The bilingual edition of The Inscrutable Japanese by Japanese author Kagawa Hiroshi, in a section entitled "Strange Japanese Social Phenomena," discusses the question, "Why do Japanese women act so cute?"  The explanation given is an interesting one.  Kagawa writes,

"This is another aspect of women in Japan that Westerners have a hard time accepting.

"Full-grown adult Japanese women sometimes speak and act like children.  They often decorate their apartments with stuffed animals, or burst out into hysterics in public...

"But why do Japanese men seem to want cute, child-like women?  In the parade of advertisements and comics, these images stand out over the images of strong,  independent female beauty.

"The source of such images may lie in the Japanese school system.  In order to get into a good university, Japanese children must study extremely hard.  Parents support these children materially and emotionally, and the entire family cooperates to help them improve their grades in school.

"Children born and raised in this post-war era of prosperity were generally overprotected kids who focused on getting good grades.  These children have now become the majority of the adult population.  However, many kids who did well in school and survived 'examination hell' to get into good universities remain emotionally immature as adults.  This tendency is especially common among men, and they usually want a child-like woman rather than a woman who is more emotionally mature than they are."

So this generation of Japanese men, in order to be able to give 100% in school, were given everything else,  and never really learned to take care of themselves.  Their growing-up experience did not include decision-making, or disappointment, or self-reliance, or the responsibility of chores.  They missed out on the painful integral adolescent experience of defining oneself apart from one's family, of staking out one's own priorities, and of exploring one's own limits, strengths, and weaknesses.  From a Western standpoint, these men never really grew up at all, and it is natural they would seek partners at a similar stage, someone to depend on them, as immature as they are themselves.

I suspect the infantilization of Japanese women has a longer history than given here, and that its reasons may be more complex.  Japanese relationships in general tend to be codependent, insular, and hierarchical compared with those of Western societies, and those tendencies too may lead to emotional immaturity and a certain degree of role-playing, which were doubtlessly present long before the war. Japan's is hardly the only culture that likes its women a bit naive, but here the tendency is especially noticeable. 

Certainly these stereotypes do not describe everyone.  I know nearly as many people who could not be described by these ideas as who could, yet it's still an interesting and fairly prevalent phenomenon.

The genders in Japan are distinctly marked.  Women tend to walk differently here -- toes turned in, to men's turned out.  Women talk differently -- there is a whole set of separate vocabulary for the sexes, not to mention intonation.  The ideal woman's voice is one not much different from that of a six-year old, and one can often hear a woman's true deeper voice crack through in places between the careful intonations of her falsetto.  They even clap differently -- women in television audiences often applaud with splayed fingers, like the kindergarteners I know with still-developing motor skills.

Men and women sit differently.  A kindergarten principal once asked me to stop sitting on the floor cross-legged, because it was a bad example to the girls.  Kindergarteners, when sitting on the floor, are instructed which sitting position to take, depending on the situation: "Okaasan" (mother) position, "Otoosan" (father) position, and so on.  In formal situations, all children must sit as the mother (sitting with the feet folded under, and usually painful after just a few minutes, even for Japanese), but under no circumstances should a child or female sit like the father (cross-legged, and far more comfortable), as this position is reserved for adult males.  Children and women sit the same.  These rules are so ingrained that by the age of four, children know to make fun of me when I don't follow them.

Every society has its own ideas about femininity, masculinity, childhood, and adulthood.  In Japan though, it is hard to draw a line between the expectations of the feminine and of the child.  For marketing purposes, the two demographics seem almost to be counted as one.  "Kawaii," or "cute," lists near the top of most Japanese women's vocabularies, whereas in America, I'd rarely heard the word said by anyone over the age of twelve.  Kawaii is an adult woman's fluffy sequined shoes, the zoo of stuffed animals hooked to her designer purse, her cartoon monkey cell phone, her pigtails with heart-shaped barettes, the Winnie the Pooh toy her 35-year old boyfriend won for her at the game center on a date, the Hello Kitty suite at the local love hotel where they later retired, or a romantic trip to Mickey Mouse's Tokyo theme park for adults, Disney Sea.  A Japanese acquaintance in her 30s who recently married received Mickey and Minnie bride-and-groom stuffed toys from six different friends as wedding presents.  Hello Kitty kitchenware, irons, and vacuum cleaners for Japanese housewives are no more diffucult to find than the "Easy Bake Ovens" enjoyed by elementary school-aged girls in the West. 

The line between woman and girl in Japan is blurred almost to the point of indistinction.  Women wear heels on their shoes, but so do many little girls.  Girls carry stuffed animals and giggle, but so do women.   The phenomena have certainly done wonders for the international Lolita industries, and made Japan's schoolgirls famous worldwide.  The consequences for both women and girls seem severe.  Girls are openly sexualized to the point of predictable stereotype, anime copies girls copy anime, which can't be helpful in allowing them to grow into healthy, well-adjusted women.  And women seen as girls must face great obstacles when they must deal with the difficulties and desires of adults.  Ill-equipped to deal with adulthood, many Japanese women find themselves in situations they feel unable to change.  The Japanese divorce rate may be famously low, but the rate of happy, satisfied, emotionally-fulfilled women may be very low too.  The idea of a Peter Pan existence, being stuck forever in childhood, is appealing in a romantic, escapist way, yet I can't help but think of all one would miss out on too in such a life, and what a shame that would be.

Comments

[Jamesha Walker]

I respect your opinion, but I have to disagree. Many Japanese
women are more comfortable in their roles in society than some
Westerners, unlike myself, believe. All Japanese women don't act
like that! Most are more mature and classier than the women you
were talking about. I will rather respect the whole Japanese
culture than criticize only one part. Only thing I disagree with
is school girls having to wear only white underwear! That's just
appalling. Why should the color of girls' underwear matter? Do
some teachers and pornographers have a fetish for lolitas in
white underwear and sailor uniforms?

[Olivia]

This was very interesting. Indeed, the stereotype of Japanese women acting cute is so famous, to the point that it is affecting the cultures of its nearby regions such as S. Korea and here in Hong kong. Under the influences of Japanese pop culture, teenage girls(and even girls in their 20s-early 30s sometimes) here often(HK) seem to imitate the way Japanese girls walk, talk, and more obviously, the way they dress. Girls will be pleased if they're called "kawaii". i wonder if this is gonna spread over furtherly. :P

[amie]

that was really interesting to read, and very well written. I'm quite enjoying your blog. <3

[Sarah]

Great article...the way Japanese women telephone voice absolutely makes my skin crawl. I used to teach at GEOS, and whenever I'd answer the phone, my manager would stand next to me waving her hands in the air, signaling for me to raise the ton of my voice three or four octaves--even when I was speaking English. So creepy.

[Karla]

Alexis, that was an interesting read. Thanks for the link.

[Alexis]

It's becoming a topic of conversation here in the States now that manga is taking over the graphic novel sections of mainstream bookstores (and most of it shoujo). The peeps at Sleep Is For the Weak wrote an interesting column about what gender messages are being communicated to (American) girls via manga, particularly as it pertains to... well, it's a clash of ideals that was pretty much inevitable. In any case, the column was an interesting read, as is the discussion that followed in the forum.

FYI: http://www.sleepisfortheweak.org/articles/shoujodangers.html