It was all supposed to be so different. In 1988, when the Japanese economy—remember?—was the wonder of the world, the Nikkei publishing group launched a magazine called Nikkei Woman. "We thought the age of the career woman was about to start, and we wanted to be at the forefront of the trend," says editor-in-chief Hiroko Nomura. It was a false dawn. By the mid-1990s, Japan was deep in a recession and many women had scaled back their career expectations. "We knew that men's attitudes would be slow to change," says Nomura. "But we found that women's own expectations of what they could do were changing, too. They were putting the brakes on their own careers." So Nikkei Woman rebranded itself as a handbook for office ladies and part-timers. (One-third of Japanese women work largely dead-end "women-only" jobs.) Recent articles have focused on such topics as "Summer skincare—protecting yourself from office air and the sun." Nomura is philosophical about the shift in content. "We were too far ahead of the times," she says. "If the bubble had continued, then progress for women would have been much faster." A recent poll by Nikkei Woman found that 61% of its readership wanted a job that guaranteed no work after 5 p.m. and weekends off—conditions hardly suited to climbing the career ladder.

To be sure, not everyone has given up. Indeed, the changing fortunes of Japanese professional women over the last two decades have produced sharp divisions in the way that women look at work. Some have bailed out, depressed because they think they will never crack the bamboo ceiling—full-time female workers earn just 69% of what Japanese men make—or because they are unwilling to commit to the rigors of working in Japan. But for women who have managed to secure a career, life can be good. Many thirty-something women in Japan who began their lives at work during the final years of the bubble economy now revel in their ability to live like the stars of Sex in the City, buying their own apartments, traveling the world, trading cramped kitchens for bistro outings—sans husbands, of course. (See sidebar.) Junko Sakai, 38, is single, buys chic clothes and laments dating men who are "like toilet paper when what you really want is tissue paper." Last year, she published a collection of essays entitled Howl of the Loser Dogs, which has sold more than 340,000 copies. Japanese society, she says, venerates the winner dog, the housewife who waits at home with a vat of miso soup for her husband and kids. Sakai, a childless single, champions a very different lifestyle. "Society may call us loser dogs," she says, "but we are happy and independent."

Yet Sakai admits that Japanese women in their 20s seem skeptical of the way that those like her have focused on their careers. "We are seen as selfish," Sakai says. "The lesson younger people take from us is that if you do as you please and have a job and buy things, then you end up alone." As if to make that point, the poster child for the new Japanese woman is a demure, doe-eyed model named Yuri Ebihara. Through her appearances in popular youth fashion magazine CanCam, Ebihara is spawning clothing lines, TV shows, calendars and manga that all extol the virtues of the office lady. "In the '90s, the trend [in fashion magazines] was 'New York career women,'" says CanCam's editor-in-chief Yutaka Onishi. "The concept was cool, sharp. Independence was a trend. Ten years later you look around and realize that it was just an illusion ... Women in their 20s perhaps see people in their 30s and decide that they don't want to end up like them. You give everything to your company, your career, but you're still getting laid off." Says newscaster Tanimoto, who is also single: "I thought our exciting careers would show younger women that there is a path to success. But I think they actually feel sorry for us."

The answer, perhaps, is to define an exciting career in a new way. Since so many of Japan's conglomerates have proven themselves wary of placing women on the career track, females are becoming entrepreneurs themselves. Today, 65,000 companies in Japan are owned by women. Most are mom-and-only-mom operations that allow working mothers flexible hours. To avoid client meetings in which female bosses are often mistaken for secretaries, many rely on direct sales through the mail or the Internet.

Mika Noguchi, a mother of four, runs a company larger than most. Although she never went to college, Noguchi at age 21 knew one very important thing: what lingerie women liked to wear. Eschewing the sexy styles of male designers, Noguchi in 1987 began designing frilly, flowery creations that she calls "I love me" underwear. Her company, Peach John, started out as a catalogue company, and is now Japan's answer to Victoria's Secret, with $8 million in sales last year. At Peach John's Tokyo headquarters, all but one of the 42 employees are women. (The lone man is in charge of office management.) The company structure is unorthodox: to avoid the pressures of a hierarchy, Noguchi has divided her staff not by job type but by flower names. The head of public relations, for instance, is in the peach-blossom category, while Noguchi is in the chrysanthemum division. And unlike the pattern at most other Japanese companies, Noguchi encourages anyone to speak up during meetings. "In Japan, business rules are all made by men," says Noguchi, now 40. "Instead of forcing myself into that system, I wanted to create a different environment through which I could compete with all those men."

If it can't find places for women like Noguchi, Japan Inc. will lose out. Just as in the bubble years, those women who don't want to start their own businesses are flocking to foreign firms, which have a long history of being less prejudiced. The president of Merrill Lynch Japan Securities, Izumi Kobayashi, spent four years preparing tea for male colleagues at Mitsubishi before switching to a foreign firm in 1985. Fumiko Hayashi, 59, made headlines in June when she took over as head of struggling supermarket chain Daiei, which made her one of the most powerful women in Japan. But she got her first big break from Volkswagen in 1999, when the German automaker recruited her to head a division of its Japan operation. Before that, says Hayashi, she had to lobby firms like Honda, writing letters explaining why she would be a good salesperson despite the fact that she was a woman. "I started working at 18 years old," says Hayashi, who like many women her age never attended college. "And no one came after me until I was 53 years old"—when VW hired her.

Yet for all those who appear to be harbingers of a new Japan, many more have watched the retrenchment of opportunities after the bubble, and left the labor market. Hitomi Asano, once the owner of her own casting agency in Tokyo, now lives on the outskirts of Sendai, in a placid, rice-growing patch of northern Japan. In 1995, aged 35, Asano married a doctor she had known from childhood. The pair moved first to a small mountainous town where he worked at a local hospital—wives in Japan follow their husbands' jobs, not vice-versa. One day, she wore her fur coat out, and an elderly man scooted away in terror. "He thought I was a bear," recalls Asano. "I didn't fit in very well." Two years later, the couple moved to Sendai, also a place that had no need for casting agencies.

So Asano did what middle-class housewives in rural Japan do. She joined the choir, planted orchids, learned traditional calligraphy. But she still feels that something is missing. "In Tokyo, I had a passion, and in Sendai I don't," she says. "Sometimes when I'm at home alone, I put on my fancy clothes from Tokyo and just walk around pretending I'm back at work." Asano knows she's a winner dog by Japanese standards; she is married to a doctor, no less. But so long as Japan—aging, shrinking, Japan—can't find a way to lure skilled women like her back into the workplace, the whole nation will lose.

With reporting by Yuki Oda, Toko Sekiguchi and Michiko Toyama/Tokyo

Back 1 | 2

	Rent Boys [Jan. 14, 2002] They're smart looking and no longer beyond the pale. Male hosts are Japan's new craze—but they're not cheap Okinawa Nights [Aug. 08, 2001] U.S. servicemen and local women can be a volatile mix. A rape allegation against an American airman casts harsh light on the island's race relations Kwest For Kawaii in Pakistan [Jun. 18, 2001] If you want to be trendier than the next girl, 'gal style' is out and faded denim is in. Kate Drake went to Shibuya 109 to see the faces behind today's brands—and found some extremely young women staring back Letter from Japan: Backbone of a Nation [Apr. 16, 2001] This country's greatest asset is its women More Related Items | Search all issues of TIME Magazine