Embodying Culture: Pregnancy in Japan and Israel (review)

I wish this book had been available 20 years ago when my non-Japanese partner had our first baby in Japan. All of the experiences which puzzled us then are described and analyzed in great ethnographic detail in Tsipy Ivry's account of what she terms the "Japanese culture of pregnancy" that still prevails in Japan today. For example, my partner was constantly told off for not behaving as she should while pregnant, by men as well as women, and by those who had never had as well as those who had had children. Criticism extended to her dress (she wore short-sleeved dresses and did not wear socks or tights during the summer months or a hara obi—a corset designed to keep the fetus small and stable and hence easier to deliver), her diet (too much salty food), her use of public transport, the way she carried her shopping, her questions to her doctor, her desire to have me attend checkups. Most of all though she felt she was being criticized for simply being visible; pregnant women in Japan were (and the book under review suggests remain) all but invisible in public and they are certainly expected to exclude themselves from the workplace many weeks before giving birth. At the same time, my partner was constantly surprised (despite having lived for several years in Japan and speaking the language) by the failure of people in public to help (especially to give up seats on public transport); by the three-hour waits to see the doctor for her regular checkups; by the fact that clinics only opened during the day (making it hard for working women and male partners to attend); by the depersonalized internal examinations (with her top half behind a curtain and her nether regions on display to all who passed down the corridor on the other side); by the detailed focus on her daily self-monitoring of everything from weight gain to bowel movements; by a system when every visit she received a different (albeit surprisingly modest) request for payment; and quite simply by the time it took to do all the things she was told by her gynecologists she needed to do in order to have a healthy baby. Perhaps most surprising of all, several of the clinics we approached as potential places to give birth told us they could not accept us as clients at a time when the Japanese population was beginning to contract and it was well known they were crying out for business. When we did find a clinic, my role was recorded, as Ivry's book reminded me, as tachiai bunben (a birth where I could "stand by" but in which I could not in any way participate), although even that became problematic as the midwife on duty at the time tried to exclude me completely.

With hindsight, given the high-ritual nature of Japanese society, we should perhaps not have been surprised by the strongly held expectations that surrounded the correct role performance of pregnant women, although it was interesting the extent to which this clearly extended to the performance of foreign women when so often foreigners at that time were absolved in Japan from local expectations. What we were not able to comprehend was how those role and ritual expectations were interrelated and reflected important Japanese ideas of motherhood, children, the body, medicine—indeed, the very nature of what constitutes social life itself in Japan. This superb book by the Israeli anthropologist Tsipy Ivry not only answers these fundamental questions but offers a series of insights into how Japanese ideas about these cultural practices differ from those of other societies and are continuously constructed and deconstructed while appearing to be never changing. In order to understand the strengths of this book, we need to look at its underlying methodology before moving to examine some of its key questions and answers.

Ivry starts her book by pointing out how strange...