MANAGING IDENTITY [GENDER]
Managing identity is often indicated by gender definitions in the collective. In “A View of Japan through Japanese Art,” Drucker engages in gross distortion in his descriptions of the roles women have played historically in the Japanese social topology.
Despite some pre-War Westernization, it took the American occupation to provide Japanese females with the freedom to participate and be represented in the nation’s government. The normative culture of Japan, and this sheds light on the less-romantic side of Confucianism, treated women as bedeviled chattel for hundreds of years, essentially a slave class.
This is why Japanese art produced no Venus de Milo, Drucker’s anecdotes about mothers-in-law notwithstanding. It is no less enlightening to note that as recently as 2005 legislation was promulgated in Japan to radically diminish the equality of women in Japanese social and professional society.
