Language, Gender, and Ideology in Japanese Professional Matchmaking.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the work of Japanese professional matchmakers located in the Osaka metropolitan area, with special attention to matchmaker training and client education. The thing that differentiates arranged marriages from love matches is the mediation of clients’ interactions by matchmakers; educating clients on the preferred modes and styles of interacting with each other is one of matchmakers’ most important mediation techniques. Through interviews with individual matchmakers and data from training sessions and professionalization opportunities made available through matchmaker organizations, this dissertation explores the content of matchmakers’ education, counseling, and mediation strategies, with a focus on gender differences and conversational norms. What do matchmakers hold up as a standard of behavior? To what extent is it the same or different for men and women?

By attending to the counseling strategies that are taught to new and old matchmakers alike, this work argues that they encourage a single standard of behavior for male and female clients. The assumption seems to be that the qualities of a successful client and a good spouse are not differentiated by gender, and moreover, that oftentimes the best way to appeal to someone of the “opposite” sex is to become less opposite. Gender obviously matters, but its importance is limited to the obvious concerns of traditional, heterosexual matrimony—household divisions of labor and reproduction. Men’s and women’s differences in modes of interaction are to be bridged, rather than emphasized. Another goal of the present work is to speak to the literature on gender performance. By examining the forces that regiment clients’ behavior, and focusing on matchmakers’ ideologies, I hope to show some of the constraints on gender performance in contemporary Japan, particularly as realized linguistically, and move beyond the agent-centered approach that predominates in this field.