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Nature In Translation
Japanese Tourism Encounters the Canadian Rockies
By Shiho Satsuka Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7560-9
CHAPTER 1
Narratives of Freedom
Freedom from a Company
Hamada Satomi had followed a life course that was considered to be ideal for women until the mid-1990s. In 1987, she graduated from a two-year junior college that had a good reputation for women's education. Right after graduating, she started to work full-time in one of the largest stock brokerage firms in Tokyo. She lived with her parents in a suburban city and commuted to Marunouchi, the central business district in Tokyo.
She chose the company not because she was interested in stock trading but because at the time she searched for a job, the large financial corporations were considered to be the most solid and stable among companies. She was attracted by the sense of stability and security. Furthermore, working in a highly ranked katai kaisha (a company with "solid" and "square" characteristics) would give her a reputation as a reliable person. There was still a normative expectation that a young woman from a good family should live with her parents until she married. Living under parental control and working in such a company would improve her chances of finding a future husband among elite sarariman (white-collar salaried men). Although Satomi herself was not particularly keen on finding her future husband, she was aware of this expectation, and her parents were satisfied with her position as an OL (O-eru, "office lady") in Marunouchi.
During the time of the bubble economy, OLs, along with female university students, were considered consumer trendsetters, whose tastes and behaviors were extensively discussed in the media, and by advertisement agencies and developers of new products. OLs were seen to represent fulfilling, exciting, and youthful lifestyles, and their preferred products would gain many followers. While conservative educators and critics denounced and despised their excessive consumer activities, the lifestyles of the young women educated in prestigious colleges and working in large, reputable corporations attracted people's attention, just like a beautiful flower would intrigue people. Hence, the expression "hana no OL," which literally means, "flowery office ladies," was used in popular discourse. OLs, especially those living with their parents, could use a large portion of their salaries as disposable income. Satomi used the term for herself sarcastically when reflecting on her life before moving to Canada. While the mass media depicted and stimulated the OLs' lavish spending on dining, overseas travel, and the latest fashions, Satomi spent most of her leisure time and money on skiing.
She started to ski enthusiastically as a college student. During her four years working at the firm, she became increasingly frustrated because she could not ski as much as she wanted. Her stress level had risen so much that she dreamed of changing her job and moving to a place where she could ski more often. She envied friends in her skiing circle who lived at a ski resort in the winter to concentrate on skiing and moved back to the cities during the off-season to work as furita (freelance part-time workers). Although their job security was low and they did not have full employee benefits, they had much more flexible work schedules. To Satomi, furita looked truly "free" from the company and the constraints that she experienced; her furita friends were freely pursuing what they wanted to do (yaritai koto). In 1991, after contemplating her situation for a while, she asked her supervisor if she could take a leave of absence. When the supervisor asked why, Satomi explained that she wanted to spend some time improving her skiing. Her boss told her this was not acceptable and tried to convince her to stay, but Satomi eventually decided to leave her job and move to Canada.
Reflecting back on Satomi's story two decades later, her yearning for freedom from the company is striking. Although it was considered normal at that time, the position of a regular, full-time employee with full benefits, or a seishain (literally meaning "a true member of a company"), is scarcer in today's Japan. After several steps of neoliberal change in corporate regulations and labor laws, many young Japanese today cannot assume the secure employment that Satomi had. In many companies, a noncareer track, assistant job is not that of a seishain anymore. These positions have been replaced with temporary workers sent from temporary staffing agencies. It is difficult to imagine that elite corporations would hire a good number of female junior college graduates every spring as seishain right after their graduation.
Accordingly, the meaning of furita has changed drastically. As it was for Satomi, for many others, working as a furita was an embodiment of freedom — someone who bravely freed oneself from the secure but constraining social pressures in the company and adventurously pursued one's own dream. The term was arguably coined in 1987 by Michishita Hiroshi, the editor in chief of From A, a magazine that posted listings for part-time jobs (Michishita 2001). Michishita explains that he wanted to support the young people who were pursuing their dreams — such as becoming a writer, film director, or photographer — while they worked part-time at an unrelated job. Now, in the 2010s, instead of having the positive connotation of an independent and creative pursuit of one's dream, furita represents the instability of youth employment, and the precariousness that is gradually penetrating every corner of contemporary Japanese workers' lives. The youth who could not find regular full-time positions in a company became an object of social concern. The increase of furita reveals the irony of the "freedom" of workers that Marx (1992) pointed out: workers in industrial society are "liberated" from the old communal ties and are "free" to sell their labor power in the market, as well as "free" from the means of production.
Satomi's story illustrates how, until the 1990s, a company had provided an important site for the construction of self for many workers. As many observers and analysts of Japanese work relations have pointed out (e.g., Dore 2000; Iwai 2003; Nakamaki et al. 2001), membership in a company as a community had played an integral part in people's lives. Her story also elucidates her ambivalence about being a part of the company as a community: on the one hand, she liked the sense of security and belonging that the company offered; on the other hand, she felt the company's communal bonds and obligations were too constraining. Interestingly, her desire to liberate herself from the company overlapped with her aspirations to leave Japan. Satomi simultaneously "escaped" from the company and the country. She looked to Canada as an ideal place for finding herself; with its vast natural landscape and its image as a frontier land, Canada seemed to be the place where she could free herself from these old social bonds and ties.
For Satomi, in addition to her desire to have more time to ski, what triggered her decision to leave the company was her disillusionment with its changing characteristics. Right after "Black Monday" in October 1987 — six months after she was hired — to her surprise, she found that the company "revealed its aggressive side." She was pressured to sell stocks and bonds to customers even though she was not sure these products would be beneficial to them. She thought that the employees were the victims of the stock market industry, too. Employees were encouraged to buy the company's stocks, and as a result, she lost a large portion of her savings. This experience was an alarming sign of the changing nature of the company, which no longer was a place that would provide her with a sense of security, protection, pride in membership, and satisfaction in doing morally justified work.
Satomi was part of a generation of women who started to work soon after the Equal Employment Opportunity Law was implemented in 1986. With the implementation of this law, female workers in the noncareer track were given a choice of remaining in their present jobs or moving to the career track. Satomi was not interested in the career track. If she made this change, she would be expected to devote herself more to her work, but the work had lost its appeal. She started to wonder if she was helping customers improve their financial security or if she was merely being used by the company for its survival. Satomi was also stressed by her everyday life, which included spending nearly two hours commuting to her workplace from her parents' home. She wanted to free herself from the daily routine of getting up early in the morning, riding the crowded commuter train, being exhausted by work, and coming home late at night.
As experienced by Satomi, economic "liberalization" (jiyuka) and corporate restructuring since the late 1980s disrupted the notions of work and company in Japan. Like Satomi, many of the Japanese tour guides in Banff who narrated their life histories to me, suggested that they were struggling to interpret the meaning of company and work in their own ways in the midst of economic change. Their stories also elucidated that Canada, especially its vast natural landscape, had become a convenient site for them to reflect on their lives and establish their new subjectivities.
Around the year 2000, the Rocky Mountain Tours hired approximately fifty tour guides each season, with fairly equal numbers of men and women. Most of the guides left Japan when they were in their twenties. The majority of them had a postsecondary education, mostly university or junior college, and in some cases senmon gakko (special vocational and professional training school). The length of their stay in Banff varied a great deal: some of them left Banff after one season and returned to Japan or moved to other cities in Canada; others stayed several years, received permanent resident status, bought houses, and raised families in Banff or the nearby area. Most of them considered guiding to be transitional work until they found yaritai koto, or what they really wanted to do with their lives, while some thought guiding was their dream job. The common theme among their life stories as narrated to me was their exploration of freedom and searching for self, or a desire to establish their own unique subjectivities.
Their narratives offer a glimpse of the changing work relations experienced by young Japanese workers in the late 1980s to 2000. This chapter examines how the tour guides narrated their life histories. Their stories elucidate how the idea of "magnificent nature" played a significant role in their pursuit of freedom and subjectivity. In many of the guides' narratives, Canada's spatial imaginary as a frontier dreamland served as a mirror to reflect on the frustrations, feelings of confusion, and dilemmas they experienced in Japan. The magnificent nature in Canada was imagined as a utopic space, in contrast to the culturally saturated space of Japan, where the weight of the "community" and the burden of following social rules and expectations put so much pressure on them that they felt they would not be able to pursue their own individual freedom.
The guides' stories also illustrate how the exploration of freedom and subjectivity in nature was experienced differently by those who entered the job market in the 1980s and 1990s. After discussing the spatial imaginary of Canada as a frontier dreamland, the following sections introduce the narratives of male guides who started to work as core full-time workers in the late 1980s, and the specific situation of women who entered the job market after the burst of the bubble economy in the 1990s. These women shared a similar fascination with living overseas with their male colleagues and tried to find a site for subjectivity construction outside of regular full-time work in Japan. This generation of women faced the challenging situation of being independent and establishing their own subjectivities, while also facing much slimmer job opportunities. Their narratives elucidate the predicament of freedom as it was translated and pursued in postindustrial, post–Cold War Japan under the ever stronger pressure to be integrated into the system of US-centered global capitalism.
FRONTIER DREAM
The way Satomi chose Canada was suggestive in understanding the guides' spatial imagination. When she looked for a location for her new life close to ski hills, she knew that she wanted to live either in Hokkaido, the northernmost prefecture in Japan, or in Canada. She explained, "It was because I wanted to go to an exotic but familiar place [ikokuteki na kanji no mijikana basho]." When she said to the tourists that it had been a tough decision between Hokkaido and Canada, her customers always laughed. It might have sounded ridiculous to them that she did not see much difference between simply moving to another prefecture in Japan and starting her new life in a foreign country. But in Satomi's mind, Hokkaido and Canada had an important commonality: both are frontier lands with a vast natural landscape, and this image provided her with a dream of detaching herself from the old social ties. Even though other ski areas on the main island (Honshu), such as Nagano and Niigata, also had beautiful mountains and good ski resorts, these places were not attractive for her because they did not have the appeal of the frontier, a space where she imagined freedom from a traditional community.
It was not only Satomi who compared Canada with Hokkaido when explaining the desire to be liberated from the constraints of everyday life. Ogura Yoshiko, another guide, also said that Hokkaido was the only place in Japan she would consider living. After living in a ski resort in Nagano for two years, she thought that she would not fit in to rural Japanese villages because they were full of shigarami, ties that would bind her to the community's traditional social relations, old customs, and rules. Both Satomi and Yoshiko chose Canada over Hokkaido because of the strong allure of a foreign country. Satomi explained, "I have lived with my parents my entire life, so if I leave my parents' house, I wanted to go to a place as far away as possible." She wanted to be independent and to start her new life in a remote location, but that "remote place" should be familiar enough to provide the right mixture of adventure and comfort.
Canada was convenient for Satomi for several reasons. Perhaps the most important reason was that it has a working holiday program, a visa exchange program based on a bilateral agreement between countries that allows young people to work while they are traveling in the country. Japan established working holiday agreements with Australia in 1980, with New Zealand in 1985, and with Canada in 1986.
All three of these countries were considered to be friendly for Japanese young people. Because English had been a mandatory subject from the first year of junior high school, living in these English-speaking countries was a realistic and manageable challenge. These countries also had reputations for being safe, with relatively low crime rates and strict gun control regulations. While the level of urban infrastructure was convenient and comfortable enough, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada also were known for their natural environments, accessible from their urban centers. With the widely circulated images of open, friendly people in a relaxed environment, these nations offered entry points for young people to experience life overseas. In particular, Canada's position is significant in constructing the guides' spatial imaginaries of the world because it is close to the United States, which has had a strong influence in shaping everyday life in Japan since the post–World War II occupation period. As presented in more detail in chapter 2, many of the tour guides described how their image of the world outside Japan had been constructed under the influence of "America."
WORK AS SHUGYO
Iwamoto Eita's story illustrates the dilemma that was experienced by a core full-time male worker. Like Satomi, he left his job in order to ski in Canada. After graduating from high school, Eita studied automobile repair skills in a vocational school. Since 1989, he had been working as a mechanic in a high-end car dealership in Osaka. Eita liked the job and worked very hard, but one day in 1993, his life changed when his friend showed him a brochure of a helicopter ski tour in Canada. Eita described how he was captured by the photo of a sole skier on the high-altitude mountain slope: "It was a landscape that we cannot find in Japan. A sharp-pointed mountain peak, the beautiful snow surface. ... Skiing down the mountain where there is no trace at all. ... It was beyond my imagination. The brochure looked like an invitation to a space flight ... a trip to a world in a different dimension [ijigen no sekai]."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Nature In Translation by Shiho Satsuka. Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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