Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies. London; New York: Routledge, 2015. xvi, 179 pp. US$145.00, cloth . ISBN 978-0-415-71765-6.
We can notice the continued centrality of family in contemporary Japan through any number of measures. From politicians’ rhetoric that links perceived threats to family risk, to omnipresent worries about Japan’s falling birth rates and its attendant problems, to deeply personal decisions about who to marry, when to divorce, and what children need to thrive, families remain a key symbol in contemporary Japan. This centrality seems to be reinforced through three interlocking platforms. First, as Carol Gluck and others have convincingly argued, the modern Japanese nation was created partially through the ideological force of “national family” (kazoku koka), when Meiji politicians built unity through constructed claims that all citizens should be figurative kin. Second, families matter in practice because, as in many other cultural contexts, Japanese people often understand their own families as vitally important in their own lives and they put tremendous resources into building, sustaining, and reformulating them. Third, and perhaps less visibly, families remain a key force of political economy because, throughout the postwar period, particular family structures worked in synergy with labour markets to create tremendous profit made by loyal salarymen who, in turn, required housewives to sustain them. Despite all this, academics and the Japanese public are still struggling to acknowledge, measure, and judge the particular shifts that have overtaken families in the last twenty years. In light of falling birth rates, later marriage, and shifting models for how romance should fit within nuclear or extended families, there are open questions about how family norms might be changing, and what implications such change might bring.
Within that context, Configurations of Family in Contemporary Japan, edited by Tomoko Aoyama, Laura Dales, and Romit Dasgupta, offers new examples and analysis of how family continues to matter. Because this analysis comes in chapters written within a range of disciplines and research methodologies, the volume enables the reader to trace how contested family norms might translate from, say, literature to television to people’s individual experiences. The book rightly pushes against any idea of a singular Japanese family and suggests the multi-vocal perspectives or positions within families that continue to tell us something broader about Japan. I understand a particular strength of this volume to be how such interdisciplinary work intersects with visual culture; many chapters, including those written by ethnographers, directly engage popular films or television. Therefore in addition to the convincing analysis included in the chapters, the collection offers a veritable “to watch” list for anyone interested in these themes.
After a brief introduction, the volume is divided into four sections, the first of which explores “Family and Companionship.” Romit Dasgupta analyzes two films, Tokyo Sonata and Hush! The former tells the story of mini disasters wrought in a middle-class family when the husband/father is laid off, while the second represents the tensions surrounding two men and one woman who contemplate building what might seem like a queer family. Laura Dales’ chapter analyzes how single women are represented in Japanese television dramas (dorama) compared with how actual single women understand themselves and their choices. Although she focuses on women, she convincingly argues that singlehood might be more problematic for men after a certain age. In a chapter exploring how LGBTI people plan for, and experience, older age, Leonie Stickland successfully tackles one of the most visible problems (aging society) within a diverse group often given less attention.
In the volume’s second section, “Old Age, Women, and Storytelling,” the chapters engage directly with literary and filmic representations of older women. Using lovely examples from manga, Tomoko Aoyama lays out a typology of how older women tend to be represented in Japanese fiction, from the fairy godmother, to the mountain witch (yamanba), or the “super-active and self-centered old woman” (55), to highlight slippages between young girls and older women that might offer representations of new social formations. Lucy Fraser’s chapter contrasts the Japanese folktale of “The Old Woman’s Skin” (Ubakawa), the 1986 British novel Howl’s Moving Castle, and the Studio Ghibli animated version of the same story released in 2004. Working in conjunction with the previous chapter, Fraser’s work argues that these iterations of similar tales demonstrate shifting anxieties about family life and aging, particularly for women.
The volume’s third section, “Contemporary Parenting,” includes two chapters suggesting that parenting might be both a hotbed of anxiety and a scapegoat for more generalized troubles. In her chapter, Tomoko Nakamatsu describes the vast difference between the ways Japanese-Brazilian parents are described in Brazil and Japan. In the former, they are often represented as model minorities who bring up highly successful children; in the latter, Brazilian-Japanese parents are instead represented as likely failing their own children and hurting society more generally. Kayoko Hashimoto’s chapter traces the power of discourse about “monster parents,” so-called because they make unreasonable demands of schools, teachers, and staff. She convincingly concludes that this discourse demonstrates a breakdown in respect between families and the education system.
The final section of the volume, “Transnational Families,” sheds needed light on the experiences of Japanese people abroad within the families they build. Leng Leng Thang and Mika Toyota explore Japanese women who have married and stayed in Bali. The women who marry and stay are usually women who aged out of the marriage market within Japan (not to say this is the reason they made such a choice) and now have to deal with the expectations put upon daughters-in-law in Balinese culture. In the next chapter, Sachiko Sone and Leng Leng Thang analyze Japanese women who make families in western Australia, describing such patterns as rendered more important in the years since 1999, a period in which more Japanese women than men have permanently left Japan (121). In his description of how Japanese migrants to Australia understand their own filial piety, Jared Denman finds a range of beliefs and practices but all suggest a continuing presence of the idea of the stem family (ie) system and the piety supposedly within it. The volume concludes with a powerful epilogue by Vera Mackie analyzing how families—and the discourse surrounding them—have changed in recent decades.
Overall this volume provides compelling literary and ethnographic examples for scholars interested in debates surrounding families in contemporary Japan. I imagine the analysis of media representations will be particularly helpful for those looking to get a sense of how people debate what families should be and why they continue to matter.
Allison Alexy
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
pp. 435-437