Cinderella and Bossy Man Christmas: Romantic Love, Consumerism, and Gender Gap in Japan.
Date Issued
2010
Date
2010
Author(s)
Lin, Chia-An
Abstract
Since the 1980’s, given the new meaning by the mass media, Christmas has changed from a family holiday into an annual romantic event for young people in Japan. Along with extravagant spending in the bubble era, Christmas consumption has become a symbol of “romantic love” in contemporary Japanese society. For Japanese young people, Christmas is the very special day for lovers, including three crucial factors: dating, romantic love, and female first. Thus, Christmas Eve is a fairytale night for young couples to spend their precious time together and developed into the Love Economy.
From the results of the participant observation and interviews with the Japanese for this study, Japanese young people’s reworking of the Christmas celebration into an elaborately staged romantic fantasy comes from the collectivist culture and the Japanese sense of homogeneity. Nevertheless, as a manifestation of consumerism and romantic practice of imagination, Christmas celebration reveals the gender gap and gender imbalance that Japanese women still face in job and family fields nowadays. This study argues that Christmas being as a fairytale night for Japanese young people, can be seen as compensation party for Japanese women to temporarily run away from the burdensome and oppression in daily life.
Subjects
Christmas consumption
Japan society
gender gap
romantic love
SDGs
Type
thesis
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