The Intimate and the Public in Asian and Global Perspectives. Leiden: Brill, 2021. xiii, 209 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$119.00, cloth. ISBN 9789004447479.
In the early 2000s, Japanese families were found to be at sea, caught between policy and programs on the one hand, and the on-the-ground realities of family life on the other. For several decades prior, journalistic and governmental warnings of an elder-heavy, baby-light population made for a problematique that often was laid at women’s feet: if women would only be less selfish and do their biological and social duty of having more children, Japan would be saved from a social welfare crisis; there would be enough children to enter the work force, increase the tax base for social programs, and support the elderly as cultural values indicated they should. What I called the “twenty-first century blues” in my work, Perfectly Japanese (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), was the result of a growing gap between the cultural ideal and the facts of late capitalist life in Japan.
But this was not a new story: the care of the elderly in post-war Japan was already a fraught issue. Yasujiro Ozu’s film, Tokyo Monogatari (1953) depicted an older couple, who, visiting each of their married children, found that they were wanted nowhere. Somewhat ironically, a non-blood relation, their widowed daughter-in-law, struggling to maintain herself in a low-paying job and living in a tiny apartment, gladly took them in. The film showed the emotional cost of aging in a changing society and the lack of a social safety net where previously none was said to be needed: the younger generation would of course take care of their parents. In the early 1950s, however, the narrative was not about too few children; the couple in the film had more than “enough” children—it was about a lack of filial piety, oyako-ko, that led to their selfish rejection of their parents.
In the present study, Yamato assembles interesting data on relationships between generations in families, focused on the geography of habitation. Using residence as a marker of caregiving, or at least of availability, Yamato sifts the data for ways of looking at the ways of relating, the intersects between generations. She is particularly interested in changes in patrilineality and the rise of alternative models for caregiving and for family itself. She maps residential location against historical and economic change, connecting to changing employment, changing gender roles, and family structure.
While social class is a variable of concern, the families under consideration here appear to be middle class, or at least, that is the reader’s assumption. It would be good to have the studies cited aligned by class, or at least have that context mentioned. “Individualized marriage,” the shift away from the assumption of a couple as a single unit—a main theme in this work—might depend on a woman’s earning ability, but also on the centrifugal effects of the draw of the workplace and the institutions of the world outside the family, the sources of value and identity for individuals shifting. Social and cultural-normative change have profound effects too, as the strength of the conserving, watchful seken, the semi-spoken neighbourhood social control, also weakens. Another variable of interest I believe would be region: Japan is far from a singular society or culture, and regional cultural variation might have influence on family practices. Further, though statistically less important, what happens when the eldest “son” is adopted, a mukooyoshi, as occurs when there is no biological male heir?
As Yamato notes, the key changes in care and relationships in general might be due to this individualization. A family is not a marriage-with-children, nor the sarariman model Ezra Vogel (Japan’s New Middle Class, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1963) described—made up of two units, the mother-children unit and the husband-worker unit. It is often separate people living together for support and convenience—and emotional bonding, of course—and thus behaviour and practices will depend much more on the realities of each person’s life, as well as his or her choices. Ochiai (The Japanese Family System in Transition: A Sociological Analysis of Family Change in Postwar Japan, Tokyo: LTCB International Library Foundation, 1997) discusses bilateralism in the Japanese family, with similar findings that caregiving and support are offered to both the parents of the wife and the parents of the husband. Ochiai points out however that the care itself is not divided often: bilateralism, while it tends to offer women more contact with their own parents than in the past, also demands more of them as caregiving tends to be done by women, especially physical and emotional care. Yamato points out that women are still the primary “kin-keepers.” Is this evidence of the persistence of patriarchal practices, if not patrilineal structures?
As the population shrinks, and the population of elders increases, caregiving concentrates on fewer people: there are few, or no, siblings with whom to share the care of parents. The problem, in China called the 4-2-1 issue, is the pressure on one or few children to care for two parents and four grandparents, without significant support from social services and governmental initiatives. Japan’s Golden Plan, put in place in 1989, which created more senior services and home helpers, emphasized keeping elders in family houses with their children, but it hasn’t gone far enough for many, as the much-publicized rate of elders dying alone has illumined the lack of a safety net for families.
This treatment of the data on changing relationships between married children and their parents is well and cleanly written, and offers methodological insights on collecting and analyzing data, commenting on variables and inclusions, as well as on important and changing storylines such as the declining marriage rate and its impact on intergenerational residence and care. The book offers suggestions on cross-cultural comparisons, but it would have been good as well to use internal, domestic regionalism as a comparative option.
With data as rich as is contained in this work it is tempting to explore the many possibilities for analysis beyond those included by the author, and it is also tempting to add voices, to ask for cases, studies, and illustrative family situations. Expanding the work beyond a synthetic treatment of collected data and studies, the book might have reached a wider audience and inspired more thought of the future of societies where, like Japan’s, the meaning of family and the responsibilities and pleasures of intergenerational connection are constantly changing.
Merry White
Boston University, Boston