had to make liberal use of black sealer paint to give myself a broken-in look.
There had been times in my life when I actually welcomed uniforms. In elementary school I idolized my neighbor Kiva Guss who was a Grandview High School cheerleader. Every Friday I watched her leave home wearing a smart blue and white pleated skirt and a sweater with our school’s roaring bobcat emblem on the front. Wearing the uniform was part of my motivation to try out for the cheerleading squad when I got to high school. I wanted the uniform to set me apart from the other girls. I wanted it to tell everyone that I was part of an elite and talented group.
“Please, take it,” said one of the women handing me a skirt as though it was the latest design from Issey Miyake. The material was thin and insubstantial. This uniform offered no expression of status—it sent an entirely different message. It said, “I’m just a woman; don’t take me seriously and don’t treat me with respect because I am as replaceable as this polyester.”
I could see by the woman’s expression that I was expected to wear the uniform; my resistance would not be understood. But I felt like I should put up some kind of fight. I wanted to formally register my displeasure before submitting. Shouldn’t someone take note that I was consciously making a choice to fit in here? I wanted credit for compromise, but instead a got a perfunctory smile. I took the skirt behind the privacy curtain to change.
The skirt was simply cut and had a zipper in the back. As I got ready to step in, I noticed a small paper tag attached to the waistband. In Japanese characters it said “Ms. Tanaka.” She must have been the employee who had previously worn this uniform. I wondered if she had retired from work to marry. Had she done her time and, like so many women, lived with her parents to save money for her big wedding day? I knew that she had not been promoted out of the uniform because all women, no matter what job they did or how long they had worked at Honda, wore the same uniform.
I did not want to follow in Ms. Tanaka’s footsteps even though I didn’t know where they would go. I was twenty-two and new to this corporate world; but I felt certain that if she had started by stepping into this polyester straitjacket her footsteps would lead someplace that I didn’t want to go.
I stepped out from behind the privacy curtain dressed in Ms. Tanaka’s discarded uniform. My clones smiled pleasantly. “It looks fine,” one said as the other nodded in agreement. They gave me two uniforms to take home along with an oatmeal-colored long-sleeved blouse, which I noticed was not mandatory. They were both wearing short-sleeved, nonprescription blouses of their own.
When I got back to my hotel room I put on the entire uniform and laughed hopelessly at my hideous reflection. The exaggerated collar of the blouse touched my chin, and the holes of the vest constricted my arms. My image was nothing like I had anticipated. As if to capture this point of departure I used my self-timing camera and took a picture.
It had been the same month two years earlier when I had arrived under very different circumstances as a twenty-year-old exchange student to spend my junior year at Waseda University. On that first night in Tokyo, I had gone with a small group of students to explore local bars. We immediately discovered that if we spoke a few words of Japanese, red-faced, drunken businessmen would buy us beer. We went from bar to bar drinking free beer and practicing our textbook-inspired introductions. That night, I learned that in the eyes of many Japanese I was singularly intriguing because I did not have black hair but could utter Japanese syllables that made sense.
My particular group of exchange-student friends were, like me, continually searching for the quintessential Japanese experience. Unlike some of the other Americans, we were not interested in re-creating a Little Los Angeles or Little Ann Arbor on the Waseda campus. We were the kind of exchange students who immediately started drinking green tea and earnestly tried to eat everything—from spaghetti to yogurt—with chopsticks.
We found inherent value in participating in almost any activity that involved Japanese people who did not speak English— activities like camping with the 4-H Club or practicing grueling martial arts that we never would have considered doing in America. In our minds, going to Tokyo Disneyland with other exchange students ranked much lower than attending a traditional tea ceremony dressed in full kimono with one’s host family. An adventure at a hot spring was in and of itself a valuable cultural experience, but going there with a new Japanese friend was considerably more interesting than going there with an old beau visiting from Missouri.
This authenticity-ranking applied to our choice of everything from extracurricular clubs to part-time jobs. When I got my job working as a weekend Welcome Lady in the Honda showroom I felt I had exceeded the authenticity quotient in every way.
In preparation for my job, Honda provided a two-day training course for me on how to be a Welcome Lady. I learned how to graciously accept business cards and how to delicately decline sexual advances without using the word “no.” Above all, our job as Welcome Ladies was to smile and create a friendly atmosphere for the customers. The Welcome Plaza was a place for them to relax. The most expensive item a visitor could buy was a rum raisin ice cream cone at the California Fresh snack counter.
The eight Welcome Ladies were in their early twenties. They wore an outfit that reminded me of the television show The Jetsons: blue short-sleeved tops with pink piping that flared out at the waist, white skirts, and high-heeled white pumps. Manicures were a requirement, but no rings were allowed. All the women had the long, well-coifed hair that comes only from hour-long styling sessions. Their makeup and glossy pink lips were flawless and checked every hour. All day we smiled and greeted customers and handed out brochures. On special occasions, the Welcome Ladies stood on platforms next to sparkling new Honda products and used the soft, agreeable tones of formal Japanese to explain its features into a microphone.
I was treated as a guest by the women and sometimes even by the customers themselves. The Welcome Ladies included me in after-work drinking parties, took me on day-trips, and told me secrets about turbulent and clandestine love affairs. Young men in thousand-dollar leather riding gear and schoolgirls wearing sailor-suit uniforms asked to have their pictures taken with me and requested that I autograph their Honda brochures.
At six in the evening the thank-you-and-goodbye soundtrack played as we ushered all the visitors out the sliding glass doors, bowing and smiling sweetly as though it pained us to bring the eight-hour workday to a close. After the doors were locked and the bright lights dimmed, all the Welcome Ladies lined up in a row facing the showroom manager. With our hands clasped gracefully, we continued to smile as the manager made a few closing remarks. We listened politely, as though with great interest, then bowed to him in unison saying, “Otsukaresama deshita, You are the tired one.”
The Welcome Ladies then retreated into the dressing room, where a shocking transformation took place. They shed the Jane Jetson costumes and put on expensive, funky black dresses. They concealed their pink lips in deep red tones and reapplied eye makeup several shades darker. Checking to make sure their cigarettes were pocketed, the women emerged from the Welcome Plaza purged of their girlishness.
I enjoyed watching this transformation, and I admired the women for it. Their new appearance was rebellious and in a way explained how they could generate eight continuous hours of sticky-sweet pinkness to strangers and then listen nightly to a patronizing speech from the manager on how we would have to try harder to be more friendly the next day.
During the year of weekends that I worked as a Welcome Lady, I never went beyond the first-floor Welcome Plaza of Honda’s Headquarters. I knew there was a bank of elevators that transported people to the building above, but I had no idea what it would be like.
“This is an intelligent building,” a young woman from the Personnel Department said as she handed me a schedule for the next six days. “We will begin your orientation with a tour of the headquarters,” she explained.
I sat at a table in the center of the seventh-floor Administration Department across from this woman, who