Women

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I'm a little uneasy, as a white European man who has never even visited Japan, on making pronouncements about Japan's attitudes to women, but some things do need saying. Women have always occupied a very secondary position there. Buddhism, for instance, explicitly exclides the possibility of women attaining nirvana. Nonetheless, they have important roles in Japan's history, and now and then in its arts.

This was most clear in Heian times. The women of the court had plenty of leisure time, and developed their own arts - there was a very clear distinction between male and female arts. Only men learned the Chinese style of writing, and the angular katakana style. Women used what was known as 'feminine hand', the cursive hiragana that has become the dominant style, often beautifully calligraphed on elaborately prepared coloured papers. Perhaps even more importantly and impressively, Heian women invented the novel - the most famous example being The Tale of Genji.

In the medieval samurai era (12th to 16th Centuries), Japan was as macho and male-dominated as any country has ever been. Samurai were frequently off fighting wars, so women had to defend their homes, families and selves, so often became proficient with, in particular, the naginata (a spear-shaft with a curved blade attached). Also, men disdained financial matters (remember that merchants had the lowest caste), so women gained some power as managers of their households.

A classic case of women's contributions being suppressed or ignored is in the revered raku pottery, the ceramic style most strongly associated with the tea ceremony, and central to one of the major strands of Japanese aesthetics. This is credited to Chojiro under the influence of the tea master Rikyu, but it is almost certain that the style was largely originated by Chojiro's mother, Teirin.

The largest part for women in Japanese culture, arguably unprecedented anywhere in world history, was in the Edo period. This deserves a section of its own (loads in a separate window, so you can continue here).

Courtesans and Geisha

Women also started kabuki theatre - but the performers were also prostitutes, and fights about the stars' favours caused the government to ban women from the stage (and a little later boys too, since they took the same dual roles): this ban continued until little over a century ago. Men took women's roles in the intervening centuries.

This transvestism has continued into modern times, but now women get to play too. Most famously, the Takarazuka theatre is all young women, and the most prized roles are male, and those who play these are the biggest stars. Some directors argue that no man could ever be as beautiful as a young woman in the role; on the other hand, the claim in kabuki is that no woman can epitomise female beauty as well as an onnagata, their specialist transvestites. Probably the Takarazuka's biggest hit was The Rose of Versailles, based on a comic story of a woman playing a man. Note that there is virtually never any camp or comical intent in any of this transvestism.

More abstractly, traditional Japanese stories at all levels tend to put women in one of four roles: the mother, normally long-suffering and a martyr to her children's needs; the wife, normally dutiful; the courtesan or more common prostitute; and the scary demonic female (it is very rare to see Japanese women enjoying sex - these demons are the exception). All of these are drawn in terms of their relationship to men - women rarely get to be agents in their own right, and are rarely designed to be identified with. This is largely true even in the work of a director such as Mizoguchi, often classified as a women's director: his women are long-suffering victims of fate and men, to be pitied or admired.

In apparent contrast to this, there is a reverence for the power of the vagina (more as a vessel of birth than sexually) in Japan that seems bizarre to Western minds. The movie star Katsu Shintaro publicly kissed his mother's genitals at her funeral. This seems weird, but it was reported with respect, not any kind of shock. I say this is an apparent contrast because it is revering one part of a woman for its function, so not genuinely respecting women in any way.

Things haven't changed as much as many would have us believe. In the early Meiji era, marriage laws were passed, giving men seven grounds on which to divorce their wives: sterility, adultery, disobeying his parents, larceny, severe illness, jealousy or talking too much. Men were positively expected to commit adultery - loving your wife and being sexually interested in her was not just the sign of a pathetic wimp, it was considered more or less morally dubious.

Japan is still a very male-dominated society today, significantly more than most of the Western world. A small but, I think, telling fact is that Viagra was legally licensed before the contraceptive pill.