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“Gender Inequality and Family Formation in Japan”

“The past is never dead, it’s not even past.”

--William Faulkner, “Requiem for a Nun”

Introduction

Institutional studies are increasingly coming to acknowledge their inability to account

for the particular pattern of deep gender inequality which persists in Japan despite a number of

factors such as women’s increasing completion of four-year college degrees and national

legislation designed to advance gender equality, which elsewhere do predict and promote rising

equality (Estévez-Abe 2013; Nemoto 2016; Youm and Yamaguchi 2016). Nemoto (2016:3)

concludes that gender inequality in Japan “continues to be seen as legitimate.” The way

Japanese culture forms families, ie, continues to legitimize gender inequality in a way that now

catches women in a moderately-high-level status trap from which there is no easy escape for

those who might wish to do so. By this I mean, on the one hand Japanese women rank among

the highest in the world in personal autonomy, financial security, physical safety, education,

health care, low infant mortality and high life expectancy. On the other hand, however, they

remain ranked near the very bottom – 104 in 2014 -- of the world’s wealthy nations in gender

equality measured as participation, especially at higher levels, in political, economic and public

life broadly, according to data used in international comparisons such as the UN’s Gender

Inequality Index, Social Watch’s Gender Equity Index, and the World Economic Forum’s

Gender Gap Index (Assman 2014). These two dramatically different rankings in international

comparisons both result from the same pattern of family formation.

The way Japanese form ie, which historically raised women’s autonomy to a remarkable

degree and today continues to frame Japan’s deepest values and commitments, now restrains

women’s ambitions for opportunity to rise in the wider world, as promised by Japan’s

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constitution. The present paper focuses on the implications of the internal dynamics of Japanese

family formation for gender inequality rather than the backgrounds and subjectivities of women

who feel constrained by this conundrum.

Japanese families, ie, subsist in perpetuity. In each generation the household head retires

while still in his prime, passing authority over the family estate to his successor, routinely his

eldest son. Distinguishing the eldest son from the other children in the family remains

fundamental in Japan. The eldest son and his wife continue the ie into which he was born. The ie

holds only one married couple in each generation: in time the successor’s new bride becomes the

household head’s wife. Daughters go to live with their husbands when they marry unless her

husband, necessarily a “second son,” joins her in her parents’ home. “Second sons” (all sons

after the first) must leave the ie of their birth to continue or begin a family through marriage

elsewhere. The koseki (family registry) system continues to conserve and enforce these

distinctions officially (Mackie 2014).

Japan has never formed joint families, the family pattern of India and China and so many

other cultures, in which a generation of married brothers lives under their father’s roof and

authority until they divide the family estate more or less equally among themselves following his

death. As Fukutake (1972, 55) observes so nonchalantly in his discussion of changing rural

family life in the postwar years, “One no longer finds, for example, that younger sons are kept at

home to provide labor until such time as a bride should be recruited into the family for the eldest

son.” Nor, as in societies such as the US with conjugal, non-perpetuating families, does each

marriage in Japan necessarily begin a new family. As Senda (2013) expresses this reality, “The

idea that a married couple might enjoy a simple life together has never taken root in Japan.”

The possibility of second sons’ demands for a share in the family estate is a recognized

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obstacle to an ie’s success and continuity. The early retirement on behalf of his successor by the

household head while still in his prime creates a sufficiently daunting barrier to claims by second

sons, long since having departed the family, at the time of the retired household head’s death.

The significant autonomy and ability of the successor’s wife to care for this narrow stem family

on her own is understood as necessary and sufficient. Thus, while stem family dynamics make

women as wives and especially mothers more important for the continuity and prosperity of the

ie than some men – second sons - but not as important as others – household heads, it remains

almost impossible for wives to justify the pursuit of a career or any other public activity that

parallels typical male activities outside the home. With all the vast variation found in Japan

since the mid-19th century, regionally, by class and status, and through two periods of tumultuous

change, this much remains constant in Japanese family life.

Method

In recent decades, a great deal of research has examined Japanese domestic life, in

particular those changes associated with urbanization, industrialization and modernization, and

since the 1990s, changes brought on as effects of Japan’s prolonged economic transformation.

Low fertility and rapid aging in the national population have most recently given these studies a

special urgency. Three lens which we may call Crisis, Transition and Tradition, are available for

such research, but to inquire into questions of value and legitimacy, how people think they and

each other ought to behave, Crisis and Transition suffer methodological shortcomings which

prevent them from successfully tackling the problem of persistent gender inequality.

The lens of Crisis, a way of looking at the metonymous Family to see the condition of

Japanese domestic life broadly, begins with data on aging, reproduction, education, employment

and gender equity, linking the private activity of reproduction and domesticity to the public

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record of population through national data collections. Japan’s population is not increasing at

the rate of replacement and it is aging more rapidly than that of any other nation. How to reverse

population decline and live with the consequences of rapid aging, how to manage reproduction,

gender equity and labor force requirements in the era of aging and shrinking population, even as

rapid economic growth has ceased, present profound challenges to Japan’s policy makers and

their media allies. This conception of family – the relation of domestic practices to

governmentality – does not have a conventional covering concept, does not have a cultural form,

even while the word kazoku is customarily used in the press and census data metonymically.

As a consequence of this conceptual vacuum, the Japanese population necessarily appears

through this lens to be heading to chaos and ultimately, extirpation. For example, Ochia (1997,

159) notes that as social scientists have tried to predict the upper and lower range at which the

declining number of nuclear family households will finally stabilize, “both they and the

government are currently becoming very nervous, because this will determine the number of

people who will live alone in their old age.” Castro-Vázquez (2017, 48) captures this outlook

elegantly with the phrase “prevalent tendencies toward childlessness.” A study done by the

United Nations on the consequences of a declining fertility rate notes that the measured birth rate

has stayed below the replacement level since the mid-1970s and was expected to come close to

zero by 2005 (Bongaarts 1998, 419). We see now this did not happen and it is worth asking why

not. It is worth asking as well why Japan has “always” been a low-birthrate society (Koeplin

2002; Mosk 1978). But there is no cultural foundation for an expectation that Japan’s population

will vanish for want of an interest in reproduction among its husbands and wives.

In so far, then, as gender is what culture makes of the fact of sex, an expectation of a

“gender-free society” in which “women and men not constrained by socially and culturally

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formed distinctions . . . will jointly participate on the basis of their individual character” (Osawa

2005, 162) suffers this same methodological defect. Goldstein-Gidoni (2012, 196-97) identifies

with surgical precision the intersection of attitudes linking the conservative policies of the State

in the areas of gender and reproduction today, and the use of status competition to drive mass

circulation magazines for women, to show that “the policies advanced to promote gender

equality since the 1990s have been in fact pronatal policies more than a product of a genuine

attempt to produce a gender-equal society.” It is noteworthy how fully these policies continue to

fail: in Japan pronatal policies are neither conservative nor compatible with contemporary

society. She continues, “Women’s reluctance to cooperate may well be related to this same

weak understanding of gender relations and more specifically to a profound aversion [by] the

State … to create a real change in the basic structure of gender relations” (Goldstein-Gidoni

2012, 197). But perhaps the crisis is not as dire as it can be made to appear.

Transition, the second lens, suffers a different shortcoming as a means of tackling this

problem of the moderately-high-level status trap in which some women today feel caught. This

orientation leans heavily on analysis of national statistics to show that the family is changing

from something (ie) to something else (especially kaku kazoku, nuclear family) by looking at

reductions in household size, age at first marriage, shifts from three generation extended family

living to two generation households, and to the growing number of one generation and even

single person households across the population in aggregate and in ethnographic detail (Ronald

and Alexy 2011; Traphagan and Hashimoto 2008). Kumagai (2008, 11) captures this view with

precision: “If the predominance of the nuclear family is one of the essential features of the

modern institution, then the Japanese family is not an exception.” Seen from this perspective, as

such changes proceed there will be fewer and fewer ie in Japan and more and more different

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kinds of families, especially nuclear families, and more and more people living even entirely

family-less lives. But focus on apparent statistical trends and census categories can never reveal

the cultural forms through which people live their lives. The concept kaku kazoku has no

cultural content whatsoever, anywhere, and so presents itself to reformers as open to anything

that is not ie, most specifically and desirably an absence of traditional authority relations and

gender role relations. And yet even while the number of nuclear households has steadily

increased, gender inequality has not diminished proportionately.

While anchoring itself in the traditional ie, the Transition lens frequently elides the

distinction between family as ie and kazoku, and household, the living members of the family

gathered under one roof, the fundamental census category, to demonstrate and measure changes

in family form. The structure of ie, however, has always permitted a wide variety of

arrangements within households and households of many sizes with one certain exclusion, that of

married brothers remaining under their father’s roof. The ostensibly matrilineal and matrilocal

gasshoku zukuri households of Shirakawa Village in the sericulture region of Gifu Prefecture

provide an astonishing example of the extent of ie’s possible and permissible permutations, here

achieved simply by not releasing brides to co-reside with their husbands. Within the broad range

of possibilities ie affords, brides who have mothers in law living with them have always wished

for greater autonomy and over time, gotten it. But the iconic three generation extended

household is not a synonym for ie, only one more contingent possibility.

To think that ie as a form of domestic life is being replaced by a different kind of family

with a different way of life, a two-generation family resembling the conjugal, non-perpetuating

families of Europe and North America, designated by the census category “nuclear family,” is a

serious conceptual error. Kazoku, the Japanese view of the living family, does not turn into kaku

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kazoku when an ie comprises for the moment only one couple and their dependent children. Nor

is one ie transformed into two kaku kazoku when the younger couple moves into a separate

residence with their children except in the eyes of census-takers. Nor does a household of one

couple cease being an ie when one of the pair outlives the other. This methodological slight-of-

hand turns a way of talking about Japanese family, kazoku, into a statistical census category,

kaku kazoku, into a cultural form characterized by nothing more than the lack of three co-

residing generations, fostering the illusion that there are cultures in the world which actually live

their domestic lives through this latter form. There are not. Americans themselves do not live in

nuclear families, they live in families. That more and more Japanese are living in two generation

households of wife and husband and one or more dependent children does not mean that fewer

people are living as ie. Yet while ie is nothing special, it is something very specific.

The concept “nuclear family,” kaku kazoku in Japanese, so frequently used to describe

adult-child two-generation households, must now be understood as entirely inadequate to

recognize the distinction between a conjugal family and a perpetuating family regardless of

whether that family lives in an extended domestic arrangement or otherwise, based as this

concept is on an Edenic/architectural mixed metaphor in which the building blocks of individual

males and females, one each, somehow come together to form families, the children of which

scatter to find one another and begin families of their own. Rather than suppose this imagined

couple and all the many others exactly like it somehow come together to form locally

characteristic varieties of communities, all of which themselves come together as well to form

various respective societies, more useful methodologically is to begin with a population able to

reproduce itself in a habitat and which differentiates itself internally to do so. We can then

examine the simultaneous formation at different levels of many different social patterns in this

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environment. By removing the unique, isolated, ur-couple from the Garden of Eden to locate

them in an always-evolving reproductive population, we see as well the incapacity of the concept

‘nuclear family’ to serve as the privileged basis for comparative scientific analysis.

The third lens, Tradition, thru which Japan’s domestic arrangements are viewed in the

present article, uses the concept ie to examine domestic life in Japan in its historic setting. Ie is

the family in its dimension of longest time, rather than a simple snap-shot of the people under

one roof at one moment or the people living as a family over some period of years. As White

(2002, 7) has emphasized, “one of the sources of durability of the traditional Japanese model of

the family… is its flexibility.” Kumagai (2008, 11) credits Nasu (1962) with the concept

“modified stem family” to capture “the persistence and continuity of the traditional stem family

throughout the life course of each individual,” the methodological stance Kumagai herself

advocates.

The ie comprises a small number of highly specific features, namely not more than one

co-residing married couple in each generation, perpetuity and an estate. Its members reproduce

their ie over time by identifying a successor, arranging a marriage, and expelling second sons.

Ie, the symbol of family rooted in history, provides legitimacy for individual behavior in

domestic and public life by allowing and more strongly, requiring, its members to justify their

behavior as contributions to the continuing prosperity of their ie, even in occupations regarded as

disreputable (Gordon, 185). There has been no transition from ie to kazoku; kazoku is not more

modern than ie; ie and kazoku are simply words for different ways of looking at private life in

Japan between which speakers choose when thinking of family in its dimension of deep time, or

thinking of family as the current members of the household. The link from here back to

governmentality, however, reveals that Japan has long been a low population-growth nation

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which finds fundamental legitimacy in the perduring stem family, the ie. The ie is not

disappearing, not even changing radically, but is, as it has been for centuries, being used as a

form for the cultural knowledge people need to live the domestic aspects of their daily lives. The

difficulty, for policy makers, is that the while the ie remains the source of both knowledge and

value the vast majority of people use to guide their personal lives, one of the three fundamental

principles of ie perpetuation requires the exclusion of second sons, an action made easier by the

absence of second sons to begin with. Again, Japan has always been a low-population growth

society, the period of demographic transition to modern society notwithstanding.

Japanese Gender

The paradigmatic structure of Japanese gender relations arising from these domestic

arrangements has long been Male : Female :: Public : Private (Senda 2010). With

modernization, industrialization and urbanization, this paradigm was extended in the 20th century

to Male : Female :: Public : Private :: Breadwinner : Housewife (Macnaughtan 2015), and

which paradigm continues “from the late 1990s to the 2000s…largely unchanged” (Nemoto

2016, 43). This extension fostered the culturally interesting development of the sengyō shufu,

the “professional housewife” of the post-World War II era (Vogel 1978; Hendry 1993; Shoji

2014) The concept ‘professionalism’ in this context identifies a uniquely high degree of skill in

combination with the equally high degree of autonomy needed to exercise that skill responsibly

and successfully.

Nemoto (2016, 44) observes that “the full-time homemaker continues to earn more

cultural respect in Japan than in the United States.” Understanding why the identity ‘professional

housewife’ rather than the more casual ‘stay-at-home mom’ emerged and persists in Japan lets us

evaluate such phenomena as the weak resistance to the persistence of large firms in hiring only

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men into permanent positions (Ochiai 1997), the continuation of tax policies known by the

colorful name “Hyakumanen Kabe” (Million Yen Wall) that separate household incomes

between primary and secondary earners in ways that reinforce strongly gendered employment

practices and patterns (Kawamoto 1993; Japan Times 2014 ) , and the convoluted crisis of too few

children, along with continuing daycare and childcare shortages (Japan Times 2016 a ) even as

parents refuse to consider baby sitters (Japan Times 2016b). The appeal of this stable

formulation of division of labor by gender runs deep: in recent national polling, the percentage of

respondents in their twenties expressing agreement with the statement “The husband should

work outside and the wife should take care of the home” climbed back to over 50% in 2013

(Honda 2013).

Taking care of the home means, essentially, taking care of children. Childcare remains

the professional housewife’s fundamental work. Her remunerated work outside the home

buttresses her childrearing. Writing on the possibility of change in Japanese family life

tomorrow, Senda (2013) documents Japanese families’ remarkably conservative nature today:

two percent of Japanese children are born out of wedlock, compared to 50% in France and

northern Europe and 40% in the United States. There remains great hostility in Japanese society

toward unmarried women having children, to women not marrying, and to women not having

children after marrying. Senda continues:

In reality very few married couples in Japan chose to forego having children. Having

children is perhaps the only privilege that marriage itself can confer. For most couples in

Japan, it seems, having children is the primary reason or impetus for entering wedlock.

All of Roberts’s interviewees expected themselves to marry and have children: “In Japan,

marriage and childrearing still largely go hand in hand” (Roberts 2016, vi). So why do couples

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http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/04/17/national/social-issues/baby-sitter-option-gains-little-traction-amid-parental-reluctance/#.VyEd0_krKHs

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/04/17/national/day-care-crisis-stuck-vicious-cycle/#.VyEddfkrKHs

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/05/26/reference/spousal-tax-break-targeted-get-wives-house/#.VgmvrMtVhBc


have the families they do? When virtually everyone who can does marry, and the only reason

they marry is to have children, and everyone who marries does have children, and broad public

opinion wants families to have more children, couples currently do not average even 1.5 children

before completing their family. At this moment, Japan’s policy makers are asking should wives

work more, or have more children, or, why not just both? Although Japanese men and women

are living longer and longer, and virtually all children born in Japan are wanted and live beyond

age five, Japan’s population continues to shrink more rapidly than that of any other nation. All

Japanese understand this as a serious national problem. Japan’s gender paradigm is not hidden,

but conscious, explicit and utterly banal.

Japanese gender relations remain deeply patriarchal and unequal, and yet do create

significant personal autonomy and financial security for women, even to the extent of exclusive

management of family finances “and their husband’s entire income” (Nemoto 2016, 42), which

always seems to impress Americans so much. Put concretely, in a social system in which

“Husbands turn over their salaries intact to their wives, and wives dispense them a monthly

allowance” (Iwao 1993, 85) even in this age of direct deposit, the status of women has not led to

fuller participation in public life, but remains sharply limited. The high levels of personal

autonomy and responsibility that have pushed Japanese wives to remarkably high levels of

personal accomplishment are not something new, or something women ever won from men, or

something men once delegated or awarded to women, they simply arose and continue to arise

from the ways Japanese families evolved over the centuries and into the present, without anyone

ever taking particular notice. Wood (2012, 83) echoes the currently conventional account of this

process:

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Although it sounds old-fashioned to say so, it is still true in Ogata-mura that once a

woman who has married into a farming household produces and raises some children

– especially a boy – and also begins helping with the agricultural work in earnest

(i.e. making a concrete economic contribution), she can start to assert her

independence.

‘Autonomy’ is preferable to ‘independence’ here (Schlegel 1972). Japanese women are

not valued more and do not earn more independence than women in some cultures and less than

women in other cultures because they work harder and bear more or fewer children. Nor do

wives gain increased independence, freedom or autonomy by persistent successful assertion of

individual rights or personal desires against the resistance of their husbands and his parents. The

process Wood describes is rather that through which wives grow into, accept, and discharge their

increasing responsibility for the success and prosperity of the ie into which they have married.

According to a survey of urban women over 40 associated with the consumer cooperative

Seikatsu Club, the overwhelming reason given for working outside the home was to create ikigai,

“a purpose in life,” followed by “help out with the family budget,” and “revive my experience.”

Keizaiteki jiritsu, “economic independence,” was more popular only than “make better use of my

leisure time” (Sumitani 2000, 54). If the “independence” to which Wood refers above is not

“economic independence,” it does not seem to differ from the widely-recognized autonomy

necessary to the fulfillment of her role as the successor’s, and then household head’s, wife.

But now this process which has provided women the autonomy they need to fulfill their

family responsibilities successfully seems to be holding women back from further

accomplishment outside the household. Following Japan’s economic recovery after WWII and

the promulgation of its postwar constitution guaranteeing gender equality, relations between men

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and women began to be discussed publicly as a power struggle, a question of who had the upper

hand in the battle of the sexes, but debated in a way that prevents clear resolution. This public

discourse contributes to the preservation of gender inequality by successfully obscuring the

origins and nature of Japan’s glass ceiling (Youm and Yamaguchi 2016; Nemoto 2016). In her

ethnography of a Japanese bank and its women employees, Ogasawara formulated the problem

as one of getting at the facts, observing that “the Japanese public often claims that once you look

beyond the immediately observable, you see that women have the real power over men” (1998,

3). She asks, “Are Japanese women oppressed, or not? Are they powerless, or powerful?”

(Ogasawara 1998, 2). Vogel (Vogel and Vogel 2013, 1) faced this same question from a

somewhat different angle: “Would YOU want to be a Japanese housewife?!?” This was the

question “some Japanese feminists shot at her” at a 1978 symposium in Tokyo where she

presented her classic paper on sengyō shufu. And she too wrestled “over the years” with the

conflicting images of strong and intelligent women confidently guiding their families, and weak,

pitiful women confined to domestic servitude under their husbands and mothers-in-law.

“”Which was more true, I wondered”” (Vogel and Vogel 2013, 1). The next question must then

ask, why are the complications of gender status in Japan simplified in public discourse as the

results of a competition for domination that women might already have won?

Ie-logic and Japanese Gender

What makes a family an ie? The explanation for Japan’s persistent gender inequality I

develop here understands Japanese gender relations as a result of complex historical processes

centering on the continuing evolution of the ie, rather than the sort of endless abstract status

competition Ogasawara questions, which locks men and women into a perpetual battle of the

sexes that women are asserted to even be winning. The following features prominently

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characterize the Japanese ie: ie are perpetual, corporate, stem, bilateral, contingently extended

patrilocal families with impartible inheritance and household head retirement (in his prime

following his successor’s marriage) to secure transmission of the ie estate to his heir and

successor free of later claims by second sons.

For the prosperity and continuity of their ie in each generation, current members are

assigned, and take, responsibility to their ancestors for those member generations yet unborn.

These features collectively distinguishing ie are examined sequentially.

1) The ie is invariably stem rather than joint or conjugal (Johnson 1964), always forming

a household with one and only one married couple in each generation (Saito 2000, 19). “All [the

successor’s] siblings eventually leave the household and ultimately lose their membership in its

stem family” (Brown 1968, 114). The shedding of those male children known as “second sons”

lies at the core of family continuity in Japan and is just as important as finding an heir and

successor.

2) The ie has historically formed extended households when possible or necessary,

typically reaching three generations, rather than simply conjugal households. Members of an ie

need not live in a multi-generation household to be perpetual, however. We cannot expect to see

three living generations, or two, or necessarily even one in every ie when we look at any single

moment as a snapshot in the course of the domestic cycle of reproduction, especially beneath a

single roof. An ie may subsist for at least a brief interval with no living members, to be saved

from the brink of extirpation, revived and repopulated by the living. Indeed, ie comprising just

two living generations, parents and dependent children and appearing so like American families

(conjugal, stem, neolocal), are and always have been common. These are not “American”

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families, but ie with few living members. Whether a household is extended or not must not be

mistaken for an index of whether that family is perpetuating or not.

3) Ie are typically patrilocal , the new bride joining her husband and his parents at his

home. In this matter too, however, ie are flexible to a substantial degree. We can find

historically and at present households headed by women over the generations, prominent among

households of geisha and commonly among households making a living in the hospitality

industry centering on inns and bars known inclusively as mizu shōbai (“the water trade”). These

ie are matrilocal, and matriarchal, but like all ie, their kinship relations remain bilateral, and are

not matrilineal. The famous gassho zukuri houses of Shirakawa village contained few or no

married couples, mainly just brothers and sisters and sisters’ children. Household heads here

postponed indefinitely the release of brides to their husbands’ homes to retain their skilled labor.

The post-marital residence practices of second sons are necessarily neolocal when the

new couple does not live with her parents.

4) The descent relations of the ie are bilateral (Brown 1966), not patrilineal (Suenari

1972); they have not been and are not becoming matrilineal. Japanese descent has always been

bilateral, at least as far and as far back as we can infer from linguistic data (Smith 1962a, 1962b).

Ie are household-centered, not unilineal domestic arrangements concerned with the descent of

individuals.

5) Ie are corporate . This concept combines a pair of related features. First, the ie has

property, both intellectual and material, which serves as the basis for its members’ livelihood and

family identity. This property belongs to the ie and is administered by the household head. The

property of the ie is not the personal property of the household head, although current law

requires him to register as the owner of the ie’s material estate. This results in a stock phrase in

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English translation requiring two words, “heir and successor,” to cover the Japanese fact that one

person only is always identified as atotsugi. Kenkyusha’s J-E Dictionary translates the Japanese

“Ano hito ni wa, atotsugi ga nai” as “He has no heir to succeed him.” Anglo-American culture

routinely associates inheritance with property and succession with office; and the two are

customarily separable. The office of household head and the estate the household head

administers are both aspects of the ie, two sides of the same coin, which connect it to the political

economy of the wider society.

Second, the corporate ie subsists in perpetuity: each next household head will pass his

office and the ie’s property – material and intellectual -- to his own heir and successor. The ie’s

most profoundly characteristic intellectual property is access to the support of its no longer living

members, its senzo, ‘ancestors’ in English. Plath (1964) clarifies for us that these no longer

living members are not all forebears, but simply dead members of the ie, to include even people

who have not reproduced. And since the mid-17th century, the dead of all ie have been attended

and their suffering diminished through Buddhist rites, which gradually transform the recently

dead into the Buddha. This intellectual property is materialized in the home by a cupboard in

which are memorialized the names of deceased members of the ie. Only ie with deceased

members have these cupboards, butsudan. Households of persons who are not atotsugi do not

have butsudan until someone in that household dies (Smith 1974, 89). That a household formed

by a second son does not contain a butsudan does not mean that he is not a devout or

conventional Buddhist or that he does not honor the ancestors of his older brother’s ie (Reader

1995) any more than the fact that when only he, his wife and two children co-reside, they turn

into a Euro-American family rather than remain a small ie in which no one in the senior

generation has yet died.

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The as-yet-unborn too are members of the ie (Hendry 1995, 24-25).

Ie, Retirement, Succession and Inheritance

The Japanese conception of retirement, captured traditionally in the term ‘inkyo’ (abdication

of the headship of a family) but replaced in the modern era by the sociological term ‘taishoku’

(withdrawal from an occupation) and by the term in colloquial use today, ‘teinen’ (fixed year or age

limit), evolved from complex considerations of age and inheritance in perduring families. Unlike

other Asian cultures such as, especially, China and India, whose conceptions of patrilineal descent

expect the several co-resident sons of the joint family to divide its estate more or less equally among

themselves following the death of the paterfamilias who does not retire, Japanese inheritance

practice holds the family property undivided for the household head’s lone heir and successor.

Smith (1977, 134) concludes, “Had more than one son stayed home and married, this rule of

impartible inheritance would have been difficult to enforce, since after the father’s death the pressure

to divide the property would have been intense.” Second sons were entitled to no share in the family

estate whatsoever. In her close discussion of the inkyo system Nakane (1967, 11-16) records

retirements of household heads in agricultural households from “while still in his forties” to age 60.

A ceremony for men at age 60 (kanreki) continues to return them to cultural infancy.

Families whose prosperity depends significantly on the personal capacity of the household

head continue to prefer a highly capable adopted son-in-law over an incompetent natural son as

successor and heir. The Economist (April 16, 2013) presents the issue of adoption in a comparative

light, observing that of the world’s nations, adoption rates are highest in the US and in Japan, but

while virtually all adoptions in the US are young children, over 98% of Japanese adoptions in 2009

were adult men in their 20s and 30s, almost 90,000 adoptees, up from just under 80,000 in 2000.

While there are almost no young children to adopt in Japan, in any event “adopting a minor does not

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seem to have an accredited place in Japanese society” (Castro-Vázquez 2017, 134). The Economist

suggests that Japan’s falling birthrate has decreased the pool of suitably talented natural sons to be

named atotsugi, but if so, this has been the case in Japan a very long time. Gordon (2003, 29) notes

the connection between slow population growth and infanticide between 1720 and 1860: “At least in

some villages, evidence of infanticide is stronger for the wealthier farmers. It may have been a form

of family planning taken not only by the poorest to avoid starvation but also by successful farmers to

prevent numerous offspring from carving a stable homestead into tiny units that could not support a

family.” Fukutake (1972, 54) too rehearses this explanation. Why has this logic appealed to

Japanese, but not Chinese or Indians, who found other solutions to this problem?

These practices resulted in a low-birthrate nation, a nation of owner-farmers rather than

numerous landless laborers and a few large landholders; and few second sons. Continuing this low

birthrate pattern into the present, 88% of husbands were first sons in North’s recent sample of

households, somewhat more than but consistent with the figure of 70% of all men born first sons

after 1964 (North 2009, 27), There has never been a reason at all to have more than one child in an

ie (although population size did increase significantly during the period of industrialization/

demographic transition, and again slightly during Japan’s brief “baby boom,” 1947 - 1949) and no

reason at all to think that economic modernization – the transition from a productive household

estate to paid labor– would dissolve the ie, would cause people to stop thinking with ie socio-logic

and begin to think with the logic of Anglo-American families, which itself preceded industrial

capitalism by several centuries. Japan’s military caste did not live by family wealth but by their

hereditary status as a ruling class. Merchant families have been wealthy. But ie-logic requires a

successor, one and only one successor, when there is much and when there is little to nothing much

to inherit on the material side. As just one example, Japanese cemeteries require proof of a

18


successor before they will sell a family a plot for a gravestone, because maintenance of the grave is

the responsibility of the successor, not the cemetery.

This pattern of focusing on the importance of an heir and successor appeared in sometimes

unexpected areas during Japan’s period of modernization (1868-1912). As one instance, when Japan

began to develop science departments in its new European-model universities, accusations of

nepotism were aroused, with professors’ sons-in-law often found as their associate professors and

successors. The Japanese selection process was misunderstood, however. Bartholomew (1989, 176)

writes, “Were the principles of scientific universalism really compromised by personal connections?

Not, it would seem, if examination scores had the importance that the evidence implies. When a

young scientist had to pass an examination to qualify for an academic marriage, it seems that

achievement was controlling ascription, not ascription achievement.”

Today families routinely subvert those provisions of the Civil Code implementing Article 24

of the Constitution, written by the Allied Occupation following WWII to undermine the Japanese

family system, including impartible inheritance, understood then as a major prop of militant

imperialism. Hendry (1987, 36) observes that, “Despite the new law that inheritance should be

divided equally between all children, family land or property can often not stand division, and non-

inheriting children will sign away their rights for the sake of the ie, if one of their number agrees to

take on the responsibility for the family home.” How, after all, does this differ from previous

practice, apart from documenting the explicit recognition of the non-inheriting children? The offices

of household head and successor were not banned, even while the family estate was targeted. Again,

why should second sons accept this rationale for being excluded from, or now renouncing, an

inheritance, which was never convincing in India or China? But this premise is a central component

of ie socio-logic. Sugimoto (1997, 11) writes just as casually a decade after Hendry, taking the

19


matter for granted that “Unlike company employees, professionals and managers, small independent

proprietors frequently hand over their family businesses to one [emphasis added] of their children.”

Mehrotra et al. (2013) recently find further not only that inherited family control is still common in

Japanese business, but that family firms are “puzzlingly competitive,” outperforming otherwise

similar professionally managed companies. “These results are highly robust and…suggest family

control ‘causes’ good performance rather than the converse” (Economist 2013). And this is not just

“family control,” but control by one heir and successor, other places being found for any other

children. In such a situation, a capable adopted son-in-law (mukōyōshi) may be preferred as atotsugi

to a less capable natural son. How then shall we reconcile the current legal facts of individual

ownership of all property and the abolition of ie property, with the requirement that all children are

entitled to an equal share of ie property, yet which they can sign away with the promise by the

atotsugi that he care for their parents?

Wives and Husbands

The ie and its gender relations are not timeless or absolute, but a way of living that can be

and has been adjusted and modified with changing times and conditions. While samurai

displayed their status superiority over wealthier merchants by showing disdain for money in the

pre-modern social hierarchy, the transformation of the political economy in the Meiji era (1868-

1912) cast money in a new light. The modern role of housewife becomes recognizable with the

emergence of a white-collar class in the late 19th century. Uno (1991, 19) finds that the modern

conception of womanhood emerged with a division of labor that "can be traced to the turn of the

[19th] century, ... in the households of public officials, professors, teachers, journalists, engineers

and white-collar workers, members of an elite who shaped public culture through their roles in

policymaking, education, and the media." Many of these men, the Meiji modernizers, were

20


themselves second sons. The ryōsai kenbo (‘good wife, wise mother’) role of women, with its

focus on division of labor as the proper relationship between husband and wife, seems from the

perspective of the present age merest boiler-plate Confucianism. It is in fact a modernist

construct appearing first in Japan late in the nineteenth century, arising principally from the

influence of European ideas about women. Young Japanese women of the time, many

themselves wives of second sons, embraced this formulation as a contribution they could make

to modernization and nation-state building (Koyama 2013).

An historical structural explanation for an historical structural problem holds more

attraction at every level than explanations centering on turning points in a perpetual battle of the

sexes. Imamura (1987, 83) suggests that, arising from Meiji precedents, “The freedom of the

housewife should be judged less in terms of money, therefore, and more in the light of her

greater responsibility to manage the household, including finances, by herself and her husband’s

expectations that she will be able to manage with what he can provide.” But still, why is she

expected to manage the household by herself? Why does she have this responsibility?

Ultimately women’s relatively high status in terms of responsibility, capability and personal

autonomy in Japan, and their relatively low level of gender equality compared to women of other

wealthy nations, never did and does not now rest on a status competition between husbands and

wives: women’s current status is not something women won from men historically but find

themselves unable to repeat today notwithstanding both women and hosiery are said to have

become noticeably stronger following World War II.

Arguments requiring a close competition between husband and wife, or men and women

widely, do not hold up well in such a context. Iwao’s (1993, 85) explanation, that “Women

tended to be thrifty while men could not be counted on not to spend money extravagantly on

21


food, sake, women and other temptations,” does not make clear why gendered temperaments

were so different, why men ever would hand over their salaries to their wives, or even who was

counting on husbands to do so. Why would such men, capable of transforming Japan from an

isolated feudal society into a modern industrial nation in one generation, agree to be reined in by

women, their own wives of all people? Why would their sons and grandsons be different?

Then did husbands not consent but capitulate? Lebra (1984) argues that men are different

at large than at home, where the Japanese husband’s “childlike dependence gives the wife

leverage to exercise power by making her services absolutely necessary” (Ogasawara 1998, 4).

Of course her services are and always have been absolutely necessary, in Japan as everywhere,

but what, if anything, does she do anyway that he forbids her to do, or vice versa? The

stereotypical “childlike dependence” of the Japanese husband deserves examination in greater

detail.

Doi’s (1973) path-breaking work on neurosis and amae, the “need for human affection”

(Johnson 1993, ix), as a verb, amaeru, to impose on another’s willingness to indulge one, to act

childishly, helps us understand how women generally perform their roles as wives and mothers

in Japan. Mothers are Japan’s intimate care-givers. They give their care as affectionate

indulgence to their charges. As Kondo (1990, 83-89) carefully records, the position of care-giver

or the one who indulges the selfish whims of another (the amayakasu position) is actually a

superordinate one, often associated with parents or bosses. As a superordinate in relation to her

dependent child, mothers are not authoritarians but enablers.

Home is the world of mothers. The home and the outside world require different styles of

behavior and habits of self-presentation for success. The home, or uchi, is the private, intimate

arena in which one can relax, let all of one’s feelings show, and expect indulgence and sympathy

22


from other members of the family. Within the uchi a healthy amount of self-indulgence,

regressive behavior, and mild aggression are not only cheerfully tolerated, but also encouraged

as the indication of intimacy and trust. However, in the soto, the outside world, one must assume

a genial and cooperative public persona, in which individual feelings and desires must be

subjugated to the harmony and activities of the group (Peak 1991, 7). Soto remains a gendered

world, notwithstanding.

Ueno (1987, S80) stresses the fact that “part-time work was an invention of employers

rather than the result of women’s demand to work,” arising from a constant labor shortage in

Japanese industry into the 1980s. Kondo catalogues the ways part-time women employees

(kengyō shufu) provide the young men apprentices with a humanized work atmosphere in a

confections factory, a source of support and care, fostering feelings of togetherness, of “company

as family,” of work groups which, like the household, become the locus of emotional attachment.

“This position is a contradictory one, for it replays on the shop floor the notion that women are

emotional workers, care-givers and creators of an uchi (homey) feeling” (Kondo 1990, 295). At

the same time, however, their position as mother-surrogates puts them in a position of advantage

over the male artisans and serves to make them highly important, even while formally marginal,

members of the company. By asking favors of the part-timer women or by acting childish, the

young artisans are placing themselves in the amaeru position of a child or a subordinate seeking

indulgence (Kondo 1990, 295-296).

Iwao describes how this pattern of indulgence based in the need for human affection

carries over into married life and relations between wives and husbands. The stock figure of the

domestically helpless husband – and some women do call their husbands “my big baby” or

“eldest son” – is a prime target for caring patterns shifted from the young. Japanese women give

23


greater priority to their role as mother than wife, but the two do overlap considerably As well,

this role tends to keep husbands acting like children at home, in Iwao’s words, “as they shift

adeptly from the indulged son to the indulged husband” (1993, 88-89). North (2009, 40)

observes how this distinction is naturalized within the household: “Socialized for natural

dominance and characterized as coddled and spoiled, first sons were defined by what they did

not do at home, regardless of their wives’ earning power or occupational prestige.” Men more

easily amaeru than women, a Buddhist priest explained when discussing care and loss in late

life: “Strength is easier for women to achieve. Men can cry ‘mommy’!” (Danely 2014, 177).

The ambiguity of the combined effects of these two features of the housewifely role --

responsible autonomy and affectionate indulgence – has allowed their wide characterization as a

wife’s power over her husband in their home, and more broadly, to come to characterize the

national discussion of gender relations as a power struggle whose outcome remains at least

uncertain and indeterminate. How easy seems the life of the middle class professional housewife

compared to that of her salariman husband. A slave to his company and his wife both! Why does

he put up with it if he doesn’t have to? He is obliged to at work where formal hierarchy among

men is clear, and it seems that he has to at home as well. That there is no actual evidence that

struggle is the basis for conjugal relations makes this debate so effective in 1) reproducing

inequality in gender roles and 2) hiding the observation that wives’ great responsibility and

autonomy to discharge this responsibility arise from the historical refusal to permit the creation

of joint families in Japan. The ie in all its extensive recorded variation has never been a structure

of married brothers’ families remaining under the authority of their father until his death, the

well-known joint family of India or China. The “early” retirement of the household head forms

24


an alliance of many years’ standing between himself and his heir and successor to forestall any

possible claims on the ie estate by second sons following the retired household head’s death.

Conclusion

Views on the broad topic “the changing Japanese family” vary depending on the focus of

the research. Research documenting recent changes in Japanese family life is abundant (Mackie

2014; Mathews 2014), and it is not uncommon to read that the accelerating pace of change in

family life makes its future more than typically difficult to foretell (Shoji 2014, 6). Research

documenting aspects of family life that seem to be changing less rapidly if at all can also be

found with little difficulty (Castro-Vázquez 2017; Hertog 2011; Roberts 2016). However we

understand these changes to family life, it is clear that the gender statuses of both men and

women arises fundamentally from complex strategical relations within the ie as a perduring

corporate stem family and its place in wider society. This family form does not now and never

in the past did require many children. One daughter, certainly two children, can be enough to

discharge the household head’s wife’s reproductive obligation to the ie into which she has

married. More is not better. Nor does she need, any longer, to have children early in her life, or

many, to be sure of the survival of one. The guidelines of the Japan Society of Obstetrics and

Gynaecology for the use of human reproductive cells observe that artificial reproductive

technologies (ARTs, so often sought by women trying to become pregnant after age 35) “are

meant to be for the preservation of a couple’s lineage” (Castro-Vásquez 2017, 176): surrogacy is

banned (Castro-Vásquez 2017, 31). Castro-Vásquez notes further, following one woman’s

explicit assertion, “basically getting pregnant is a woman’s duty,” that women must search out

and take the steps necessary for pregnancy to occur (Castro-Vázquez 2017, 123). And while

“ambivalence was a common feeling among all the mothers who tried ARTs” (Castro-Vázquez

25


2017, 123), husbands often felt imposed upon and even resentful of the scheduling and lack of

sexual spontaneity required by various ARTs. From what source does the duty to become

pregnant arise, if not from the knowledge of how members of ie fulfill their roles within their

family?

Japanese women today rarely reproduce before marriage or outside of marriage, and do

not reproduce to provide themselves personal fulfillment through unconditional love. The

position of the household head’s wife in the ie can be understood from this perspective to have

resulted today in a moderately-high-level status trap in so far as it provides women with great

personal autonomy with which to discharge their obligations as wives to their ie while depriving

them at the same time of any justification for behaviors that others may assert fall outside this

scope. Among blue collar women too who aspired to full-time, lifetime employment such as

those Roberts (166) got to know at the Azumi garment factory, rather than rising as men do

through increasing dedication to their company and work, because “sharp lines are drawn

between public and private life, the woman who cannot clearly separate home and work will not

be successful at either, and may be the object of criticism from family and/or coworkers.” At

present in Japan men’s and women’s behaviors alike must be justifiable as contributions to their

ie, or “people will talk” (Holloway 2010), as the cruel invective directed toward “parasite

singles” and other disparaging categories of unmarried women shows (Tran 2006). Japanese

deprecate selfishness. Is there any act on behalf of the continuity of his ie more personally

selfless than the retirement of the household head, unless it is the implicit, now explicit,

renunciation of claims on its estate by second sons? But then, how could people anywhere live

without socially and culturally formed distinctions, gender-based and otherwise? What symbols

would we draw on for guidance under uncertainty?

26


Because the importance of a competent wife to the prosperity of the ie is recognized and

even insisted upon, wives have long exercised sufficient autonomy to meet their great

responsibilities within this narrow family; but that a wife was and continues to be more

important to the prosperity of the ie than a husband’s brother is not a topic of public discussion.

At no point does the socio-logic of the ie require acknowledgement that the retirement in his

prime by the household head in favor of his heir and successor obviates conflict over the ie estate

at the retired household head’s death. And consequently, there is no mention of a relationship

between household heads’ wives and brothers at all, that a good wife and wise mother is more

important to the success of the ie than a brother. It just never comes up. That this pattern of

family formation makes some women more important than some men and less important than

other men to a fundamental institution of Japanese life remains unacknowledged and

unrecognized, but nonetheless true. Its effects continue to be found throughout Japanese life

today. Nemoto asserts that the fundamental structure of modern Japanese firms must be

reconstituted to allow women to break through Japan’s glass ceiling. Yet it is the values inherent

in the dynamics of the perpetuating corporate stem family, ie, that justify the particular pattern of

gender inequality which structures employment practices and role relations in other institutions

in Japan today.

27


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69. White, Merry Isaacs. 2002. Perfectly Japanese: Making Families in an Era of Upheaval.

Berkeley, U of California Press.

70. Wood, Donald. 2012. Ogata-mura: Sowing Dissent and Reclaiming Identity in a

Japanese Farming Village. New York: Berghahn Books.

71. Youm Yoosik and Yamaguchi Kazuo. 2016. “The glass ceiling in Japan and South

Korea.” 11 Dec. 2016. VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal. http://voxeu.org/article/glass-

ceiling-japan-and-south-korea

While gender equity accounting divides populations into men and women, Japanese families

have long divided people into women, older sons and younger sons, recognizing implicitly that

women as wives are more important to the success of ongoing families than their

husbands’younger sons. Public discourse in Japan now argues broadly that wives might actually

dominate their husbands, and women dominate men generally, as implausible as this appears to

outsiders, in a way that shrouds the central dynamic through which family formation continues to

legitimize gender inequality into the present.

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