Gender Differences in Tokyo

This is a very broad, overarching topic so I'm not going to try to address everything, just a couple of my own experiences and observations.

I was at dinner with some friends a couple nights ago and the two guys present mentioned how living in Japan was really easy and made them much more complacent and mellow as people. One of the guys, who lived in NY his entire life before moving to Tokyo, noted that living in NY had been far more intense, that he had to try harder and be more aggressive to succeed in NY, while working in Tokyo was so easy and made him more laid back.

I didn't respond at the time because the conversation moved on to another topic, but it brought up a fundamental difference in the experiences of living and working in Tokyo for women v. men that I've perceived.

I could totally see how living and working in Tokyo for an Asian-American man could be easier and more comfortable. Because you were educated in the US, you have an advantage and are immediately given some respect for that. Because you speak English, you are automatically heads above the rest of the Japanese working community when it comes to international business-making. And because you are a man, you are king. You are automatically granted the respect of being born with a penis. In Japan, this means that when people see you in an elevator, there is no assumption that you might be a secretary, but rather an assumption that you are at the very least a salaryman, if not higher. It means that you get to go first, all the time - in Japan, the practice is "men first" so you can push your way past women to enter or exit the elevator first (usually while one of the women in the elevator will press open the "open" button for all the men to go out first). It means that when you speak, especially in English, people will automatically assume you have some authority, and grant you the corresponding respect. And then when you leave the office, because you are an expat, even if you are a hideously ugly person with a truly odd personality, there's a very good chance that a gaggle of decent looking Japanese girls will flirt, make out or sleep with you, whereas if you were still back in your home country, you'd be a complete loser. If you're a man, Japan is heaven.

But it's the complete opposite for a working Asian-American woman. Whereas living and working in Japan made my friend more mellow because of how easy it is, working in Japan has made me a a super-aggressive, bitchy hardass.

In the US, the social/professional rule requires subordinates to listen to the authority of the seniors, whether male or female. The social/professional rule requires people to assume that if you are in a certain position, you probably have the brains/experience to be there. So in the US, I was used to asking subordinates to do something and having it be done. I was used to people taking me seriously as a professional.

Then I came to Japan, and all of that went out the window. I am the only foreign female associate at my company, and in addition to that, I'm told that I look very young and "not like [my profession]." So since I've arrived in Japan, I've had to deal with a whole lot of annoying crap that just added to my aggravation (in addition to the inane meetings and general inanity of corporate Japan). I asked a very junior person once to do an assignment and he responded, "well I'm pretty busy right now so I don't know when I'll get to it." I knew for a fact he was not that busy and he just didn't want to do it. So I had to break out superbitch and ream him out and tell him that it's not my job to manage his schedule, it's his, but he better figure out how to get the assignment done by the next morning.

Another time, I was asked by a Japanese person to draft a document, then found out later that afterward, he had asked a WHITE MALE associate who was MORE JUNIOR to me to review my work. Presumably because I am Asian so maybe my English isn't as good as the white male's English. I can't recount every instance, and perhaps each instance in and of itself was not a big deal, but in the aggregate, they were entirely disrespectful and inappropriate. There are other things - in the hallways, when one of the male expats passes a secretary, I've noticed the secretaries bow their heads down in respect as they pass. For me, they don't. It's not that I want people to bow at me when I pass - but it's the DIFFERENCE in treatment of a man in my position versus me, just because I'm a woman. My colleagues' secretaries treat them with appropriate respect and acknowledge the professional decorum between their positions. My secretary regularly comes into my office to go off about how hard her day is, or gossip, or ask me to bring her stuff back from my travels. Again, it's not that I want my secretary to be all serious around me, but it's the mere fact that she feels she can just treat me as she pleases, when she doesn't treat the men in the office the same way (I share my secretary with two male associates).

In order to deal with the handicap of being a woman in corporate Japan (and not just a woman, but a foreign-but-Asian-looking woman), I've had to be more assertive, more aggressive, more bitchy, more mean, more demanding, more stern - just to get simple things accomplished that in the US, I could have done simply by asking nicely.

I say all this because my friend's comment actually really surprised me with respect to how Japan changes men differently from women. Most expat men find it easier than the US because in the US they experienced the handicap of being an Asian-American man, afforded less respect in society than white men. But my experience as an expat woman in Tokyo has been that it is exponentially more difficult to be taken seriously as a professional in Japan for me than it was in the US.

In some ways, I feel that the "training" I had in Tokyo to become a hardass bitch will be helpful to me in the rest of my career. I think that in order to move up the corporate ladder, even in the US, it's necessary for women to be aggressive. But when I lived in the US, I didn't aspire to become like the aggressive women I saw in senior positions. It just seemed like something I didn't ever want to become. But like it or not, working in Japan has forced me to become aggressive, mean, demanding, bitchy. Personally, I don't like it. Professionally, I think it may be good for me.