Image-Makers and Victims: The Croissant Syndrome and Yellow Cabs

In The Enigma of Japanese Power (1990 [1989]), Karel van Wolferen outlines the Establishment’s political control over the country. He shows how effectively “the System” keeps citizens in their place through the stifling educational system, the friendly neighborhood police, and the “housebroken” media (van Wolferen 1990, 93). He shows that Dentsū, the largest advertising agency in the world, censors television, newspapers, and magazines for the benefit of its clients, namely, the government and big businesses. Vis-à-vis women, he asserts that “Japanese officialdom is aware that emancipated female citizens are likely to disturb the domestic labor system” (van Wolferen 1990, 368). He then paints a very bleak picture of how those in power prevent women from creating such disturbances. According to van Wolferen, voluntary retirement for women at age 30 is still practiced, except for jobs at government offices, banks, insurance firms, and foreign companies. He claims that the government maintained a ban on the contraceptive pill to support the lucrative abortion industry of between 1 and 2 million abortions a year (van Wolferen 1990, 53 and 368), and that consumer movements initiated by housewives in the 1960s and 1970s have been systematically contained and undermined. In the decade after van Wolferen wrote this book, Japan saw the forced early retirement of women disappear as lawsuits were brought by female workers (Iwao 1993,