Paper short abstract:

The emancipatory turn promised by the 'foreign option' entices women to escape Japan's gender-stratified corporate structures for the language services industry. However, their trajectories clash with failures of work-life balance, discriminatory socio-economic relations and gender ideologies.

Paper long abstract:

In the post-growth scenario of Japan's economic and society, women face new challenges overlaid on long-established ones. Despite renewed labour participation and policies, factors such as over-representation in non-regular employment, pay gap, employment discontinuity, and the burden of domestic work call into question the future of gender equality in Japan.

This paper explores the narratives of a group of Japanese women who, to escape gender discrimination in regular employment, deploy their linguistic expertise in temporary employment as interpreters. Building on the sociology of work and language economics, it highlights the professional/personal trajectories of Japanese women engaged in the economy of linguistics acts. Thus, adopting a critical approach to neoliberal linguistic instrumentalism, it examines a segment of the Japanese female labour force, who - by mobilising rare communication skills - constructs an emancipatory turn from gender-stratified corporate structures. Besides, it questions women's investment dynamics into languages as an organising construct for their presence in the labour market, in a feminised industry where they feel gender equity is secured.

Drawing upon a wider comparative mixed-method research on the Japanese labour market for linguistic services, this paper focuses on a micro-level ethnographic understanding of a temporary form of skilled work and women's aspirations. It also contends that ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative data help giving voice to working women's experiences, values, and transitions to complement the quantitative mapping of gender inequality in Japan. The paper contributes to scholarship by scanning female interpreters' contextual situation in the contemporary Japanese labour market, but also resonating with broader observations of gender discrimination and precarious female work, including a better understanding of women's trajectories from regular employment and their gender implications in Japan beyond the part-time model, as the 'means by which women enter […] alternative systems of thought and value' (Kelsky 2001, 101). It finds that interpreting, and the ethos of linguistic instrumentalism it carries, promises to informants a work-life balance and career growth. However, findings also show that informants' work trajectories in interpreting are not immune from gender stereotypes and occupational segregation, and thus remain a 'professional chimera' for their future.