Traditional Women's Roles in Japan

Lately in some of my classes we’ve been talking about women, women’s roles in society, and our thoughts on it all. I’d rather not get into a discussion about women today since it seems to be a sticky subject, but I will talk about women in the past. I will specifically talk about Japanese women in the past. I read a wonderful book called Shogun and it was mainly about a European trapped in Japan after his ship crashed. As the main character struggled to understand Japanese society (which was very different from European society) the reader could see how the women were treated and what they were expected by society to do.

Unlike other places in the world, it was perfectly acceptable for a woman to carry a sword and know how to fight. The twist is that a woman with a sword could only be a woman of high standing.   However, usually upper class women actually preferred their duties of taking care of the house so most didn’t get involved with fighting and such. The most war-like (if you could call it that) possession that they might carry is a short dagger.

Traditional Japanese women took their duties of taking care of the house perhaps further than other societies. Traditionally it was the wife or sometimes the eldest female of the house who took care of the household expenses, in other words the money. The wife would, basically, give her husband an allowance to spend as he chooses and take care of the rest such as paying the bills or getting food for dinner.  Of course the husband was still in control. He would be the one to decide what dinner would be and it would be the wife’s problem to figure out how to pay for it if the couple were not well off. If the husband’s lord, or a superior, says he’s going to stay the night and demands all of these things that he wants, like some scented candles, the husband will tell the wife and she will once again have to find out how to pay for it. As you can imagine, women of that time were good at bargaining for lower prices from merchants and dealers. To me it seems like the gender roles of that time were defined like this. The men were like a mask, show to others that their house is respectable, honorable, and well off. The women would just quietly work behind the scenes to make things as good as the men pretended and a successful wife would do just that.

There’s much more to talk about and I will continue in my next blog post.

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Japanese women doing a flower arrangement