It is Not that I Can’t, It is that I Won’t: The Struggle of Japanese Women to Redefine Female Singlehood through Television Dramas

Abstract

This article focuses on single and childless over-30-year-old women in Japan, representations of them, and the discourses surrounding them in female-oriented television dramas. Bearing in mind the active role that screenwriters have in the production of the discourses embedded in these serials, as well as their function as translators of the audience’s perspective, it is argued that by means of the agency of female screenwriters within production teams, Japanese women are slowly redefining how the media portrays female singlehood to resist the pejorative or condescending discourses that media and society have imposed on single women. It is also argued that the scripts of the recent dramas directed to single and childless over-30-year-old women, written by female screenwriters, offer positive alternative models of femininity, democratising discursive devices for Japanese women to reclaim the right to be themselves and decide how to assess their achievements in life.

Keywords:

• Japan
• gender
• women
• singlehood
• agency
• media
• ohitorisama
• arafō
• alternative models of femininity

Acknowledgments

This article is the product of a research project conducted in the Department of Pacific Studies at the University of Guadalajara during a Postdoctoral Fellowship funded by the Mexican National Council of Science and Technology (CONACyT). I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the paper for their constructive feedback.

Notes

1. Kekkon shinai, Wonderful single life. The title tag is originally in English.

2. Watashi kekkon dekinainjanakute, shinaindesu.

3. Seken is a Japanese indigenous notion of society understood as the public, the community and the hegemonic worldview that goes beyond the individual’s desires or intentions. It is, in Lebra’s (2004, p. 64) words, “the ill-defined, often invisible, and yet ubiquitous and critical community constituting the audience or social jury surrounding the self”.

4. These stances are reflected in the Japanese National Fertility Surveys (National Institute of Population & Social Security Research, 2008; 2012), and in media reports on the harassment and pressures mothers face at work (Cox, 2015; Osaki, 2015; Ryan, 2015).

5. “Parasite single” was used for both sexes, but the characteristics of singlehood and residence in the parental home were more recurrent among women, so the label was more frequently associated with female singlehood.

6. For an extended analysis of the evolution of the term “ohitorisama” and its different connotations, see Dales (2014).

7. Rating levels have decreased for all genres of content as a result of the extreme fragmentation of audiences and the variety of content available through other media. Thus, while in the 1990s popular trendy dramas achieved an average of 30 points, these days, most weekday primetime dramas achieve between 8 and 11 points. See Video Research Ltd. (n.d.).

8. There are five private television corporations in Japan – Nippon Television Network (NTV), Tokyo Broadcasting System Television (TBS), Fuji Television (Fuji TV), TV Asahi and TV Tokyo Network (TV Tokyo) – which produce serial dramas for diverse time slots; each of these consists of between 9 and 12 episodes of about 50 minutes to be broadcast weekly over 3 months. The topics of the dramas are determined according to the time slot and the expected audience. The primetime slot is considered to be between 19:00 and 23:00 hours each day (Video Research Ltd, 1997). The dramas are: Around 40 (TBS, 2008), Ohitorisama (TBS, 2009), Kekkon shinai (Fuji TV, 2012), Last Cinderella (Fuji TV, 2013), Otona Joshi (Fuji TV, 2015), Gisō no fūfu (NTV, 2015), Damena watashi ni koi shite kudasai (TBS, 2016), Hayako sensei, kekkon surutte hontō desuka? (Fuji TV, 2016) and Watashi kekkon dekinainjanakute, shinaindesu (TBS, 2016).