Made in Sacramento: Advice for Japan
In an alcove of the sunny side of her Sacramento ranch house, Helen Bottel wrestles with the Japanese culture. Often enough to matter, she wins. By wile, not by brute force. And never, never by put-down.
Beside her word processor is a stack of letters, translated into English. The letters are from readers of Tokyo’s Yomiuri Shimbun, the world’s largest newspaper, with a daily circulation of 9 million. Addressed to Bottel--the only American writing an advice column for export to Japan--the letters are plaintive, quizzical, rarely brusque (“That’s not the Japanese way,” Bottel says).
Poring over a particularly poignant query from a housewife, Bottel permits herself an untranslatable but universal “Tsk-tsk.” Despite Japan’s obvious economic and scientific advances, Japanese women, the letters indicate, remain a beleaguered sorority whose social status, Bottel reckons, “is some 30 to 50 years behind ours.”
Confronting Tradition
“They’re ahead of us in many areas,” the columnist says, “but they’ve done it at the expense of half the population. A good part of my job is to show the women that it doesn’t have to be like this.”
Butting heads with tradition from relatively safe shores, Bottel is modest about her impact.
“Oh, I don’t tell them what to do,” Bottel says. “I just tell them what I would do if I were faced with the same problems.”
To the Japanese--”They’re eager to emulate the American way of life, without sacrificing the male’s manifest destiny”--Bottel is an enigma. There remains in Japan an innate reverence for age. Conveniently, even defiantly, Bottel confesses to 74 years’ worth.
To the Japanese, however, age, especially when borne by women, implies a role of cosseted and sedentary prerogative, says Bottel--most typically the household matriarch who commands daughter-in-law and grandchildren from a batwing by the brazier.
The Family Circle
Bottel’s four children and seven grandchildren, not to mention retired husband, Bob, “are my friends.” Her mornings are consecrated to tennis; her figure dispels any lingering notion that her most lethal weapon is the lob. “I do one new thing a week,” she says, explaining a vitality that would tax a teen-ager, “even if it’s only learning a new stroke, or eating a new dish. Or bike-riding in India . . . .”
The Japanese prize femininity; Bottel is abundantly feminine. The Japanese also yoke femininity with predictability and gaman , which, Bottel says, roughly means to endure without complaint.
Bottel does not endure. Never has. Nor is she particularly predictable. “My motto is: Leap before you look.”
Locking horns with millennia of reticence daunts Bottel so little that she was three years into her Yomiuri Shimbun column before she ever set foot in Japan. (“I still can’t use chopsticks,” she confesses.)
For one thing, she is an old--make that experienced--hand at writing an advice column: 25 years behind the quill of Helen Help Us for King Features Syndicate. For another thing, she is doing exactly what her new boss requested: “Pull no punches.”
For years, Yomiuri received--but didn’t print--Bottel’s column in its regular packet from King Features. Helen Help Us was an oddity (the great majority of Japanese advice columns are written by men), enjoyed only by the more sophisticated of the Yomiuri staff. Among them was Tokiko Fukao, “one of only two women senior editors in a sea of male faces.”
“Toki was far-sighted enough to realize that the Japanese people were ready for an American-type column,” Bottel says. She told me not to get so immersed in their culture that I’d begin to rationalize and say, ‘Well, this is wonderful for you , but . . . .’ ”
“In a way, what’s happening is deja vu for me. When I started my first U.S. column, I was getting the same kinds of letters from Americans as I am now from the Japanese. People are always saying, ‘Well, you can’t change the culture of Japan--it’s that way and it always will be. But 50 years ago, you’d have heard the same thing here.
“Besides, if I goof I can always say, ‘Well, this is the way we do it in America.’ ”
A Few Boo-Boos
Bottel has goofed. In sending sassy advice to a culture that still retains at least vestiges of arranged marriages, mistresses as status symbols, daughters-in-law as virtual slaves, and racial purity, a boo-boo or two was inevitable.
“I once advised a man who was having trouble at work to change jobs,” Bottel says. “That brought a lot of mail, because you don’t change jobs. It’s considered a loss of face.”
Then there was the time a childless couple was advised to adopt, perhaps, a Korean orphan, or a Cambodian. “I thought that, like the column, was an idea whose time had come.” It wasn’t.
One facet of Japanese culture that is changing, though, is the status of women.
“A lot of women are resisting now,” Bottel says, “but they’re doing it in a very mild, low-key, traditionally self-effacing manner--again, the way American women did back in the ‘30s and ‘40s.
“They start their letters: ‘I’m a terrible person, I know, for complaining, because I’ve had a really good life . . . .’ Then they go ahead and describe this total male chauvinist pig.”
Strong Reaction
Bottel does not have access to most of the letters addressed to her, nor to the tsunami of reaction her advice elicits. Selected letters are translated and sent to her pleasant ranch-style house in Sacramento, whence Bottel replies. She misses the give-and-take of her American columns (she still writes for the Sacramento Union), “the personal contact, but occasionally Yomiuri runs a poll on something I stirred up, and I can get a reading.”
One typical tip that drew more than 1,000 replies was directed at a Mrs. K., who wrote, in part:
“I think marriage is unfair, nothing but an open wound.” Mrs. K. left work to care for her husband, two children and her sick in-laws--with no help from her husband and “with no time for sports or hobbies”--then found she was “too old” to get her job back.
“Married women lose their jobs, their time, their identities and their future, while their husbands remain active and lively, working and drinking with friends and staying out most evenings . . . . More and more I feel the open sore festering in my life,” Mrs. K. wrote.
Bottel “not only urged her to hold a family conference and push for understanding and cooperation, I also suggested she find a local women’s group--or start one--and crusade for nationwide change. I added, ‘Let your husband know you’re a person, and you expect marriage to blossom into a full partnership.’ ”
The poll was almost equally divided, most of the opinions from women: “A third thought, ‘Yes, women have it tough’; a third commiserated with both sides; a third were from women who said, ‘We are very lucky, because we have complete harmony at home. This is our castle, where we can do as we please.’ ”
“It’s a beginning,” Bottel muses. “Maybe even more.”
Bottel’s personal beginning was less than Utopian. Her mother was mentally ill (“I never knew her when she wasn’t”), her father left when Helen was 2, “so I raised myself. We were extremely poor. I have no idea how we ate. It was a small town and we were definitely the very dregs. I kind of dropped through the cracks.
“Still, it probably had a lot to do with my becoming a successful columnist. It wasn’t that I was wiser than anybody else, but I really got involved. I’ve always really cared.”
Be that as it may, Bottel’s career started on nothing more than a dare.
In the ‘50s, living in O’Brien, Ore., Bottel was working for a weekly in nearby Cave Junction--population 300, and “a lot bigger than O’Brien.”
“I started out as PTA correspondent and ended up as editor, sports columnist, writer, Linotype operator and ad seller. Even when I was pregnant, I took my scribbles to the hospital and wrote the whole paper while my daughter was being born.
“I came home one night and my husband was reading an advice column in the (comparatively huge) Grant’s Pass Daily Courier and laughing his head off. It was Dear Abby. That made me sore. He didn’t laugh when I was trying to be funny.
“In a huff, I said, ‘Heck, I can do better than that.’ I didn’t think I could, but you have to say things like that once in a while to get your husband’s attention. He said, ‘OK, prove it.’ I typed up a few samples, and son of a gun (the Daily Courier) took it.
“Within two weeks, King Features was looking for somebody to go up against Abby and Ann. I didn’t even know what a syndicate was, but I sent them my entire output: four columns. They signed me up!”
The First Letter
What Bottel had planned was “a light, family-oriented column, sort of pre-Bombeck. Then I got my first letter, from a woman who wanted to kill her husband . . . .”
At its peak, Helen Help Us (Bottel loathes the title) ran in more than 200 papers. A concurrent column, Generation Rap, was written with daughter Susie--”She was the only teen-ager in America who was paid to argue with her mother.”
As Susie became more conservative, Helen became more--”Well, not radical, but less judgmental.”
To Bottel, Helen Help Us--whose petitioners got at least a personal answer, if not an invitation to dinner--was a full-time profession. In time, though, Bottel, still up against Abby and Ann, “grew tired of being third in a field of two. I was a little more outspoken; I guess I ruffled more editors.”
She had just resigned when the call came from the Yomiuri Shimbun. Bottel, in character, leaped before she looked. “However it turned out,” she now says, “it was going to be nice to be first in a field of one.”
It turned out beautifully, at least for half of Bottel’s Japanese readers. From the other half, the men, a grudging if reserved respect. (“In Japan,” Bottel says, “they don’t really tee off on the writer. They’re far too polite. In America, it’s ‘Horsewhip the columnist!’ ”)
Japanese reaction is difficult to gauge from a distance not only of miles but of temperament. Representative, perhaps, of the sophisticated woman is Kaoru Nakamaru, founder and director of the Japan-based World Affairs Institute, granddaughter of former Emperor Meiji Tenno, and a faithful Bottel reader. “I think what she’s doing is great,” Nakamaru says by phone from Tokyo. “She’s straight, open, a human being--she could be English or Russian or Japanese or anything--who understands other human beings. She’s not sensational, she’s sensible.
“Of course, you must understand that while on the surface women here don’t seem all that liberated, they are strong, the strongest women in the world. Because, you see, Japanese women know how to treat men, to appreciate them, not step all over them. Then from home, from inside, the women actually control the men.”
Kenya Mizukami, sort of the Lou Grant of Tokyo, demurs, with a polite but eloquent laugh. Mizukami, managing editor of Yomiuri Shimbun, says, “I am not a full-time reader, but I have the impression that there is a good, mature opinion of her column. When she asks the men to help with the housework, the children--well, frankly I think these things are embarrassing to Japanese men. They’re lazy. They’d prefer not to do it, but deep in their heart they know they should. Helen tells them what their mothers told them.
“As for Japanese women being the stronger sex, of course they are: in the home, with the children, running the family. In business? Maybe it’s better that I don’t say.”
Japanese Women’s Reactions
The Japanese women, though, “love the column,” Bottel says. “When I finally went to Japan in 1986 to give some speeches, they really mobbed me. Of course, they venerate what they consider ‘older women,’ but in a way that would drive me nuts. Everywhere, they take your arm, as though if you stepped off a curb on your own you were going to break yourself. Seniors are honored, of course, but they’re not supposed to go out and play tennis . . . .”
Such is the fame of the woman affectionately called Kimottama Obachan (Daring Old Aunt) that when a prominent Japanese TV personality visited California, her top three scheduled interviews were with Charlton Heston, Pat Boone--and Helen Bottel.
