More oppressive than Gwen Stefani

I've seen a few blogs complaining of Gwen Stefani's use of asian woman as being demeaning by perpetuating stereotypes in the West.

Gwen Stefani has hired four geisha-like Japanese women to hawk her new Asian-inspired accessories line... Despite their all(sic) being fluent in English, she has stipulated in their contracts that they must only speak Japanese.

This past week, I ran across this piece regarding social conservatives in Japan.

In an effort to reinforce national family values in Japan, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is pushing to rewrite Article 24 of the island nation's constitution -- the legal crux of women's rights in post-World War II Japan.

The LDP says the move is necessary to stem a tide of individualism that's corrupting family and community values. As Masahiro Morioka, an LDP member in the House of Representatives, said in a report on Article 24, "The constitution must ensure that protecting family is the foundation of securing the nation."

The tone is pretty familiar here. A key difference is that they're promoting traditional Japanese values instead of traditional Christian values. Individualism is the enemy, rather than secularism. My intuition informs me that individualism is also a code word for Western values; thus, they consider Western values to be corrupting. They're certainly freaked out at the low birth rate for Japanese women; traditional marriage there is unattractive to modern career women.

Normally, married Japanese women have not only to look after their own parents during old age, but also to care for their parents-in-law. When it comes to raising kids, "they can't expect much cooperation from their partner" because of the long work hours required at many Japanese corporations and because of established gender roles that assume that the woman does the child-rearing...

Supermom and retirement home duty is a pretty heavy load.