A company's internal paperwork, in some offices, still sorts female staff under a two-letter heading: OL. Not a department. Not a rank. Just two letters of the English alphabet, worn the way a uniform is worn.
Ask what it stands for and the answer comes instantly: office lady. Ask where that phrase came from and almost nobody knows it was once the winning entry in a magazine competition.
It was. And the word it was built to replace got banned from Japanese television the same year.
Before OL, the standard term was BG — ビジネスガール, business girl, in everyday use since the postwar years for young women doing clerical work. In 1963, word spread in Japan that BG carried an ugly second meaning in English, something closer to a woman who sold company rather than typed memos. Whether that was an accurate reading of English slang or a rumour nobody fully checked, the sources themselves disagree; what's on the record is that NHK, the national broadcaster, added BG to its list of banned broadcast terms that September.
A word that can no longer be said on national television needs a replacement fast, and the weekly women's magazine Josei Jishin ran an open call for one. Readers mailed in suggestions, the magazine tallied the votes, and the winner was announced soon after — オフィス・レディー, office lady — promptly shortened the way Japanese shortens almost everything with more than four syllables. (Some tellings put the announcement in 1963, others in 1964; even the contest's own legacy can't quite agree with itself, which is a fairly fitting way for a word invented to fix one confusion to start generating a smaller one of its own.)
OL caught on completely. By the bubble-economy 1980s it was not just a word but a whole look — shoulder pads and loafers, a stock character in manga and TV dramas, the unglamorous-but-stylish counterpart to the sarariiman working beside her. It also did quiet administrative work: for decades, Japanese companies ran two separate hiring tracks, ippanshoku (general clerical work, overwhelmingly filled by women) and sougoushoku (the career track toward management). OL was never an official job title, but everyone understood which track it meant — so the word was describing a glass ceiling while sounding, in English, like nothing more than a job description.
Which is where the second half of the story catches up with the first. In English, calling a grown woman an "office lady" to her face now reads as faintly mocking, the kind of phrase a style guide flags. In Japan, OL has started collecting a similar reputation: HR departments and style guides increasingly prefer the gender-neutral kaishain (company employee) or shain (staff member), on the grounds that a job label which exists only for women — with no real male equivalent beyond the unrelated sarariiman — has started to look like exactly the kind of thing it was invented to get rid of.
The whole point of OL, in 1963, was that a word describing a working woman shouldn't carry an unwanted second meaning she never agreed to. Sixty-odd years later, the objection to OL is the same objection, aimed at the word itself: why does only the woman's job need a separate, gendered label at all? Japan didn't get the fix wrong the first time. It just did the fix once, assumed it was permanent, and is now quietly doing it again — using the exact same instinct that produced OL in 1963 to slowly let OL go.