Word: maleness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This emancipation lasted scarcely ten years. The rising militarists, in destroying so much else, clamped down on women, and reasserted male superiority. But once Japan had plunged into war with the U.S., it was these same militarists who insisted that woman's place was in the factory. Even geisha girls were rounded up for munitions work, and housewives organized into "patriotic" associations to sew uniforms and make bandages. When the war ended in humiliating defeat, the men were totally discredited, and the young women ripe for transformation into mambo-garu-generally to the distress of their mothers...
Carrying the Male. But there remains one enormous roadblock on the path of female emancipation: the Japanese man. Few husbands will take their wives out for an evening. Their usual excuse is that their employers, for business reasons, insist that they attend numerous geisha parties, where much of the nation's business is still transacted. In the geisha houses, the jokes and sake drinking have not changed in a thousand years. Tipsy politicians and businessmen play such children's games as "scissors, paper, rock" or the passing of lighted tapers until they go out, to determine who must...
Even the men unable to afford the geisha house often will not go home to their wives, but stay downtown in all-male sake bars, lingering over a single drink, or in pachinko parlors playing pinball machines. "Why do they do this?" asks a girl indignantly. "Because they want their wives to think they are big shots. They want the world to believe they are out chasing women. An average Japanese wife is ashamed if her husband comes home at 6 or 7 at night. The neighbors will then say he must be only a humble clerk...
Japanese businessmen are slow to hire educated girls for decent positions. A girl college graduate says bitterly: "Yes, I can get a job in business, all right: serving tea to the office help." The Japanese male is proving skittish about marrying the emancipated female. He wants an old-fashioned girl just like the girl who married dear old Dad: thrifty, a good cook, plain rather than pretty, cheerful, obedient, and with "just enough spunk to make life interesting...
...what officials euphemistically called a "goodwill mission," troops began moving northward in a nine-day mopping-up operation. At night, soldiers and police swooped down upon scattered villages of mud-walled huts to cart off every male adult for questioning. The "screening process" was admittedly a bit clumsy-"not nearly so well defined," one police officer said, "as in Cyprus or Kenya." But the fact that those two fateful names came up at all was symptomatic of the uneasy mood...