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say they have no illusions about the di
culty of
'
'finding Japanese men like
that
. They were aware of the normative ideals expected of them as women;
they knew they faced discrimination in the job market and that they were
expected to give up their job in order to take care of young children. For
women without career jobs, if given the choice they might prefer the house-
wife role as it gives them time to engage in Gakkai activities. Without fem-
inist awareness, this did not make young people argue for a fundamental
restructuring of the gender division of labour. Instead, they found renewed
meaning in caring for their families, Soka Gakkai members and the wider
community exactly because such a way of being was regarded as qualitatively
superior compared to a potentially dead-end job of subservience. Yet, it was a
di
'
erent situation from that found by Pharr (1981) two decades earlier, which
painted young female Komeito supporters as neo-traditionalists simply wait-
ing to ful
l their lives through marriage.
When it comes to Soka Gakkai
s call for the good society
(Sato 1999), the issue of gender highlights the tension between where individual
self-transformation stops and social or political a
'
s and Nichiren
'
rmative action begins, all
the practical stuff
s choice about their living
performance (Butler 1993; Morris 1995). The gender-divided activities among
Soka Gakkai members both re
that complicates an individual
'
ect and reinforce women
'
s role as home-
makers and men
s role as wage earners. Could the housewifery role ever be a
way of resisting patriarchal structures without a feminist awareness and, even
more to the point, would many of these women even want to strive for simple
entrance into the existing male working practices unless there was a system in
place that allowed them to raise a family as well? Supporting Komeito, the
political agenda of which was focused on creating a society in which women
would have the chance to continue working after marriage and children and
with men playing a more active role as fathers, did seem to make a lot of sense.
This was one of Komeito
'
'
s major campaign slogans in the July 2007 Upper
House election.
While practically rearranging gender roles in wider society is a formidable
task, so is changing attitudes towards gender expected performance. Chan-
ging values and attitudes is arguably where the more paradigmatic changes
take place. Could we look at how women are praised as a way to fundamen-
tally re-evaluate what society considers status-superior? This seems to be what
is happening in Soka Gakkai as an overall process of deeper cultural change in
attitude towards a new understanding of what constitutes human greatness as
lying in caring for others. While encouraging wider social participation of
women, could this emphasis on care for others help to avoid the backlash that
is visible in many places where more rapid structural changes took place but
without changes in general patriarchal values of prominence given to the
individual as animal
laborans de
ned by the time they spent on making
money.
The con
ict for the young female university students might be a typical one
for middle-class women in Japan who have the
'
choice
'
of giving up work
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