What Womanhood Feels Like In Japan

“Shoganai ne” will be something a friend will tell me after I lose my wallet on the train or something. It’s used a lot in Japanese, but we use it when things are really out of our control, or more accurately, when we don’t have the energy to deal with it.

Egg freezing intrigued me, as it does many millennial women in their thirties. Last year, Tokyo began subsidizing the procedure up to 300,000 JPY in cost, and the city recently announced it would continue subsidization for a second year. I wanted to sign up for it and use this as a chance to end my I-don’t-know-when-I-want-children quest.

Everyone’s egg-freezing experience is different, but mine was frustrating and disappointing at times. Over the course, I realized I was just a part of a huge money grabbing scheme. I felt like the clinic didn’t bother to check in with my body. In the end, I was diagnosed as having OHSS (ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome) as a result of the aggressive hormone pills and injections, but the clinic didn’t look into it further at the time when they diagnosed me. Days later, I was assailed by an acute pain in my stomach and had to undergo surgery five days later after extracting my eggs. I didn’t expect to have two surgeries within a week on separate occasions.

The clinic’s lack of care didn’t help. After my egg extraction, as I was slowly waking up from my anesthesiaーstill barely conscious on the bedーthe doctor came in and started to explain a lengthy postmortem report on how many eggs they got and what to do next. She explained that if I’m interested in IVM, a reproductive technology to assist in maturing your eggs outside your body, it would incur an additional cost of 100,000 JPY. The post-op addendum was way too complicated for someone who was basically high. Later, I had a follow-up consultation with the clinic to check in how I was feeling. While I was expressing that my stomach was really uncomfortable and in pain, the doctor proceeded to say to me, “So, when would you like to do another round?”

Everything felt too mechanical. It was too obvious that the clinic did this routinely, everyday. I was just another customer they wanted to keep for their retention rate. The whole thing felt counterintuitive. I wanted to do this for a sense of relief, but instead I was left with feeling angst. I had to deal with a part of my body being in the system that didn’t give me a lot of comfort. It was just all shoganai.

I thought about the long list of other things women go through in Japan that relentlessly feel shoganai; things that just can’t be helped. Take abortion, for instance, and how hard it is to make the obvious case that it is a necessary medical need. Technically, it’s legal to have an abortion in Japan, but it’s fundamentally considered a crime for women who don’t read the fine print. The current law states that abortion must be carried out by 22 weeks of pregnancy and with a spouse's approval if married. Under the penal code article 212, married women who have an abortion without spousal consent or take medication to induce their own abortion can face up to a year in prison. But, let’s not get it twisted, it’s not a crimeーunless you don't get your man’s approval.

This disturbing spousal consent is stated in our Maternal Health Act, which was renamed from the Eugenic Protection Law in 1996. For years, when speaking about women’s choice and reproductive rights, this law has been the center of the topic. For women to stop their reproductive function and to have sterilization surgery in Japan is banned by this act unless it’s medically necessary. Requirements to perform sterilization surgery is, once again, spousal consent and medical reasons. The same rules apply to men who want a vasectomy—but only the spousal consent part. It completely takes away the essence of choice for women. It feels reminiscent of the war when Japan had an objective to overpopulate the country with soldiers. Women were told to “Beget and Multiply,” (ume yo, fuyase yo) because a woman’s job was to supply the country with children who can soon go to war and that a woman’s body only exists to procreateーsounds familiar? This law cleverly thinks that they are giving women protection. Botai hogo hou is what we call the act in Japaneseーbotai literally means mother’s body, hogo as protection, hou as law. It seems to me that it’s a pejorative message for them to think that all women’s bodies are automatically “mother’s body” and nevertheless, these bodies need protecting.

Only 70 years ago, Japanese women gained the right to vote. Only 53 years ago, the equal employment law was enacted, which deems discrimination or unfair treatment based on sex as illegal. Only two years ago, Japan raised the age of consent from 13 to 16. Meanwhile, The Maternal Act was written nearly 80 years ago and hasn’t been rewritten since, even as skepticism around it raises.

In Japan, it’s easy to become too comfortable with the ways things are. The tricky thing in a country that has deep roots in valuing traditional gender roles and customs is that people are prone to look at a clearly unreasonable problem, shake their heads and grunt and say, it’s shoganai. Is it though? Is it really out of our hands that women still pour tea for men at work when they are having an important business meeting in the conference room? Is it really out of our control to let groping in public spaces become a cultural problem? (The only solution provided for this issue is gender segregation— a women’s-only train cart.) Should it be considered standard protocol for women to do ‘bridal checks’ at clinics, once they are newly engaged,to see if they have any STDs, cervical or breast cancer etc to prove that they are ‘good’ brides to be?

I’ve only recently started to value history as a part of my journey to understand myself and my country more. Today, Japanese people seem disengaged with our own history. The younger generation are mostly taught stories through their grandparents, and when the grandparents pass, the story sort of ends there. I think looking at history as static will only benefit a certain group of peopleーthe people who wrote the law in the first placeーand that doesn’t only halt us from moving forward. It causes us to regress from where we want to be. Now feels like the best time to conjure the energy and confront our rights, or lack thereof, for the sake of a change.