Women in Japan: Conversation remembered

Ayuko was the receptionist at the tiny family-owned English school where I was working until June 2008. It was just the two of us there most of the time, she manning the office and I teaching the lessons. During breaks or no-shows we talked about everything under the sun.
I couldn’t help doing a bit of western-tradition feminist indoctrination from time to time, which I now somewhat regret. The more time I spend in this country, the more I see that whenever Japan gets around to having a major feminist revolution it’s going to have to happen Japanese-style. In a culture that values collectivism rather than individualism, people take a different and softer approach to identifying and solving problems. Plus, western feminism has made its mistakes, and it would be great to see new feminisms develop without having to repeat them. Still, there were a few fun lightbulb moments when Ayuko noticed close-to-home examples of things I liked ranting about.

Ayuko was a great reference on what a Japanese child grows up hearing. She was always saying, “We are told that…” She seemed to remember everything she had ever been told. One time, it was, “We are told that men want to love, and women want to be loved.”
I reminded her of what she had told me recently about her current vs. ex-boyfriend: Her ex wanted her back, and she felt he probably liked her more than the new one did…but, when I asked her if she would ever consider going back to him, she said, “No, because after I met this boyfriend I realized that I can like someone that much.”
Well lookee there…it would seem that, contrary to the common wisdom, humans want to want what they want after all. I don’t think she had even noticed the gap between what “we are told” and her own experience.
Current bf, whom she dated the whole year I worked there, was apparently nice, easy-going, in no rush for anything. Ayuko herself, on the other hand, was husband-hunting. When I asked her why she felt the need to go get married if she had a nice bf she enjoyed spending time with, she said, “Actually, I don’t like working!”
Well.
I sure felt sorry for the future-salary-machine bf. I couldn’t blame Ayuko for the way she felt about work, though, as her full-time salary provided only spending money (she lived with her parents, at age 28-nothing unusual in Japan, but had she wanted to move out her salary wouldn’t have supported it). Upon graduating college, she had gotten a good salaried position that looked to be a lifetime job, but when the company started doing badly she had to leave, and now she was fatalistically certain that as a female nearing 30, it was impossible for her to land a second good job.
(In fact, our own boss had told Ayuko that she could keep her current receptionist job until she got married-and our boss was a married woman no less! Her own parents had established the three schools the family owned, so she had been born into power…and apparently just counted herself in with the men at that point, turning right around to oppress her fellow women.)
A few months after the I-don’t-like-working conversation, there was the all-husbands-cheat conversation. Ayuko was depressed by the stories of her friends who had already gotten married: all their husbands seemed to be cheating now. One husband kicked his wife out of their house for a new girlfriend, when the wife was eight months pregnant! (To be fair, I don’t think this is a typical situation. The friend had been too distraught and confused to seek out proper legal assistance at the time of the story.)
Ayuko said, in a sad little voice, resigned yet still almost crying, that even though her boyfriend was fun now, she was pretty sure that the same thing would happen to her if they got married.
There was no other option in her field of vision though.
I wonder how things have gone with the bf since June.
Cross-posted at The Josei Thing