Crashes and small dreams

There was a train crash in Osaka today which killed 49 people. It happened in Amagasaki, right near where I work. I had the day off, but the airwaves were full of it, and the train drivers were all on edge. Crashes almost never happen here. Coming back from a job interview, I got on the front carriage by chance and regretted it immediately; trains in Japan are much more open than those in Australia; you can walk freely between carriages without being a rebellious teenager and you can stare out the front window at oncoming trains as they hurtle past mere centimetres away. I couldn't look away.

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One of my conversation students opened up to me a little last week. The lesson rooms are open at the top, which lets the rest of the office hear our conversation (constant accountability), so she leant forwards and lowered her voice and lent me a bit of herself, showed me her tiny dream of change. She was 36, a hairdresser, and for 18 years she had nursed the dream of working overseas for a year, perhaps in Singapore, perhaps Australia, but her parents wouldn't let her and now she was 36 and couldn't qualify for a working holiday visa and she had worked up the courage to defy her parents and leave Japan for a while. Now she has to contend with the visa maze, pitting her fledgling English against the immigration systems. Which was where I came in. How can you refuse a request like that? You can't. I spent an hour trying to navigate the Australian immigration department's website (god, it's like the new version of the imfamous language testing that the government used to conduct to make sure no undesirable skin colours crept into Australia). Bureaucratese mingling with fragments of normal English. I came up with scant hope; if she gets a sponsor, she might be allowed in. I don't know the system so well. Any suggestions? Where are hairdressers in short supply in the world?

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I never really understood the need for contemporary feminism until I started living in a rich country which bypassed it altogether. When my student confided her terribly small dream to me, I couldn't help but think that here is where feminism needs to happen. In Australia and the rest of the West, feminism is dying because most of its work has been done; women can have careers now and the Pill is here to stay. Third wave feminists keep trying to revive the movement but the need is less urgent now, the critical mass needed for change has faded because much change has been achieved. Here, feminism is needed, and in the developing world.

The ideas are trickling in, as Japanese youth look outside their country more and more and bring foreign ideas back home when they return. Women are no longer as satisfied with a life in the home and work as the office lady. But it's taking time for the shift in opinion (thirty years ago, something like 80% of women said the right place for them was in the home; now, it's closer to 30%) to translate through into action.

Kiyono does well out of hostess work, and many women do well out of sex work. Being an office lady pays terribly, as does teaching, translating and the other jobs which are dominated by women. It seems the only way to become rich is to become a singer.

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It almost seems as if much of contemporary Japan is set up around satisfying male desires, as a reward for the exhausting demands of the salarymen life, the salarymen who rebuilt Japan post-1945. So sex is readily available - every suburb has its sex parlours - beer comes from cheap vending machines and porn is everywhere.