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

In Japan, modern marriage and divorce laws were inscribed in the civil code of 1898 and then partially revised during the Allied Occupation period. The fundamental legal paradigms have remained amazingly constant: Marriage is still defined as an official union between a man and a woman, divorce as the termination of a marriage between a husband and a wife. Unlike in many other countries, in Japan a court of law is not necessary either to dissolve a marriage or to decide on post-divorce settlements. The vast majority of divorces in Japan are by mutual consent and take effect through the simple act of registration at a local ward office.

Scholars in several fields have studied this general system of divorce in Japan. What has been lacking is a monograph in English about contemporary divorce and especially how people adapt to the legal framework while attaching personal meanings to their respective actions.

In Intimate Disconnections, cultural anthropologist Allison Alexy paints an exceptionally nuanced picture of the performance of divorce in early twenty-first century Japan based on several years of participant observational fieldwork, during which she was able to conduct many interviews. As a thoughtful scholar, she reflects throughout her study on how she, as a Caucasian, American, female social scientist, attracts attention and how people react to her and her unusual research topic. Alexy is able to apply her social outsider gaze to build a well-balanced—and well-written—"thick description" of the worldviews of Japanese individuals and to explain the social texture beyond the widely available government statistics. She debunks some pervasive divorce myths shared by many of her Japanese interlocutors and propagated by the Japanese media. She also provides a novel interpretation of how the neoliberal political discourse promoted by former Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichirō, himself one of Japan's most famous divorced men, altered Japanese perceptions of themselves in relation to others, including members of their families. That shift in the desirability of self-reliance and independence has had a profound impact on how men and, even more so, women justify their actions or nonactions in maintaining and dissolving marriages. Alexy's interpretation is original and goes beyond the usual simplistic explanations in terms of general dissatisfactions with or ambivalence toward traditional ideals of masculinity and femininity.

In an extensive introduction entitled "Anxiety and Freedom," Alexy reviews multiple academic approaches to the study of divorce and intimacy. She also briefly outlines postwar macro demographic trends. As expected, marriage is becoming less universal in Japan, with people either marrying later or forgoing it altogether. Marriage, however, remains the only socially viable framework for childbirth, with less than two percent of children born out of wedlock. The postwar divorce rate stabilized after its peak in the year 2002 but has nonetheless reached a level where about a third of all marriages end in divorce. Most divorces take place among people in their early thirties, but divorces later in life receive disproportionate media attention as symbols for changing norms of intimacy. Today, couples with minor children account for 60 percent of divorces. Custody is granted to mothers in 80 percent of cases, a major departure from earlier patrilineal family traditions. As a result of social change and legal continuity, Japan now has one of the highest levels of child poverty among OECD countries. Despite the potentially negative financial implications, it is common knowledge that mostly wives initiate divorce. While in many ways trends in contemporary divorce in Japan resemble those in other societies, Japanese ground them in the lived realities of their own country. The book's structure does not take divorce as a single legal event but traces marital dissolution as a process, as narrated by Japanese interlocutors, while giving due attention to larger discursive and social contexts.

Part 1, "The Beginning of the End," contains the theoretical centerpiece of the monograph, the chapter...