Kimono in the Boardroom: the Invisible Evolution of Japanese Women Managers
Published by EH.NET (September 2001)
Jean R. Renshaw. Kimono in the Boardroom: the Invisible Evolution of
Japanese Women Managers. Oxford, England and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999. x + 289 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, glossary, and
index. $35.00 (Cloth), ISBN 0-19-511765-4.
Reviewed for EH.NET and H-BUSINESS by Christienne L. Hinz, ,
Department of Historical Studies, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
Jean Renshaw’s Kimono in the Boardroom, the Invisible Evolution of Japanese
Women Managers, attempts to bring to light the lives, character traits,
motivations, and methods for success found among a small but growing cohort of
Japanese women managers who are struggling to make or find a place for
themselves in a society in which the very existence of the female managers is
oxymoronic. Renshaw, a self-described “manager, business owner, and professor
of management,” clearly states that her research goal is an applied one. Her
work attempts to create a concrete number of suggestions to help Japanese
businesses tap the human resource potential represented by underutilized
Japanese women. Renshaw argues that the presence of Japanese women at the very
highest levels of management would both necessitate and drive the
transformation of Japanese managerial techniques and Japan’s business world,
giving birth to a more holistically human, more humane corporate citizen.
Renshaw’s research questions are timely, apt, and yet deceptive in their
simplicity: who are Japan’s female managers? In which industries do they tend
to congregate? How have they negotiated cultural, institutional, legal, or
personal barriers which typically exclude the vast majority of Japanese women
from managerial hierarchies? Why are Japanese women managers invisible? What
character traits, organizational or institutional environments, laws, or
cultural trends help Japanese women managers to succeed in their chosen
vocations?
The crux of Renshaw’s argument is that Japanese women managers do, indeed,
exist despite the assertions of Japanese nay-sayers, most of whom are male.
Moreover, these women share certain traits and experiences; and these
predispose them for non-conformist behaviour and life-choices. For example,
Renshaw argues that birth order is an important variable. Supporting her
argument with the secondary work of Frank Sulloway’s Born to Rebel,
Renshaw observes that eldest daughters without male siblings and youngest
daughters are disproportionately represented in her interview sample. Another
common experience that Japanese women managers share, according to Renshaw, is
a relatively permissive, achievement-oriented, gender-neutral socialization as
children. Successful female managers also seem to share non-sexist, foreign,
or otherwise strong childhood role-models such as the cartoon character Sailor
Moon. Renshaw cites post-secondary education or considerable experience
abroad, and bilingualism as experiences common to successful women managers.
Perhaps most interesting, she finds that Japanese women managers tend to fall
into one of two age cohorts, either the 20 to 30 year cohort, or the 40 to 50
year cohort. She theorizes that both 20 to 30 year old and 40 to 50 year old
women experienced a Japan whose dominant paradigms were in flux, either as a
result of the devastation of the Second World War, or because of the
unprecedented wealth of the 1970s and 1980s or because of new and popularly
held notions of basic gender equality, as represented by the 1986 Equal
Employment Opportunity Law. Women between the ages of 30 and 40, however, were
not similarly influenced. Although Renshaw does not interview broadly among
non-managerial or unsuccessful managerial women, she nevertheless argues that
their conformity to traditional gender roles is the result of having been
raised by parents who “lived through the difficult war and postwar years and
wanted the ‘good life’ as they remembered it, for their children. Part of that
remembered good life had included homemakers, full-time wives and mothers,
taking care of the house and children while men, the samurai economic
warriors, went off to battle the corporate world” (p. 100).
Kimono in the Boardroom also attempts to classify the methods by which
Japanese women succeed in management. Renshaw asserts, although she does not
supply supporting evidence, that “[w]arlords and samurai provided the models
for current management in Japanese male-defined corporations” (p. 157). Making
liberal use of the exotic image of feudal Japan, Renshaw sustains the analogy
between modern managers and the samurai class of the medieval period when she
explains the paths by which women seek the exclusively male-defined world of
business: “Family-business warriors” are women who inherit businesses from
their parents. “Warrior entrepreneurs,” are women who begin their own
businesses after repeatedly encountering “glass ceilings and sticky floors,”
that is, institutional barriers preventing female career advancement.
“Warriors taking over,” are women who find means to purchase defunct
businesses and revive them. “Warriors breaking out” are women who choose to
seek upward managerial mobility in foreign corporations, within Japan or as
expatriates.
Renshaw argues that Japanese women managers have remained invisible despite
their slowly increasing numbers because of social and cultural norms which on
the one hand, deny their existential reality, and on the other, force them to
manage from behind a “shoji screen,” in low-profile positions. As marginalized
people, Japanese women managers, respond to their circumstances by engaging in
a range of coping behaviours (adopting, adapting, and transforming) which mask
the reality of their power from male peers, from society in general, from
other women seeking access to the upper echelons of management, and even from
the women managers themselves (p. 139).
Kimono in the Boardroom is a timely study. Renshaw’s research questions
have been only inadequately, if at all, answered by scholars of Japan,
scholars of Japanese business, scholars of Japanese women, or scholars of
women in business. However, as an academic work it stumbles in a number of
critical areas. The most fundamental is, perhaps, its uncomfortable and
unresolved treatment of audience. Exactly to whom Renshaw intends to read her
work is unclear. It hovers awkwardly between serious academic scholarship and
the popular journalism that is more commonly consumed by the
quasi-to-uninformed Japanophilic and Japanophobic reading public.
Because the reviewer is an academic speaking to a largely academic readership,
and because certain aspects of the work are explicitly structured as
scholarship, the reviewer has chosen to frame her commentary accordingly. It
is to preface the reviewer’s more critical remarks by underscoring her
awareness of the many technical, linguistic, and hermeneutical difficulties
that a study like Ms. Renshaw’s presents. Kimono in the Boardroom is a
bold transgression of the quite arbitrary boundaries separating the
humanities, the social sciences, and applied business administration.
Renshaw’s questions cannot be answered from within the boundaries of any
single academic discipline. Such work requires no mere familiarity with the
relevant secondary literatures; rather it requires a real fluency across the
total range of related fields. The reviewer hopes that all scholars with
broad, multi-faceted questions would be encouraged by Renshaw’s study; and
that they would also come away from it with a heightened awareness of and
respect for the complexities and problems inherent in doing cross-cultural,
multi- and inter- disciplinary research.
In the opening chapter of the work, Ms. Renshaw minimizes the importance of
statistical sampling in the following way: “In the course of my travels within
Japan and Korea, I found successful Japanese women managers in every
industrial category, and I interviewed over 160 of them. The interviews were
conducted in English with a Japanese speaker at hand to clarify if necessary.
While this approach introduced the danger of a biased sample, it also had
advantages. Most Japanese women at management level understand English, and as
an evaluator on scholarship committees in Japan, I observed that the same
person spoke more freely in English than in Japanese, an observation
corroborated by other Japanese” (p. 5).
It is common for scholars in the humanities to demonstrate their discomfort
(generally disguised as contempt) for the social sciences by drawing the
weapon most easily drawn, cocked and fired: the dreaded criticism of
“unrepresentative sample.” This reviewer has little patience with the typical
historian’s cheap and easy slander of the research method basic to social
scientific inquiry. Nevertheless, it must be stated that Renshaw’s inadequate
statistical sample deals a critical blow to the remainder of the project.
Renshaw’s core informants were drawn from “a preselected sample of successful
women managers … found in the members of Keizai Doyukai, the Association of
Corporate Executives, which is one of four powerful industrial organizations
in Japan” (pp. 97 – 99). Based upon these contacts, she then expanded her
informant pool through series of cascading personal introductions.
Apparently neither Ms. Renshaw nor her editors appreciated the painful
circularity of the work’s introductory arguments, which are the result of the
aforementioned methodological errors: 1) the project was based upon women
informants belonging to an elite and extremely discriminating organization; 2)
the informants were all, to some degree, bilingual; and 3) the author was
referred by these informants to others who were also bilingual. From this
incestuous sampling, Renshaw reports that “[s]eventy percent of the women
managers… interviewed went to school or lived abroad at some time in their
lives. Many had gone abroad as children with their families when their fathers
worked or served in the military in another country” (p. 123). She continues,
“[a]nother route to the awareness of alternative culture is language. Women
said they seemed to learn second languages more easily than their brothers,
and research substantiates this tendency for girls. The learning of a second
language is related to expanding thought patterns, creativity, and innovation”
(p. 124). That Renshaw concludes that Japanese women managers share similar
family cultures and formative childhood experiences should surprise no one.
After all, she interviewed people who were friends and colleagues. The only
surprise is that despite her apparent awareness of the dangers inherent in
statistical sampling, Renshaw failed throughout the text to match her analysis
to the extremely narrow scope of her data.
Secondly, Renshaw neglects to rationalize her statistical material with a
cogent definition of the manager. She asserts that a “manager focuses the
energy of a group and mobilizes resources of money, people, information,
plant, equipment, and markets to accomplish goals…. The Japanese women
interviewed for this book meet the definitions of manager as they successfully
direct organizations, carry on business within the national and international
economy, and handle affairs of state, of corporations, of small home
businesses, and of families (p. 97).” However, her statistical treatment of
female managers by industrial category is based on data drawn from labour and
gender studies published in the International Labor Organization’s Yearbook
of Labour Statistics, and in the Japanese Census. She does not investigate
the standards which produced these data, or offer even the briefest commentary
upon whether or not (or to what degree) they reflect Japanese managers as
defined in the study.
Furthermore, Renshaw’s research sample does not adequately represent the range
of managerial roles included within her definition. Small home businesses are,
for the most part, absent in her qualitative analysis because so many of her
interviews seem to have been conducted with executives in national,
international, or multinational firms. The Japanese definition of “success” in
business no more reflects Japanese women’s participation in the economy than
would Western definitions of “success.”
Even more problematic than her management of statistical sampling, Renshaw’s
project is crippled by her inability to speak or read Japanese. She breezily
minimizes this problem by claiming that Japanese scholarship interviewees tend
to speak more frankly in English than in Japanese (p. 5). She does not
question the meaningfulness of such frankness, nor does she problemetize
Japanese self-representation to a foreign interlocutor. She does not consider
the impact of the Japanese translator’ s presence on her interviews. Finally,
Renshaw seems completely unaware of the fact that the problem of translation
is not whether or not her informants can understand her, but whether or not
she can understand as well as correctly interpret their utterances in English.
There are many places in the text where, in this reviewer’s experienced,
informed, and carefully considered opinion, Ms. Renshaw has incorrectly
understood the intent and nuance of her informants’ utterances.
Among the most damaging flaws in Kimono in the Boardroom is the
author’s failure to correctly contextualize her subject matter within the
greater history of Japanese women, and within the history of Japanese
business. She seems unfamiliar with current secondary scholarship on Japanese
history, the changing roles of Japanese women, and abundant anthropological
and sociological studies of Japanese culture. She repeatedly and inaccurately
interprets national mythology as historical fact. For example, in chapter
three, titled, “Sex Roles, Creation Myths, and Worldview: Japanese and Western
Historical Perspectives,” Renshaw mixes and matches mythology and history to
create a narrative intent on locating powerful female role models for modern
Japanese women:
“Evidence of prehistoric society in Japan indicates that, like most
prehistoric societies, it was probably matriarchal…. The temple at Ise is
still honored as the temple of the supreme goddess, Amaterasu …. The Goddess
of Creation, Amaterasu Omikami… survived as the ancestor of all Japanese….
[T]he gleam of feminine possibility hides in the dimmest recesses of the
memory bank for both men and women…. In the West,… collective societal
memory of feminine goddesses had been buried and denied…. In the Japanese
memory bank, there is more recent knowledge of women as leaders.” (p. 60 –
62).
The only primary historical evidence provided to support this extravagant
psycho-mythology of the Japanese is Hiratsuka Raicho’s oft-quoted essay which
begins, “in the beginning, woman was the sun.”[ ] Furthermore, the secondary
works upon which Renshaw’s analysis rests are two: a single quote by Motoori
Norinaga, as translated and reprinted in deBerry and Keene’s textbook
Sources of Japanese Tradition, Volume II, and Marija Gimbutas’
controversial monograph The Civilization of the Goddess: the World of Old
Europe. Ms. Renshaw either did not know or failed to mention that Motoori
Norinaga’s construction of Japanese history served his own intellectual
objectives, as well as those of the Tokugawa Shogunate; his work is not
understood by contemporary historians as being “factual,” as representing
anything approaching an “objective” truth. And while this reviewer was
spiritually stimulated by Gimbuta’s theory of primeval European matriarchy and
matrifocality, this work is of debatable applicability to the Japanese case,
to say the least.
In fact, Renshaw’s control over the basic secondary literature behind her
subject is painfully inadequate. Although she drops the names of several
well-respected Japan specialists, like Takie Sugiyama Lebra, Takeo Doi,
Kathleen Uno, and Mary Brinton, she seems unable to actually incorporate such
scholarship into a coherent theory within her own work. Furthermore, the truly
interested reader will be continually frustrated by the paucity of footnotes,
and by faulty bibliographic citations which chronically omit the actual page
numbers corresponding to referenced arguments and data. It is, therefore,
almost impossible for readers to utilize this text as a research tool, to
corroborate, correct, or even to enter into a stimulating dialogue with the
author about her interpretation of the academic works with which her own
research is engaged.
Indeed, Renshaw’s theoretical analysis relies far too heavily upon the writing
of popular Japan commentators like Norma Field (In the Realm of the Dying
Emperor), Masao Miyamoto (Straightjacket Society), and Christopher
Wood (The End of Japan, Inc.). She also supports her theoretical
analysis of Japanese culture using such New York Times Best-Selling books as
John Gray’s Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, and Leonard
Schlain’s The Alphabet vs. the Goddess. Some of Renshaw’s analytical
examples are based upon her own primary interview data, but also includes
disorienting cameos from Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barbara Bush, and Connie
Chung. The overall result is a somewhat surreal mixture of Japanese culture,
fantasy, stray facts, and shocking historical error, such as “feudal Asia was
roughly parallel in time to feudal Europe, but the Asian form of feudalism was
more complex and highly evolved, and it continued into the nineteenths
century, deriving structure from the sophisticated and hierarchical Chinese
civilization,” or “Japan officially abolished the class system with its
postwar constitution of 1946.” Unfortunately, Renshaw’s hard work in the field
is imperfectly, and inappropriately supported by this veritable mosh-pit of
half-baked information, misinformation, and blatant oriental exoticism as
generated in popular literature.
In Kimono in the Boardroom Ms. Renshaw has asked a series of pertinent,
potentially paradigm-challenging questions. She has brought quantitative and
qualitative research methods together despite the mutual hostility that has,
at times, informed the relationship between their proponents. Lastly, she has
attempted to move beyond theory into applied research in order to offer
concrete solutions to the cultural barriers which deny Japanese women access
to managerial leadership. Although this particular work does not succeed in
achieving its goals, Ms. Renshaw has nevertheless set worthy guideposts for
herself, and for others who are working in the field.
Christienne Hinz is assistant professor in Asian history at Southern Illinois
University, Edwardsville. Her research interests are modern Japanese history,
comparative business history, and the history of Japanese women. She has just
completed her dissertation, entitled “Dismembered Remembrance:
Entrepreneurship Among Japanese Women and the Creation and Marketing of
Japanese National Identity,” which she hopes to publish soon. She has also
reviewed for several hard-copy journals.