In my life, I’ve managed to do a few things right. I had good luck choosing a university (SDSU) with an excellent Japanese department. I pulled the trigger on coming to work in Japan as an ESL teacher and got here just a few years before the Internet happened in a big way, enabling J-List, JAST USA, and J18 Publishing to be possible. And of course, I was lucky enough to meet my wife, who has been the most important person over the years. I thought I’d write a post with my own random observations on Japanese women as a person who’s lived in Japan for three decades.
My Journey to Japan
I came to Japan back in 1991, during the presidency of the first George Bush (yikes!). Back then Japan was a very different place, very closed off to the outside world, with no Amazon to allow us to order exotic products. (I brought a Mac from the U.S., and it was a minor struggle to get a three-prong plug adaptor for it.) Anime was getting more popular but was still very much subculture that you might learn about from underground ‘zines, and the idea that anime would be available with English subtitles was still a far-off dream.
While I worked as an English teacher and learned about my country, I worked hard studying Japanese, filling in the real vocabulary that my Japanese textbooks hadn’t prepared me for. I took my study of kanji a little too seriously, learning to write difficult characters like 薔薇 bara, meaning rose, which Japanese people cannot themselves write. One day I met a girl in a kind of “English conversation coffee shop” that a friend of mine was running, and wrote this kanji to impress her. Seeing my passion for language must have piqued her interest because we started dating, and the rest is history.
So here we go with eight observations about Japanese women I’ve made over the years. Please note: this is a very subjective collection of random observations I’ve made based on my own experiences. As in all things in life, your mileage may vary.
Japanese Women are Pragmatic
One of the reasons I learned Japanese was so that I could properly enjoy Maison Ikkoku, the legendary manga and anime from Rumiko Takahashi. It’s the story of a poor university student named Godai who’s trying to woo his widowed apartment manager, Kyoko, while fighting off several other girls who want to marry him. One of the characters in the story is Kozue, who loves Godai but ends up marrying another man for the sole reason that his hobby was saving money, and he had a huge bank balance accumulated. This was my first exposure to what I would come to think of as “the pragmatism of Japanese women.”
And lo and behold, when I was dating my future wife and things were starting to get serious, she inquired how much money I had in the bank… then laughed that anyone could actually have 140 yen (US$1.27) in a bank account. Happily for me, she saw my future potential despite my lack of savings. She found students for me to teach in her neighborhood, and in ten months we’d saved up money for our wedding.
(This pragmatism continued after we had started J-List. From the beginning, our offices were constructed so that if anime and the Internet ever went bust, we could convert the building into an English school and survive teaching ESL. Happily, that hasn’t been necessary.)
Japanese Women are Calculating… Literally
My own observation has been that when Japanese women go out to eat, they’ll generally calculate the bill afterward so that everyone pays for what they ordered with great accuracy, down to the yen. When I go out to eat with American friends, we’re much less precise, rounding the bill to the nearest 1000 yen if we feel like it. The Japanese actually use the English word “about” as an adjective to describe this kind of imprecise person. (Example: Kare ha abauto na hito dakara, chanto keisan ga dekinai. “He’s an imprecise person, so he can’t calculate numbers properly.”)
Japanese Women Can Be Very Marriage-Focused
Before I met my wife, I dated some Japanese girls, and had some interesting experiences. One girl wouldn’t even date me, with the reason being that “I can’t see myself marrying you one day, so dating you would be a waste of both our time.” And with my wife, we were basically making plans for a wedding after only a few weeks if knowing each other, because she was on a mission to find someone worth marrying at the age of 25.
I don’t now how much things have changed in the three decades since I met my wife. On the one hand, I hear from young Japanese women that “the current generation of young men are worthless,” being herbivores who don’t take the initiative with women like we did in the old days.
Want to learn about Japan’s birth rate challenges through anime memes? Here’s an article for you!
Vulcans vs. Humans?
Another theme with my wife and me is that I am emotional, often letting my feelings get the better of me, while she is usually cool and collected, almost to the point of being a kuudere character. Once my son observed that I am like Captain Kirk while his mother was like Mr. Spock, which I thought was interesting. Another area Japanese might potentially resemble Vulcans is in how they never show affection with family members, which is a big difference compared to my American family, always hugging when we meet after a long time apart.
Japanese Women are Incredibly Punctual
In our household, it’s understood that I operate on “American time,” which means that if I say I’ll be home in 15 minutes, I mean one hour, and if I say one hour, I mean three hours. I’m not lying when I give these inaccurate time forecasts… I’m just operating on “American time.” My wife understands this and converts it into proper time.
Women in Japan are also capable of remembering dates weeks or months in advance. While I’m a slave to setting reminder events in my iPhone calendar, always having Siri tell me what I’ve got to do this afternoon, my wife can set a lunch date with a friend for Saturday five weeks in the future, and somehow manage to not forget it.
They’re Also Incredible Clean
Japanese people are incredibly hygienic, a trait that’s helped them manage the COVID-19 crisis better than many countries. This goes for Mrs. J-List, who is always making sure everything in our house is super clean. I’m rarely allowed into her kitchen.
Japanese Women Are More Conservative
Obviously, each country has its own list of cultural hang-ups, and Japan is a country that’s quite conservative about things like nudity. I remember when we were visiting Thailand, some female European tourists nearby were sunning themselves with their bikini tops off. I suggested that she could sunbathe topless, too, and she reacted like an embarrassed giggling anime girl at this. Japanese women of her generation are also scandalized at the idea of using a tampon during their time of this month, and nearly always prefer pads.
Japanese Women Apparently All Have Size 23.5 cm Feet
I once visited Rome with a friend and wanted to buy a gift for my wife. I decided to surprise her with nice shoes, but I didn’t know her size. My friend said, “Don’t you know anything about Japanese women? Their shoe size is always 23.5.” I asked what my wife’s shoe size was, and it was… 23.5. Have I stumbled on some kind of glitch in the Matrix?
Thanks for reading this post about random observations I’ve made about women in Japan. Got any comments or questions? Post them below, or on Twitter!
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