Language
Women's speech in Japan is often expected to conform with traditional standards of onnarashii (女らしい), the code of proper behavior for a lady. In speech, onnarashii is exhibited by employing an artificially high tone of voice, using polite and deferential forms of speech more frequently than men, and using grammatical forms considered intrinsically feminine. Feminists differ in their responses to gender-based language differences; some find it "unacceptable," while others argue that the history of such gender-based differences is not tied to historical oppression as in the West.
In Japan, marriage law requires that married couples share a surname because they must belong to the same koseki (household). Although it has been possible since 1976 for the husband to join the wife's family in certain circumstances, 90% to 98% of the time it is the woman who must join the man's family and therefore change her surname. Men may take the wife's surname "only when the bride has no brother and the bridegroom is adopted by the bride's parents as the successor of the family."
Feminist groups have introduced legislation that would allow married couples to maintain separate surnames, a practice which in Japanese is referred to as fūfu bessei (夫婦別姓, lit. "husband and wife, different-surname'?), but such legislation has not yet been enacted.
Read more about this topic: Feminism In Japan
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“In a language known to us, we have substituted the opacity of the sounds with the transparence of the ideas. But a language we do not know is a closed place in which the one we love can deceive us, making us, locked outside and convulsed in our impotence, incapable of seeing or preventing anything.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“We have tried so hard to adulterate our hearts, and have so greatly abused the microscope to study the hideous excrescences and shameful warts which cover them and which we take pleasure in magnifying, that it is impossible for us to speak the language of other men.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)