Last month Scott Burke wrote about the oddities of being married to a fellow gaijin in Japan.
This month his wife Tess gives us a different perspective on the same relationship.
by Tess Burke / America, Teacher
As an American in Fukuoka, I’m constantly being reminded that I’m different. I live in Futsukaichi, where the primary form of entertainment seems to be dyeing your hair blond and screaming“Wooo!” like a hood from a Jackie Chan movie while riding on the back of somebody else’s moped. Out here, folks get bored easily and there aren’t many foreigners, so I get a lot of stares. What bothers me is not the stares themselves,but the fact that they’re so often accompanied by assumptions.
See, Japanese people think they know all about me, which I’m sure sounds familiar to most foreigners. They think I must be American, for instance. (True,but it’s just a coincidence.) They talk about me right in front of my face because they assume I don’t understand Japanese. They say I look like “insert blonde American star here,”and ask me if I own a gun back home.
(Actually, I prefer knives.)
Again, these are situations any gaijin might experience. But there is one aspect about me that trumps even my foreign status, one which, ironically,makes Japanese people assume I’m exactly like them: I’m a married woman.And we married women all spend our days planning and cooking sumptuous meals to greet our dear husbands when they get home from work. Don’t we?
Here’s a typical scenario. I’m at Starbucks with a friend, chatting about current events and whatnot. Suddenly she glances at a clock. “Oh! It’s almost four. I’d better go!” “Sure,” I say. “Do you need to be somewhere?” “Well, yes,” she replies. “[Hubby’s name] will be home around five. I cooked up a pot of[delicious food] earlier, but I have to put the rice on. What are you making for Scott-san?” When I tell her that my husband does most of the cooking at our place, that’s when the conversation stops cold and she looks at me like I stepped out of a flying saucer.
Once, when a new friend wanted to know if I was married or had kids, she asked, “How many people do you make breakfast for?” I couldn’t help but chuckle, because breakfast for us is strictly a self-serve, stumble-out-of-bedand-pour-coffee-down-your-throat affair.
Of course, such stereotyping can come in handy: take my last job, for instance.
When my classes ended on most days,I’d have to hang around for conferences,chats with the manager, or just patent busywork (all unpaid, but that’s a subject for another column). Unless it was after five. Then I’d get shooed out of the school because “Your husband is waiting for you!” Under the circumstances, I didn’t argue.
Now, I’m not saying I never cook.but Scott is better at it. Also, he’s good at making healthy nihon-shoku, whereas I excel at fattening American foods (Southern fried chicken), which we shouldn’t be eating anyway. So most of the time I let him handle meals, while I take care of other important tasks. (Like video games, as he mentioned in his column here last month. It’s a good life.)Therefore, in the eyes of the Japanese women who know me, I’m weird. They may even see me as a bad wife, though they’d never say it.
Scratch the surface, and you can see this is part of a larger issue, with its own dangerously circular logic: of course women do the cooking, because the husbands are the ones who work full-time.If a woman has a job, she quits when she gets married, or switches to part-time.Why? Because somebody needs to do the cooking! Makes perfect sense.
Now, we all know that Japan is a sexist society. I’ve adjusted to various inequalities,like our new apartment lease being drawn up in Scott’s name even though I was the breadwinner at the time, or the fact that under Japanese law he’s the head of the household. I know laws change at a glacial pace here. But what about people’s attitudes? As much as I’d like to blend perfectly into Japanese society, I’m still an American woman of the 21st century, and I’m not about to change my spots. He’s happy to be the chef in our house, and I’m happy to let him. So it looks like I’m going to keep messing with the harmony, surprising folks out of their belief that married women all over the world are the same.
Then again, this is Fukuoka. Social change can take a long time to make it down here. I’ve heard that the gender imbalance has already shifted up in places like Tokyo and Osaka. Maybe that shift is inevitable: the world moves on and drags Japan along with it. But who knows-part of it may be because of all the foreign chicks showing up and saying,
“Hey, whoa, wait a minute. Dodesho?”
