Gambling with Virtue: Japanese Women and the Search for Self in a Changing Nation

Chapter 2. Virtuous Selves: Housewives

44 2 Virtuous Selves Housewives Public discourses established the middle-class housewife as an enviable position in the ’70s. In the northeast, women who fit this description showed me the difficulties and joys that professional housewife-ism brought to their lives. Despite the standard category, one housewife’s situation rarely equaled another’s: variables such as husbands, incomes, occupations, and responsibilities to elders evoked different choices and strategies from women. What kinds of selfhood or personhood did women construct in various circumstances? Stage Director Through Sasaki-san, the calligraphy teacher in chapter 1, I met her mother, a woman in her mid-forties at the time, who extended as far as possible the power given to her as a middle-class wife and mother. In this case, her husband’s attitudes and actions strengthened the boundary already constructed in public discourses between the outside male sphere of work and the inside female sphere of home. Mother Sasaki responded by building a kind of mother-based personhood within those boundaries. We start with the personal history of her marriage. I’ve gotten so thin since I married. All my friends say so. I used to be healthy and played basketball. You see, people could not get much education during the war, and after graduation almost all the girls went off to work for the war effort. But my mother was an oldfashioned person, born in Meiji, and she thought girls should get training as a bride and not go out of the house to do anything. So I got very strict training in Western sewing. Virtuous Selves 45 I was teaching sewing when a marriage proposal came to my parents. It was a good chance to marry into a rich family because the son was going off to war [World War II] and they wanted the son to marry before he went. He was 11 years older than me; almost of a different generation. So everything got arranged very quickly and I married into his house without even getting all my clothing from my house. I almost refused to go, but then I did. Ever since then my health has gone down. His parents made me work very hard, even in the fields, because food was short during the war. I wasn’t used to such hard work. My brothers worried about me and brought me food. I really thought of divorce very seriously, but I hesitated. Then it was only a matter of months before I found that I was pregnant. I was so sad. The tears flowed and flowed. I felt like this was the end because now I couldn’t divorce. Mother Sasaki considered resisting the constraints of the arranged marriage several times. Unable to divorce without losing the children,1 however , she chose to invest in mother power, gaining status, power, and love through her children. So from that time on I decided that even if the children belonged to his family, I would fight for their education. If it was a girl, she would be a teacher, and if a boy, an engineer. The education was mine, even if the inheritance wasn’t, I thought. I was so closed into the house when I was first married that I never talked of my dreams about the children to my husband, or to anybody. So I had a girl and a boy and then started having trouble with the older brother’s wife who lived nearby. She was jealous of me because she could never have children. After the two children came, I just couldn’t sleep, so finally my brothers came and took me to my natal home and I lived there for three years. Finally we bought a house in another neighborhood and that was the first time we all four lived alone. Investment in mother power is not uncommon in patriarchal systems that lack other channels for women (Kandyoti 1988). Some feminists in Japan argue that indeed women are at the center of power in Japan, for their “maternal love” symbolizes the empathetic power practiced in Japan (Ide 1997, 42); others argue that women’s over-close tie with children demonstrates their weak position in the larger society (Matsui 1997, 273). Mother Sasaki’s mother power shows her economic and political weakness , but also her ability to strategize behind the scenes and her ultimate claim of virtuous endurance. 46 Virtuous Selves When...