The Changing Japanese Family (review)

I have to admit to setting this volume aside at first sight—another edited volume on the Japanese family? How much more needs to be said about challenges and crises, about the problems of women, children, and the elderly? But this rare collection of excellent essays is a worthy addition to the literature, full of insights and well-documented findings and perspectives. Scholars and other interested readers, policymakers, and students will find much useful material in it; I have already assigned sections of it to my undergraduate courses.

A volume of collected essays is rarely as organically coherent as this one. It includes disparate ideas and comparative material but also speaks across fieldwork and data to common issues. The essays converse with each other, and their material goes global, beyond the case of Japan. The treatment of post-postwar Japanese families here highlights the change and diversity of the present while exposing the past as also more changing and diverse than it is commonly held to be. Indeed, whatever have been the social and legal codes interactively governing and producing ideologies and practices, Japanese families have always been plural in their modes and independent in their strategies.

The myth of Japanese uniformity and uniqueness will not die easily. Being useful for ideological and political purposes, the Japanese family can be propped up and framed for public (and foreign) viewing as the way we always were and still should be. The "beautiful family culture" that conservative politicians extol as the "Japanese-style welfare system" has been (if it ever truly existed) diminished by materialism, selfishness, and out-and-out decadence according to those who would have family take care of itself (on behalf of the state). This volume describes the concrete underpinnings of what have been called crises—the crisis of the falling birthrate crossed with the rising proportion of elderly people, the crisis of pathologies such as "parasite singles" and hikikomori among the young. Far from a conservative project of indictment of the families in which these phenomena are having an effect, the work looks at history, economics, and changing norms as explanatory frames. As the editors note, "the Japanese family is not necessarily 'in crisis'; neither are there uniquely Japanese ways in which the family is changing" (p. 14).

Partly to illustrate the argument that Japan is a "normal" country, rather than an anomalous and unique one, this book takes a view of Japan compared with a European case: Italy. I have long felt that those of us in the United States who have given priority to U.S.-Japan comparisons can learn much from putting Japan in a different bilateral comparison, even a triangular one. In many ways, Japan is modern, even Western, if by that we mean the rest of the West rather than simply the American case; this is most evident in family studies. For several phenomena observed in Japan, data from Italy show some of the same trends: delayed marriage and childbearing, declining birthrate, and rising proportion of the elderly. In the essay by Nobuko Nagase, data are brought to bear on the perceived phenomenon of marriage avoidance: women appear to avoid marriage because marriage means the difficulties of raising a child and working; men seem to have no strong motive to get married at all. She notes the increase especially among men in the "never married" category.

One interesting comparison, in Francesca Bettio's chapter, is between the "parasite single" phenomenon in Japan and the so-called "long family" in Italy. In both, children stay at home longer. Of those 20–29 years of age, 81.9 per cent remain with their parents, 75.3 per cent for those 24–29. Not until their thirties do Italian children definitively leave home. In spite of the "length" of the family, however, Bettio notes lower familial cohesion, seen also in Japan where longer sojourns in the family home show diminishing, rather than increasing, "family time" or joint activity...