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

This book is about the "forgotten" history of Japanese divorce. According to the long-lived modernization perspective, divorce rates will increase in parallel with such social changes as rising incomes and westernized attitudes, broadly defined as modernization. The post-WWII experience in Japan is congruent with this perspective; the divorce rate increased mildly at first, then more rapidly during the 1970s, and dramatically since the 1990s. Thus, many researchers and policy makers in Japan, as well as sociologists in the United States, have forgotten – or have not realized – the history of high divorce rates during the 1800s and earlier.

Available official statistics show that the crude divorce rate (divorces per one thousand population) ranged between 2.5 and 3.4 in the last two decades of the 19th century, until the Meiji Civil Code was promulgated in 1898. Local data also show that divorce was similarly prevalent throughout the Edo and Meiji periods across the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, albeit with some variations by social class and region. Divorce was more prevalent among peasants, in rural areas, and in the East than among the ruling samurai class, in urban areas, and in the West. Only at the turn of the century, did the crude divorce rates begin to decline, dropping as low as .6 in the 1940s.

To sociologists, simply revealing such historical facts and demonstrating the counter evidence to the implicit but widespread assumption of convergence may be considered a major achievement of this book. Being a historian, however, the author brings together put bits and pieces of historical evidence and conflicting hypotheses – actually quite a large amount of information – but does not necessarily theorize the backgrounds of high divorce rates. Understandably, that is partly because of limited historical data, but a sociologist would have tried to find more systematic explanations.

The author links the high divorce rates in Japan to the tradition of consensual divorces. When spouses or their families reached a settlement, the local authority or the government would not interfere. The author argues that in Japanese history there has never been a notion that divorce is evil, unlike European societies with Christian cultures, which generally allowed no-fault divorce only in the mid-20th century. Not surprisingly, Japanese officials drafting the Meiji Civil Code adopted the Napoleonic Code of divorce, which was exceptional in the European standard in that it embodied no-fault divorce. Only when the two parties could not reach agreement would the court resolve a case based on explicitly written grounds for divorce. Court cases, however, comprised a minimal proportion of total divorces, no more than five percent, until the early 20th century.

One institutional setting that, the author argues, is relevant to the tradition of mutual consent divorce is the notion among peasants of testing spouses, as exemplified in the custom of "trial marriage" in the 1870s. In the Japanese family, a newly-wed young woman moved in with her husband's family. If the husband's family members, particularly the mother-in-law, found her not adjusting well to the new family, then she would be sent back to her natal family. Popular media, thus, have described the divorced young wives as helpless victims of the traditional family system. However, the author argues, historical data suggest otherwise. Often the go-between who was involved in the marriage also played a role in negotiating the terms of divorce. The small dowry – smaller than in other societies –brought at the time of marriage was returned to the woman's natal family unless she committed a serious sin, such as adultery. Remarriage after divorce was as frequent among women as among men. Further, a newly-wed wife might also choose to leave her husband's family, even with the support of her natal parents, if she or her parents found the circumstances of the husband's family were not satisfactory. Supporting the author's argument, a majority of divorces occurred within two years after marriage through the Edo...