The female Japanese entrepreneurs’ best friend is always next to her bed.

This post is going to seem like I’m doing a lot of generalizations, and I am, but this doesn’t mean I’m an ass or something. The generalizations that you are about to witness have more than a grain of truth in them. At minimum, I’d say there are 2-3 grains of truth. And not those small shitty grains you get at the cheap supermarket, but the big ones you find at the upper end store. This post focuses on the majority of individuals born and living in Japan.

Those shades of gray are kawaii!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The problem itself is not actually one that is alien to other cultures. It is seen other places as well, but it is slightly more exaggerated here; this problem being intelligent/well-off women. In what you are used to, smarter women have a smaller pool of eligible mates. This is not to say that they are being elitist (although I would hate to see them with a knuckle dragger), but that many men are turned off or scared by this type of woman. The skewing is increased in Japan and it is quite sad.

To give one example of many, a woman in a smaller city was the owner of a small, but successful, business. However, she was single and was looking to marry in the near future. The problem, as you can guess, is that she was pretty much shit out of luck. Her choices were few. If she wanted to stay in the area, she had to either run the business and stay single or quit and have plenty of choices for mates. True, if she was living in Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, maybe even Kyoto, she would have a higher probability of finding someone who didn’t immediately shit their pants and run screaming when they heard of a successful woman. Even then, the options and choices are still much smaller than they should be. Men should be begging for women like her, but they’re not.

Dammit Keiko, I wanted my coffee 20 minutes ago.

Now it’s not to say that they have to keep their ass in the kitchen and constantly make their man pie nabe, but they can just decide that they’re going to start a home business either. To quote a useful article from Pepperdine:

In contrasting women’s roles in business, we must consider that Japanese women have played a very traditional role in Japan’s post-World War II era. In the traditional household, men go to work and earn income to support their families, and women stay home and raise their children and care for elders. Even though women work after graduation from school, they are expected to leave school when they get married or give birth to children. If they should decide to re-enter the business world, they tend only to get clerical work featuring lower wages than men earn, regardless of the woman’s level of education.

For many years, this system in Japan isolated women from participating in society and prevented them from acquiring technical knowledge or social skills and from establishing a network of business colleagues. In the Gender Empowerment Measure Index, which evaluates whether or not women are able to participate actively in economic and political activities and take part in decision-making, Japan has been ranked 43rd among 80 countries evaluated. In contrast, the United States was ranked 12th, and Norway was ranked first in 2005.

It is quite true that Japanese women have been making inroads as of late, but even/when they work, it’s rarely anything more than secretarial, clerical, or retail. Computer companies? Engineering firms? Sausagefests. Even more so than you might be used to. It’s (mostly) not that they don’t want to, it’s that even if they wanted to, the societal pressure is that it is not work for women.

The pressure will probably lessen over time, but now, it’s still quite stifling.