Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The prominence of women in the organisation (at all organisational levels)
is not re
ected in whom is employed by Soka Gakkai. There is a tension
between this and the fact that the only female head of a department was to be
found in public relations for overseas a
airs. The lustrous rhetoric about
women
dence
on a daily basis seems somewhat hypocritical when it comes to Soka Gakkai
'
s greatness that encouraged so many women to have self-con
s
own employment practices. Women employed by Soka Gakkai told me of
implicit rules or expectations about them quitting their jobs upon marriage.
Why was that so important when women seemed prominent in the organisa-
tion as a whole? Women who had worked for Soka Gakkai and then quit
upon marriage at least symbolically map out a norm for other women in
Soka Gakkai as a whole. I began to inquire about this and came upon the
following explanation by a Soka Gakkai staff
'
member, a woman around 50
years old who had decided not to get married in order to remain in her job,
where she is now in a senior position.
There is a view that female employees who are not employed for some
special skill will give up their job upon marriage. This is because as she now
has the
financial support of her husband she can volunteer her time and
engage in Buddhist activities in her local community, which is considered no
less valuable, and which does not use donations from members who would
otherwise pay for her salary. The donations that pay for her salary can then
be used to employ someone else. Similar to what Martinez (2004) concluded
about the ama (female divers), appreciating women
'
is work is not the same as
according her the same status or power as men. On the other hand, from my
interviews and chats with women it was clear that many women themselves,
those who did not have particular skills or followed a career, were not that
keen to continue working, which meant very long working hours. This was
not the case for women with a career or certain skills. One staff
member,
herself a feminist by any standards, working for a decade for Soka Gakkai,
told me that
t get women to want to continue working simply
because you believe in a feminist objective of equal employment
'
You can
'
. According
to her, many female employees showed little interest in continuing their job
after marriage and were happy to continue their
'
for k
-
sen-rufu as full-
time housewives (see Lock 1980; and Ueno 1987, who point out that women
may not always be happy with this role).
Another sta
'
work
'
member told me that since the early 1990s there had been
increasing pressure from members for staff
orts not to waste
money because of the vast sums of donations that the Nichiren Sh
-
sh
-
priesthood had been discovered to have spent on luxurious lifestyles. This had
put extra pressure on sta
to make e
to demonstrate within already stringent expecta-
tions from Soka Gakkai members that their staff
work the hardest of all to
justify their wages. It is clear that most work very hard and many feel a
strong sense of responsibility to do so at least partly because they are paid by
members
donations. Expectations of long working hours as the norm in
Japan make it di
'
cult for women to continue working once they have
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