Identity was in their entity.
Example: When economy burst, then so did their sense of identity. because the economy, their entity, was central to it.


The day when the mountains move is coming
I tell you, yet people refuse to believe it
The mountains have been sleeping for a long time
Long ago they moved it passionately blazing with fire
You need not belive it
But ah! believe only this:
Women who have been sleeping
begin to wake and move

patricia Moreley the Mountain is Moving: Japanese Women's Lives UBC Press Vancouver 1999

Akiko Yosano, "The day When the Mountain Move," composite translation.

Karen Kelsky women on the verge Japanese Women, Western Dreams Duke University Press London 2001

1
The 1980s and 1990s saw a series of profound and far-reaching transformations in Japanese gender relations.

It was during this time that the birthrate first began its preciptous slide downward, reaching 1.57 births per woman in 1989, well below the minimum 2.2. births required to sustain the present population. This development so stunned the public that it earned the name "the 1.57 shock" and inspired impassioned media debate as well as government directives to women to bear more children (these were ineffective and by 1997, the rate had plummeted to 1.39; koseisho 2000a). Meanwhile, it was during his time that Japanese began marrying considerably later in life: By the late 1990s the average age of first marriage had risen to almost twenty-nine form men and almost twenty-seven for women, the highest in the industrialised world (Koseisho 2000b). Single japanese men now began to suffer seriously drom the effects of kekkon-nan (marriage difficulty), as a large proportion of young single marriage-age women first deserted rural areas and farmimh life for the large cities and then, even within the large cities, spurned men employed in the blue-collar sector for the urban middle-class ideal of the white-collar sarariman (salaryman). At the same time, backed by the high yen and the overvalued economy, yound women began travelling abroad in ever-increading numbers, eventually surpassing, by 1990, the number of young men engaging in foreign travel by a margin of 2 to 1. As one offshoot of this overseas crazy, ryugaku(study abroad) for periods ranging from one month to several years became an accepted and even common career move for middle-class single women in their twenties and thirties. By the early 1990s, almost 80 persent of Japanese study-abroad students were female.

2

I argue that the turn to the foreign has become prhaps the most important means currently at women's disposal to resist gendered expectations of the fema;e life course.