Japanese Office Ladies
| Upon visiting any major city in Japan you will be intrigued and a little confused buy the clothing of female office workers. Japanese salary men tend to blend in with the dark gloomy landscape with there cheap black suits. Office ladies, on the other hand, are sort of neon-lights with the colorful eye-catching work uniforms. You will often seen large groups of OL's (office ladies) walking around the streets during lunch hour. In a typically poetic way of classifying and symbolizing things unmarried female office workers are labeled 登ffice flowers - jimsho no hana. Jimsho means office and hana means flower. The connotation of this label is obvious - like flowers young Japanese girls decorate their workplace doing menial office work for a relatively short period of time. Then when their beauty fades they are discarded and new flowers are sought after. Pretty much the male mentality of Japan. |
Women are treated like second class citizens in the workplace. They are paid less and usually offered only low-rung employment opportunities in most companies. Successful and powerful business women are few and far between, and are considered scary or intimidating by their male counterparts. However, the situation is changing rapidly and gaining momentum. Women are slowly finding or making their place in the workforce. If Japanese women had more opportunity and power it would do this country so much good. Japanese women are naturally more flexible, adaptable and usually more talented and inventive than the men. Japanese society would greatly benefit from female influence. They give society its color and taste, and are responsible for most of the creativity in the country. |
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It is time for Japanese women to blossom again. During the Occupation from 1945 to 1953 Japanese with their new found rights had an incredibly positive impact on a rapidly changing Japan. Without the cooperation and efforts of Japanese women, the Occupation would likely have been a long drawn-out disaster. Their aggressive willingness to work and change their traditional way of living, in large part, resulted in the consumer economy that now exists in Japanese society today. The growing labor shortage seems like the perfect opportunity for women to blossom again and fulfill long-suppressed ambitions in the upper echelons of business, science and politics.
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