The Japanese Woman in a Changing Society

Abstract

Each and every human being in this world is unique, an individual in a world of other "individuals". And yet, we as individuals exhibit certain qualities, certain patterns of behavior that set us apart in groups, the groups formed by the boundaries of the cultures we are born into. As individuals we are taught the rules of our society, of our own particular culture, through an unconscious learning process—a process so subtle as to make us think that we thought up the rules ourselves. Since the end of Japanese isolationism, when the world was awakened to Japan and its unique society, people have been writing about Japanese women. However, almost without exception, the foreigners who have been writing about them have portrayed the Japanese woman as a ''victim" of her society, her culture, her environment. In this thesis I intend to show her in a different light, not as a "victim" but as a product of her changing society—the Japanese woman of today, in 1975.