30 June 2016
High heels or bound feet?
Japanese women choosing the wrong route to empowerment
by Lynda Goetz
When I lived in Japan for a year, twenty-six years ago, the position of women was far worse than it is now. If they were not married by their twenty-fifth birthday they were regarded as ‘leftover Christmas cake’ (rather oddly as the Japanese, officially at least, don’t celebrate Christmas). They were expected to be married in their early twenties and thereafter to dedicate their lives to their husband and children. When those husbands entertained for business they mostly did so outside the home, but, should they decide to invite business colleagues or contacts for dinner, their wives would be expected to serve at table, not sit down with the men. I was therefore intrigued to see a short item in The Telegraph about the Japan High Heel Association (JHA), which is urging Japanese women to swap their flat shoes for stilettoes on the grounds that this could not only improve their posture but give them confidence.
High heels can be fun. They can be sexy. How many of us have not seen those ads in the Men seeking Women columns (before they all went online that is) where ‘Silver Fox’ or ‘Handsome professional’ is seeking his sexy lady who loves wearing high heels. They can be very elegant. Think of all those beautiful celebrities on the red carpet in their fabulous dresses and Jimmy Choos. They can make those of us who are ‘vertically challenged’ taller and not quite so overwhelmed by the height of those around us in a crowd. But as a recipe for confidence in the twenty-first century?
Last month, around 100,000 people in this country signed a petition against an obscure dress code law which allowed businesses to require women to wear high heels in the work place. The campaign was started by a receptionist who was sent home for wearing flat shoes. So, why on earth would Japanese women, at this point in history, feel it might be confidence-boosting or otherwise empowering to wear high heels? High heels, sexy and elegant as they may be, do come with drawbacks. I still remember as a child watching a woman in high heels run for a bus. That frankly comical sight has never left me. High heels can also have the rather disastrous effect of making you look drunk when the laws of physics come into play as you stand on a soggy summer lawn sipping champagne. As all your weight is concentrated onto that tiny 5mm square that is your heel, it can be disconcerting to find that you are slowly tipping backwards. Extricating heels from drain grids or air vents can be another problem and owners of wooden floors tend not to be best pleased when your elegant shoes, again as a result of the laws of physics, ruin their elegant floor.
Mainly though, the downside of wearing high heels is that it has the effect of limiting movements and the ability to do much other than sashay around (in as limited an area as possible for preferably as short a time as possible) or sit somewhere with legs elegantly crossed – at the heels of course. ‘Madame’ Yumiko, a former ballerina and the managing director of JHA, has however already had some success with her six-month course, as 4,000 Japanese women have already completed it a cost of 400,000 yen (£ 2,895) each. To her critics, Madame Yumiko’s attempts to empower Japanese women seem somewhat akin to suggesting that foot-binding was empowering to Chinese women. Surely this is not the way forward for gender equality in Japan or indeed anywhere else in the world?
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