It is a time when women in many parts of the world are questioning the roles, life styles, and values by which women have lived for centuries. The contributors are American women engaged in studying various aspects of the life patterns of Japanese women in many walks of life and have published their findings in this volume. We come from a variety

Westerners and Japanese men have a vivid mental image of Japanese women as dependent, deferential, and devoted to their families--anything but ambitious. In fact, the author shows, Japanese women hold equal and sometimes even more powerful positions than men in many spheres.

Through analysis of trends and policy options, combined with interviews with 21 female role models from business to the arts, Bill Emmott takes an optimistic look at how a society with an extreme level of gender inequality, an ageing population, and slow economic growth can achieve greater social justice and sustainable prosperity for the future.

Re-Imaging Japanese Women takes a revealing look at women whose voices have only recently begun to be heard in Japanese society: politicians, practitioners of traditional arts, writers, radicals, wives, mothers, bar hostesses, department store and blue-collar workers. This unique collection of essays gives a broad, interdisciplinary view of contemporary Japanese women while challenging readers to see the development of Japanese women's lives against the backdrop of domestic and global change. These essays provide a "second generation" analysis of roles, issues and social change. The collection brings up to date the work begun in Gail Lee Bernstein's Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945 (California, 1991), exploring disparities between the current range of images of Japanese women and the reality behind the choices women make.

Why do Japanese women enjoy a high sense of well-being in a context of high inequality? Beyond the Gender Gap in Japan brings together researchers from across the social sciences to investigate this question. The authors analyze women’s values and the lived experiences at home, in the family, at work, in their leisure time, as volunteers, and in politics and policy-making. Their research shows that the state and firms have blurred “the public” and “the private” in postwar Japan, constraining individuals’ lives, and reveals the uneven pace of change in women’s representation in politics. Yet, despite these constraints, the increasing diversification in how people live and how they manage their lives demonstrates that some people are crafting a variety of individual solutions to structural problems. Covering a significant breadth of material, the book presents comprehensive findings that use a variety of research methods—public opinion surveys, in-depth interviews, a life history, and participant observation—and, in doing so, look beyond Japan’s perennially low rankings in gender equality indices to demonstrate the diversity underneath, questioning some of the stereotypical assumptions about women in Japan.