Intimate Disconnections: Divorce and the Romance of Independence in Contemporary Japan by Allison Alexy (review)

Intimate Disconnections by Allison Alexy is a welcome ethnographic study of divorce and discourses of divorce in early twenty-first-century Japan, a time when not only was divorce on the rise but its public discussion ubiquitous. As part of a moral panic over family disintegration, many popular television series, talk shows, and films featured failing or failed marriages. Several decades of research on changing gender norms has illuminated a host of challenges for husbands and wives caught between long-standing societal expectations and shifting ideas about what a family should be. This new study, centered on men's and women's feelings about marital intimacy, familial stability, and, in Alexy's words, intimate disconnections, fills an important gap in our understanding of the state of marriages and their dissolutions amid changing economic conditions in Japan. In a postwar society that explicitly and heavily depended on the labor of the household in the success of the economy, marital stability, if not happiness, was everyone's business. However, as we see in Intimate Disconnections, the significant infrastructural support for particular forms of heteronormative families by the Japanese business sector, which was backed by government policies so popular in the 1970s and 1980s, was replaced by neoliberal economic and social policies beginning in the 1990s. Alexy elucidates the impact of these employment and economic shifts on the rise of both imaginings of divorce and divorce itself, which changed from a rate of approximately 1.30 per 1,000 in the early 1990s to 1.81 in 2015.

In her introduction, Alexy recounts a conversation with a stranger in an elevator who, upon hearing about her research topic, says "All the men I know are scared. We're all scared"—a plaintive confession that epitomizes the anxious milieu within which this study progressed, a time when men feared that Japanese women were increasingly able and even likely to initiate divorce. Alexy outlines a clash between standards for marriage common in the 1970s and 1980s and more recent expectations of intimacy and closeness conveyed through new types of communication and attention. Marriages where husbands and wives occupied separate spheres and held distinct complementary responsibilities that separated them morning until night contrast with the more recent trend of emotional connection and strong verbal communication. These competing models of marriage leave some husbands ill prepared, as the marital norms of their parents' generation are no longer appropriate in their own relationships. Many of the author's interlocutors, friends, and acquaintances, both men and women, struggle with this shifting ground which Alexy examines through extensive interview material that probes the reasons and reasonings for leaving marriages in Japan in the last several decades.

The author introduces the concept of intimate political economy to examine the complex interplay between economic and labor policies and the practices and norms of the home. Intimate political economy foregrounds the interpenetration of intimate and marital relationships, what is widely understood as the private sphere, with economic conditions and employment practices of the public sphere, "models of intimacy that are themselves constructed through labor patterns" (p. 37). Earlier studies also focused on the dialectical relationship between the private and public spheres that built the economic powerhouse that Japan became in the postwar period.¹ Alexy builds on that work to show that neoliberal values of privatization, self-responsibility, and independence, which have shaped Japanese governmental and economic policies since the 1990s, and are now widespread across the globe, bleed into the most intimate spheres of contemporary life. Tax policy, corporate salary and benefits programs, and other financial norms in the high-growth period underpinned the hegemonic idea that a gendered division of labor would maximize a husband's commitment in paid labor and a wife's devotion to the home just as newer neoliberal ethics which increasingly inform government and institutional practices now shape familial relationships at a time...