ABSTRACT
Time and space are two important categories with socially constructed boundaries and symbolic meanings that have significant ramifications on the daily lives of individuals and their self-understandings. This chapter examines how two groups of Japanese women with professional careers perceive, interpret and practise the use of time and space strategically to renegotiate notions of the gendered self, as a means of re-aligning some of the asymmetries in their working lives, and in the hope of mitigating the disappointing gaps between their expectations and experiences. The urban night space in Japan has historically been a male-dominated sphere, due to the socio-cultural constructions of gender that have associated salaried work in the public realm with masculinity, while assigning femininity to the private domain of domesticity. While women in Japan have been given unprecedented opportunities to pursue management-track careers from the late 1970s, the opportunities were – and still are – driven mainly by contingencies to meet a labour shortfall required to propel the country’s economy, and most of the jobs are also confined to feminine types of work in typically feminine sectors. For two groups of female corporate managers, the collective orientation of their respective friendship networks provides them with a differentiated temporal and spatial realm between the office and the home in Tokyo to redefine the meanings of the gendered self and their work-related, gendered friendship based on values and ideals of independence and equality that have been shaped by work.
