Deference to tradition, dreams of the future
It is hard to avoid mentioning Madame Butterfly. Rustling compliantly in her kimono chrysalis, she forever set the Western image of the Japanese woman. Poor Butterfly first appeared on the stage of Milan's La Scala in 1904, decades after Western ideas about women's rights had reached Japan. In 1947 the American-dictated revision of the Japanese constitution and legal codes gave women the right to vote and explicitly forbade sex discrimination. But the idea of equality is a long time being assimilated into practice.
Today's Japanese women—urbanized, educated,...
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