Content area
Full Text
Women of Japan and Korea: Continuity and Change
Since women of East Asia have experienced rapid social change due to the region's dynamic industrialization, informed and interested observers will be pleased at the publication of this book examining women of Japan, the most developed industrial power of Asia as well as the economic challenger to the United States, and of South Korea, one of the most successful Newly Industrializing Countries. Women's studies of Japan and Korea is exciting and challenging not only because it can demonstrate similarities and dissimilarities between two highly comparable societies, but also because it can build a model of its own in comparative women's studies.
Women of Japan and Korea is an edition of thirteen chapters. Twelve chapters, not including the introduction, are making up two indepdendent sections, one for Japanese women the other for Korean women, based on the six parallel topics of family, education, abortion and health, working women, and the women's movement. Since these topics are not compared directly across Japan and South Korea in each chapter, readers have to infer from two related chapters in order to view two societies simultaneously. The attempted parallel set of topics do not match sometimes because some chapters remain to be rather sketchy and less focused. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that this book makes it possible to compare women of South Korea and Japan in a systematic fashion for the first time.
Major points that relevent chapters are drawing can be summarized as follows. Chapter 2 by Chizuko Ueno examines the progress and limits of women's labor force participation from the context of the family. She shares the view that the advance of Japanese women into the workplace is largely attributable to the rise of returning married women to work. This returning to work phenomenon of married women, visible since the 1960's, is understood to be caused, not so much by supply side changes of female labor, as by demand side changes in the industrial structure. She argues that as Japan moved from heavy to information-service oriented industries, i.e., from industrial to post-industrial society, Japanese women filled a labor shortage gap mainly as insecure underpayed part-timers. In this sense, Japanese women took newly-created trivial jobs and had not usurped...