Westernization or Hybridization?: Restructuring Japanese Hegemonic Masculinity in Globalization

During the economic growth period, a form of masculinity attained a hegemonic position in Japanese society, that is, salaryman. The Japanese can easily build up a mental image of a typical salaryman as, a man who works for the same company for life, being protected by career-long employment and a seniority system, and throws himself into the role of the breadwinner leaving domestic duties to his wife. Until the 1990s, majority of Japanese people approved the idea of gender division of household labor and Japan’s economic conditions at the time could afford to provide a large part of people with such lifestyles. Hence, male-dominated regime in Japanese society in the second half of the 20th century has been legitimized thorough a masculine ideal characterized by preoccupation with work to provide for a family rather than violence or physical prowess.

In the age of globalization, however, any local gender orders cannot be isolated from the world and the hegemony of a locally-dominant form of masculinity is always threatened not only by local conditions but also by economic, political and cultural struggles in a global scale. Based on in-depth interviews with Japanese men in two different social contexts, the paper explores the conditions of restructuring salaryman masculinity in terms of the world gender order. First, the encounter between different local hegemonic masculinities in a transnational arena is examined, showing the cases of businessmen working at subsidiaries of Japanese-affiliated companies in Australia. Then, the impact of contemporary globalization on a local gender order is considered by looking at the gender practices among middle-class men to keep up their hegemonic positions, being confronted with globally-expanding feminist agendas and neoliberal economy which undermine the basis of male-dominated Japanese society. Finally, we will discuss how ongoing reconstruction of hegemonic masculinity is associated with multiple social (in)equalities.