Imagine a place where men and women do not live on the same floor or even enter one another's rooms in a dormitory, a place where men and women consciously sit and stand apart from each other in public places, a place where men and women are rarely friends. Welcome to Japan.
In high school, I used to be one of those girls who mostly hung out with her other female friends, and I thought I was happy with that. College changed everything for me, though. Now it sometimes feels as though all I have in my life are men. I do not mean that in a dramatic, love triangle kind of way. I simply mean that I seem to have way more male friends than female friends, and in a lot of ways I feel that I get along better with guys than with girls. Of course, there are those times when I enjoy a good girly movie or a chat about guys with my girl friends, but on the whole I would rather be playing games or joking around with my guy friends. Interestingly, I have noticed that all of my close female friends are the same as me, and so perhaps we get along so well because we are less feminine. I never realized how true this was until I visited Japan.
The first night in the dormitory was a wake up call. All of the girls in the building lived on the fourth floor, which was separated from the rest of the building by a locked door just above the third floor landing. Not only could the men in the building not get to the fourth floor, they could not even see into it. Women got in trouble whenever they were seen going into or coming out of a man's room ' something that we did often enough anyway after we figured out how not to get caught.
Trying to develop friendships with Japanese males was much more daunting of a task. Anyone who had already studied abroad before was more likely to try to become friends, but even so, Japanese males seemed much more receptive to foreign males than to foreign females. On the other hand, forming friendships with Japanese males who had never been outside Japan was almost impossible. Two other study abroad girls and I were able to hang out a couple times with one Japanese guy with whom we thought we would be able to become friends, only to find out after a month of talking that he could never see us again. Why? His girlfriend was uncomfortable with him having any female friends. We asked some other Japanese male friends if this was normal, and we received a resounding yes. Normal? It's normal for a man to be happy with a woman who dictates who can and cannot be his friends? This explained why so few men over there had any female friends, though.
The trend seems to be that each Japanese guy either has no women in his life outside of his family, a girlfriend or one close female friend. In most cases involving the latter, it is assumed that the one close female friend will eventually become his girlfriend. But in the case of the former, no female friends would be preferable because that way any prospective girlfriends will not be put off by the presence of other women in the man's life. Jealous much? Possessive much?
Ever since returning from the land of male/female segregation, I have been immersing myself in male interaction. I must have been in withdrawal, because I think I have doubled my number of male friends and acquaintances in the past two months. I personally appreciate a man who can both understand and be comfortable with other men and women. That is true whether I am appreciating him as a friend or as something more, and I would hope that most American males look at women the same way. I have been told that there is nothing like living abroad to make you value your own culture more. I found what it is about my own culture that I value.
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Jennifer Musser
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Jennifer Musser
