Answer the following question on the basis of pp. 171-88 of R. P. Dore’s City Life in Japan (1958)
Robert J. Smith has described popular attitudes toward gender in Japan as follows:
Japanese society is not at all unusual in the explicitness of its expectations that men behave like men, women like women. From early childhood the words otokorashii (manly; masculine) and
onnarashii (womanly; feminine) are applied to demeanor, activities, interests, and preferences. The unstated but quite clear implication is that what is deemed appropriate to one sex is by
definition inappropriate to the other. In this and myriad other ways the complementarity of male and female competence is presented as the ideal…Neither sex is viewed as totally helpless or
incompetent; both men and women are accorded equal respect for the effective, accurate performance of their respective gender-specific roles. Yet, viewed from the standpoint of society’s
requirements of its members, women are conceived to serve an auxiliary function, albeit a crucially important one, for it has been defined as their responsibility to offer the kind of private,
domestic support that enables men to make their way in the public world of affairs. Neither can manage alone; marriage, therefore, is a partnership, matching two people of very different abilities
regarded as necessary to the creation and maintenance of the family unit. (Quoted from “Gender Inequality in Contemporary Japan,” 1987, p. 3.)
Using examples from Ronald Dore’s classic anthropological study of Shitayama neighbourhood in Tokyo in the mid-1950s (published as City Life in Japan in 1958) develop an argument as to whether or
not Smith’s general observations correspond with Dore’s findings.