The Too-Good Wife: Alcohol, Codependency, and the Politics of Nurturance in Postwar Japan (review)

After-hours work-related drinking by men and dedication to family and household by women have become familiar parts of popular images of gender difference in contemporary Japan. However, the intersection of these aspects of gendered Japanese lives has not, until now, been explicitly examined in academic writing either on families or on the workplace in Japan. Amy Borovoy’s perceptive and sensitively written book both fills that gap and uses the material presented to reflect on family structure and gender roles in Japan (in particular the role of good wife, wise mother—ryōsai kenbo) as well as notions of the self and dependency.

Borovoy draws on material gathered in a one-year ethnographic study of a support group in Tokyo for the families of substance abusers. In practice, these were all women, either wives of alcoholics or mothers of teenage drug users. Borovoy notes that alcoholism had not, in the past, received much attention as a social problem in Japan: heavy drinking by men and women’s role in taking care of men incapacitated by drink tend still to be largely taken for granted as part of a social system in which men drinking alcohol to the point of sometimes extreme inebriation is a part of everyday life in the company, the neighborhood, and elsewhere (p. 45).¹ In addition, Borovoy argues, women’s care of their alcoholic husbands is normalized in Japan by a view of human relationships that valorizes dependency (Borovoy refers here to Doi Takeo’s popular work on the psychology of dependency in Japan and notes that amae, or passive dependency, has become a concept that is widely evoked in everyday Japanese discourse ²).

Against this background, it comes as a surprise to learn that the support group Borovoy studied had imported the American theory of “codependency,” a theory developed in the context of Al-Anon (a support group for families of alcoholics) in the United States. According to this theory, partners of alcoholics enable the alcoholic’s destructive behavior to continue by intervening to ostensibly take care of the alcoholic or to resolve problems that person may have caused. From this perspective, it is essential to stop compensating for the alcoholic’s behavior; otherwise the alcoholic will never be forced to confront his or her problem.

As Borovoy notes, the theory of codependency is rooted in a view of the self as a separate and isolable unit which contrasts strikingly with the more mainstream Japanese view of the self as embedded in, and realized through, human relationships. The challenge that the codependency movement in Japan offers to this discourse is used here as a point of departure for a critical evaluation of how gender roles in the family have been constructed in postwar Japan, in particular the meanings attributed to being a “good wife and wise mother.” Borovoy combines this analysis with an examination of the ways in which the women whose stories are recounted here have sought to renegotiate their roles within the frame of the competing discourses of codependency on the one hand and the valorization of caregiving and self-sacrifice in postwar constructions of the roles of wife and mother in Japan on the other.

Considerable space is given to the women’s own narratives, from which a complex picture emerges, revealing both their frustrations and the pride they take in their ability to endure the hardships with which they have been confronted in their experiences of marriage and motherhood. Endurance is an important theme here, echoing Dorinne Kondo’s argument that the ability to endure hardship is a key element in the attainment of mature adulthood in Japan, for both men and women.³ This ability is placed in the context of expectations of marriage, which, as Borovoy points out, differ markedly from those prevalent in the United States and Western Europe. For these women...