ABSTRACT
Research on friendship has until recently focused extensively on non-kin ties, as opposed to kin relations, and also on classifying friendship into mutually exclusive types – as instrumental or affective – of relations. Where work-related friendship is concerned, it was often depicted in scholarship as male, while women’s friendship is typically discussed in terms of its significance to serving the needs of the domestic sphere and the community. This chapter argues that with the rapid expansion of Japan’s white-collar female workforce over the past few decades, notions and practices of the self and friendship among women are increasingly being shaped by career choices, corporate cultures and cosmopolitan influences. It thus calls for the need to address the gaps and biases in research on women’s friendship, and for the importance of undertaking a meaningful and realistic analysis of women’s changing self-understandings and social relations away from domesticity, and in association with salaried work.
