Re-reading the Salaryman in Japan: Crafting Masculinities by Romit Dasgupta (review)

Back in 1998, Romit Dasgupta set out to investigate the masculine identities of salarymen from a couple of companies in northern Japan. Fifteen years later he has parlayed that material into this book, focusing on the “man” in “salaryman” (p. 5). Borrowing from Dorinne Kondo’s well-known work on “crafting selves,”¹ he sets out to see how this “hegemonic” style of masculinity (pp. 7–8) is crafted through upbringing, cultural milieu, and workplace encounters.

However, there seems to be an ambiguity in the way Dasgupta uses the term “hegemonic masculinity.” On the one hand, the image of the salaryman certainly is one of the first to come to mind when people try to imagine Japanese men. It is hegemonic in the sense that it is pervasive. But sometimes Dasgupta wants the word “hegemonic” to work harder, to imply an ideological dominance in which being a salaryman becomes a norm to which men are expected to aspire. Here the argument is more difficult, because, as Dasgupta’s informants clearly show, few people dream of becoming a salaryman. His subjects drifted into this role with a weary shrug of the shoulders, not with a shout of excitement. It is not a macho identity—when asked to name “masculine” occupations, the informants mention policemen, fishermen, truck drivers. and construction workers in preference to salarymen (pp. 85–88). The image of the salaryman in Salaryman in Japan, a guide for tourists published by the Japan Travel Bureau² (pp. 1–3), a lovingly drawn caricature that I, like Dasgupta, enjoyed reading over 20 years ago, is that of a bespectacled, unassertive drone in a business suit with his hair parted on the side. Despite all the great economic changes in the last quarter of a century, that image remains fairly accurate. Interestingly too, salarymen do not seem to have acquired any extra glamor from the destabilization of the economy that has made the status of salaryman so much harder to attain.

Dasgupta argues (p. 158) that other masculine images, such as the otaku (“techno-geek” in his translation) or sōshokukei otoko (“herbivorous man”), form a challenge to the salaryman norm, but I am not convinced. With his black-rimmed glasses glued to the computer screen, the salaryman is a close cousin of the otaku; and with his still relatively cozy job, slave to corporate herd instinct, he also has plenty in common with the herbivores. Indeed, Dasgupta himself says the traditional salaryman stereotype is “almost feminine” (p. 160).

Hegemony makes more sense in the economic realm: certainly, many women still want to marry a salaryman. But when they say that, they are not speaking of a romantic dream—no, what they want to marry is a regular paycheck with two bonuses a year. Surely it is money, more than the salary-man style of masculinity, that is truly hegemonic. So I would argue that an orthodox Marxist interpretation well accounts for the persistence of salary-man masculinity. It is a ghostly cultural superstructure built on a rock solid economic base. Culturally, it is a weakly enforced norm, satirized and even despised in popular culture. Economically, it guarantees the household’s survival and is therefore approved by the general public.

Here the word seken, included in the glossary but never mentioned in the text, seems important. Seken is the imagined community of the general public, supposed to hold conservative views collectively known as jōshiki or common sense. This ingrained conformity to values imagined to be universal is at the root of the persistence of the salaryman norm. That point is made very well by Wim Lunsing, whose neglected masterpiece, Beyond Common Sense,³ is extensively quoted by Dasgupta. These two words (seken, jōshiki) are all about appearances, and the bottom line for maintaining appearances is the monthly arrival of a salary, not the maintenance of a household conforming to heterosexual norms. Lunsing has plenty of cases of married...