I recently completed two essays, one for each of my Japanese Culture Studies courses. I'll give a brief summary of each essay in order to provide an example of what I've studied in both courses.

For my Society and Law course, I wrote about the drive for gender equality here in Japan. I looked at it from a legal point of view: what laws have been passed, and how progress toward making the law into reality is measured. As recently as 1999 Japan passed a law laying down its basic standards for a gender equal society and how it wanted to achieve those goals. The law emphasized combined efforts from national, prefectural, and local governments, as well as assistance from foreign countries that already have a established a standard of gender equality. After ten years, a cabinet office dealing with gender equality conducted a survey and other research to see how close the country is to realizing the ideals of the '99 law, but progress is slow. Since this was not a research paper, I did not come up with an actual thesis and prove it, but I'm thinking that Japanese society in general does want gender equality, it will just take time and conscious effort to change social practices and citizens' attitudes.

In my Literature course, we spent a lot of time discussing how women were portrayed in Japanese literature. They are often sacrificial characters that die to save a male character, or they are portrayed as helpless and at the mercy of an overbearing, power-hungry male character. However, the two women in the stories I chose to compare and contrast in my essay were both temptresses and full of evil passions, endangering the piety of the monks whom they encountered in the stories. In one of the stories, the monk is seduced by the woman, but when he breaks his promise to marry her, she turns into an poisonous snake and kills him. In the other story, the monk is just about to return to the woman's cottage and renounce his religious vows in order to be with the woman when he meets an old man who talks him out of his rash decision. At any rate, women are not often portrayed with much power in old Japanese literature, but if they do have power, they seem to often use it in a terrible way.