Divorce in Japan: Family, Gender, and the State 1600-2000 (review)

Writing about the United States, William J. Goode pointed out that "divorce has been viewed by many as an index of social disorganization" and that divorce may be "seen as one kind of mechanism for dealing with the pressures and problems inevitably caused by marriage."¹

Almost 40 years later, similar comments are made about Japan. The rising divorce rate is claimed by some to be a recent phenomenon that runs contrary to the "Japanese way" of family stability. Others stress that the rise in divorces indicates that women are freeing themselves in a culture dominated by the legacy of a male-dominated marriage and household system. Merry Isaacs White points out that "divorces are as various as marriages."²

Divorce in Japan tackles these complex issues and questions many of the commonly held perspectives on Japanese divorce. In this deceptively slim volume, Harald Fuess takes on a monumental task. He points out that whereas there is a wealth of scholarship on Japanese divorce, "this body of knowledge appears fragmented and sometimes even contradictory" (p. 6). He therefore sets out to write the first English-language social history of divorce in Japan analyzing the "long-term legal, social, and intellectual changes surrounding divorce" over the 400-year period from 1600 to 2000 (p. 8). In the process, he draws upon a wide range of materials from court records, plays, contemporary media, personal diaries, and survey and statistical data. His bibliography is in and of itself a rich resource.

Fuess notes that in Japan historically, marriage was not seen as a lifetime commitment, but rather as a union that could be dissolved by both women and men for a variety of reasons. He asks probing questions about the influence of historical period, social class, and geographic region on marriage and divorce. He is surprised to find data indicating that even though Confucian concepts were most highly absorbed by the literate elite, and the samurai did not divorce as much as the commoners, the prevalence of divorce in all classes "seems to have been affected just as much by the existence of regional cultures condoning divorce and the socioeconomic environment" (p. 25).

One fundamental question is how divorce is defined. How does one compare the dissolution of unions in a society in which couples routinely live together without formalizing the union and dissolutions of unions in a society in which the union must or should be formally registered before the couple lives together? The term divorce is more complex than the ending of a spousal relationship. Fuess learned that in Japan "divorce" could include ending an engagement, separating a widow from the family of her late husband, or separating an adopted husband from his wife's family. Each of these involves different constituencies.

Who can initiate divorce is also an important question. Fuess's examination of plays popular during the Edo period supported the position that the inability to please the senior members of the household might lead to the expulsion of a new junior member, regardless of gender, who had entered the household through marriage or adoption. This included examples of a senior woman in the household (mother-in-law) dissolving the adoption and marriage of the adopted groom (muko yōshi). This surprising finding, Fuess argues, refutes the stereotype of absolute male dominance.

Fuess's observation is supported by the work of Anne Walthall who cites examples of lower-class women initiating divorce before the Meiji period and points out the role of divorce temples, in which a woman could seek sanctuary and be freed from her marital bond in three years, and the role of the Buddhist clergy as divorce brokers.³ Definitions of marriage also varied, and it was only comparatively recently (in the late nineteenth century) that legal registration defined marriage. Prior to that time, there was wide variation in local practice that ranged from couples simply moving in together to formalized...