauded the outcome of the criminal trial. I was subjected to criticism when I expressed doubt about the verdict.

My friend Erin was ignored by some classmates after she supported one’s right to enjoy pornography in her Feminist Jurisprudence class. The First Amendment held little power in our predictably liberal law school community.

The law school boasted of its ethnically diverse student body in the brochure. But reality told a different story. My classmates were virtually all fair-skinned. I was the only Japanese student among the entire student body of nearly seven hundred students. I struggled with my outsider status. Am I the only one? I wondered, for instance, as I sat mute in my contracts class as we discussed the following case: We’ll continue playing music for half an hour without interruption, announced a radio station. It failed to fulfill its promise. One inmate sued the station, alleging breach of contract. (This happened in real life.) When our professor read this case aloud, no one laughed. On the contrary, my eighty classmates discussed, in all seriousness, whether there had been a legally enforceable contract. A fierce debate lasted for the remainder of the class. Ask any Japanese law student; no one would spend forty minutes pondering the contract formation theory when an inmate with all the time in the world files a lawsuit just to start a fight.

Passing through the student lounge, where symposiums on environmental justice and affirmative action were held regularly, I quietly made my pilgrimages to the library. While other students sat frozen in front of the television in the lounge, awaiting the outcome of O.J. Simpson’s trial, I worked on my paper in the empty computer lab.

I didn’t understand why those students who prized diversity approached me when I was having sushi for lunch and told me how unsophisticated it was to eat raw fish. I could have said the same thing about eating turkey. I didn’t understand why Janet, a socially-conscious, twice-divorced mother, said to me, laughing, “You must have been a C student in college since you’re a foreign student.” In fact, I had graduated with honors. But I shook my head modestly. Later, I felt angry with myself. Why did I lack the courage to confront her stereotype?

I had felt like an outsider in my homeland. And I felt the same way in America, where I carried my permanent resident alien card with me. To me, living in America meant constantly navigating between two alien cultures. I found myself too American to embrace a culture with arranged matches and company anthems; yet I also remained Japanese enough to distance myself from my classmates who rambled on about individual choice and autonomy. I disdained Japanese "burikkos" –women who acted cute and sweet (knowing that I myself acted that way sometimes); but I also felt irritated by an American woman who munched on a sandwich in Commercial Law class and addressed the professor by his first name.

Pursuing an American Accent (3)

2005-05-16T22:55:00.000-07:00

“Where are you from?” One Japanese lawyer complains that her clients and other lawyers curiously ask her, having noticed her accent. Some openly express doubt about the ability of the Asian woman lawyer. She is keenly aware of struggles that lie ahead as she competes for a partnership. In her office overlooking the Manhattan skyline, she ponders her future.

One Japanese saleswoman takes frequent business trips while suffering from severe morning sickness. But she isn’t allowed to complain. “If you want equal treatment,” her male boss told her, “don’t expect special treatment.” Gender equality can be attained only when women meet the male standards of work, she concludes. “America is a land of opportunity,” she says, “but once you have been given the opportunity, it’s now your responsibility to prove yourself.”

Lacking marketable skills, many Japanese women in America endure low-status jobs. Many nonetheless refuse to return to Japan. Harsher realities await them back home. Their parents would waste no time in contacting matchmakers for their “aging” daughters. Some employers refuse to hire them; they tend to view Western-educated women as self-described cosmopolitans who may disrupt the workplace harmony. Eager to remain in America, some women look for Caucasian husbands –for both pragmatic and symbolic reasons. Marrying a U.S. citizen remains the easiest way to obtain a green card. Moreover, it is considered a status symbol (among Japanese women) to be married to a white person.

Yumiko Hayashi, a Ph.D candidate in linguistics, married a bus driver who took her Japanese class at a community college. Getting her doctorate from an obscure university, Yumiko had been dismayed at the bleak prospect of obtaining a tenured professorship. But she refused to go back to Japan, where she would have less difficulty landing a job. Feeling as if she had been struggling in a sinking ship, she saw marriage as a lifeboat. Back home, her parents were stunned to hear about her marriage. Their daughter had once turned down an arranged marriage with a sober-suited businessman in Tokyo.

Without hope of independence, Masami Terao (*see “Pursuing an American Accent #1"), too, sought shelter in marriage. Even after finishing her English-as-a-Second-Language course, she accumulated a pile of rejection letters from various business schools including NYU. Not knowing what to do, she began to work as a clerk at a sourvenir shop for Japanese tourists. She finally married an American she had met at a friend’s party. Now a mother of a two-year-old, she stays at home.

Here lies the irony: Seemingly tough-minded women who have once disdained the sentimentalized role of wife and mother ultimately escape into marriage as a way out of their confused self-search in a foreign country.

Pursuing an American Accent (2)

2005-05-14T00:10:00.000-07:00

“How can anyone say American men treat women with respect?” One Japanese businesswoman says emphatically. “In this country, women can’t even go out alone at night. What about rape? What about domestic violence? Where’s liberty?” She adds, “American men share housework? Well, when we have office parties at work, it’s always the women who prepare food and do the dishes. Male co-workers just come, eat, and leave.”

Jobs are hard to come by. In a country where even kindergartners effortlessly produce the flawless “r” sound, Japanese women can no longer rely on their English as the focal point of their resumes. Surrounded by native speakers, these former self-described bilinguals strive to overcome their inferiority complex. Sooner or later, there comes a time when they face the reality: the language barrier pushes them into safe occupations as translators and language teachers. Some forge their way into the American professional workforce. But even they invariably face obstacles due to their gender, race, or a combination of both. Petite Asian women are rarely taken seriously. (...CONTINUES...)

Pursuing an American Accent (1)

2005-05-09T11:19:00.000-07:00

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...)