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Japanese Women Research Paper

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The signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender on 2 September 1945, aboard the deck of USS Missouri marked Japan’s unconditioned surrender to the Allies, officially drawing an end to the Second World War (Weber, 1997). Indeed it was the end of the Second World War, for the Japanese people to ‘begin a new life’, an encouragement for Japan to rebuild, for the society to restructure, also a new age for a Japanese woman’s position in the Japanese society to be re-evaluated. In this essay, I explore the status of the Japanese women between the pre-war period and the post-war period, as well as hope to address the areas of discrimination that could be observed from the pre-modern times and in the contemporary society.

In the pre-war period, all social classes including merchant, court …show more content…

Actresses or female spokesperson must smile to their male co-characters, an act set to represent their feminine gender characters, which is women support or men; while male characters must not smile, in order to highlight their competence and serious behaviour at work (Arima, 2003). It illustrates that Japanese advertisers and producers allocate gender stereotypic actions to actors according to socially desirable gender traits, for example, females must smile because they are expected to serve and they have good interaction skills; while males must not smile, but instead they are expected to showcase their abilities (Inoue & Ebara, 1995; Arima, 2003). This brought me to ponder that in parallel to an individual’s gender stereotype role and imagined identities, everyone is categorised according to the society’s value judgements and prejudice, based upon his or her functionality within the contemporary social hierarchy; with that women will forever remain inferior to

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