ANDO HANAKO x KYARY PAMYU PAMYU

Oshin the perennial favourite on Japanese television seems more and more incongruous in this era of the empowered female. Think Kyary Pamyu Pmayu the queen of the Harajuku girls and female gender identity in Japan does not look like there will be a return to the self-sacrifice embodied in the Oshin narrative. Whilst Kyary Pamyu Pamyu is the latest in a long line of examples of the New Japanese Woman, the NHK production about Ando Hanako, the Japanese translator of Anne of Green Gables, shows that there is a still a fascination for the traditional Japanese female stereotype. The NHK story has Hanako growing up in a poor farming family with no education until her father comes home and sends her to primary school. From there she is sent to a girls school in Tokyo where she is forbidden to speak Japanese. Typical of the era, the rules were strict but for those who adapted the rewards were great. Of course Anne of Green Gables had a powerful impact on young women all around the world. Simone de Beauvoir has written at length about the importance of this book to her during adolescence. This is the spirit with which the New Woman in Japan in the early twentieth century was imbued. The character of the New Woman developed (or degenerated, depending in your point of view) into the shojo of which the Harajuku girls are the latest manifestation. Interestingly, the spirit of Oshin is, however, not dead. Apart from the ongoing television series directed at those nostalgic for the traditional hard luck story of being born female in Japan, there is a group of mothers, survivors of the earthquake and tsunami in the Fukuoka region, who have made the news with their nuigurumi made from socks, named Onoko. These soft toy monkeys are sold to raise money for the victims of natural disasters. Supporters of the campaign include the actor Tsugawa Masahiko who starred in many of the late Itami Juzo's films. People who buy them hold parties and take toys on holidays and photograph them in famous locations. In this way traditional values and virtues of sacrifice and hard work endure in the age of digital technology and are propagated on social media displacing to some extent the idol culture and the slavish devotion to individualism that it promotes.