headquarters in Tokyo, I walked into the seventh floor Administration Department and stared into a black-haired sea of Honda employees. The Japanese men were dressed in dark business suits, but the women wore blue polyester knee-length skirts and matching vests. I was shocked to see only women in uniforms. They looked like tall Girl Scouts, missing only merit badges and knee socks.
More than one hundred desks and at least as many people filled the wide-open office space, and considering the number of people there the room seemed suspiciously quiet. Two women approached me looking like paper cutout dolls in blue uniforms, white blouses, and black, shoulder-length hair. Nothing about them seemed particular enough for me to grasp; if they were to turn back into the crowd of people I felt sure I would never find them again.
In polite Japanese one of the women asked me to follow her. We walked down a long, empty hallway. No one spoke. We stopped in front of a closed door and one of the women knocked timidly. Then she opened the door which led into a small, dingy storage room; brown cardboard boxes stood along the windowless walls. The women effortlessly slipped off their shoes before stepping up onto a low landing. I imitated their actions.
Without saying a word, the two women began digging around in the boxes; when I realized what they were looking for, a shiver ran up my spine. The boxes were full of uniforms. All I wanted to do was run away from the room; but I had to stand there, pretending not to hear them discuss my waist size.
I was wearing a new cream-colored suit—a light wool, tunicstyle Liz Claiborne design I had purchased just weeks before at Nordstrom with one of my first paychecks.
A pretty beige briefcase was slung over my shoulder, a graduation present from Grandma Mozelle, and I wore matching beige pumps. I had tried to mold myself into the image of an international corporate woman—an image that did not include polyester.
I hadn’t minded wearing a uniform when I worked on the assembly line in Ohio. Everyone there, including the president, wore the same white coveralls with a red name patch on the front. The only problem I’d had then was that the newness of the clean, stiff cotton betrayed me as a temporary college kid, so I’d had to make liberal use of black sealer paint to give myself a broken-in look.
There had been times in my life when I actually welcomed uniforms. In elementary school I idolized my neighbor Kiva Guss who was a Grandview High School cheerleader. Every Friday I watched her leave home wearing a smart blue and white pleated skirt and a sweater with our school’s roaring bobcat emblem on the front. Wearing the uniform was part of my motivation to try out for the cheerleading squad when I got to high school. I wanted the uniform to set me apart from the other girls. I wanted it to tell everyone that I was part of an elite and talented group.
“Please, take it,” said one of the women handing me a skirt as though it was the latest design from Issey Miyake. The material was thin and insubstantial. This uniform offered no expression of status—it sent an entirely different message. It said, “I’m just a woman; don’t take me seriously and don’t treat me with respect because I am as replaceable as this polyester.”
I could see by the woman’s expression that I was expected to wear the uniform; my resistance would not be understood. But I felt like I should put up some kind of fight. I wanted to formally register my displeasure before submitting. Shouldn’t someone take note that I was consciously making a choice to fit in here? I wanted credit for compromise, but instead a got a perfunctory smile. I took the skirt behind the privacy curtain to change.
The skirt was simply cut and had a zipper in the back. As I got ready to step in, I noticed a small paper tag attached to the waistband. In Japanese characters it said “Ms. Tanaka.” She must have been the employee who had previously worn this uniform. I wondered if she had retired from work to marry. Had she done her time and, like so many women, lived with her parents to save money for her big wedding day? I knew that she had not been promoted out of the uniform because all women, no matter what job they did or how long they had worked at Honda, wore the same uniform.
I did not want to follow in Ms. Tanaka’s footsteps even though I didn’t know where they would go. I was twenty-two and new to this corporate world; but I felt certain that if she had started by stepping into this polyester straitjacket her footsteps would lead someplace that I didn’t want to go.
I stepped out from behind the privacy curtain dressed in Ms. Tanaka’s discarded uniform. My clones smiled pleasantly. “It looks fine,” one said as the other nodded in agreement. They gave me two uniforms to take home along with an oatmeal-colored long-sleeved blouse, which I noticed was not mandatory. They were both wearing short-sleeved, nonprescription blouses of their own.
When I got back to my hotel room I put on the entire uniform and laughed hopelessly at my hideous reflection. The exaggerated collar of the blouse touched my chin, and the holes of the vest constricted my arms. My image was nothing like I had anticipated. As if to capture this point of departure I used my self-timing camera and took a picture.
It had been the same month two years earlier when I had arrived under very different circumstances as a twenty-year-old exchange student to spend my junior year at Waseda University. On that first night in Tokyo, I had gone with a small group of students to explore local bars. We immediately discovered that if we spoke a few words of Japanese, red-faced, drunken businessmen would buy us beer. We went from bar to bar drinking free beer and practicing our textbook-inspired introductions. That night, I learned that in the eyes of many Japanese I was singularly intriguing because I did not have black hair but could utter Japanese syllables that made sense.
My particular group of exchange-student friends were, like me, continually searching for the quintessential Japanese experience. Unlike some of the other Americans, we were not interested in re-creating a Little Los Angeles or Little Ann Arbor on the Waseda campus. We were the kind of exchange students who immediately started drinking green tea and earnestly tried to eat everything—from spaghetti to yogurt—with chopsticks.
We found inherent value in participating in almost any activity that involved Japanese people who did not speak English— activities like camping with the 4-H Club or practicing grueling martial arts that we never would have considered doing in America. In our minds, going to Tokyo Disneyland with other exchange students ranked much lower than attending a traditional tea ceremony dressed in full kimono with one’s host family. An adventure at a hot spring was in and of itself a valuable cultural experience, but going there with a new Japanese friend was considerably more interesting than going there with an old beau visiting from Missouri.
This authenticity-ranking applied to our choice of everything from extracurricular clubs to part-time jobs. When I got my job working as a weekend Welcome Lady in the Honda showroom I felt I had exceeded the authenticity quotient in every way.
In preparation for my job, Honda provided a two-day training course for me on how to be a Welcome Lady. I learned how to graciously accept business cards and how to delicately decline sexual advances without using the word “no.” Above all, our job as Welcome Ladies was to smile and create a friendly atmosphere for the customers. The Welcome Plaza was a place for them to relax. The most expensive item a visitor could buy was a rum raisin ice cream cone at the California Fresh snack counter.
The eight Welcome Ladies were in their early twenties. They wore an outfit that reminded me of the television show The Jetsons: blue short-sleeved tops with pink piping that flared out at the waist, white skirts, and high-heeled white pumps. Manicures were a requirement, but no rings were allowed. All the women had the long, well-coifed hair that comes only from hour-long styling sessions. Their makeup and glossy pink lips were flawless and checked every hour. All day we smiled and greeted customers and handed out brochures. On special occasions,
