Language, Gender, and Ideology in Japanese Professional Matchmaking by Erika Renée Alpert A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Anthropology) in the University of Michigan 2014 Doctoral Committee: Professor Bruce Mannheim, Chair Associate Professor Miyako Inoue, Stanford University Associate Professor Alaina M. Lemon Assistant Professor Michael P. Lempert Associate Professor Robin Queen ! !! © 2014, Erika R. Alpert ! !! To everyone I have ever loved: this is all your fault. Thank you for the lessons we learned together, and thank you for making me ask critical, theoretical questions about love and relationships themselves. ! ii Acknowledgements No work on this scale is possible without the generosity, cooperation, guidance, and at times, indulgence, of any number of people. Most particularly to be thanked is my advisor, Bruce Mannheim, for his guidance over the long haul of my graduate training, his intellectual insight, emotional compassion, and vast patience. I also wish to extend my most profound gratitude to the ITO Foundation for International Education Exchange for their financial support of my fieldwork; without their belief in my project, none of this would have been possible. Additional financial support during my graduate education came from the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan, the Department of Anthropology, and the Department of Linguistics. Thanks are also due to the staff of the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama, and through them, the Shoyu Club, who were of great financial assistance with my language studies as well as with smoothly transitioning me from those studies into my fieldwork. The Center for Research in Humanities at Kyoto University gave me an intellectual home during my fieldwork and my advisor there, Masakazu Tanaka, provided comments and feedback on some of my earliest research. My experiences in seminars there was invaluable in helping me with the complicated balancing act of participation (and taking on the views of my research community) versus observation (maintaining an academic perspective). In Kyoto and Osaka, I need to thank Nakanishi Keiji and Kiyomi, along with their daughters Sayuri and Yumi, for never being less than wonderful, welcoming, and informative. I also most particularly need to thank KT and TM (herein known as Kawakami-sensei and Takamiya- sensei), whose warm welcome back in 2007 made my research seem possible in the first place. These wonderful matchmakers and friends welcomed me into not only their business lives, but into their homes and families, showing me through multiple kinds of practice the happiness that matchmaking ! iii can and does bring into the lives of its practitioners and clientele. I also owe a debt to Yuko Iwasaki and the staff of Green e Books, for giving me a home away from home, and a place where I could always go to talk about relationships, and compare attitudes about life, the place of love, and what our relationships mean with some of my closest Japanese girlfriends. My conversations there have done much to clarify what I learned from matchmakers in a larger cultural context. The bookstore will be closed by the time I receive my PhD, but its spirit of cultural exchange will live on in all of our future projects. Finally, many many thanks must also go to Esther Ahronheim, a wonderful friend whose help was invaluable in parsing out the mysteries of everyday life in Kansai. For their comments on my writing and translations, their continual conversational willingness to be my soundboards, and their constant intellectual support and encouragement, I wish to thank my committee, first and foremost, but also Mari Armstrong-Hough, Rusty Barrett, Roy Berman, Jonathan DeVore, Jean-Paul DuQuette, Erica Pelta Feldman, Jeremy Johnson, William Leap, Katherine Martineau, Kevin McGowan, Denis Provencher, Greg Storms, Junko Teruyama, and John Thiels. Our conversations have helped me view my work and its place in scholarly conversations about language, gender, sexuality, and family in new ways. You have all pushed me to rethink what it means to write and research, refine my arguments, and approach my data from a number of different directions that almost certainly would not have occurred to me on my own. Double thanks are due to Roy Berman and Junko Teruyama for their help with transcript checking and translation. My work is infinitely better because of all of you, but all errors, as always, remain my own. Finally, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Kate McDonald, the Kyoto Asian Studies Group, Sally McLaren, Lavender Languages and Linguistics, the editorial board of Language and ! iv Sexuality, and the UM Linguistic Anthropology Laboratory for providing me with several fora for presentation and feedback on early versions of some of this material. Finally, I think no warning can quite prepare anyone for the emotional dramas of fieldwork and the subsequent, and different, emotional drama of reifying the fieldwork experience in text form and presenting it to a wider audience for criticism and comment. I have been truly blessed with friends around the world who have been there for me—in person, in text message, in IM and email, and sometimes even on the phone—at every new and challenging stage of this project, and without whom I am certain I would have lost my mind. I love you and thank you with all my heart. To my family: thank you for your constant support, belief in me, countless care packages, and willingness to let me run halfway around the world to follow my passion for research. And Mom? Thank you so much for that old American Heritage dictionary. That one book started me on a lifetime of linguistic and cultural curiosity. (Also, you proofread the whole thing, and there is no adequate way to thank you.) ! v Table of Contents Dedication………………………………………………………………………………….. ii Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………. iii List of Figures………………………………………………………………………………. vii Notes on Names……………………………………………………………………………. viii Notes on Transcription……………………………………………………………………... ix Chapter I: Introductions……………………………………………………………………. 1 A Brief Primer on Language and Gender in Japan…………………………………... 10 Language, Gender, Desire, Family………………………………………………….. 13 Chapter Overview…………………………………………………………………... 28 Chapter II: Networks and Access…………………………………………………………… 32 Preliminary Research: Making Contacts, Making Plans…………………………….. 33 Primary Fieldwork: 2009–2011…………………………………………………….. 39 The Anthropologist In and Out of the “Field”……………………………………… 54 A Cast of Characters………………………………………………………………… 59 Chapter III: Authority, Business, Trust……………………………………………………... 63 The Marriage Advice Business………………………………………………………. 66 “A Job Where You Can Help Someone Is a Reason to Live”………………………... 70 Making Trust and Breaking Trust…………………………………………………... 78 Trust and Expertise: Building the Matchmaker/Client Relationship………………… 95 The Implications of Education ……………………………………………………... 100 Chapter IV: Refiguring and Configuring Masculinity………………………………………. 103 New Economies, New Men? ……………………………………………………….. 105 The Semiotically Impaired Male Client……………………………………………... 113 Learning the Fine Art of Conversation…………………………………………….... 124 New Possibilities for Japanese Masculinity………………………………………….. 139 Chapter V: Great Expectations, Bitter Reality………………………………………………. 146 Mitame wa Shōbu: It’s All Down to Looks…………………………………………. 150 Too Many Expectations…………………………………………………………….. 158 Balancing Cooperation, Self-Assertion, and Expectations…………………………… 166 Responsibility and Femininity………………………………………………………. 174 Chapter VI: An Ideal Partner? ……………………………………………………………… 178 The Role of “Traditional” Gender Roles……………………………………………. 179 Assertiveness…………………………………………………………………………188 Realism……………………………………………………………………………... 190 Consideration………………………………………………………………………. 192 Cooperation………………………………………………………………………… 194 Verbal Facility………………………………………………………………………. 195 Masculinity, Femininity, Neutrality, and the Limits of Agency……………………... 197 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………… 210 ! vi List of Figures Figure 1: Data from NIPSSR (2011b: 30). 3 Figure 2: A graphical summary of ideological relationships between pronouns and 11 speech levels in Japanese. Figure 3: 2012 ad for the marriage information service Partner Agent, found on a 34 Kintestu Kyoto Line train. Figure 4: A 2012 web advertisement for Zwei, a large marriage information service 67 owned by the larger corporation Aeon. It promotes free, 30-minute explanatory meetings where you can go to find out what the company offers its members. Figure 5: Footing at the start of omiai partner introductions. 75 Figure 6: Footing as the matchmakers send the omiai couple on their way. 75 Figure 7: Charisma Man #1, The Alien, February 1998. 141 Figure 8: The author's (amateur) profile picture. 155 ! vii Notes on Names With the exception of the Nakanishi family, who have given me permission to use their real names, and the name of their organization, the Japan Matchmaker Organization (Nihon Nakōdo Kyōkai), all names have been changed. I promised in my interviews to obscure these for privacy’s sake, and still wish to, in case my writing has any deleterious effect, however unintended, on the people and organizations that worked with me. However, I have typically given a pseudonymous first name for people whom I knew as such, and a pseudonymous last name for others. Where a full name is given, the name is listed in the Japanese order, with family