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Title: Gender into the Co-Ethnic Workplace:
Japanese Men and Women in Japanese-Owned Workplaces in the United States
Abstract
This paper explores the experiences of Japanese women who are employed locally and
work with their co-ethnic managers in Japanese-owned workplaces located in the United States.
Although the overall gendered nature of the dynamics between these women and men in their
workplaces—such as the division of labor within their workplaces, and its symbolic
importance—does not change dramatically, new elements emerge in transnational workplaces,
and they are flexibly given gendered meanings and added to the gendered way of understanding
and organizing workplaces. The sense of Japanese male managers of endangered masculinity
contributes to this process of gendering. In addition, ethnicity comes to light in the United
States, where Japanese people perceive and construct ethnic differences more readily. Many
Japanese male managers re-construct the discourse of “Japanese womenness” in the workplace
context, by conflating the discourse of gender reenacted and the set of newly perceived and
emphasized ethnic differences. While Japanese-owned work organizations provide Japanese
women with relatively easy access to paid employment and possible visa acquisition, working
with those who know how to exploit the cultural discourses of gender and ethnicity and
reconstruct it to their advantage in the ethnic enclave such as Japanese-owned work
organizations sometimes results to the detriment of Japanese female local hires.
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