Glenda S. Roberts

Similar outcomes, different paths: The cross-national transfer of gendered regulations of employment

In twenty-first-century Japan, numerous legal measures encourage both ‘work/family harmonization’ and gender equality at the workplace. Influenced by global (i.e. North American, UK and European) norms regarding gender equality as well as by changing demographics that have encouraged governmental reform in family/work reconciliation, corporate policies are changing, especially in large firms. This chapter will discuss the implementation of new in-house regulatory schemes for promoting work/life balance and gender equality at two large firms in Tokyo from the late 1990s to the present. Through the analysis of these two firms’ strategies, one can discern different organizational cultural stances regarding the relationship between employee and firm, and between firm and government, leading to differing outcomes in the timing and structuring of work/life balance or ‘family-friendly’ policies.

Salary Women and Family Well-Being in Urban Japan

Few well-educated Japanese women manage to maintain regular full-time employment while raising a family. Yet, with governmental initiatives designed to shore up the birthrate, it is arguably easier to do so now than ever before. How do women in career-oriented jobs conceive of the well-being of themselves and their families? In this article the author explores this question through data from qualitative interviews with working mothers in continuous full-time employment in one Japanese multinational corporation in the Tokyo metropolitan area. Evidence from these interviews supports Uenos (2005) hypothesis that changes in the Japanese family system itself ironically enable support for womens participation in society, through what she terms the “Asian solution” of reproduction. Work/life balance for full-time career women hence is often achieved as a kind of extended family project.

Japanese Workers in Protest: An Ethnography of Consciousness and Experience.

This first ethnographic study of factory workers engaged in radical labor protest gives a voice to a segment of the Japanese population that has been previously marginalized. These blue-collar workers, involved in prolonged labor disputes, tell their own story as they struggle to make sense of their lives and their culture during a time of conflict and instability. What emerges is a sensitive portrait of how workers grapple with a slowed economy and the contradictions of Japanese industry in the late postwar era. The ways that they think and feel about accommodation, resistance, and protest raise essential questions about the transformation of labor practices and limits of worker cooperation and compliance.