Smiling beatifically at the restless shoppers, more like a saint than an elevator operator, Hiromi Saito opened her mouth to do her duty.
"I thank you from the bottom of my heart for favoring us by paying an honorable visit to our store," she said in The Voice. "I will stop at the floor your honorable self is kind enough to use, and then I will go to the top floor."The Voice is as fawning as her demeanor, as sweet as syrup, and as high as a dog whistle. Any higher, and it would shatter the crystal on the seventh floor.
Most Japanese women cannot muster the Mount Fuji-like heights of Saito's voice, but their voices regularly skirt the foothills. For a quick gauge of the status of women in Japan, just cock your ear and listen to Japanese women speak - or squeak.
European women no longer rearrange their bodies with corsets, and Chinese no longer cripple their daughters by binding their feet. But many Japanese women speak well above their natural pitch, especially in formal settings, on the phone or when dealing with customers.
"When slaves talk, they have their slave language," said Fujiko Hara, an interpreter in Tokyo. "Those girls are trained to be robots. With the elevator girls, you don't see a person but a doll."
Yet in a sign that the dolls are coming to life, women's voices in Japan are dropping significantly. Japan still has many squeakers, but there are a growing number of women who speak in natural voices.
"When girls speak in really high voices, I just want to kick them in the head," said Mari Shimakura, a 15-year-old in Tokyo. "It's totally fake and really annoying. It gives me a headache. Mom tells me I speak in too low a voice, and that I should raise it. But I can't change it."
One standard-bearer of the changing times is Miyuki Morita, who was rejected when she first tried to enter broadcasting, as a disk jockey.
"They said my voice was too somber, and they wouldn't hire me," Morita recalled. She eventually found another job, with a television station in northern Japan, and she tried to imitate other female journalists who spoke in high voices.
"Then when I saw a video of myself, I saw my face, but it wasn't my voice," she said. "It didn't sound convincing. So I settled back to my voice."
That voice is now among the best known in Japan. Morita is the evening anchor of NHK News, the most popular television news program in the country.
Other evidence that women's voices are dropping comes from taped announcements on subway platforms in Tokyo. Older recordings are clearly higher pitched than the newer ones.
The pitch of female singers is also falling. Tadahiro Murao, professor of music at Aichi University of Education, has analyzed the frequency of 200 songs dating from the 1950s, and found a clear trend.
"From the late 1980s, the pitch of female songs has dropped dramatically," Murao said. "In fact, there was a popular duet last year in which the female vocalist sang the lower part, and the male sang the higher part."
Why have women traditionally spoken in high voices in Japan?
"Your voice in the office and your voice at home are totally different," said Harumi Yamamoto, who works at a computer company in Tokyo. "The point is that when you are with a customer, you want to be polite. If you're being courteous, your voice naturally rises."
Almost everyone agrees that high pitch is wrapped up in the Japanese preoccupation with courtesy. In polite conversation in Japan, people routinely denigrate themselves and try to sound unsure.
One technique women use to sound tentative, and therefore polite, is to raise their pitch and let their sentences trail off, the way Americans sometimes do when asking a question.
"A lower voice sounds too bullying, too aggressive, too manly," said Julie Saito, a reporter at Asahi Shimbun.
Saito said Japanese men seem attracted by high voices and girlish behavior, which some Japanese women then emulate. The attraction to young girls is known here as the Loli-con - short for Lolita Complex - and it is a Japanese phenomenon, the basis for endless psychoanalyses of the Japanese mind and libido.
"A high voice sounds more cute, more like a girlish image of women," Saito said. "In the United States I project more confidence, while in Japan I find I act in a more cute way."
Saito, like many bilingual women, speaks in a higher pitch in Japanese. Indeed, she said that when she returned recently from a visit to the United States, she telephoned her Japanese friends and they asked: "Is that really you? Your voice sounds so low."