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Popular Japanese writer teaches women 'dignity'

Young Japanese women searching for a wider role in society have no role model today. The ideal of a self-sacrificing "good wife, wise mother," according to a Japanese saying, belongs to the past. And fighting alongside the country's overworked and overstressed salarymen holds little appeal.

At least that was the view of Mariko Bando, 61, the author of a book that professes to be a guide for young women. With sales of more than 3 million copies, The Dignity of a Woman has become one of Japan's biggest best sellers in decades and has presented Bando as just such a role model.

Bando has, to be sure, led a career considered ground-breaking for a woman of her generation. After graduating from the University of Tokyo, she became an elite bureaucrat, choosing to keep working even after marriage and children. She later became the deputy governor of a prefecture and then the first woman to serve as a consul general. She is now president of Showa Women's University here in Tokyo.

And yet, in her book, Bando focuses not on policy or diplomacy but on everyday issues. She gives tips on using dignified manners and speech and wearing dignified clothes. Other chapters revolve around living and interacting with -- of course -- dignity.

A "sophisticated" strategy is necessary for women to get ahead in Japanese society, Bando said, making a snaking motion with her hands. Simply being aggressive, like US women, would not work.

"Japanese society hasn't matured enough yet to accept independent and aggressive women," she said at her university office. "That's the reality. So we have to think about how to become independent here. However, I did not write that we should be meek like women in the old days."

Though fans have praised the book for its useful information, critics have complained that, in the guise of upholding dignity, it reinforces a traditional view of women. Why should women be required to know the names of flowers or be good cooks to be considered dignified, as Bando writes?

In the age of "Hillary, Rice and Merkel," this book seeks to shape young women into traditional, subservient women of the distant past, Nanami Shiono, an author of history books, wrote in the monthly magazine Bungeishunju.

"I think this book is perfect for the mass production of dull women suitable for dull men," Shiono wrote. "But why is it that, in Japan, a person who could not have become an elite bureaucrat by being dull is so keen on mass-cultivating dull women?"

Bando answers the critics by pointing to the popularity of her book, saying it resonated among young women searching "for a way to live with dignity."

The success of Bando's book can be viewed as a backlash against the half decade of economic and political reforms under former Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi. With Koizumi's emphasis on free markets, deregulation and competition, brash US-style entrepreneurs were briefly heralded as role models for a new Japan. But calls for a return to so-called traditional, more dignified Japanese values -- like Bando's -- are multiplying.
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