As promised, here’s my rough translation of Hiroko Yokoyama's Japanese game industry discrimination thread. If you don’t know her already, she’s an early SNK artist (Ikari, Crystalis, Guevara) who moved to Video System (Sonic Wings series). Thread incoming!!
The story she tells begins with the rise of 3D in games. At one company, they knew 3D was the future, and wanted to train two artists to work with polygons and share that with the rest of the company. All applications from women were summarily dismissed by the boss at the time.
The boss’s logic was – we are training these people to learn technology and keep it in the company. He apparently said: “Since girls quit working after getting married, there’ll be no technology left in the company, so there’s no point in letting them do it.”
He said that if they let a woman learn something like this, she will inevitably get married and leave, and their whole investment would be a waste. So the boss chooses two guys, ignoring many women's applications, including Yokoyama's. Guess what happens.
The two guys who the boss invested in up and leave the company. They didn’t share the technology or learning with anyone, they just left. So in the end, what did he invest in? She was frustrated even more because of the boss’s impression that only women would leave like that.
There was a worry that people would change jobs, but it wasn’t that easy for women, even if they had technology knowledge. And she feels the idea that if you teach women you’re gambling or taking a chance is really terrible. She wants to believe it’s no longer that way.
(and as an aside, she believes experience and artistic sense are more important traits than simple technological knowhow from a seminar anyway)
As for Yokoyama herself, she wanted to learn new technology, but her boss passed her over because she was *already* married. She was told that “Married women don’t work properly after they give birth, right?”
So as a woman you can’t learn anything new if you’re not married because you'll get married and leave, and you’re not worth investing in if you already are because you'll have a baby and leave. She says “Talking about it now, I feel like I was told ‘hey, eat shit.’”
She doesn’t believe those decisions are all the way at the top, at least at that company, since women were allowed to be planners/designers, but middle management was keeping women “in their place.” (my own editorializing: they were worried about keeping their jobs/status quo)
Yokoyama ended the night's thred by saying she hopes the industry is better now, but also retweeted others who said (as we know) that the struggle goes on. Yokoyama no longer works in games. (Though she’s helping us with the SNK 40th Anniversary collection!)
One thing she didn’t explicitly state but is clear here: in the early/mid-90s, 3D was the future, and she and other women were kept from it by this sort of attitude of only investing in a gendered view of investing in “stable” people.
I had always wondered why so many Japanese women in games who had gained some prominence in the 80s and early 90s just sort of… went away by the end of the 90s. This is my own editorializing, but refusing to let them learn new tech seems like a big part of why.
And in Japan it’s not like you could just go off and do it on your own, especially pre-internet. You’re working 10-12 hour days and stuck very much within that company ecosystem. Either your boss lets you take classes/seminars or you don’t get to do it.
Resuming the thread the next morning she shared how she was told by her boss that she was fat, ugly, and an otaku, and so her work was no good as a result. He was charmed by what he thought were pretty women. He said it was “all jokes” but repeated this for years.
In the end, Yokoyama has continued doing art on her own because her friends, her husband, and people who liked her work supported her and she’s grateful for that. She's even bringing some art to Comiket this year.
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