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The South Atlantic Quarterly 99.4 (2000) 865-902



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The Rise and Fall of Maternal Society:
Gender, Labor, and Capital in Contemporary Japan

Tomiko Yoda


The notion that Japan is a maternal society (bosei shakai) is a powerful cliché that has been haunting the discussion of gender in the Japanese context for quite some time. That it is still an issue that demands some attention appears to be underscored by ongoing condemnation of the maternal excesses in Japan launched by conservative critics today. In the past few years the call to restore respect for fatherhood and the paternal principle (what I will refer to as “paternalism”) has been a popular theme in the Japanese mass media. We have seen a plethora of articles, special issues of popular magazines, and books on the subject, including Fusei no Fukken [The restoration of fatherhood] (1996) by Jungian psychologist Hayashi Yoshimichi, and Chichi nakushite kunitatazu [No father no nation] (1997) by the current governor of Tokyo, Ishihara Shintaro. The paternalists denounce postwar Japanese history as a process in which the presence of the father and his authority have diminished in family life. At the same time, they claim that the paternal principle—law, discipline, independence, objectivity, the privileging of public virtues over personal desire and so on—has been [End Page 865] greatly eclipsed in society at large. In place of father/paternal they perceive the harmful excess of motherhood and the maternal principle both inside and outside homes, encouraging uncontrolled egoism, narcissistic and hedonistic consumer culture, and the hysteria of entitlement and victimhood. Moreover, they consistently equate paternal with national and accuse maternal society of eroding the nation-state as a community based on the supra-individual (and suprafamilial) concern for the public good. Paternalists blame the interconnected phenomena of paternal deficit and maternal excess not only for the problems riddling Japanese families, such as violent crimes committed by youths, prostitution by middle-class teenage girls, and the refusal of children to attend school, but also for a broad range of economic, social, and political upheavals that the nation has seen in the past decade.

The apparent popularity of paternalism has been explained by the destabilization of Japanese masculine identity in the wake of the nation’s economic downturn since the early 1990s. Fathers who have lost their jobs or who fear getting squeezed out of their “corporate domicile” (to which they have hitched their fortune and self-identity) are desperate to find their way back “home.” Yet the homecoming of workaholic, estranged fathers is often met with indifference and mild contempt by wives and children. Paternalists’ diatribe against maternal excess allegedly appeals to the discontent of middle-aged Japanese men, providing them with reassurances that they do have a unique and indispensable role to play at home and in the society at large, beyond the confines of their workplace. In other words, neoconservative paternalism is said to be gaining an audience by offering a remedy to the wounded male ego, providing an alternative vision of masculine legitimacy in postbubble Japan.

The above explanation of the surge of paternalism in Japan, however, takes for granted the basic assumption that Japan is in one way or another a maternal society—a condition reinforced by the crisis in the male-centered corporate world. The status of this notion as a descriptive category needs to be interrogated, and its ideological contours and functions must be explored. In the following I study the history of the concept, which emerged in the late 1960s on the cusp of the nation’s postwar industrialization and economic expansion and developed into a pervasive metaphor of Japanese social order in the 1970s. In the first part of the essay I focus on the early theorization of maternal society, on one hand, and the formation of mother-centered domesticity in rapidly industrializing Japan, on the other. I locate [End Page 866] the link between the two developments in the economic and political functions played by the new construction of home/family and the psychosocial dynamics projected...

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