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“Kickboxing Geishas:” A Lecture at Pomona College on How
Modern Japanese Women are Changing Japan
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Veronica Chambers, an acclaimed journalist, and author of
Kickboxing Geishas: How Modern Japanese Women are Changing
Their Nation, will give a lecture on that topic on
Friday, January 26, at noon. She will address how Japanese
women today are leading a socio-cultural movement that is
shaking Japan’s gender stereotypes to the core.
A geisha’s white features were once a familiar archetype.
But in today's Japan women wear many other faces: girlish
and sexy, traditional and trendy, sophisticated and punk. In
her book, Chambers goes inside the world of the new Japanese
women who are freely mixing East and West, burying
stereotypes and defining a new zeitgeist.
While Japan is often thought of as the land of the new:
super technology, big business and a perpetually hip
culture, Chambers found that for most women Japan was more
like 1970s America than anything remotely 21st century.
Chambers observes that opportunities for woman in corporate
Japan are still rare. Women who aren’t married by the age of
30 are called “losing dogs.” Shop-happy, twenty-somethings
live with their parents and spend their disposable income on
Louis Vuitton. But Chambers also encountered pioneers who
have changed what it means to be a woman in Japan: the
wildly costumed Yamamba girls, career women and
entrepreneurs, fashionistas, and the Christmas Cake Girls
(those who are over twenty-five and remain happily single).
Publishers Weekly writes: “With compassion and warm wit…[w]riting
in a hip, visually vivid and entertaining style, Chambers
fluently places the courage and isolation of these women in
a briefly sketched social and economic context…”
Chambers was an editor for the New York Times Magazine
and a culture writer for Newsweek. Her work has also
appeared in Vogue and Glamour.
This lecture will be held at Pomona College’s Oldenborg
Center (350 N. College Way, Claremont), and is organized by
the Pacific Basin Institute and co-sponsored with the
Oldenborg Center for Modern Languages & International
Relations. The lecture and luncheon are free. For further
information, call: (909) 607-8065 or (909) 607-1159.
The Pacific Basin Institute is dedicated to expanding and
enhancing comity and shared knowledge among the nations and
cultures that face the Pacific. A valued study, media
production and research center for the distinguished, PBI
also offers books, film series and lecture programs to a
general as well as academic audience. Since the turn of the
past century Pomona College has been a leader in Asian
Studies among American universities. Visit Pomona College on
the web at www.pomona.edu |
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