Japanese Boys and Men:
Are they different or
same? Cultural considerations.
Takeshi TAMURA, M.D.[1]
Outline
Japanese men in the historical context.
1. Militarism
before the Word War II
2. Post-war economic
growth in 1960-90.
3.
Post-bubble-economy era in 1990+
Gender role in the Japanese marriage.
Japanese men in the families
Traditional
men
New type of
men
Domestic violence
Toward the
parents
Toward the
children
Toward the
female partners
Solutions to the absent fathers
Japanese
men in the historical context.
1.
Militarism before the Word War II
The society was very hierarchical under the military regime. Chinese teaching of Confucianism was used as a framework of discipline that people had to obey. The senior male held an extreme power over the members of the family. The division of the labor between the genders was clearly defined; men to stay out of the family and to work for the family, women were expected to stay home and to do the household chores and child rearing.
Men were defined as a chief of the family, clearly stated in the civil law. Wives and children were expected to obey the men. The first son were expected to take over the leader role an inherit all the family properties, and other children (daughters and subsequent sons) were expected to leave the family of origin.
2. Post-war
economic growth in 1960-90.
The demand for productivity, time and loyalty was paramount from all employees, particularly men at the managerial positions. The gender pattern also remained clearly devided.. Men are supposed to work hard for the companies, staying late at night during the weekdays, and playing golf with work colleague on weekends to entertain their business partners.
As a result, mothers took on the major responsibility in child rearing, and maintained very close (often enmeshed) relationships with children not only in childhood years, but also in adolescents and young adults up to their twenties. On the other hand, the fathers remained the peripheral figure in the family, but were still expected to function as a head of the family.
3.
Post-bubble-economy era in 1990+
Japanese men realize the limit of the growth by facing collapse of the Japanese economy and end of the life-time employment system. They faced the lay off from their work, and have to struggle for alternative life style. Workplace cannot provide them with their fulfillment of life any more. Those men who decide to return to their family also face the resistance from the rest of the family. Absent fathers/husbands had lost their place in the families, and cannot intervene the too close mother-children relationships. They lost the work and family, and have no place to go.
Gender
role in the Japanese marriage.
Men gave permission to themselves to leave the house and devoted their lives to their work almost as if they were married to the company. Women and children were literally left home, and remain strongly bonded.
The most important relationship in the family is the cross generational relationship between the parent and the child. It is primarily between a mother and a child and the mother meeting the physical and psychological needs of the child. The Father-child relationship tends to be more distant, but still important for the succession of family leadership. It used to be the family's obligation to look after elderly people in the family. When the children are in their thirties or forties and their parents are in their fifties or sixties, their elderlies can still live on without any help. Since the children are busy working and raising their own children therefore the elderly parents can live separately. When the parents get old and weak and need to be looked after by others, they often decide to live together so that the younger generation can care for the parents or parents-in-law. This re-joining is very much a part of the Confucian teaching.
Japanese
men in the families
Traditional
men
From 1960s to the early 80s, Japanese comfortably believe that economic success was the top priority for men. Definition of masculinity then was measured primarily by their success in the workplace. Absent father was a sign of successful man. The mother has an unspoken responsibility of taking charge of everything in the family including child rearing. She may not feel supported by her husband, but it was regarded to be something they have to put up with.
The relationships with wives were rather distant. They spend small amount of time together. But they could trust each other, and believed they could understand each other without words, and without seeing each other a lot.
Their relationship with children was also distant. They spent so little time together, so the children could not hold a positive and intimate image of the absent father.
New
type of men
Most of the men that I encounter in family therapy appear to lost confidence and do not know how to take the role of husband/father in the family. He may try to be nice to the family and become friends to his children. As a result, he cannot excise any authority, and becomes over indulgent to the children. Or on the contrary, he may believe a father must be aggressive to be respected by the children, so he becomes abusive to the kids and rejected by his children and wife.
His wife may hold the image of the traditional family that wife/mother needs to be in charge of the family, and should not ask her husband for help. In this kind of family, the husband may try to be involved in child rearing, but his wife dominates the role. As a result, husband would gradually become peripheral after all. The Father's difficulty continues when the children grew to be adolescent. The children become rebellious and often the father's authority. It is a very difficult job for the father to set the right amount of limit with the growing adolescence.
Domestic
violence
Toward
the parents
The type of violence, which is unique in Japanese family, is the adolescent children beating up their parents. Many of them find reasons not to go to school in spite of the strong pressure for academic achievement. The children are so frustrated, not being able to socialize in school, and violently release their internal conflict to their parents (often mothers) whom they are most closely attached to.
Toward
the children
Child abuse has been regarded to be a rare phenomenon until the late 1980s (Ikeda, 1982). The abused cases were well kept under the carpet. The professionals in child guidance center could not manage the case properly because of the strong parental rights guaranteed by the civil law. Things had started to change in 1991 when volunteer groups in Osaka and Tokyo set up children’s emergency telephone line for abuse victims. It came out very interestingly that the most frequent callers were not the abused children nor the third parties, but the perpetrator who is seeking help for themselves. They were typically housewives from intact families, whose husbands worked very hard and offer very little help in raising their child (Tamura, 1993). They were very isolated, and often being traumatized in childhood by their parents. Number of abused cases reported to the child guidance center has drastically increased in the last ten years. A new child protection law was introduced in 2000, which made professionals like social workers and police easier to intervene in such abuses.
Toward
the female partners
Domestic violence, in the narrow sense, came to the public’s attention in the last five years. Social support for battered women like shelters and feminist counseling service had been set up by governmental and non-governmental groups. Support groups for women had been started, as well as abusing men’s group. The increased in domestic violence seems to have to do with the economic depression that Japan is going through.
The Law for the Prevention of Spousal Violence and the Protection of Victims was enacted in 2001. The main focus of the law is the enforcement of the protection order for the battered women against the perpetrator. The direct measure of prosecuting the violent men are incomplete. According to the survey on DV in Tokyo in 1997, one of three women experienced some violence by the partner.
Survey of the incident of the violence by the Japanese Government in 2000.
4.6% of the women had experienced life threatening violence.
4.0% of the women had experienced violence which require medical treatment
14.1% of the women had experienced violence which do not require medical treatment
14.8% of the women had been forced sexual activities against their will.
5.3% of the women had been forced to view pornographic video/magazine against their will
17.3% of the women had been verbally and physically ignored
15.9% of the women had experienced verbal attacks, such us “You live off my earings!!”
45.3% of the women had been yelled at with a loud voice.
Solutions
to the absent fathers
It is very difficult to engage the peripheral fathers into the family therapy session. They tend to be absent not only from family life, but also from therapy as well. They are not included in a problem resolving system. In other words, once the system has changed its configuration and the father is invited, the family problem seems to resolve automatically. At time, the wife herself would resent the father’s involvement. His involvement could confuse her role. If the father is involved, she has to minimize her role as the primary care giver with the child and this can be stress for her. The question is, why need the father now? It is certainly a hard task having to share her power with her partner. For the housewife who stays home all the time, her children are the only objects she can exercise her power.
Therapist needs to understand the structure of the Japanese family without a father. Men do not come to the therapy just because they are busy working or because of their immature personalities. It is the characteristics of the system that fathers are excluded to solve the family problem. Family members often would invalidate any action of the therapist to include the father in therapy. Therapists have to bear this in mind; otherwise they would misunderstand the reason why men do not come attend therapy.
References
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[1] Adolescent Psychiatrist and Family Therapist. Associate Professor at Tokyo Gakugei University, and privately practicing in Tokyo. His works include;
1) Applicability of family therapy to Japanese families (Family Process 31(4):319-340, 1992), which came from his experience of living in the U.S. as an adolescent (AFS exchange student to Granite Falls, N.C., and my three year training at the Institute of Family Therapy in London and Birkbeck College, University of London.;
2) Gender issue from men’s perspective; i.e. how to engage peripheral and absent father/husband into the therapy sessions, supporting violent men in the families, and Japanese cultural context and men’s lives.
His office address is 4-1-1 Nukuikita-machi, Koganei 184-8501, Tokyo, Japan. His e-mail address is tam@u-gakugei.ac.jp. This paper had presented on his web site: http://www.u-gakugei.ac.jp/~tam/