Gendered Cultural Discourse in Japan across the Prewar-Postwar Transition: Evidence from Historical Word Embeddings
Using historical word embeddings from 1900 to 1998, this study reveals that while gender stereotypes in Japan's domestic sphere remained stable, those in work and politics underwent significant positive shifts around 1945, aligning with postwar institutional reforms and demographic changes.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
Imagine language as a giant, living library where every book, magazine, and newspaper is a snapshot of what people were thinking at that exact moment. For decades, scientists have been trying to understand how our beliefs about the world change over time, but they usually have to rely on asking people directly, like taking a poll. The problem is, you can't ask someone from 1920 what they think about women in politics, and old surveys are often messy or missing. So, researchers in a field called computational linguistics came up with a clever trick: they treat words like puzzle pieces. By using math to see which words hang out together most often (like how "doctor" might sit next to "he" in old books, but "nurse" sits next to "she"), they can build a map of cultural stereotypes. This paper asks a big question: Do these mental maps change when the real world changes? Specifically, it wonders if laws and new rules actually fix the way we think about gender, or if our old habits just keep rolling along like a heavy boulder that's hard to push.
The authors of this study decided to investigate this by looking at Japan, a country that went through a massive, sudden makeover after World War II. They used a massive collection of Japanese books and magazines from 1900 to 1998 to build a series of "word maps" for every single year. Think of these maps as a time machine that lets them measure how strongly words like "kitchen," "boss," or "politician" are linked to the idea of "woman" versus "man." They focused on three main areas: the Home (domestic life), Work (jobs and careers), and Politics (government and voting).
Here is what they found, and it's a bit like watching a tug-of-war where the rope suddenly snaps in the middle. Around 1945, when the war ended and new rules were introduced by the U.S.-led occupation to give women more rights, the language in the Work and Politics domains did a dramatic 180-degree turn. Before 1945, these words were becoming more strongly linked to men (the trend was going negative). But right after the war, the trend flipped and started going positive, meaning the language began to slowly, steadily associate these public roles more with women. It's as if the legal changes acted like a gust of wind that finally pushed the heavy boulder of public opinion in a new direction.
However, the story is different for the Home. In the world of domestic life, the word map didn't budge. The link between "woman" and "home" remained rock-solid and stable from 1900 all the way through 1998. The authors suggest that while the laws changed quickly for jobs and voting, the deep-seated cultural idea that "home is for women" was too heavy to move with just a few new rules. It's like trying to change the rules of a game while the players are still playing by the old ones; the official rules changed, but the way people actually played the game in their living rooms stayed the same.
To double-check their work, the researchers looked at 18 specific jobs, like "doctor," "lawyer," and "geisha." They compared their word maps to actual census data (the real numbers of women working in those jobs). They found a clear connection: in years and jobs where there were actually more women working, the language in the books also started to link those jobs more with women. The correlation was moderate but real (a score of 0.364), suggesting that these computer-generated word maps are actually good at tracking real-life changes in who is doing what.
The paper doesn't claim to have solved the mystery of why these changes happened or proved exactly which law caused the shift. Instead, it suggests that cultural change is uneven. The "public" parts of society (work and politics) responded to new laws by shifting their language, while the "private" part (the home) stayed stubbornly the same. It shows that while we can change the rules of society overnight, changing the way we think about those roles is a much slower, bumpier ride that doesn't happen everywhere at once.
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