Single 30-something Japanese women, long dismissed as too old to be marriage material, are getting their revenge through the pen of Junko Sakai, whose book about "losers" has become Japan's answer to Britain's beloved Bridget Jones.
Since its debut in October, Howl of the Loser Dogs, a non-fiction account of the plight of single career women aged 30 or older, has sold close to 220,000 copies.
The book has attracted massive media coverage and even spawned a television show featuring well-known single celebrities.
"Until now, there had been nothing but caricatures and cliches about single women over thirty, generally considered to be old bags or outcasts," said senior editor Etsuko Moriyama of the book's publisher, Kodansha.
Sakai writes in her book that society has become divided between "winners" -- married women with children -- and "losers" or childless females who have crossed into the 30s but have been left behind in the marriage game.
"This is the first time that a 30-something woman herself, single and without children, has offered an introspective, lucid analysis on the condition of the losers," Moriyama said.
In an interview, the writer said the benefits of single life have been ignored in a country where relationships are seen as all-important.
"However entertaining and amusing her life is, a single woman free of constraints will always be perceived as a loser in a society where a woman's social status is still based on her marriage," Sakai, 37, said.
"The goal of this work was not to pit us against them, but rather to try to understand how these losers, who are more and more prevalent, have come to be," said Sakai, who admits being inspired by the big screen character of London yuppy Bridget Jones.
"Even if there are more and more unmarried women over 30, until now their social status had not been identified yet nor their life clearly portrayed," said Sakai.
Described as eternal romantics, losers are predisposed toward love and have a taste for danger, which stimulates them but also leads them to have affairs with married men, Sakai writes.
Winners, on the other hand, are rational and calculating, which explains why they finally end up finding a partner, contrary to their counterparts who are too emotional and demanding to tie the knot, she says.
"In Japan, men tend to marry those whose professional and financial situation is inferior to them, but for women, it's the reverse," Sakai explained.
"Women who are too brilliant find themselves on the bench or having no other choice than to date the leftovers and some are not willing to do that," she said.
Sakai paints a picture of women in a losing battle against their biological clocks in a country where men consider a woman over age 25 to be "faded."
But she also describes Japanese society in major flux, marked by an explosion in the number of unmarried women.
According to the latest statistics by the home affairs ministry, the number of women between 30 and 34 who were unmarried has nearly doubled over the last decade, from 13.9 percent of all women in 1990 to 26.6 percent in 2000.
Between ages 35 and 39, the percentage of unmarried women rose from 7.5 percent in 1990 to 13.8 percent 10 years later.
For Takayo Yamamoto, research director at the Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living, the phenomenon is linked to an equal opportunity employment law that took effect in 1985.
It opened new horizons for a generation whose careers had previously been severely restricted, she said.
"Since that law was passed, there have been more and more women who earn their own living, an independence they are not ready to sacrifice at any price," Yamamoto said.
"In the past, marriage allowed women to become wealthy. But now, that's no longer true," she said. "A majority of women would rather stay single than get married to a man with a low salary. It could be that women are getting greedy."
The ultimate goal of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is the total and overwhelming domination of everything within the sphere of what it considers China and deems as theirs. All decision-making by the CCP must be understood through that lens. Any decision made is to entrench — or ideally expand that power. They are fiercely hostile to anything that weakens or compromises their control of “China.” By design, they will stop at nothing to ensure that there is no distinction between the CCP and the Chinese nation, people, culture, civilization, religion, economy, property, military or government — they are all subsidiary
Nov.10 to Nov.16 As he moved a large stone that had fallen from a truck near his field, 65-year-old Lin Yuan (林淵) felt a sudden urge. He fetched his tools and began to carve. The recently retired farmer had been feeling restless after a lifetime of hard labor in Yuchi Township (魚池), Nantou County. His first piece, Stone Fairy Maiden (石仙姑), completed in 1977, was reportedly a representation of his late wife. This version of how Lin began his late-life art career is recorded in Nantou County historian Teng Hsiang-yang’s (鄧相揚) 2009 biography of him. His expressive work eventually caught the attention
It’s always a pleasure to see something one has long advocated slowly become reality. The late August visit of a delegation to the Philippines led by Deputy Minister of Agriculture Huang Chao-ching (黃昭欽), Chair of Chinese International Economic Cooperation Association Joseph Lyu (呂桔誠) and US-Taiwan Business Council vice president, Lotta Danielsson, was yet another example of how the two nations are drawing closer together. The security threat from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), along with their complementary economies, is finally fostering growth in ties. Interestingly, officials from both sides often refer to a shared Austronesian heritage when arguing for
Late last month the Executive Yuan approved a proposal from the Ministry of Labor to allow the hospitality industry to recruit mid-level migrant workers. The industry, surveys said, was short 6,600 laborers. In reality, it is already heavily using illegal foreign workers — foreign wives of foreign residents who cannot work, runaways and illegally moonlighting factory workers. The proposal thus merely legalizes what already exists. The government could generate a similar legal labor supply simply by legalizing moonlighting and permitting spouses of legal residents to work legally on their current visa. But after 30 years of advocating for that reform,
RSS