"Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful" by U.S. labor economist Daniel S. Hamermesh states that one's appearance plays a statistically significant role in job income. In other words, those who look better than average have a better chance of getting good jobs compared to those whose looks are below average. Moreover, one's appearance results in a bigger income difference for women than men. From a different viewpoint, this seems to indicate that people with good looks are considered to be more competent at a job just from how they look. Such a blunt statement, and yet hard to refute.
The protagonist of "Muno no Taka" is Tsumeko Takano, who works at an IT consulting company. With her beautiful long hair, smart looks, polite words and composed demeanor, she indeed emanates an aura of competence. However, in contrast to her appearance, she has an extremely low level of communication skills and practical business abilities. After only a year and a half with her current company, she is labeled an "in-house, no-good goldbrick." On the other hand, Hiwada, a young man employed at the same time as Takano, is intelligent and full of ideas but mentally weak and timid. He gets an upset stomach whenever he becomes nervous during visits to clients. "Muno no Taka" is a comedy about how these two, who are nothing but liabilities to the company on their own, make a great team and do steady, profitable work for the company.
Takano is doing her best on her own terms. She is not goofing off or "hiding her claws." She says about herself: "Have you ever heard of the law of worker ants? Well, I forgot the details, but in any case, someone like me is crucial to a company's success."
The law of the worker ants is based on research led by Eisuke Hasegawa, an associate professor of Hokkaido University. According to his theory, a colony of ants avoids eradication and lasts longer when 20% to 30% of the ants in the colony do not work at all. Takano wanted to say she is contributing to the company by being a non-working ant. That doesn't quite feel like an accurate description of her, and yet it has a certain amount of persuasive power.
Takano is oblivious to the fact she annoys her boss and is a pain in the neck to others, but "Muno no Taka" doesn't leave her there and provides an ingenious twist to her situation. This manga also specifically describes how the willful assumption that women with good looks should do a good job is nothing but the viewpoint of a male-dominated society. Before she got her current job, a middle-aged male executive who interviewed her spoke highly of her, saying, "I can tell an excellent applicant when I see one." After the company hired her, he is now irresponsibly blaming the personnel department for getting rid of the written exam on the pretext of giving more weight to applicants' personalities.
Takano and Hiwada team up to turn their "uselessness" into a sales tool and delightfully expose the showy but worthless "competence" of elite male employees in client companies. This is a manga about working and the workplace that could well have been drawn before but interestingly has never been.
It is interesting that, after reading "Muno no Taka," I now think Hamermesh's theory of how beauty pays is perhaps revealing of just how male-dominated American society still is. By the way, I mistakenly believed for the longest time that worker ants were male. The truth is, an ant colony is a female society. Worker ants or not, all ants that form a colony are apparently female.
-- Kanta Ishida, Yomiuri Shimbun Senior Writer
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