The current government wants women to demonstrate their full potential in the workplace, which means transcending gender roles and achieving occupational parity with their male counterparts. Since these roles are socially conditioned, it's important that young women understand their situation vis-a-vis the job market as early as possible.

On his website "13-sai Hello Work," which helps adolescents consider what they want to do with their lives, novelist and economic pundit Ryu Murakami posts a list of occupations ranked in order of descending popularity as determined by the number of times individual job descriptions on the site are accessed. The list is gender-neutral, but No. 1 this month and last month is "grand hostess," the person who manages the service functions for an airline in an airport. As the title indicates, it's women's work, and while, based on the ranking explanation, it's impossible to say how many girls covet such a job, it does indicate that the connotation of "hostess" is not a negative one.

But it depends on the context. A fourth-year university student named Rina Sasazaki is suing Nippon Television Network Corp. after the company informally offered her a job as an announcer last year and then withdrew the offer when they learned she had worked part-time as a bar hostess. The suit has attracted attention ostensibly because it addresses job discrimination, but the story was initially reported by the weeklies and tabloids, whose main concern had little to do with social justice.