INDEX
Unintentional Middle-Aged Man Behaviors
Okaya: People of the same generation who have worked at a company for a long time have grown up and have subordinates, don’t they? When I ask my female friends about this, they tell me that they never had a role model for a female boss, so when they try to act like one, they are shocked to realize that they are acting like an old man! Nishi: If I were a man, I would have to act like a man, too.
Nishi: If I were a man and in this position at this age, I would have done something wrong. Even now, when I go out for a drink with a young man, I try to be careful not to sexually harass him, but I still don’t feel confident about it.
Okaya: I have another friend who says that she makes more money than me and her husband is mainly responsible for raising the children. She, too, comes home and says, “Why aren’t you cleaning up? She sometimes says things like, “If you’re home, you can do it,” and I think, “I’m a bad old man! She said she sometimes thinks, “I’m a bad old man!”
Nishi: I understand. There is a novel by Naomi Alderman called “Power,” which has been made into a drama on Amazon Prime Video, about a future where women have the ability to discharge electricity into their bodies and have more physical power than men. In that story, there are women who end up doing the same things as men. Naomi said something along the lines of, “If women were in power, there would be no wars,” or something like that, that she is not comfortable with portraying women as beautiful in such an excessive way. She said that it is not about gender, but about how power is used.
Okaya: Oh,
Nishi: By the way, I sometimes meet Mr. Shinbo Minami*, who is very funny, soft-spoken, kind, and not at all arrogant. Nowadays, such men may be normal, but living as a man of that generation, I wonder how I could have become like Mr. Shinbo.
Okaya: That’s right. Everyone is a martial artist. Fistfights in the Golden Gai were the norm.
Nishi: That was the era, and that was the way they were educated. They said, “What a man should be like! But even if you were a man in that era, I don’t think you would have gotten into fights. I really respect you for that.
Okaya: Yes?
Nishi: You are always so flat, no matter where you go. I think we would have read the atmosphere and fought each other (laughs).
*Shinbo Minami…… illustrator and essayist. Along with his close friends Genpei Akasegawa, Kosaburo Arashiyama, and Shigesato Itoi, he led the subculture of the Showa period.
