Editor's Note: This is a collection of stories on the theme of the Japanese family. The stories have been taken from my contributions to the Japan Times' Tokyo Confidential feature amd cover the years 2001-2006. How did family life evolve during those six years? What issues are common to family life everywhere, and which ones peculiar to Japan?
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Source: Yomiuri Weekly, 2001
Hawaii has everything: fine weather, plenty of Japanese speakers, good hospitals, and - most important - membership in a club called the United States of America. And so one month before their first child was due Yuko and Hideaki Tokito caught a Hawaii-bound flight and made the necessary arrangements. Right on schedule came little Terumasa, an American citizen by virtue of his place of birth. His middle name is Keikirani, Hawaiian for "heavenly child."
More and more parents are doing this, says Yomiuri Weekly. Why? To give their children a lifetime ticket out of the sinking ship Japan? Or to follow in the glowing footsteps of celebrities like Anna Miyamoto, who recently gave much publicized birth in Los Angeles?
Both motives come into play, the latter mostly with couples in their twenties. But the despairing sense among parents-to-be that Japan has run its race is palpable.
"In Japanese society," says Naomi Miyoshi, whose daughter was born four years ago in Hawaii, "individuality doesn't count, there's no independence. Take parasite singles for instance - they would be unthinkable in North America! The Japanese hiring system doesn't reward all-out effort. The whole way of thinking is skewed. I don't want my child growing up that way."
Miyoshi, 42, offers advice on the Internet to likeminded parents. He gets on average two to three callers a day. One, a doctor in his early forties, had this to say:
"Selfishness and irresponsibility are spreading in Japan. I'm sick of it! In the old days, if a child did something bad the neighbors would give him a good scolding. Now they pretend not to notice - or if someone does give a kid hell, the parents are furious. Kids grow up not knowing right from wrong - like the kids who beat a homeless man to death recently. I have no desire to raise a child in this country. I'm thinking of moving my whole family to the U.S."
Be careful, warns Yomiuri Weekly. Apart from the fact that America may not be as virtuous as it seems from afar - likewise Canada and New Zealand, the other favored destinations that automatically confer citizenship on anyone born there - there are drawbacks, even dangers.
One is cost. Japanese health insurance coverage does not extend overseas in this case. The Tokitos' hospital bill came to YY1.5 million. With accommodation and air fare, their expenses totaled YY3 million. Should Yuko Tokito have required a cesarean section, they could have mounted to YY10 million.
And suppose medical complications arise? "If the pregnancy is even slightly risky," warns an expert Yomiuri Weekly consults, "better stay home."
That said, American citizenship is a good qualification to have in an American-led world. Not only does it give the children the right to study and work in the U.S., it also allows them to apply for permanent residence for their parents. Everyone's a winner.
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Source: Dias 2001
Heaven forgive us the damage we do our children in our well-intentioned ignorance!
We mean well, honestly we do, in subjecting our little ones to that barrage of stimulation known as infant education. Hilary Clinton herself, the former American First Lady, seemed to endorse our efforts. Didn't she say, back in 1997, that a major difference between growing up poor and growing up prosperous is that in poverty small children are inadequately stimulated?
She did indeed. However, cautions Dias, she didn't necessarily mean, as many over-eager parents on both sides of the Pacific seemed to think she did, that a child's brain is a balloon to be inflated to bursting with skills, wisdom and foreign languages before the poor mite has turned three. Cool it, mom. Ease up, dad. Natural development is slow and convoluted; it tries our patience in this competition-driven, goal-oriented age. All the same, there's much to be said for it.
Brain development is a delicate, highly nuanced unfolding. An infant's brain is as malleable as clay, and the adaptations it makes to its environment are wonderful to behold. Consider this experiment: Newborn infants from Japan, the U.S. and Sweden were tested to measure their perception of the difference between L and R. All newborns seemed to perceive it quite clearly. Six months later they were retested. The Japanese infants had already lost their capacity to distinguish the two sounds.
Brain cell reaches out to brain cell, forming over the years a vast web of cerebral circuitry. The circuit pattern reflects the stimuli in the environment. An infant who never hears L versus R will, as the circuits poised to make that distinction decay through disuse, lose the ability to employ those sounds. By age six months? The message is clear. English education must start before that.
The trick is, parents feel, to take advantage of the infant brain's precious but fleeting plasticity. Primary schooling starts at six, and even then, for the first years what passes for education is as much social as pedagogical - glorified playing. Life is too short! There's too much to learn! Those early years must not be wasted! Thus not only foreign languages but science, music, computer skills and so on are lately given pride of place on toddlers' agendas. It's called giving them a head start in life.
There is both good and bad in this. Infant brains should be stimulated; no one denies that. The question is, how intensely? Parents who recognize no limits may be doing their children as much harm, in a different way, as those who leave their children languishing in bored solitude.
Recall, says one neurologist Dias speaks to, the 1997 "Pokemon Incident" - the mass outbreak of epilepsy-like convulsions among young children watching a Pokemon TV special. This suggests the harmful effect of over-stimulation. In the cerebral cortex, stimulator neurons outnumber suppressant neurons 4 to 1. Unrelieved stimulation - in the case of the Pokemon show it was provided by flashing bright lights - over time dull the suppressant neurons and lead, if not actually to epilepsy, to personality distortions in which emotional instability is not uncommon.
We must realize, pediatrician Yukuo Onishi tells Dias, that "neither human time nor the human brain is infinite. The problem then becomes, how can we best use these finite resources?"
Take English language education. Considered purely from the point of view of producing a fluently bilingual youngster, starting very early has unmistakable advantages. But at what price, asks Onishi, are these advantages procured? In stimulating the brain's language centers, might we be withholding stimulation elsewhere? Onishi's recommendation sounds terribly old-fashioned, and yet it reflects a common sense we may be in danger of losing. "Maybe," he says, "the most stimulating thing parents can do for their children is simply play with them."
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Source: Friday 2001
On February 19 at 3:35 p.m., Yuka Fujishima answered her office phone. "Your son didn't wake up from his nap. I'm sorry. Perhaps you'd better come."
Head reeling, Fujishima dashed to the daycare center. A part-time staffer greeted her with a smile. "I'm terribly sorry," she said. "The directress has taken the child to the hospital..."
Fujishima rushed to the hospital. Hitoki, aged 14 months, was already dead. Crib death, said the directress calmly. She admitted having beaten the infant - he wouldn't stop crying, she said - but that, she maintained, was not the cause of death. The baby had fallen asleep face-down and choked. Artificial respiration was administered, in vain.
"Why," demanded Fujishima's husband Kenji the next day, "did you wait one hour and 45 minutes before calling an ambulance?"
"Because," replied the directress, "an ambulance coming to a daycare center starts strange rumors."
True. Actually, reports Friday, strange rumors had been circulating about the Kobato Daycare Center in Kagawa for years, to such effect that its original enrollment of 70 children when it opened in 1990 was down to four when Hitoki died.
The directress, a woman of 60, had had previous run-ins with the authorities. In one, Kagawa Prefecture child welfare officials investigated last year the alleged beating with a drumstick of a five-year-old, whose swollen head was fairly plain evidence. Discipline, said the directress, denying nothing. The investigators were disturbed, but not unduly so. "We instructed her not to administer corporal punishment in future, and suggested she hire an assistant," an official tells Friday. "The prefecture took appropriate action. We don't believe we did anything wrong."
The Kobato center, though unlicensed by the prefecture, was a perfectly legal establishment. With daycare availability lagging far below soaring demand, it's a relatively open field, and Kobato is not the first questionable, not to say eerie, institution to enter it. Even so, it's hard to imagine a prospective client, let alone prefectural officials investigating a specific complaint, coming away from the place with an easy mind.
"About five years ago," Friday hears from a former client, "the directress seemed to be into one of those strange religions. She was selling glass globes - 'good luck globes,' she called them - for YY100,000 each, and if you refused to buy one, she'd say, 'A misfortune will befall your child.' Sure enough, the day I refused, my child came home all bruised."
"I was thinking of taking my child out of there," says another former client. "Late one night - it was after midnight - the directress showed up at my house. 'You want out?' she said. 'I know some yakuza people. Whatever happens to you, it won't be my fault!'"
Friday does not say how the mother responded.
"I'd like to see that directress in handcuffs," says Yuka Fujishima. Maybe one day she will. For now, however, her whereabouts are unknown.
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Source: Josei Jishin 2002
"I'm one of four children myself, and I'd love to give my son a brother or sister, but..."
The "but" is everything for Yukari Kimura and the other women Josei Jishin interviews for its story on the increasingly common one-child family. Personal circumstances differ but add up to the same conclusion: "But no."
Kimura, 31, has a 2-year-old son and a truck-driver husband whose varying monthly income sometimes - last month, for instance - dips to YY200,000, forcing the family to fall behind on rent, utilities and car loan payments. "Supposing I work part time?" she suggested. "Absolutely not," said her husband. "It's bad for the child."
That's ironic, given how little attention Mr. Kimura has to spare for the boy - or for other household chores. "When I was pregnant and not feeling well," says Yukari, "he wouldn't lift a finger. No way I'm going through that again. I want another child, but I can't do it without my husband's cooperation."
Eriko Ouchi, 32, would also like a second child, but the way things are today, she says, it's best to think twice. Consider education costs. Her daughter, now in first grade, will almost certainly go on to a private junior high school. Ouchi doesn't trust the public school system, with its reduced curriculum in an increasingly competitive world. Along the way there will be juku, piano lessons, the advantages every child should have. She herself wants a few advantages - a brand-name handbag now and then, a restaurant dinner from time to time... Her husband, a company employee, earns YY320,000 a month, to which her computer work at home adds YY50,000. "We're not suffering," she says, but multiplying those education costs by two would have the family facing poverty.
Yukiko Nishi, 33, works for a cosmetics firm and sends her two-year-old to a daycare center. Finding one with a vacancy was not easy - the facility in her neighborhood was full. When she thinks of a second child, her sister's plight gives her pause. "She couldn't get her two kids into the same daycare center. Every morning she sets out on her bicycle with the two children, dropping the older one off at a center 10 minutes away, then pedaling to the train station and riding two stops with the younger. Then it's off to work. I couldn't do that. I'm barely coping as it is."
Japan's plunging birthrate - currently 1.39 children per woman - is setting the nation firmly on course toward a declining population increasingly dominated by the elderly and their concerns. The standard explanation is a growing tendency to marry late or not at all. Prosperous societies generally experience lower birthrates. But Japan is unique - a prosperous society that sees no future for itself. Reproduction and child-rearing must therefore assert themselves against two counter-pressures - the pursuit of pure self-interest which prosperity encourages, and the fear of progressive economic and social collapse. More and more couples, says Josei Jishin, are marrying determined to have one child, maximum.
None of the women interviewed mention sexless marriage as a reason for small families - but, the magazine hears from Tokyo Gakugei University professor Masahiro Yamada, when surveys show contraceptive use and pregnancy in simultaneous decline, the inference is plain: the main road to marital felicity is being bypassed. Why? One factor, says Yamada, is rancor stemming from quarrels over the distribution of actual and prospective child-care chores.
The old homemaker-wife breadwinner-husband paradigm died long ago, but its ghost remains, exerting disproportionate influence. Josei Jishin urges enlarged daycare capacity and government financial support for multi-child households. Meanwhile, career women who fault their husbands for not helping with housework have a point but are not blameless. As prospective brides they show a marked preference for men as ambitious and driven as themselves. Such men, they should know, are not lightly broken to domestic routine.
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Source: Spa! 2002
There is nothing Daisuke won't do for his mother. At 27, he has just put his seal on a 35-year-loan to buy her a house. Well, it's not entirely hers, since Daisuke and his fiancee plan to move in with her one day. Still, this is an expansive gesture. If the word mazacon, mother complex, springs to mind, that's understandable; post-adolescent affection for parents is all too often treated as a perversity. But no - the appropriate word in this case, a much pleasanter word, is oyakoko, filial piety. Confucian? Outmoded? Yes and no. Yes, Confucian. Outmoded, maybe not. Maybe, says Spa!, we're seeing "the awakening of oyakoko mind." A filial piety boom.
It comes in two formats, casual and hardcore. Casual is helping mom with the dishes, taking out the garbage, phoning home from time to time. Hardcore is anything from meeting dad regularly for golf to marrying a rich man for the sake of the parental blessing. One 23-year-old man treated his father to four days at an onsen resort. The father had been laid off after 35 years, and his son hoped the vacation would lift his spirits. The pitiless economy, landing hardest on the middle-aged, partly explains the resurgence of filial sympathy, Spa! says.
Daisuke, a computer company employee, is used to taking financial charge at home. His parents divorced six years ago. Even before that, the family wasn't rich, and Daisuke worked his way (and his younger sister's) through college. But there's more to it than money. Mom is something of a live wire who needs - and doesn't seem to mind - a little filial supervision, which Daisuke conscientiously provides. Once, he says, he dropped into a bar his mother was drinking at, and found her making an intoxicated if amiable nuisance of herself with actor Beat Takeshi. Apologizing profusely, Daisuke led her away. "Since then," he grins, "I make a point of checking up on her more often."
Oyakoko, says Daisuke, is a masculine virtue. Spa! seems to agree; there are few daughters in its story. "How can I be happy," Daisuke reasons, "knowing someone in my family isn't?"
Filial piety takes odd forms. Meet Yasunori. He's 25, a playboy, not one of the world's workers. In fact he's unemployed, though not poor. He has a talent for pachinko, and parlays it into a steady income. His parents would be mortified if they knew. Growing up, he'd never had much to do with his parents. One day a couple of years ago he tagged along while a girlfriend bought flowers for her mother's birthday. How interesting, he thought - and so grown-up! What a contrast to his scapegrace self, who would never in a million years have thought of such a thing.
That was his oyakoko epiphany. He started dropping in on his parents, taking them out to dinner. He made up a story for their benefit about working at a friend's printing company, and when they seemed skeptical, he brought the friend along to back him up. Meanwhile, he tries harder than ever to keep winning at pachinko, buttressing a fake job with real cash. All in the name of oyakoko!
How pervasive is filial piety today? It's a hard quality to quantify, but if it has percolated into rap music, as Spa! claims it has, we may suppose it has spread fairly far. Rino Latina II, whose first album is selling briskly, may be the world's only rap artist who helps out at his mom's yakitori restaurant. Then again, he may not be. His reasoning is simple: "I wouldn't be here without my parents." It's not a typical rap theme, but not a bad one either. It may be closer to the cutting edge than it sounds. Sociologist Atsushi Miura says oyakoko is just the balm ailing 21st-century Japan needs.
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Source: Spa! 2002
All the names in this story are pseudonyms. You'll soon see why.
"My husband has a solid income," says Yuko Matsumoto, 34, "but I hate the thought of reducing our standard of living. So what else can we do except depend on my folks?"
The couple's BMW was a present. So was their mahogany furniture. They go out drinking quite often, to forget their troubles no doubt, and when their wallets are empty, they know where to fill them. There are, however, limits. "They won't give us more than YY20,000 or YY30,000 at a time," says Yuko. "YY100,000 a month max."
With parents so happy to give, and children so happy to receive, family harmony reigns, bridging the generation gap. Is there anything wrong in this? "Parasite couples," the acerbic term Spa! coins to describe the beneficiaries, echoes "parasite singles," unmarried people who continue indefinitely living with, generally off, their parents. Lately, Spa! finds, even marriage, late though it often is, does not necessarily mark the start of independent adult life.
Keika Suzuki is a 26-year-old temp worker and mother of a 3-year-old daughter she sees once a week. The little girl lives with her grandparents. "My husband and I are busy," says Keika. "It's best for the child" - who sees her father, a 34-year-old trading company employee, once a month. A faint shadow mars - not seriously - the couple's busy connubial happiness. He is keen on saving money. She is no less keen on spending it, mostly on brand name products. Fortunately, her parents provide pocket money as well as surrogate parenthood.
Megumi Kato, 26, has a husband and child, neither of which she wanted, but these things happen. When she got pregnant, her 36-year-old boyfriend talked her out of an abortion. His parents had been after him to marry and give them a grandchild. Here was his chance. All right," said Megumi - "on one condition." The condition amounted almost to ransom. Besides providing the couple a place to live and a YY150,000 monthly allowance, the grandparents have ended up raising the child by themselves.
Takako Sakai is a 26-year-old housewife. Her husband works for a public corporation - no telling what it's future is, in these days of reform and restructuring! The nervous couple needs a nest egg. What to do? "How about," Takako suggested, "moving in with my folks?" That way there's no rent, no furniture to buy, no utility bills to pay - no housework to do either. And the couple puts aside YY70,000 a month.
Marriage is not a prerequisite for conjugal sponging, Spa! finds. Ken Tanikawa is a 26-year-old freeter whose odd-job earnings left him chronically short of rent money. So his girlfriend brought him home with her. Things went well at first, but at last her father lost his temper - the young man seemed a little too comfortable in an arrangement the girls' family saw as temporary. "If he leaves, I'll kill myself!" she cried. That silenced dad.
Why is this happening? Granted, the times are uncertain, but even so, aren't young couples traditionally eager to break free of parental constraints and protection in order to forge their own paths in life?
Blame the distorted times the current crop of young adults grew up in, Spa! hears from sociologist Masaharu Yamada, who first named and studied the "parasite single" phenomenon. Within their lifetime, sudden wealth suddenly evaporated, leaving the threat if not the actual experience of poverty. More robust generations knew how to cope with poverty; this one doesn't.
Besides, adds Yamada, "Most parasite singles reject marriage in the name of economic freedom and unlimited consumption. So parents are saying, 'Marry - we'll support you.'" Well-meaning, they unwittingly foster perpetual childhood, eerie accompaniment to the rapid aging at the other end of the demographic spectrum.
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Source: Yomiuri Weekly, 2002
You'd think, in changing times when everything is open to question, that better ideas would be flooding the drawing board - but no, monogamous marriage remains unchallengeable as the social arrangement regulating the perpetuation of the species. Soaring divorce rates are blamed on personal rather than institutional failure.
The hatred marriage engenders can be as powerful as the love that engenders marriage. The mere sight of a spouse fallen from favor sets the teeth on edge. "I don't care about money, just get me a divorce." "I don't care what it costs, as long as I get the children." Lawyers hear this all the time.
And yet, Yomiuri Weekly reminds us, money is a factor - a big one. For couples apt in the heat of passion to forget that divorce hinges largely on economics, the magazine offers some case histories. Do you recognize yourself in them?
Sachiko, 50, married at 19 and had a son three years later. Shortly afterwards the couple divorced on grounds of incompatibility. The mediated settlement called for Sachiko to receive a YY10 million lump sum towards child support, plus Y30 million as her share of the couple's property.
For the boy, it was private school all the way - plus home tutors, plus extracurricular cram school. By the time he graduated junior high school, the YY10 million was exhausted. The YY30 million was tied up in investments. Sachiko was ill and couldn't work. What to do? The only hope was to appeal to the father for supplementary funding.
The father refused. Sachiko took him to court. The court ruled in her favor. The father had been educated in private schools. He owed his son no less, said the judge. The father appealed - and won. The higher court's ruling was based on a clause in the initial settlement committing Sachiko to never asking for additional support. Case closed. We never do find out how Sachiko managed her son's higher education.
If Yuka, now in her 30s, had been a little older when she married 17 years ago, she might have glimpsed what lay ahead when her fiancé said to her, "I beat my last woman, but I'll never beat you." The first glow of love faded, and the vow was forgotten. He beat her constantly. Yuka and her two infant daughters would escape his rampages by sleeping in the car. Many years and several suicide attempts later, she finally took the children and walked out.
The husband refused to divorce her. She went to court, and was awarded YY8 million in compensation - twice the average award, Yomiuri Weekly says. Child support payments were fixed at YY70,000 per month per child.
Money won't buy them a new life or erase the psychological trauma they still suffer, the magazine observes. Still, it must be some comfort - one not all divorced mothers can count on. According to Osaka and Tokyo Family Court sources, no more than 50 percent of court-ordered child support payments are made in full and on time.
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Source: Yomiuri Weekly, 2002
Family dinner, family restaurant: Mom, dad, two teenage kids. Nice scene. What's missing? Talk. Dinner unfolds without a word. The kids read manga and play computer games; the parents stare into their plates. Here comes the waitress with the bill. At last - time to leave. Tension drops in anticipation of the separate rooms of home.
What's the matter with families today? Why are households empty of animating conversation? One factor among many, says Yomiuri Weekly, goes way back to the children's infancy. Parents don't talk to their babies anymore. And the surprising, borderline *weird* explanation for that turns out to be: They don't know what to say to them.
How can a mother or father be socially stymied by a gurgling infant? Does it matter what you say? Improbable or not, the problem is real. Nutritionist Sumiko Koike tells Yomiuri Weekly of a family she visited in response to the young mother's complaint that her two-year-old son wasn't eating right. He seemed to have no appetite at all.
Koike observed the feeding-time proceedings and soon had her answer.
"Talk to him," she said.
The mother looked blank.
"Encourage him."
"What should I say?" faltered the mother.
Koike is a professional, with a professional's patience. "Like this," she smiled. Taking over the spoon, she proceeded to demonstrate the happy nothings that used to come naturally to moms. "Down the hatch! Good boy! One more, to grow up big and strong like daddy." That sort of thing. Sure enough, the little one made short work of his dinner.
Koike explained to the mother that children's videos, the usual backdrop to the baby's meals, were no substitute for maternal prattle. The mother had not known. It had never occurred to her. "And yet she was a dedicated, concerned parent," Koike says.
She is not exceptional. Many young mothers, living in suburban isolation from neighbors and older relatives who might offer guidance, are like her, Yomiuri Weekly finds - so much so that a phrase book written by a pediatrician and purporting to solve that existential dilemma of what to say to an uncomprehending infant has sold 80,000 copies since its release 11 months ago.
And a series of lectures on "parent-child communication" sponsored for the past three years by Tokyo's Katsushika Ward has focused not on puberty, the traditional problem phase, but on infancy. At least parents are growing aware of the problem. The lectures draw capacity-plus crowds.
Too many parents, Yomiuri Weekly hears from experts, think speech comes to children as naturally as teeth do. Or they feel TV and videos render personal communication redundant. That is dangerously misguided. "Too much exposure of small babies to the hyper-stimulation of TV and videos," warns one pediatrician, "can be as harmful as abuse."
Worst-case scenarios aside, parents with nothing to say to their infants may discover, over sad family dinners years later, that their children have nothing to say to them.
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Source: Aera 2002
Little So-kun, at six months, didn't cry for his milk, he asked for it, using a distorted but recognizable version of the word for breast. At eight months he could get papa's and mama's attention by calling "Papa! Mama!" At three he was reading hiragana. He's four now. Where does he go from here?
His mother doesn't know, but she believes she does know how he got where he is today. The key, in a word, is "womb education." That's been big in Japan since 1986, when a book appeared entitled Every Fetus is a Genius. The author was a woman whose four children had genius IQs because, she said, she assiduously talked to them while they were in the womb. Not only that, she read to them, sang to them, and even taught them the alphabet - by studying alphabet cards herself so the fetuses could see them through her eyes and absorb them through her thoughts.
Scoffers she could silence by pointing to her children's achievements. Her eldest daughter was burbling "mama" at two weeks, reading at seven months, and attending university at 10. Her life beyond that - she would be past 30 now - is unfortunately unknown. Still, Every Fetus caused a stir. Who doesn't want to raise a genius? And even if the claims are exaggerated, what harm can it do?
One reader was Mieko Iwasaki, So-kun's mother-to-be. Around the time she got pregnant she temporarily left her company job and went back to university. "I'm listening to the professor now, so be quiet," she would whisper to the unborn child. "I'm writing my thesis now - that's why I'm spending all day at the computer."
The fetus seemed to understand, and the mother-fetus dialogue proceeded, with post-natal results any parent would be proud of. Or would she? To Aera, Iwasaki confesses second thoughts. "There were times," she says, "when I wanted him to just cry, like normal babies." A daycare staffer once said to her, "He's like a grownup in a baby mask." That's nice, but also a little creepy. Iwasaki dispensed with womb ed for her next two children, and was frankly relieved when they were born with no sign of budding genius.
Scientific opinion is divided on the validity and value of womb ed. A Tokyo University pediatrician Aera speaks to says it's fanciful to suppose a fetus possesses memory. Still, counters the director of an Osaka fertility clinic, there is a clear difference between infants who have been talked to and read to in the womb, and those who have not. The former, he says, stop crying and start observing almost immediately after birth.
It's possible, says the Tokyo pediatrician. Talking to the fetus might calm the mother, which promotes good hormone balance, which favors infantile development.
By all means talk to your fetus, adds a child psychologist - but beware: inflated expectations can turn bitter when the child is born ordinary, and that bitterness can poison the parent-child relationship.
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Source: Shukan Shincho 2003
Yujiro and Masako are a couple in their fifties living with Yujiro's mother. In her eighties and suffering from dementia, the mother can neither eat nor go to the toilet by herself. Masako, the prime caregiver, gets help from a daycare service, one of many spawned by a national nursing care plan that went into effect three years ago. It was a daycare worker who noticed bruises on the mother's face.
A medical check that followed detected a broken rib. The mother's responses to questioning were vague, but seemed to implicate her daughter-in-law, who, she said, sometimes hit her and flung her out of bed. Not so, said the couple; the old lady fell out of bed herself. Professionals close to the case find that unconvincing, and suspect that the demands of caregiving were simply too much for Masako, who cracked under the strain.
Abuse of the elderly, like child abuse, occurs in the home and out of the public eye, says Shukan Shincho. To pluck it from the shadows, the Health Ministry has launched a massive survey, entailing interviews with some 85,000 nursing services and health centers across the country. The results are due next March. In the meantime the evidence is anecdotal, but, to Shukan Shincho, damning.
Takeshi took early retirement to care for his mother when dementia got the better of her. He and his wife started with the best intentions. They renovated the house and installed an elevator to make it easier for the old lady to get around. Time passed, and it all got to be too much. From sheer exhaustion they left her hungry and thirsty, stopped changing her diaper, and eventually dispensed with diapers altogether. When a home helper expressed surprise, Takeshi shrugged and said, "Old people have no sense of shame anyway."
Sometimes abuse arises from pure malice. Fusako, when her husband died, was left the sole caregiver of a senile mother-in-law she had never liked. Now revenge was hers. She stopped bathing her, stopped feeding her, helped herself to her bank savings, and probably would have buried her sooner than she did - the end came last year - had the neighbors not taken charge of the feeding over her protests.
Revenge wears many faces. A shared lifetime breeds so much accumulated bitterness! Husbands turn senile, and abused wives gain the upper hand at last. "Sometimes," a journalist tells Shukan Shincho, "they tease their helpless husbands with food they don't give them, or refuse to change their diapers, and say, 'Remember when you treated me this way? Remember?'"
Is the root problem human imperfection, or institutional inadequacy? In Sweden, Shukan Shincho learns, two professional caregivers are available, on average, for every elderly person needing care. In Japan, the ratio is 5-10 dependent elderly for every professional caregiver. A senile population burgeoning at the Japanese rate is a new experience in human history. Family members cannot cope alone.
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Source: DaCapo 2003
The doctor was angry. "Why didn't you have sex this morning?"
The patient didn't know what to say. Her husband had taken the morning off on purpose, but the pressure, the feeling of compulsion, made it impossible.
"Are you serious about wanting a baby?" pursued the doctor.
She was. At least she thought so. After eight years of marriage she was still childless. Her in-laws, without meaning to intrude of course, were visibly anxious for a grandchild. But there were limits to what she would put up with. Her sex life was her own affair. She walked out of the clinic and never returned.
The doctor was not being unpleasant on purpose. Once you call in the fertility technicians, DaCapo explains, you must realize that there is an agenda to follow. Step one is a series of tests, including one immediately after sex. Step two is medication to stimulate ovulation. Step three, should it prove necessary, is artificial insemination. Step four, if that fails, is in vitro insemination.
With so much attention focused on Japanese women rejecting motherhood, it is surprising to learn that many women are desperate to have children, if only they could. Health Ministry statistics show some 1.4 million infertile couples nationwide, of whom 285,000 are undergoing fertility treatment. The treatment is psychologically invasive, physically uncomfortable and very expensive. National health insurance covers you up to step two above. Beyond that, you're on your own. Artificial insemination, at YY10,000 a shot, has a 5-15 percent chance each time of inducing pregnancy. In vitro insemination has a higher success rate - 20-40 percent - but costs YY300,000 a try. The odds are daunting but evidently compelling - 12,000 in vitro babies are born in Japan each year. That works out, DaCapo calculates, to one newborn in 1000.
Some municipalities are concerned enough about their declining birth rates to subsidize fertility treatment. In July 2001 Iihara City in Okayama Prefecture began paying couples up to YY200,000 toward the cost of treatment. In fiscal 2002, nine couples claimed the subsidy. Three pregnancies resulted.
Kumiko, 33, endured tests, took medicine, underwent artificial insemination, tried in vitro - no luck. The frustration killed her marriage - she and her husband divorced after four years. Two years later she remarried on a hunch: "I know I can get pregnant by this man!" She did, only to miscarry. "Why me?" she thought in despair. But she persevered. The next artificial insemination took, and Kumiko is now the proud mother of a little girl. "I'm so glad I didn't give up," she says.
A gynecologist tells DaCapo this story: He had been treating a woman for infertility for several years, without success. The woman quit. Two years later she returned - pregnant. "Congratulations!" beamed the doctor.
"I want an abortion," snapped the woman.
"Pardon?"
"It's too late," said the woman. "A child no longer fits into my budget."
Nao and Sho, a lesbian couple, had planned to raise a family this way: Sho would have her eggs artificially inseminated, and Nao would carry them to term. It couldn't be done - their blood types are incompatible. So Sho is the birth mother after all. "We are very strict parents," Nao assures DaCapo. "So strict the daycare teacher is surprised."
The technological wizardry behind all this is very impressive. One wonders, though, whether infertility is such a scourge as to justify the rude poking and prodding. Almost lost in the excitement of our mechanical prowess is the old-fashioned solution to unwilling childlessness. Kayoko and Masaji Noguchi were married in 1971. Masaji's father died in the war; Kayoko's parents were divorced when she was small. More than anything else they wanted a "normal" family. When children were not forthcoming, they adopted twin boys. Two more adoptions followed. The children know they are adopted. The explanations were difficult - but easier, one supposes, than the ones many children will face about their origins.
***
Source: Yomiuri Weekly 2003
"My wife and I - we don't talk. She has no idea what's on my mind. I have no idea what's on hers. What should I do?"
"An argument breaks out over nothing at all, and the next thing I know I'm hitting her. What's wrong with me?"
Living doesn't come naturally. You have to learn how to do it. Women have long known this, which explains the nationwide proliferation of "women's centers," their agendas filled with everything from culture to counseling.
Lately men too are starting to realize how lost they are. But there are no "men's centers." What is a troubled man to do? Where can he turn? To a women's center? Slowly but surely, says Yomiuri Weekly, that is becoming an option. Some centers are even changing their names to accommodate the emerging masculine awareness - an anguished, bitter awareness at times - of vulnerability. Women's centers are evolving into "men-and-women's centers."
The Tokyo Women's Plaza in June 2001 opened a once-a-week hotline (Monday evenings, 5-8 p.m.) for men. The 13-odd calls a month, though hardly a flood, represent the beginning of something new, and interestingly enough, Yomiuri Weekly finds, 60 percent of the calls concern domestic affairs (infidelity, divorce, violence, "what on earth goes on in my wife's head?"), as against a mere 10 percent dealing with the venue where a modern Japanese man's real life was once thought to unfold - the workplace.
Some centers, like the Hyogo Men's and Women's Joint Participation Center in Kobe (the name dates from last April), make a point of having male counselors or advisors on hand. "Men find it easier to unburden themselves to men," explains a center official.
No doubt they do, but why are women's centers going to such lengths to accommodate the opposite sex? Pity? Partly. But partly also it's shrewd policy. Most observers agree that social change in Japan over the past 20 years has been female-generated, with men coping as best they can, generally badly. Men's failure to adapt, disastrous for themselves, is not good for women either. As Yomiuri Weekly puts it, "For women to reach their potential, men must eventually change too."
But are men ready for the kind of change the age calls for? Not in vast numbers. The Tokyo Women's Plaza's 13 male callers in an average month is the high point of the nationwide effort to engage men in the adjustment process. A similar hotline at a Tottori Prefecture center drew seven calls in all 2002.
A series of lifestyle lectures for men at a Shiga Prefecture center in December and January did better - but, the center notes with some disappointment, the audience was overwhelmingly elderly - either new retirees or men about to retire.
"Many were face to face with the fact that their working lives were over and all they knew in life was work," says an organizer. If we can start drawing them in at an earlier stage..."
That would be progress indeed. And it's coming, Yomiuri Weekly believes. But slowly.
***
Source: DaCapo 2003
Parents. We take their protection for granted when we need it, and then, naturally, we outgrow it. What then? No problem - 86 percent of grown children surveyed by DaCapo feel they have a good relationship with their parents. Is it really that simple? Of course not.
Aging parents are a worry, agree 73 percent of DaCapo's 142 respondents. There are the obvious concerns - health, money, living environment - and a few less obvious ones. "By the way," writer Megumi Ishikubo heard from her 61-year-old father one day, "my wife and I are having a baby."
Why was she so shocked? Did she think life as we know it ends at 60? There is a tendency for the young to regard the old as members of a different species. Sex, for instance. There is the old story of the feudal lord who inquired of his old mother, "Until what age do women feel sexual desire?" Mother, stirring the ashes in the hibachi, remained silent. "I see," said the lord. "They experience desire until they are ashes."
Precisely, confirms DaCapo. "I get women coming to me complaining that men want them only for their bodies," says the manager of a social club for seniors. "But these same women will leave a man pretty quick if he's unable to perform." His conclusion: With a few qualifications, "sex for the elderly is pretty much what it is for the young."
Back to Ishikubo's father. He is a retired TV director whose first wife, the writer's mother, abruptly left him 10 years ago. Stunned at first, Mr. Ishikubo rallied. He married a woman 20 years his junior and went on to show he still had it in him to challenge the preconceptions of the younger generation. "But you'll be 80 when the kid grows up!" protested his daughter. True enough. That's life.
Filial piety, we are told, is an Oriental notion alien to the West. The filial piety capital of the world is Shanghai. A worldwide survey of elementary school children's attitude towards their parents finds 84 percent of Shanghai children prepared to have their aged and helpless parents live with them in future - as against 33.8 percent in New York and 28 percent in London. Tokyo, with 54.1 percent, ranks in the middle. The Japanese consider themselves highly devoted to their parents - but in what sense? Some of DaCapo's respondents cite, apparently with a straight face, their gratitude for parental monetary handouts, or their gracious acceptance of grandma and grandpa's babysitting services, as evidence of their devotion. If that's filial piety, it's probably better known in the West than Asians think.
Rina Igarashi (a pseudonym) is 19, and, filial daughter that she is, hesitated to undergo longed-for cosmetic surgery on her eyelids. True, her eyes were narrow and "Oriental" in a way no longer fashionable; on the other hand, her face is her inheritance from her parents. Didn't she owe it to them to respect it? She talked her parents into sanctioning the surgery - which, no sooner done, put new ideas into her head: she wanted her nose raised, her breasts enlarged. "Absolutely not!" cried her parents. "Never mind," she thought, "I'll do it when I'm on my own. But," she vows, "I'll make it up to my parents - I'll buy my mother a facelift!"
Will parents and children ever see eye to eye? As children we deplore their power; as adults we dread their helplessness, actual or potential. What to do when parents grow incurably ill, unmanageably incompetent? "Many people feel terribly guilty about placing their parents in an institution," a care professional tells DaCapo. Once they cross that hurdle, however, the relief can breed negligence. "This is an extreme case," the professional continues, "but we had a man with terminal cancer. 'Call me three days before he dies,' his son told us."
***
Source: Aera 2003
Six a.m. Monday is a bad time for Mitsuko. "Where's papa?" asks Rumi. Though half asleep, the five-year-old knows without being told. "Shall we write papa a letter?" suggests Mitsuko, to comfort her. Rumi nods but doesn't stop crying.
Mitsuko, 40, is what Aera calls a "pseudo single mother." When her husband Yukio was transferred to Kyushu three years ago, joining him was out of the question. She is a systems engineer with a major Tokyo firm. Yukio
comes home weekends, but the separation is painful, especially for Rumi, who doesn't understand why everyone has a live-in father except her.
Actually, everyone doesn't have a live-in father. Pseudo-single families are on the rise. A 2002 survey Aera cites shows 49.1 percent of work transfers split families, temporarily but often long-term, as against 32 percent 10 years ago. Reasons are various, but the one applying most often (in 37.6 percent of cases) is that both spouses work and have conflicting job commitments.
When Yukio was home, they shared the chores 50-50. He took Rumi to daycare and did the laundry and the cleaning. Mitsuko got up at 5:30 to make breakfast and dinner. She came home at 8 p.m., paid the babysitter, fed Rumi and put her to bed. Then Yukio arrived for late-night dinner, just the two of them. While she washed the dishes, he did the ironing.
Now she gets up at four. She does the laundry, the cooking and the cleaning, wakes Rumi at six, takes her to daycare and dashes off to work. At night there's more cleaning to do. She's lucky if she gets four hours' sleep.
And there's no end in sight. Yukio isn't expecting a transfer back to Tokyo any time soon.
If Mitsuko finds herself close to despair over her husband's absence, Yuri, in a similar situation, is adjusting much better - almost too well, her husband might think if he knew.
She's a 41-year-old Tokyo corporate executive; her daughter is 6. When her husband Masahiro was transferred indefinitely to Nagoya two years ago, her first anguished thought was, "We'll never live together again." He considered fighting the transfer, but was warned against it. No one, he was told, is unexpendable these days.
So he left and she stayed - and found, to her surprise, that the oxygen grew richer in his absence. Out early and home late, he had never done much around the house anyway. She can manage without him. She feels free, unconstrained. Neighbors mind the child when she has to work late, and when she goes abroad on business her mother comes over.
Best of all, Yuri and Masahiro are happy to see each other when he comes home on weekends. That's a new feeling. Their family dinners are friendly now as never before. The old tension is gone. "We're closer than ever," Yuri tells Aera.
Her only worry is that eventually he'll come home for good and spoil it all.
***
Source: Aera 2003
Yaeko and Haruki pore over their household accounts. It's a monthly ritual. She's 27, he's 28. They earn YY4 million a year each. Suddenly Yaeko flings down her pile of receipts. "I hate my job," she says. "I'm quitting."
Haruki blanches. Yaeko explains. Her boss is impossible. The working hours - 8 a.m. to midnight - are brutal. The couple want a child. Theoretically her company, a semiconductor maker, allows maternity leave, but in fact no one ever takes it; almost all new mothers quit.
"Think it over," Haruki cautions. His own prospects are none too sunny. The chemical company he works for is belt-tightening. In three years he has not had a raise. The future is uncertain. And living on half their present income won't be easy. They will no longer be able to set aside YY125,000 a month towards the condo they hope to buy. There will be no more trips. No more dining out. "Are you sure you want to live like that?"
Yaeko is not. She wavers.
"I know it's hard," says Haruki, " but let's tough it out a while longer."
Yaeko nods.
Interesting, muses Aera. For a generation women have pursued careers as a liberation from household drudgery, often in defiance of husbands who prefer their wives at home. But the stresses and strains of a recession economy are working a curious reversal. Many wives, the magazine finds, now work not because they want to but under pressure from husbands no longer able to support single-handedly a middle-class lifestyle.
Osamu, 26, is in advertising. His wife Nobuko, 25, worked for an importing firm. Two years ago Nobuko took five months' maternity leave, but getting back into the working routine proved more difficult than she'd anticipated. Deskbound until 7:30 p.m., she would pick the baby up at daycare and get home by 8:30. She bathed him, fed him, put him to bed - and then it was 9:30, and the housework was waiting. Osamu, rarely home before midnight, was of little help.
She suggested she quit. "Impossible!" cried Osamu, aghast. Her salary was higher than his - YY4.2 million a year against his YY3 million. They, too, were putting money aside for a condo - YY200,000 a month.
Nobuko glared at him. "Doesn't it hurt your pride," she demanded icily, "not to be able to feed your family?"
Where does a couple go from here? There are two alternatives - divorce, or a domestic revolution. They chose the latter. Osamu undertook to be home by 8:00 every night and do his share of the chores. He appeases his colleague's resentment by taking work home. This spring Nobuko quit her job and took a part-time position at a neighborhood clothing store. It only nets her YY100,000 a month, but she's home by 5:30. It might mean a longer wait for the condo - but isn't freedom in a rented apartment better than quasi-slavery in the name of home ownership?
If economic stagnation has a bright side, Aera suggests, it is its tendency to foster marital equality. It places both genders in the same boat, and requires that they both row - sometimes without knowing where they're going.
"We're poorer than before but happier," sums up Masayuki, 40. He's an architect. In good times he did very well, but good times didn't last. When his first company folded he joined another one, only to see it too collapse. He was unemployed. His wife Chieko, 37, had quit her job at his insistence - "I wanted her to stay home." Adversity can be opportunity in disguise. Why shouldn't they both stay home - she working as a freelance translator, he as a freelance architect? Among other advantages, they get to watch their two children grow up.
Will the recession ever end? Probably. Soon? Hopefully. And when future historians study it, what will strike them? How it impoverished Japan, or how it enriched it?
***
Souce: Shukan Asahi 2004
Can it really be true, demands Shukan Asahi, that almost a quarter of all junior high school children suffer from latent if not full-blown clinical depression?
That's the conclusion drawn by a Hokkaido University study, the first of its kind in Japan. Adult depression is an old story - the World Health Organization estimates 4.5 to 6 million Japanese are afflicted with it - but children? What do they have to be depressed about?
A great deal - especially, the study suggests, in Japan, where the rate of depression in children appears to be 1-2 percentage points above average rates in the U.S. and Europe. It is nearly double the rate in Sweden.
The Hokkaido University research team surveyed 3331 Sapporo-area elementary and junior high school students in late 2003, having them respond "always," "sometimes" or "never" to 16 statements such as: "There is much happiness in my life;" "I sleep well;" "I have scary dreams;" "I am capable of doing the things I want to do;" "I enjoy talking to my family;" "I feel alone," and so on. Responses were quantified. A score of 16 or more out of a maximum 32 suggests depression. The overall average was 9. Thirteen percent overall scored 16 and up: 7.8 percent of elementary school children, about one child in 12; and 22.8 percent of junior high school students, nearly one in four.
"Kenta" is a sixth-grader who last year in grade five was elected class president and student council representative. Excited at first, he soon found the burdens of office overwhelming, especially when other student council reps lost interest and he, blessed or cursed with a sense of responsibility beyond his years, had to put together the school sports day agenda all by himself. His collapse under pressure is weirdly similar to what many corporate executives go through. His mother took him to a doctor when she overheard him muttering to himself, "If only I could die now." Kenta, after a time of being unable to show his face in school, is back in class, apparently cured by a program of medication and psychotherapy, possibly even stronger for his experience.
That's the optimistic view, but Shukan Asahi's report gives little ground for optimism. The human brain contains some 15 billion nerve cells; depression is essentially an inter-cellular communication breakdown. Symptoms, similar for adults and children, include ongoing sleeplessness, lethargy, an inability to concentrate, an inability to take pleasure in anything.
Root causes are little understood, but extreme stress seems a common factor. "Children," says Tokyo junior high school teacher and therapist Kaoru Mori, "are wrung-out dishrags." It's a striking image. The pressure comes chiefly from schools setting standards, parents demanding results, and peers wielding the ubiquitous threat, overt or implied, of bullying or ostracism for failure to conform. Career-focused parents who have little time to spend with their children are another factor. No wonder the kids are depressed.
Shouldn't teachers be doing more to help? No doubt they should; unfortunately, many of them are depressed too. Education Ministry figures for 2003 show 3194 teachers took sick leave in connection with "psychological symptoms" - an all-time high, up 2.7-fold over the past decade.
***
Source: Shukan Asahi 2004
"I hate my father! I hate him! He tells stupid jokes, he's cold, he's old... I don't mean I want to kill him or anything, I just wish he'd die..."
So wrote a 12-year-old Nara girl to Nicola, a magazine for young girls. Nicola receives some 1500 letters a month, anonymous angst-filled disclosures that make a mockery of the placid veneer of our lives.
That the horror can occasionally surface we know from such episodes as the murder in Sasebo last June of a 12-year-old girl by her 11-year-old friend. Clearly the feverish emotions of little girls are to be taken seriously. What goes on in the unformed minds of children? To get an idea, Shincho 45 (September) sifts through four years' worth of letters to Nicola. (Are boys less dangerous, or merely less interesting? In any case, they do not figure here.)
Shukan Asahi (Sept. 3) explores a similar theme, minus the tragic overtones, via the Sunday morning TBS Radio show Zenkoku Kodomo Denwa Sodanhitsu (Nationwide Children's Telephone Consultation Service). Now heading into its 41st year, the program tackles phone-in questions from children aged 5 to the mid-teens. Regulars and special guests man the phones and spin answers, sometimes out of very thin air. Example: "What's so great about the Emperor?" "Well," began the moderator (this was in 1978) "don't you think your father's great?" "No way," retorted the little rogue (a boy, as it happens).
One thing about boys - they may lack girls' depths, but they do know how to put grownups on the spot!
"Lately" - this from a sixth-grader in Niigata Prefecture to Nicola - "my mother and my grandmother really hate each other. 'Please,' I plead with my mother, 'try to get along with her!' 'I want to die already!' wails my mother. 'Don't say that!' I scream. My dad just sits there and sighs. I'm really afraid that one of these days my mom will just pack up and leave."
"Whenever I'm alone I'm ashamed," writes an 11-year-old girl from Kumamoto. "I feel everyone's eyes on me. I blush to think of them thinking, 'Poor kid, all alone, no friends!' I hate it! At recess when I have no one to play with I hide in the toilet until the bell rings."
"Everybody bullies me," confides a 12-year-old, also from Kumamoto. "They shout at me, 'Die! Get lost!' When I get home I take it out on my sisters. I beat up my younger sister, and I bug my older sister when she's trying to study. Once I tried to cut my wrist..."
"I know a mother's nipples are for her babies," piped up a Zenkoku Kodomo caller one Sunday morning. "What are a father's nipples for?"
Good question - and nobody on the panel that day knew the answer. Hang tough, the panelists told the caller; we'll see what we can find out for you. A flurried behind-the-scenes consultation with the National Genetics Research Center yielded the solution: an embryo's gender is not determined until five weeks after conception; nipples develop earlier.
"There's this boy I like," writes a girl from Saitama Prefecture. "Trouble is, I also like his little brother..." If 12 seems a little young for such conflicting passions, comments Shincho 45, consider it one of the fruits of sex education that now begins early in elementary school. The non-sexual (or "innocent") part of life gets shorter and shorter.
Times have changed in other ways too. Earlier generations of children, a Zenkoku Kodomo producer tells Shukan Asahi, asked questions about things they themselves had experienced. Now they tend to ask about things they've seen on TV.
Incidentally, the Nara girl who wished her father dead started having second thoughts even before she'd finished her letter: "If he dies, who'll support us? Who'd drive me to school? My mom can't drive. Well, maybe I don't want him to die..."
***
Source: Spa! 2004
There were 283,906 divorces in Japan last year. That's 777 a day, Spa! calculates - a 45 percent increase over the past 10 years. Every two minutes, while three couples marry, one couple splits up.
What's the problem? Polling 120 divorced men and women in their twenties and thirties, Spa! asks why they got married in the first place, and from 34.1 percent of them hears, "*Nantonaku* - for no particular reason." Well, maybe that's half the answer right there. A marriage entered into with a shrug is liable to end with a shrug. One-third of them ended before the first wedding anniversary.
But let's get down to cases. Miyuki, 34 now, was at 28 desperate to marry before 30. An insurance saleswoman, she proposed to a client she'd been dating less than two months. He accepted, on one condition: they move in with his parents. Miyuki agreed.
Shouldn't she have known better? No doubt. Before long the inevitable mother-in-law-daughter-in-law rivalry was making domestic life unbearable. A year later the young couple moved out, which should have heralded a happy and independent future. Instead, the husband sank into depression. On bad days he couldn't get out of bed in the morning.
Miyuki was pregnant, and she hoped fatherhood would rally his spirits. When it didn't, she began to think, "Why should I sacrifice myself?" She set her sights on a divorce.
"But if I'd told him I no longer loved him he'd've killed himself," she tells Spa!. Instead, she sold him the idea on economic grounds: if they separated, she would qualify for a single-parent government pension. A rather odd pitch, but it worked, and Miyuki is now free - as free, that is, as the single mother of a five-year-old can be.
Kazuya, a 29-year-old bank employee, had been dating a woman for two years. Conversation flowed easily, they enjoyed each other's company - why not marry? One might as easily ask, Why not leave well enough alone? But marriage won the day, and suddenly little quirks they'd scarcely noticed before swelled into major irritations. He, for example, liked to sprinkle *furikake*, a powdered seasoning, on his rice. Innocent enough, but it got on her nerves - there's no accounting for these things!
The effortless talk dried up; sex became a bore, and three years after it began the marriage ended, to the relief of both parties. Spa! ventures an acid observation at the woman's expense: "If you're going to get angry over something like furikake, you're not suited to conjugal life!"
"I don't remember much about my marriage," says Hiroshi, a 28-year-old real estate agent. "Actually, it wasn't me who wanted to get married. She did. I just sort of went along with it."
The couple met via an Internet encounter site. The beginning of the end of their sex life was when, following their engagement, they began living together. Marriage killed it altogether; suddenly Hiroshi no longer felt like it. Her eagerness chilled him. His chilliness devastated her. He moved out. Divorce soon followed.
Two years later, Hiroshi is considering remarriage. His girlfriend has all the seductive reserve he blamed his wife for lacking. "I don't think," he tells Spa!, "that my next marriage will be sexless."
Sexlessness is hardly a problem for Yuko, mired at 25 in her second marriage necessitated by pregnancy. The first was a disaster - her husband would introduce her to his girlfriends as his younger sister, and his insolvency forced her into debt to pay her maternity expenses. The second is better, but far from happy. "I'm so ashamed," she says of her tendency to get carried away to the point of neglecting contraception. Does a second divorce lie ahead? She fights the temptation. She's a mother now, she says, and must give her children a stable home.
***
Source: Josei Jishin 2004
Shizuko, 64, is desperate. It's her daughter. What's wrong with her? Why doesn't she get married?
She's 37, a bank clerk. "As a girl gets older," Shizuko tells Josei Jishin, "her value declines. My friends say to me, 'My, what a dedicated worker your daughter is!' And she isn't even making good money! What kind of future does she have? How will she live?"
Is a mother's work ever done? Not in Japan, with its growing number of unmarried "children" in their thirties. As of 2000, government statistics show, 42.9 percent of men and 26.6 percent of women aged 30-34 were single. There are twice as many unmarried men in their 30s today, and three times as many unmarried women, as there were 20 years ago, says Josei Jishin.
"I tell everyone I meet," says Shizuko, "'If you know a good man, please introduce us. My daughter is very domestic, she does all the housework on her day off.' The other day a friend said to me, 'Every time I see you it's the same song. Don't you think you're overdoing it? It's like you're making a public declaration: I have this daughter on my hands...' It's true, but at this point we can't just sit around waiting for something to turn up, can we?"
Akiko, 59, feels the same way. Her daughter is a 33-year-old workaholic in the IT sector.
"I'm so worried," confides Akiko. "She's okay now, but imagine her growing old alone, with no husband, no children... And here I am at my age, with no grandchild. It's so sad. Whenever I come across a pamphlet from a likely-looking marriage agency, I mail it off to her, but she's not interested."
That's typical. In fact, so pronounced is the young generation's indifference to matrimony that commercial marriage agencies have started going over the young people's heads, appealing directly to parents. Their marriage "events" bring together mothers and fathers of aging single children for mutual encouragement and exchanges of photographs and phone numbers.
"One-third of respondents to our newspaper ads," says an agency spokesperson, "are parents."
Masako, 60, started her own club for parents of single children. Her three daughters, aged 34, 32 and 29, are all unmarried. At one of the meetings was a certain "Mrs. A," whose 35-year-old son, judging by his photograph, seemed suitable for Masako's middle daughter. "No thanks, mom," said the daughter when shown the photo. "Well," thought Masako, her heart sinking, "maybe one of the other girls will have him." So far, it's "no thanks, mom" all around.
Some mothers go to remarkable lengths in their quest for a son- or daughter-in-law. Toshiko, 60, knows a courting young man needs good clothes, a nice car, meticulously styled hair. Her 35-year-old son now has all these things, Toshiko having paid the bills.
There are many reasons for marriage's fall from grace - among them, ironically enough, the very mother-matchmakers whose plight Josei Jishin chronicles. "Children now in their thirties," explains a counselor, "grew up hearing from their mothers how unfulfilling marriage is. Mothers taught their daughters to be independent, to rely on nobody but themselves."
Did they expect the message to fall on deaf ears?
***
Source: Shukan Asahi 2004
The murder of parents by their children is not as pervasive as Shukan Asahi's headline suggests. The headline reads, "Why does the murder of parents not stop?" It was the twin family massacres in Ibaraki Prefecture late last month, one day and less than 100 km apart, that shocked the weekly into its apocalyptic exaggeration. Two murders are not an apocalypse.
But they are alarming. Suspect in the slaying of three members of the Iijima family of Tsuchiura is Masaru Iijima, 28, the victims' son and brother. His face, said police who responded to his call, was expressionless. His replies to questions were vague. Strangest of all, perhaps, was his room.
It was bare except for a chest of drawers and a TV. "He seems to have spent a lot of his time there," muses an investigator. "What on earth he could have been doing I can't imagine."
He must have been thinking. But his thoughts, though he shared some of them, are not easy to grasp.
"I thought," he reportedly told police, "that as long as my father was there, there would be no place for me."
The Iijima family had for generations been prominent landowners in a farming district that has only recently
given way to Tsuchiura suburban housing developments. Kazumi Iijima, 57, was deputy curator at a local museum.
"He was strict with his children," Shukan Asahi hears from Kazumi's uncle. "He had a loud voice, and could come across as just a little threatening."
As a child Masaru shrank from his father. As he got older, he shrank from the outside world altogether, dropping out of vocational school at 20 and holing himself up in his room. His father stormed, Masaru lashed back, and his mother Sumiko, the first to die in Masaru's alleged final rampage, was the gentle, increasingly desperate peacemaker.
"It was five, six years ago," recalls a neighbor.
"There was the sound of breaking glass. Then I saw Sumiko running away from her son, hiding behind a tree in the garden..."
Around noon on Nov. 24 Masaru allegedly stabbed his mother to death with a kitchen knife. Half an hour later he allegedly went at his older married sister, who was visiting from Tokyo, with a knife and a hammer. His father came home from work at 5:30. Then, investigators say, it was his turn.
Twelve hours earlier, not far away in Mito, a 19-year-old boy allegedly battered his sleeping parents to death with a 4-kg dumbbell. The boy is a juvenile and cannot be named. His parents, aged 51 and 48, were both teachers. Like Iijima, he had withdrawn to his room and was under some pressure, from conscientious parents with high expectations, to get on with his life.
"The two households are similar," an education writer tells Shukan Asahi. "Both were strict and serious - and both tried to solve the children's problems on their own. They should have sought help from public agencies."
That may be true. But do "public agencies" exist in sufficient force to cope with the growing problem of dysfunctional families? That question is not addressed.
***
Source: Shukan Shincho 2004
"Mom, do we have any condoms in the house? I need some for a school project. Oh, and by the way, how many times a week do you and dad have sex?"
The mother was speechless. Who can blame her? Her own sex education hadn't prepared her for the sex education her son was receiving in his grade six classroom.
Actually, reports Shukan Shincho, sex ed begins much earlier than grade six at Yokohama's Imajuku Public Elementary School. It begins in grade one. By grade three the kids are writing reports that (says the magazine) are enough to make parents blush, if not faint.
A brief sample: "The man's penis stands erect. He inserts it into the woman's vagina. When the man and woman are at the height of their excitement, the man secretes semen into the woman's body. The semen penetrates the woman's egg. And that is how life begins."
The technical term for this is "radical sex education." Imajuku Elementary initiated it in 1997, roused to drastic measures by a wave of bullying which hit the school around then. Bullying, it was thought, stemmed from children's failure to appreciate the sacredness of life. Perhaps if they understood how life is generated they would value it more.
At Imajuku, says Shukan Shincho, "life studies" is taught for 20 hours a year in grades one and two, 25 hours a year in grades three and four, and 30 hours a year in grades five and six. From first grade to graduation, students receive a total of 150 hours of life studies instruction - roughly 10 times the conventional concentration, the magazine finds.
In grade one they learn basic terms like penis and vagina. A booklet used as a supplementary text in grade three features detailed illustrations of various animals copulating - insects, fish, snakes, dogs cats, dolphins. The final chapter shows humans copulating. Interestingly enough, Shukan Shincho notes, the woman is on top.
What goes through a small child's mind as he or she takes all this in? There is no easy way of knowing, and probably no way at all of generalizing. In any case, not all parents are pleased to have their children's precocity stoked so vigorously.
"You can teach this stuff to first-graders, but I doubt if it means very much to them," comments one parent. "All it does is arouse unnatural interest. At home, words like 'penis' and 'vagina' keep coming up. When a love scene appears on TV, the kids go, 'Is that intercourse?'"
A high school teacher who observed an Imajuku grade six sex education class had this to say: "It made me shudder a little to hear boys whose voices haven't even changed saying things like, 'When having sex you must keep your condom on from start to finish.' And little girls piping up, 'Rape is not mainly about sex but about power.' It made me feel sad somehow."
A counter-argument is that in a society in which sex is ubiquitous and inescapable and includes AIDS, rape, child porn and teen pregnancy among its attributes, childhood innocence may be an unaffordable luxury. And in fact, Shukan Shincho says, radical sex education is spreading to other schools - though Imajuku itself is reportedly considering a program revision in response to some parents' objections.
The challenge is to calibrate sex education's quantity and content to what children can absorb. A certain Professor Ohashi of Tokyo Gakugei University thinks Imajuku Elementary lays it on a little thick.
"Radical sex education is extremely dangerous," he says. "It teaches more than children need to know. What children see and hear they will soon want to try for themselves."
What about the bullying that started it all? Has radical sex education solved the problem?
"The evidence is not clear," a school official told Tokyo Confidential.
***
Source: Yomiuri Weekly 2004
“Papa, what’s an umbilical cord?”
“An umbilical cord? It’s… it’s like a hose; it delivers nourishment from mother to baby.”
“A hose! Was I connected to mama by a hose?”
Father and son are looking through an album of the boy’s baby photos. Shuji, 38, stumbles through his explanation, Ko, 7, taking it in as best he can. For Shuji it’s an awkward moment. “Mama,” who figures so prominently in this narrative, is no longer on the scene. Shuji is a single father – has been since the couple’s divorce four years ago. Will Ko go on to ask why mama isn’t here? No. For now, he has quite enough to mull over. Besides, to him and his six-year-old brother Yu, mama’s non-presence is quite natural. They are used to it. Shuji to them is both father and mother.
That is less uncommon than is generally supposed, Yomiuri Weekly finds. Largely unnoticed, the number of single fathers is rising rapidly. As of 2003 it stood at 173,800 nationwide – far below the 1.22 million single mothers, but still representing a 28 percent increase in five years, a reflection of the soaring divorce rate.
Most single fathers find unaccustomed housework the heaviest burden. Shuji, a Sendai university lecturer, takes it in stride. “It’s just routine work,” he shrugs. “No big deal.”
A typical day plays out something like this: He’s up early to get breakfast ready; he sees Ko off to school and drives Yu to daycare. Then, work. At 5:15 he leaves the university and picks the children up (Ko having spent the late afternoon at an after-school daycare facility). At home, there’s dinner to prepare. When the children have been fed, bathed and put to bed, the laundry awaits.
“I’m lucky I work at a university,” he says. “To some extent I’m master of my own time.”
Yes, but there’s a price to pay. Just after the divorce, when the children were three and two (we are not told how their father acquired exclusive custody), Shuji, then employed at a small-town college, would take Ko and Yu to work with him. Enlisting his students as volunteer babysitters, he taught his courses and at night carried on his research, the boys asleep beside him in the college lab.
That couldn’t continue indefinitely. As they grew, the children claimed more and more of his life. He gives it willingly, but is keenly aware of what he is missing.
Unable to work past 5:15 because the daycare centers close at six, “I feel as if I’m being left behind. When I see my colleagues working late into the night – well, it gets to me.”
Much of this would sound familiar to Eiji, 45, single father to his pre-school son since his divorce two years ago. A builder by trade, he spent his days at construction sites, often not coming home till ten at night. It was an impossible situation – private daycare fees were eating up a third of his income, and besides, “If this continues,” he realized, “my kid will start to hate me.” He put in for a transfer to a desk job with fixed hours. The pay is less, but he feels it’s worth it: “At work I could be replaced, but I’m the only father my son has.”
Eiji was fortunate in the sympathetic support of his employer. Some companies, says Yomiuri Weekly, seize on the inability of single fathers to work overtime as a pretext for the euphemistic “tap on the shoulder” that signifies dismissal.
“Before I was born, was I inside mummy?” inquires Ko.
“Yes you were,” replies Shuji. He turns to Yomiuri Weekly’s reporter. “They grow up so fast,” he says. “We parents are still coming to terms with the divorce, but they’ve already moved on…”
***
Source: Shukan Bunshun (2004)
Nail polish on infants? Well, why not? "It's so cute!" gush their moms.
"Yes, but it's dangerous, I tell them," fumes a nurse to Shukan Bunshun. "Babies put their fingers in their mouths. The mothers don't listen." Cuteness trumps health, and the nail polishing continues. Not only nail polishing - hair dyeing and ear-piercing too. Can you imagine an infant not yet a year old with dyed hair and pierced ears?
Shukan Bunshun's headline leaves no doubts as to where it stands: "Idiot parents are destroying their children."
Idiot mothers, for the most part. Fathers are barely acknowledged; their role, when they have one, is that of indifferent onlooker. The young parents of today are the children of yesterday's freewheeling bubble economy. They grew up thinking the pleasures of youth were a lifelong entitlement. Their parents never told them otherwise. They'll have to learn on their own. So far, they'd rather not.
"We had a three-year-old child staying with us - she had a fever," says a Kanagawa Prefecture hospital nurse. "Suddenly we lost all contact with the parents. Six days later the mother comes in, all suntanned. 'It seemed like such a good opportunity so my husband and I went to Guam,' she said, passing out souvenirs to the nurses. We just didn't know what to say!"
"On parents' day lately," says a Hyogo Prefecture nursery school director, "many of the mothers are totally wrapped up in their cell phones - talking, exchanging mail. We have to get them involved in the children's' games, just so they'll pay attention.
"Also," the director continues, "many of them can't read kanji. We have to simplify the notices we send home. Sadly, mothers are reading less and less to their children. The children beg to be read to. 'No!' the mothers snap; 'if you keep bugging me about that, I won't like you any more.'"
"When I ask the children what they had for breakfast," says a nursery school teacher in Fukuoka, "I get answers like, 'A chocolate bar'; 'a rice cracker'."
A colleague in Ibaragi faces the same problem, and wonders ironically if nursery schools aren't wrong to serve natural, nutritious, balanced lunches. "It gives parents an excuse," she explains, "to say, 'They get a good meal at school, so it doesn't matter what they eat at home.'"
Let's drop into "the kids' room" for a moment. The little glassed-in room overflows with small children. Judging by the noise, they are having a pretty good time. There are toys, a slide, a video set showing anime cartoons. You'd hardly think you're in an izakaya pub, but that is where the "kids' room" is. It's an innovation that's catching on, Shukan Bunshun finds. It lets the whole family go out on the town.
But small children's appetite for night life is limited. By the time 11 p.m. rolls around, the little ones are tugging at their partying parents' sleeves. "I wanna go home."
"Not yet," snaps an impatient mother. "Go play." And the party swings on into the small hours.
***
Source: Trendy (2004)
Is it good for parents always to know exactly where their children are - within, say, 10-15 meters?
"Orwellian," the word that immediately springs to mind, no longer inspires the dread it once did. The youngest of today's parents were born in or around 1984. To them, in 2005, electronic surveillance is not a nightmare but a precaution. There are strange people roaming the streets, doing awful things to children. If parents are reluctant to let their kids out of their electronic sight, who can blame them?
Under capitalism, that most un-Orwellian of economic systems, a consumer's wish is a producer's command. In a feature entitled "The Prevention of Crime," Trendy shows us what's available in the way of tracking devices.
To the novice, the sheer variety presents a most bewildering spectacle. "Terminals," carried by children like cell phones (but lacking most cell phone functions in deference to the ban many elementary schools have clamped on cell phone chatter), transmit location-pinpointing signals to their parents' computers or cell phones. Is that oppressive to a ten-year-old? It may be, but that concern, to the extent it is one, is trumped by the fear of living among sinister individuals with incomprehensible psychologies and ungovernable erotic impulses.
Some terminals are equipped with emergency buttons that signal an "operation center," which in turn alerts parents and, at their request, dispatches an investigator to the child's location.
Some are equipped with buzzers. Buzzers are controversial, however. "Opinion is divided," says Trendy, "as to whether it's better to try to frighten away a molester with a noise, or to transmit an alarm signal without the offender knowing."
How accurately do the devices mark location? Here is another source of bewilderment to protective parents - they must anticipate the type of neighborhood in which their children might encounter trouble, for some devices work well in (for example) residential neighborhoods but less well in areas full of high buildings, while others are the opposite. At their best, though, says Trendy, the range is 10-15 meters.
Next to our children, where do our major security fears focus? On our homes, of course. In 2003 there were 330,000 recorded burglaries, nearly 60 percent of them residential. "Secure your windows first," is Trendy's advice, for most burglars gain entry through them. Locks, cameras and alarm systems of varying levels of sophistication can turn the castle that is your home into a fortress.
But burglars are not fools, and defensive measures only inspire their ingenuity. Thus the ultimate defense must be psychological. A remote control device that, when you're out, turns the lights and TV on and off at varying intervals, is bound to disconcert a thief looking for an empty unprotected house to slip into. One model even casts shadows on the curtains.
That only works at night, of course. What about during the day? There are live cameras that can put your home under protective observation, via the Internet, 24 hours a day. Now, though, we're back in Orwell country, and when the children's lives are not at stake, how deeply ought we to sink into that swamp? Where is the perfect balance between privacy and security? Is there one?
***
Source: Yomiuri Weekly (2005)
Takeshi, 25, on the job two years, at last had his office routine down pat. Brisk and assured, he could get his week ’ s work done in five days. Now weekends were his – and his girlfriend ’ s. One day she said to him, “ I think I ’ m pregnant. ” That gave Takeshi pause, but not for long. He proposed marriage. She agreed. They told their parents. The parents were pleased. The young couple went to a hotel and explained the situation – they wanted a full ceremony but didn ’ t have much time. “ We understand perfectly, ” said the hotel; they had a special plan in place for what in English used to be called shotgun weddings. The untranslatable Japanese expression is dekichatta kon. Dekichatta, meaning “ ready, ” refers to the baby; kon means marriage.
In short, says Yomiuri Weekly – no problem. Times have changed. The awful social and moral stigma that as recently as ten years ago might have poisoned the lives of the wayward lovers has been swept away as completely as other moral cobwebs – Victorian veils, feudal giri-ninjo and whatnot. A good thing too, Yomiuri Weekly believes. Japan ’ s remarkable tolerance in this regard could help lead it out of the demographic dead end into which late (or no) marriage and a shrinking child population are dragging it.
No longer a disgrace to be concealed, a bride ’ s pregnancy can now be celebrated as “ a double happiness, ” with major hotels across the country devising wedding ceremonies with names like “ My Angel Celebration for Three, ” or “ Il, Elle, Bebe ” – pidgin French for “ he, she, baby. ”
Not least among the special arrangements to be made is speeded-up planning. The six months or a year that wedding preparations conventionally require is out of the question in the case of a dekichatta kon. Most couples, however open, still prefer to hold the ceremony before the bride ’ s condition shows.
Which came first, the benign tolerance, which as Yomiuri Weekly points out is far in advance of attitudes in the West, or the “ boom ” ? They seem to have developed in lock-step. Japan is often described (often rightly) as conservative, but there is this built-in facilitator of social change: once a celebrity does something in public, the barriers go down. In 2000 entertainer Kimutaku broke the ice with his much bruited dekichatta kon. Other stars followed. Then it was their fans ’ turn. Now an estimated one bride in five goes proudly pregnant to the altar.
The big mystery in all this is not the young couples ’ indifference to convention, which comes naturally at that age; not the hotels ’ eager cooperation, easily explicable in purely economic terms, but the acquiescence of parents. “ That, ” in Yomiuri Weekly ’ s view, “ is uniquely Japanese. ” It may well be.
Back to Takeshi, married in April, due to be a father in August.
“ I always knew I wanted to marry my wife, ” he says. “ The only question was whether I had what it takes to raise a family. When she became pregnant there was only one thing to do: cast off all doubts and take the plunge! ”
***
Source: Spa! (2005)
A guy walks into a lingerie shop. The customers gasp, scream and scatter. The saleslady looks like she doesn’t know what hit her. “I want a bra,” he says, “and panties to match.
“Come, measure me,” he prods the saleslady, whose stupefied immobility is making him impatient. “I’m a customer too. No discrimination, now.”
Discrimination? Nobody wants to be guilty of that. The saleslady composes herself, takes a deep breath, and measures the man for a bra. “You’ll need a large size,” she says. The customer nods. He is shown some samples. He examines them critically. They are not quite what he had in mind, not frilly enough. “I’m looking for something... gorgeous,” he says, using the English word.
“Gorgeous,” echoes the saleslady under her breath as she leads him to another rack.
He makes his selection at last, lays down his cash, and walks out of the store, no doubt laughing heartily to himself at the confusion he has sown.
He is in fact a Spa! reporter, one of an all-male team of correspondents visiting places that cater exclusively or primarily to women. Why? Why not? Just to see what happens. With women-only train cars now a fact of Tokyo commuter life, the subject seems appropriate. Incidentally, observes Spa!, if a man *really* wants to enter a car reserved for women, no law or penalty prevents him – although, says a man who absentmindedly did enter one once, “you draw some awfully wicked stares! I felt damned uncomfortable, I can tell you.”
Into what other consecrated realms does Spa! venture? Into, among others, a lesbian bar and a cooking class. Guess which of the two proved more awkward. If you said the bar, you’re wrong.
It’s a nice little hideaway in Shinjuku 2-chome, the heart of gay Tokyo – not at all decadent, the reporter who drew this assignment notes with some surprise. On the contrary, it seems oddly normal – guys and girls enjoying drinks, conversation and darts together. “What’s lez about it?” he wonders.
He sees after a drink or two what he had missed cold sober: the “guys” are women – not much less masculine than he is, but women all the same. How will they react to his presence among them?
His neighbor accosts him: “Hey. Do I look like a guy to you?”
“Well...”
“I’m a woman,” says the woman, using the masculine pronoun “ore.” “But I live like a man, okay? Go ahead. Feel my breasts.”
Timidly, he does. “It was like feeling up a fat old man,” he writes.
Still, he finds himself warming to the place – and to his new companion, whose brusque exterior conceals a friendliness that soon surfaces. He passes two pleasant hours with her and her friends, purchasing a bottle and leaving it as a token he will be back someday.
Cooking class turns out to be more of an ordeal. The school is a well-known one, and a reservation is required. On the phone Spa!’s reporter is told that three of the 25 students are men. Well, that’s reassuring. But he arrives to find none of the men have turned up. Less brazen than the scribe who stormed the lingerie shop, he is frankly self-conscious. “May I sit here?” he inquires of a young woman next to an empty seat. She nods, but declines to be drawn into conversation.
In mid-lecture, to the reporter’s relief, one of the male students appears. Afterwards, the two pair up to practice. “What happened?” jokes the late-comer. “Your wife left you and you have to cook for the kids?”
“Something like that,” laughs the reporter.
A woman cooking nearby turns on them. “We are not,” she hisses, “here to play!”
“Believe me,” the reporter retorts mentally, “this is not play. This is work!”
***
Source: Yomiuri Weekly (2005)
Who doesn’t this happen to? You’re walking through a train station minding your own business when someone minding his own business bumps you rather brusquely and vanishes into the crowd without a word of apology. On the station platform you endure a regular pummeling of briefcases and handbags. Outside, it’s raining; umbrellas sprout like mushrooms; you’d think people would be the least bit careful - but no, evidently they’re too self-absorbed to care who they jab, poke or drip on.
The petty annoyances of massed anonymous urban life are familiar enough. Some of us dismiss them and remain cheerful; others suppress their resentment and maintain an outward equilibrium; others still go mad. Yomiuri Weekly presumably has the latter group in mind when it consults a criminologist for a professional view of discourtesy.
Is rudeness a crime? Maybe not – but, warns Professor Kenji Kiyonaga of Japan Women’s University, it breeds crime, and crime of an uncommonly vicious sort. There’s more to rudeness, Kiyonaga says, than boorish disregard for the social niceties. What’s in an apology? Acknowledgment of other people’s existence, if nothing more. To someone who bumps you and fails to apologize, you basically don’t exist. If you don’t exist for him or her, the feeling is probably mutual. Think of the recent juku stabbing in Kochi, or the high school bombing in Hikari, Yamaguchi Prefecture, for insight into the possible implications of the infiltration of non-existence into existence.
It will be interesting to see how future historians treat Japan’s 1980s and ‘90s – the abrupt rise to unprecedented prosperity, followed by the no less dizzying descent and dislocation of the bubble economy’s collapse. For now, says Kiyonaga, the key themes are selfishness and isolation – the isolation of families within neighborhoods and the isolation of family members from one another. That in itself is not new, but the depth of it may be. Beginning in the 1990s, Kiyonaga argues, “other people just don’t enter our field of vision.”
We don’t even talk to our friends anymore, laments Tamotsu Sengoku, director of the Japan Youth Research Center.
“Even to those we consider our friends,” he says, “we no longer confide our private thoughts and troubles. This is an enormous change. If we’re alienated to this degree from our friends, it’s not surprising we don’t consider people on the street worth apologizing to.”
Prosperity, we’ve been learning, causes as many problems as it solves.
“As long as we’re materially well off,” says Sengoku, “we can manage just fine without serious communication.” At least we seem to be able to. “Parents,” he says, “no longer scold their children. Kids grow up without those flashes of hatred, followed by repentance.”
So much the better, you say, thinking what a relief it would have been to be spared the emotional storms of your own childhood. But smooth sailing is a mixed blessing. “It’s that childish friction with our parents,” notes Sengoku, “that nurtures consideration for others.” Without it, we are indifferent. Indifference is not always bad. It can make us tolerant. But Kiyonaga sees its darker side, and Yomiuri Weekly, taking its cue from him, fears a wave of “criminal behavior such as Japan has never known before.”
***
Source: Yomiuri Weekly (2005)
Poor dad. He works like a beast of burden because that's what society demands of him, and he comes home one night to find his children grown into semi-adults and virtual strangers. Can he get to know them? Is it too late? The sad answer to the second question is, Probably.
Yomiuri Weekly presents some case histories. "Hara" is a 47-year-old management consultant who three years ago started his own company. It's the all-too-familiar story of job pressure pushing family life into the deep, deep background. That's the way postwar Japan works. You can fight it only at the cost of professional failure, an option family expenses and personal pride scarcely allow.
Hara's university-aged son and daughter grew up more or less "fatherless"---an expression coined by commentator Shunsuke Serizawa in a sidebar looking at father-child alienation in general. Then a crisis occurred. Hara's son, a second-year student, was failing his courses and shutting himself up in his room.
The proliferating hikikomori or social withdrawal syndrome was familiar to Hara from news reports, but here it was on his own doorstep, and he had not even seen it coming. Now, if ever, was the time for a heart-to-heart talk with the boy, but for that to work there has to be a relationship to start with. There was none here, and the two were soon at cross-purposes. It was not an angry conversation, merely a pointless one. At last, says Yomiuri Weekly, the elder Hara agreed to let his son drift for a time, on the understanding he would return to school next year.
This required a consultation with university officials. Hara and his wife set out together---but at the university gates he got cold feet. "You talk to them, I'll wait in the car," he said to his wife. Looking back, he sees this as a far from praiseworthy unwillingness on his part to become involved in his son's affairs. What is behind it, he wonders---lack of love, or lack of confidence?
In a second sidebar, education analyst Naoki Ogi refers to children's lack of a sense of family. "They don't think, 'I'm going home to my house,'" he says, "but, 'I'm going home to my room.' And when dad suddenly tries to get close to them, it rarely works."
He offers this advice: "Fathers, get a life. Do sports, do volunteer work, be active in the community---anything, as long as it's outside the company." Professional success is fine, he says, but the children don't see it, and don't identify with it. "All they see of their fathers' work is his utter exhaustion when he comes home at night."
"Moriyama," 47, works for a food company. He has a daughter in senior high school and a son in junior high. This spring Moriyama was transferred out of town, where he lives on his own.
Coming home for a visit after a few weeks away, he was astonished at the sight of his daughter. Dyed hair, high heels, short skirt---was this his little girl? It was indeed, and moreover she had acquired the habit of going out at night and returning in the small hours. Could she be working in the sex business? Should he ask her? No, impossible. You can't ask your daughter a thing like that!
Something else: she had taken up smoking. What to do about that? Remonstrate? Bluster? We all know how much good that does.
Strangely enough, Moriyama finds he communicates better with his children by email than he ever did face to face. He has an idea. "I'll suggest we quit smoking together," he tells Yomiuri Weekly.
He hasn't proposed it yet; he's waiting for the right moment. With luck, he'll find it. It sounds hopeful---the perfect father-daughter project for a post-modern alienated age!
***
ource: Spa! (2006)
Noboru could find a girlfriend of his own, if he felt like it, but it's so much easier having affairs with other men's wives. Just think, he tells Spa!, of the money you save by not going out because you don't want to be seen in public.
True, he still shudders to recall the time a woman he was seeing said to him, "I told my husband I found somebody I liked." That's all he needed---an encounter with an enraged husband! A false alarm, fortunately. All things considered, for easygoing guys like Noboru, shy of making commitments, this is a pretty good way to arrange one's social life.
At 29, he's typical of Spa!'s gallery of "men who refuse to take responsibility." Their road in life is the path of least resistance. If, in consequence, their businesses don't flourish and their private lives don't soar, there are compensating attractions, among which serenity ranks very high.
Noboru has nothing against matrimony, and even looks forward to it "some day." But the marriage he envisions is one with money in the bank, kids in private schools, dinner and drinks at swank places. It’s a nice picture. The only trouble is, "I'd need twice my present salary" (he makes YY4 million a year working for an insurance company). When reality is that uncompromising, one is best advised to follow Noboru's lead and cultivate resignation.
Shigeo, 27, is a man of firm and even fiery opinions, but you'd never know it by talking to him, because face to face he is mild-mannered, says Spa!, to the point of mousiness. His fire is reserved for the anonymity of Internet chat rooms like 2Channel, where he lets fly with both barrels against venal politicians, hypocritical journalists, and other natural targets of those who don't suffer fools gladly. Articulate and well-informed behind the veil of anonymity, he admits he has little to say for himself in situations where anonymity is not possible.
At the office, for instance. He works part-time for a Website design firm, making YY100,000 a month. His parents virtually support him. "Whatever my boss says, however misguided, I just shrug and say, 'Yes, ok,' he tells Spa!. What's the point of making waves? "The other workers, their education level isn't very high. The way things are, you don't need talent to succeed. Even dull-witted people can get ahead. I wish the world recognized talent. If it did, maybe, I'd have a chance."
Kenzo, 32, doesn't want a chance. He's happy to be a temp office worker. Become a full-timer? No way! "What would it mean," he asks rhetorically, "except more responsibility?"
Of ambition he was cured long ago. As a university senior he received a job offer from a yakiniku chain restaurant. There was an orientation. The speakers' ringing encomiums to hard work and self-fulfillment rang hollow. Their bodies were flabby from lack of exercise, and for sex, they told him, they went to the sex shops, being too busy to start families.
No thanks, thought Kenzo, and triumphantly launched his going-nowhere temp career. Not that he himself has started a family. "If I did that," he says, "I'd have to work hard." Case closed.
email than he ever did face to face. He has an idea. "I'll suggest we quit smoking together," he tells Yomiuri Weekly.
He hasn't proposed it yet; he's waiting for the right moment. With luck, he'll find it. It sounds hopeful---the perfect father-daughter project for a post-modern alienated age!
***
Source: Spa! (2006)
He's 26, she's 32. Well, so what? In these taboo-shattering times, the conventional coupling of men with younger women is easily set aside. Sure enough, Spa! finds, many young men have lately discovered reasons for preferring older women, and vice versa. Nobody cares, nobody disapproves---and yet, if the magazine's case histories are any indication, the arrangement doesn't gel all that well.
"When we first started going together," says Naoki, "it was fantastic. I was telling all my friends, 'A woman over 30 is the greatest! Young women? No thanks!'"
He works for a precision machinery outfit; she's a secretary at an appliance maker. They met last year. She impressed him with her cool competence, her stylish fashion sense, her well-kept apartment. So this is how an "adult woman" conducts herself, he thought. Former girlfriends seemed children in comparison.
"Then one day," he says, "she threw me a curve ball." She was the eldest daughter of country people with a family business, there was no son to take it over---"in short," he sums up with a shudder, "she wanted to get married."
Married! "I'd thought vaguely of getting married at 30 or thereabouts," he says---"but when I'm 30 she'll be 36!"
Here was a sober awakening indeed: your older girlfriend doesn't stop aging while you slowly catch up to her. The age gap remains, growing possibly more awkward with time. So at least it seemed to Naoki. He provoked a split, and is now happily dating a girl of (as Spa! puts it) "his own generation."
Kenichi, 33, is the same age his ex-girlfriend was when they met 10 years ago, which makes her 43 now. In some ways, she was the girlfriend sent from heaven. She wasn't interested in marriage, didn't want kids, had money and paid her own way. What spoiled things a little was her maddening habit of treating him like a younger brother---a much younger brother. He'd come back from shopping and she'd critically scan his purchases. She'd complain of him to his mother---older woman to older woman. She'd invite his friends over for drinks, and give them such a piece of her mind over their loose living that he'd be obliged to make the rounds later to apologize.
It couldn't go on forever, though it went on a very long time. But finally, just recently, Kenichi noticed she was starting to look her age and suggested they part.
"All right, fine!" she snapped. She left gracefully---taking all the household goods and most of the savings with her. Never mind. Kenichi feels more relieved than distressed. "My second life starts now," he says. "I'm looking for a young girlfriend..." Spa! wishes him luck.
What, one naturally wonders, would an experienced, financially independent older woman see in a younger man? Dash? Fire? Beguiling innocence? One 33-year-old woman Spa! speaks to sums it up in a manner much less complimentary to masculine pretensions:
"I like weak men. They fawn on you, and you can thrust them aside or indulge them, depending on your mood." Speaking of her current "elite bureaucrat" boyfriend, she says, "I'm the queen, he's something I own. Who but a younger man," she adds, "can you have that relationship with?"
Who, indeed?
***
Source: Shukan Shincho 2006
One July day in 1993 a child was born and his name was... Devil. Heaven help the innocent offspring of fathers with a sense of humor. It was quite a cause celebre at the time. Municipal officials in Akishima, Tokyo, scanned the birth registration documents and paused in perplexity. "Name: Akuma." Akuma? Akuma is not a name, it's the Japanese word for devil. What was this, some kind of joke?
Yes and no. Yes it was a joke in the sense that it was funny, in the father's opinion. Otherwise, no. The name, the father insisted quite seriously, would stick. The municipality passed the papers on to the Tokyo Legal Affairs Bureau. Choose another name, the bureau ordered. Outraged, the father appealed to Family Court. The court upheld the bureau. The proud papa's next recourse was to the media, which relished his buffoonery and conferred on the family a fleeting celebrity. Time passed, attention shifted, the family relapsed into obscurity.
"Akuma"---he has a different name now, of course---is 13. What are he and the family up to? Shukan Shincho wonders.
What the magazine uncovers is a mix of good news and bad. The boy is in first year junior high school and doing very well. An avid soccer player, he dreams of turning pro. Sadly, he lives most of the year in a child welfare center, his parents apparently having lost interest in him when their attempt to make a toy of him was frustrated. Summer holidays he spends with relatives who, Shukan Shincho says, dote on him.
The father was 30 back in '93. His wife, Akuma's mother, was 22. They ran a neighborhood snack bar---which closed down in '94, the notoriety having driven away the regular clientele. In 1996 the couple divorced. Akuma, then in nursery school, ended up in a public home. The father ended up in prison. Unemployed, he had drifted into drug dealing.
"A selfish, stupid father," sums up Shukan Shincho; "the very picture of irresponsibility." His release from prison after four years has so far made no difference to Akuma; "financial problems" prevent him from taking charge of the boy.
What, then, of the child's mother? She has not seen her son since he was two. Shukan Shincho tracks her down. "Really? I had no idea he was in a public home," is her initial response upon being brought up to date.
Then, after a pause, she resumes, "When my former husband was arrested, I took care of the child. Afterwards, all kinds of things came up, and we ended up living apart. Then I heard he was living with my ex-husband's father. What happened after that I don't know, I was never told.
"I pray for his happiness constantly," she continues. "My ex-husband said to me, 'When the boy turns 16, if he wants to see you, I'll allow it.' I do so want to see him when he's grown, even if only once."
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Source: Chuo Koron 2006
"Q" (as Chuo Koron calls him) is a third-generation Brazilian of Japanese descent on his mother's side. His parents moved to Japan in 1992, two years after an amendment to the immigration law permitted foreigners of Japanese ancestry, and their spouses, to live and work here as permanent residents. Q and his two sisters followed four years later.
Q's life story, sketched for Chuo Koron by journalist Haru Sugiyama, reflects the opportunities and pitfalls the law embodies. Now a 24-year-old hip-hop singer whose band has lately released its second CD, Q looks ahead to a potentially enviable future, one belying a harshly troubled past typical in many ways of immigrant life in a country with no immigrant tradition.
Did the Japanese government anticipate such a vast influx of Japanese-Brazilians? It was not unforeseeable. In 1990 Brazil's economy was racked by 1000-percent inflation, while Japan's "bubble" was still floating, though soon to burst. A month's factory work in Japan---the labor shortage gripping factories was the law's main impetus---was worth a year's work in Brazil, in terms of wages. Brokerage firms advanced transportation costs. Naturally, strapped Brazilians heeded the call. Currently numbering 280,000, they form Japan's third-largest immigrant community, after Koreans and Chinese.
Predictable though it was, preparations for their arrival were few. The jobs were there, as promised, but outside the factory gates society as a whole had no place for them. The crime problem that dogs the Brazilian community reflects this social exclusion.
Sugiyama cites some statistics: In 2005, 8508 foreigners were arrested in connection with Criminal Code offenses. Most in trouble were the Chinese, who accounted for 3737 arrests. Second were the Brazilians, with 1066. But regarding juvenile crime, Brazilians led with 360 arrests, more than twice the number among the second-place Chinese.
When Q's parents left for Japan in 1992, the three children remained behind in the somewhat grudging care of their grandparents. Q was 10. Without parental discipline, his schooling foundered. He and his sisters arrived in Japan in 1996. Q never attended school in Japan; he went to work in a Brazilian-owned shop instead.
Immigrant kids who do go to school must struggle to hold their own. Bullying is endemic. The language problem is crippling. "I've heard that some schools even encourage their foreign pupils to quit," Sugiyama writes. Private Portuguese-language schools exist but are expensive. Education is only compulsory for Japanese children. There are regions, Sugiyama figures, where 40 percent of the foreign children are not attending school.
With both parents working long hours, "it's hard to lead a child-centered life," Sugiyama observes. Q saw little of his own parents. "When we did get together for a meal," he recalls, "all they talked about was how terrible the Japanese were, how terrible the company was." Not very encouraging.
At 15, Q left the shop and went to work in a factory. He hated it. Soon he learned about easier ways of making a living, like selling amphetamines. He fell in with the bosozoku---apprentice yakuza types who, among other things, torment the ears of peaceloving citizens with souped up car and motorcycle engines. Fights broke out constantly. One day Q showed up at home after a month's absence, black and blue all over. Horrified, his father made a quick decision: "We're going back to Brazil."
And so they did, Q imbued with new respect for his father: "He really loved me."
A year later Q was back in Japan, this time with something new on his mind: music. Perhaps he's found his road in life.
Unfortunately, not every immigrant has latent musical talent. "What this country needs," Sugiyama concludes, "is a foundation on which immigrant children can hold their heads high and grow up proud of their heritage." It's a fundamental necessity the hastily passed 1990 law failed to allow for.
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Source: Sun