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Asian Anthropology

Gender Inequality and Family Formation in Japan--Manuscript Draft--

Corresponding Author: Robert Craig Marshall, Ph.D.

Western Washington UniversityBELLINGHAM, WA UNITED STATES

Author Comments: This is not a very snappy title. I am open to suggestions.

Manuscript Number: RAAN-2017-0002

Full Title: Gender Inequality and Family Formation in Japan

Article Type: Original Article

Corresponding Author's Institution: Western Washington University

First Author: Robert Craig Marshall, Ph.D.

Order of Authors: Robert Craig Marshall, Ph.D.

Abstract: The way Japanese culture forms families (ie) has historically provided women withgreat autonomy. The formation of the ie as a perpetuating, corporate, stem family withimpartible inheritance raises the successor's wife's status in the ie above that of thesuccessor's brothers, who leave the ie. The ie's succession of generations functionsmost smoothly with one son, or a daughter and then a son, the pattern typical ofmodern industrial societies as well. But Japan's stable gender paradigm Male :Female :: Public : Private :: Breadwinner : Housewife has now become a hindrance tothose women ambitious for opportunity in the wider world once they have fulfilled theirduties to their husband's ie. Neither the modernization of Japan nor its economicadvance and more recent stagnation have significantly altered this pattern of familyand gender formation.

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Gender Inequality and Family Formation in Japan

Robert C Marshall

Department of Anthropology

Western Washington University

Bellingham, WA 98225

[email protected]

360.685.3593

Title Page

mailto:[email protected]

“Gender Inequality and Family Formation in Japan”

1

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

--William Faulkner, “Requiem for a Nun”

Institutional studies are increasingly coming to acknowledge the current general

inability to account for Japan’s deep, persistent gender inequality despite a number of factors

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

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

(Estevez-Abe 2013; Nemoto 2016; Youm and Yamaguchi 2016). As Nemoto (2016:3) observes,

gender inequality in Japan “continues to be seen as legitimate.” The present paper examines the

contribution of one disregarded and even explicitly denied source of legitimacy of gender

inequality in Japan, family (ie). The way Japanese form ie, which historically raised women’s

autonomy to a remarkable degree and today continues to frame Japan’s deepest values and

commitments, now constrains women’s ambitions for opportunity to rise in the wider world.

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

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

wives are more important to the success of families than younger sons. Japanese culture now

argues broadly whether wives might dominate their husbands, and women dominate men

generally, as implausible as this appears to outsiders, in a way that shrouds the central dynamic

through which family formation legitimizes gender inequality into the present.

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

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

is routinely the eldest son. Distinguishing the eldest son from the other children in the family

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

Manuscript - anonymous


2

born. The ie holds only one married couple in each generation. Daughters go to live with their

husbands when they marry. “Second sons” (all sons after the first) must leave the ie of their

birth to join or begin a family through marriage elsewhere.

Ie dynamics thus make women as wives and especially mothers more important for the

continuity and prosperity of the ie than some men – second sons - but not as important as others

– successor household heads. The possibility of second sons’ demands for a share in the family

estate is a recognized obstacle to an ie’s success and continuity. The koseki (family registry)

system continues to conserve and enforce these distinctions officially (Mackie 2014). Japan has

never formed joint families, the family pattern of India and China and so many other cultures in

which a generation of married brothers lives under their father’s roof and authority until they

divide the family estate more or less equally among themselves following his death. Nor, as in

societies such as the US with non-perpetuating families, does each marriage in Japan necessarily

begin a new family.

This Japanese way of forming families appears now to have caught Japanese women in a

moderately high-level status trap. By this I mean, on the one hand Japanese women rank among

the highest in the world in access to personal autonomy, financial security, physical safety,

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

however, they remain ranked near the very bottom – 104 in 2014 -- of the world’s wealthy

nations in gender equality measured as participation, especially at higher levels, in political,

economic and public life broadly, according to data used in international comparisons such as the

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

Forum’s Gender Gap Index (Assman 2014).


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The paradigmatic structure of Japanese gender relations has long been Male : Female ::

Public : Private (Senda 2010). With modernization, industrialization and urbanization, this was

extended in the 20th century to Male : Female :: Public : Private :: Breadwinner : Housewife

(Macnaughtan 2015), and which paradigm continues “from the late 1990s to the 2000s…largely

unchanged” (Nemoto 2016, 43). This extension fostered the culturally interesting development

of the sengyō shufu, the “professional housewife” of the post-World War II era (Vogel 1978;

Hendry 1993; Shoji 2014). The concept ‘professionalism’ supports a uniquely high degree of

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

successfully.

Nemoto (2016, 44) observes in this context that “the full-time homemaker continues to

earn more cultural respect in Japan than in the United States.” Understanding why the identity

‘professional housewife’ rather than the more casual ‘stay-at-home mom’ emerged and persists

in Japan lets us evaluate such phenomena as the weak resistance to the persistence of large firms

in hiring only men into permanent positions (Ochiai 1997), the continuation of tax policies

known by the colorful name “Hyakumanen Kabe” (Million Yen Wall) that separate household

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

employment practices and patterns (Kawamoto 1993; Japan Times 2014), and the convoluted

crisis of too few children, along with continuing daycare and childcare shortages (Japan Times

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

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

percentage of respondents in their twenties expressing agreement with the statement “The

husband should work outside and the wife should take care of the home” climbed back to over

50% in 2013 (Honda 2013).

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

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

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

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


4

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

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

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

tomorrow, Senda (2013) documents the Japanese family’s remarkably conservative nature today:

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

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

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

children after marrying. Senda continues:

The idea that a married couple might enjoy a simple life together has never taken root in

Japan, and in reality very few married couples in Japan chose to forego having children.

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

couples in Japan, it seems, having children is the primary reason or impetus for entering

wedlock.

All of Roberts’s interviewees expected that they should marry and would have children:

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

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

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

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

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

should wives work more, or have more children, or, why not just both? Although Japanese men

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

live beyond age five, Japan’s population continues to shrink more rapidly than that of any other


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nation. All Japanese understand this as a serious national problem. Japan’s gender paradigm is

not hidden, but conscious, explicit and utterly banal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

process in a village lately called into being from nothing but central government policy and

planning on ground reclaimed from the sea, to be the very model of a modern major rice

cultivating community for Japan’s 21st century:

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

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

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

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

independence.


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

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

women in other cultures because they work harder and bear more children. Nor do wives gain

increased independence, freedom or autonomy by persistent successful assertion of individual

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

family responsibilities successfully seems to be holding women back from further

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


7

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

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

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

(Ogasawara 1998, 2). The next question must then ask, why are the complications of gender

status in Japan simplified in public discourse as the results of a competition for domination that

women might already have won?

Ie-logic and Japanese Gender

What makes a family an ie? The explanation I develop here understands Japanese gender

relations as a result of complex historical processes centering on the continuing evolution of the

ie, rather than an endless abstract status competition locking men and women into a perpetual

battle of the sexes that women might even be winning. The following features prominently

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

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

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

successor free of later claims by second sons.

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

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

The premise of the immeasurably popular Japanese anime franchise Doraemon reverses this

temporal flow in a humorous twist: Nobi Sewashi sends the earless blue robot cat Doraemon

back in time across six generations, from 2112 back to 1969, 143 years, to correct the flawed

character of his great, great, great grandfather Nobi Nobita, around whose misadventures the

cartoon revolves. This desirability of this social possibility continues to make unquestioned

sense in Japan today. Stand by Me Doraemon , a full-length movie released in 2014, pulls

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAr9sE6_BCY


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together in one continuous narrative the main story threads running through the television anime

series from its inception through the first seven years, 1979 to 1986. The film was a major

commercial success in Japan, ranking number 1 on the box office charts for 5 consecutive weeks

and the second highest-grossing Japanese film for 2014 in Japan. Nobi Nobita is his parents’

only child. These features collectively distinguishing ie are examined sequentially.

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

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

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

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

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

successor. Japanese families perpetuate ie by securing successors, making marriages and

excluding second sons. Precisely this exclusion makes some women more important than some

men to the prosperity of ie, raising their status through the autonomy they need to meet their

responsibilities for that prosperity.

2) The ie has historically been an extended family when possible or necessary, typically reaching

three generations, rather than simply conjugal. Members of an ie need not live in a multi-

generation household to be perpetual, however. We cannot expect to see three living

generations, or two, or necessarily even one in every ie when we look at any single moment as a

snapshot in the course of the domestic cycle of reproduction, especially beneath a single roof.

An ie may subsist for at least a brief interval with no living members, to be saved from the brink

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

generations, parents and dependent children and appearing so like American families (conjugal,

stem, neolocal), are and always have been common. These are not “American” families, but ie


9

with few living members. Whether a household is extended or not must not be mistaken for an

index of whether that family is perpetuating or not.

“Social scientists discussed the nuclear families that had become the norm in urban

Japan” in the 1980s (Roberts 2016, v). This bit of history embodies a deep methodological error

among such social scientists, the assumption that somehow the analytic category “nuclear

family” developed for comparative research, could in any way have replaced the Japanese lived

conception of family, the ie. Japan’s two generation households are as much and entirely ie as

three generation households or the households of couples who do not yet have children. The

concept “nuclear family,” kaku kazoku in Japanese, so frequently used to describe adult-child

two-generation households, must now be understood as entirely inadequate to recognize the

distinction between a conjugal family and a perpetuating family regardless of whether that

family lives in an extended domestic arrangement or otherwise, based as it is on an

Edenic/architectural mixed metaphor in which the building blocks of individual males and

females, one each, somehow come together to form families, the children of which scatter to find

one another and begin families of their own. Rather than suppose this imagined couple and all

the many others exactly like it somehow come together to form varieties of communities, all of

which themselves come together as well to form various societies, more useful methodologically

is to begin with a population able to reproduce itself in a habitat and which differentiates itself

internally to do so. We can then examine the simultaneous formation at different levels of many

different social patterns in this environment. By removing the unique, isolated, ur-couple from

the Garden of Eden to locate them in an always-evolving reproductive population, we see as well

the incapacity of the concept ‘nuclear family’ to serve as the privileged basis for comparative

scientific analysis.


10

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

this matter as well, however, ie are flexible to a substantial degree. We can find historically and

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

geisha and commonly among households making a living in the hospitality industry centering on

inns and bars known inclusively as mizu shōbai (“the water trade”). These ie are matrilocal, and

matriarchal, but like all ie, remain bilateral, and are not matrilineal. The famous gasshozukuri

houses of Shirakawa village in the sericulture region of central Japan contained few or no

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

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

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

new couple does not live with her parents.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

economy of the wider society.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

generation has yet died.

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

5) The descent relations of the ie are bilateral (Brown 1966), not patrilineal (Suenari 1972); they

have not been and are not becoming matrilineal. Japanese descent has always been bilateral, at

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

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

individuals. Like English, Japanese kinship terminology is Eskimo, which linguistic reality

created substantial difficulty in adopting the Chinese system of writing in the 7th century. The


12

Chinese created characters with which to write about the patrilineal relationships that formed

their family lives, but which relationships were not marked in Japan, then or now. It is important

to distinguish the nature of Japanese descent from the overwhelmingly common practice in Japan

of naming a male as heir and successor. Again, the heir and successor in geisha houses, for

example, is female. But in all cases, ie are perpetual stem families in which kinship is bilateral:

children are equally related by descent to all four grandparents.

And yet on one point Japanese and Chinese kinship language is similar and differs from

English and Eskimo: they identify birth order. The oldest son is chōnan, the second, jinan, in

Japanese. Ichirō is a personal name frequently given to the oldest son, Jirō to the second. While

the Chinese ideal pattern of family living has been joint, a group of patrilineally-related married

brothers under their father’s roof, second sons in Japan leave their birth household and stem

family, the ie into which they were born.

Ie, Retirement, Succession and Inheritance

Japanese culture does not support the Bismarkian conception of retirement, that a person

might in the course of life entirely stop remunerated labor to thenceforward only consume

accumulated savings. Unfortunately, however, this view of retirement has long been

misleadingly applied from outside to Japan through the phrase “early retirement” because

government and businesses enforce mandatory retirement, for many years at age 55, now more

commonly approaching and even surpassing age 60. Japan has a long history of retirement, in

the prime of life or even earlier, but with movement from one level of work, wage and status to

another appropriate to one’s capacity with increasing age.

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

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


13

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

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

Japanese conception of retirement, the work which secures a family’s livelihood, and authority

within the household, are closely bound. Unlike other Asian cultures such as, especially, China and

India, whose conceptions of patrilineal descent expect the several co-resident sons of the joint family

to divide its estate more or less equally among themselves following the death of the paterfamilias

who does not retire, Japanese inheritance practice holds the family property undivided for the

household head’s lone heir and successor. Smith (1977, 134) concludes, “Had more than one son

stayed home and married, this rule of impartible inheritance would have been difficult to enforce,

since after the father’s death the pressure to divide the property would have been intense.” Second

sons were entitled to no share in the family estate whatsoever. While still in the prime of life, the

household head formally passes his authority (materially in the form of the family’s officially

registered stamp (han) and the keys to the family strong house) to his successor, withdrawing with

his wife to a small separated lodging in the family compound. In a smaller ceremony the retiring

wife would hand the rice paddle (shamoji) to her daughter-in-law. In her close discussion of the

inkyo system Nakane (1967, 11-16) records retirements of household heads in agricultural

households from “while still in his forties” to age 60. A ceremony for men at age 60 (kanreki)

continues to return them to cultural infancy.

The practice of inkyo allows the heir to be seen to direct the household for many years

with the support of the previous household head. Together they make a formidable combination

no second son could hope to overcome to claim a birthright in the family estate. This practice

prevailed alike in aristocratic, military, commercial and farming families, with the transfer of

authority following the successor’s marriage.


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Retirement for this purpose has historical precedent at high levels. Gordon (2003, 11)

writes, “In 1605, just five years after Sekigahara, while he was still energetic and healthy, Ieyasu

“retired.” He put his own son, Hidetada, in the office of shogun to ensure a smooth succession.

He continued to rule from behind the scenes until he died in 1616. The son had only seven

unchaperoned years as shogun until his own death in 1623.” The contenders to be shogun

following Ieyasu’s death were fellow warlords, however, rather than Hidetada’s adult brothers

(eight in number).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

named atotsugi, but if so, this has been the case in Japan a very long time: the concept “suitably

talented” is highly elastic. Gordon (2003, 29) notes the connection between slow population growth

and infanticide between 1720 and 1860: “At least in some villages, evidence of infanticide is

stronger for the wealthier farmers. It may have been a form of family planning taken not only by the

poorest to avoid starvation but also by successful farmers to prevent numerous offspring from

carving a stable homestead into tiny units that could not support a family.” It seems to me the phrase


15

“numerous offspring” has the same meaning here as would “numerous sons.” Why has this logic

appealed to Japanese, but not Chinese or Indians?

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

numerous landless laborers and a few large landholders; and few second sons. Eighty-eight per cent

of husbands were first sons in North’s recent sample of households, , somewhat more than but

consistent with the figure of 70% of all men born first sons after 1964 (North 2009, 27), continuing

this low birthrate pattern into the present. There has never been a reason at all to have more than one

child in an ie (although population size did increase significantly during the period of

industrialization/demographic transition, and again slightly during Japan’s brief “baby boom,” 1947

- 1949) and no reason at all to think that economic modernization – the transition from a productive

household estate to paid labor– would dissolve the ie, would cause people to stop thinking with ie

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

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

their hereditary status as a ruling class. Ie-logic requires a successor, even where there is little to

nothing much to inherit on the material side. As just one example, Japanese cemeteries require proof

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

grave is the responsibility of the successor, not the cemetery.

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

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

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

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

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

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


16

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

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

achievement was controlling ascription, not ascription achievement.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

of household head and successor was not abolished, even while the family estate was targeted.

Again, why should second sons accept this rationale (given above by Gordon as well) for being

excluded from an inheritance, which was never convincing in India or China? But this premise is a

central component of ie socio-logic. Sugamoto (1997, 11) writes just as casually a decade after

Hendry, taking the matter for granted that “Unlike company employees, professionals and managers,

small independent proprietors frequently hand over their family businesses to one [emphasis added]

of their children.” Mehrotra et al. (2013) recently find further not only that inherited family control

is still common in Japanese business, but that family firms are “puzzlingly competitive,”

outperforming otherwise similar professionally managed companies. “These results are highly robust

and…suggest family control ‘causes’ good performance rather than the converse” (Economist 2013).

And this is not just “family control,” but control by one heir and successor, other places being found

for any other children. In such a situation, a capable adopted son-in-law (mukōyōshi) may be


17

preferred as atotsugi to a less capable natural son. How then shall we reconcile the current legal

facts of individual ownership of all property and the abolition of ie property, with the requirement

that all children are entitled to an equal share of ie property, yet which they can sign away with the

promise by the atotsugi that he care for their parents?

Let me recapitulate this somewhat extended argument to this point. Contemporary

Japanese gender relations have resulted from specific historical processes, fundamentally

changes in the ie reproductive cycle in different social settings, rather than a continuous

ahistorical status competition between men and women. The Japanese ie continues as a

perpetual corporate stem family. While ancient, reports of its death or radical transformation are

greatly exaggerated. Impartible inheritance and household head retirement secures the

transmission of the estate to the heir and successor free of claims by second sons. The prosperity

and continuity of the ie is such a profound value that a capable successor and heir might be

secured by marriage to a daughter of the family and adopted, even in preference to a natural son.

At no point does the socio-logic of the ie explicitly acknowledge how the retirement of

the household head in favor of his heir and successor creates a seamless and conflict-free

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

relationship between a household heads’ wife and his brothers at all, that a wife is more

important to the success of the ie than a second son, because it just never comes up. That this

makes some women more important than some men in a fundamentally important institution in

Japanese life remains unacknowledged and unrecognized. No act explicitly elevates household

heads’ wives above household heads’ brothers. Hints which could be followed up to deconstruct

this logic, however, are common enough: new wives who cannot adjust to the ways of the

groom’s house are sent back to their parents. Young men are warned not to become an adopted


18

son-in-law while they still have a cup of rice bran to their names. Japanese kinship language

marks out birth order and boys are often given birth order personal names, although only one

succeeds to the ie headship and continues to reside in his birth home. Relevant folk sayings

abound: “A brother is the beginning of a stranger,” “better a good neighbor than a bad brother,”

“first have a girl and then a boy.”

Husbands and Wives, Women and Other Men

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

based on status competition broadly for this complex state of affairs can be just as theoretically

specious and methodologically intractable. Ogasawara (1998, 910) concludes that

the extent to which these [male bankers] feel constrained in their relations to women

[employees] and take care not to arouse their displeasure is extraordinary. I therefore

argue that macro-level power relations are not necessarily reproduced in micro-level

interactions, and may even be reversed…. Men must therefore accede to women’s use of

manipulative strategies if they are to exercise their power.

Arguments characterizing relations between men and women as a power struggle, even in

formalized settings which might encourage the proliferation of analytic categories such micro

and macro, can only lead to confusion. Ogasawara (1998, 156) writes in the context of her bank,

that “It is costly for a man to actually use his power” because “In the final analysis, it is women’s

willingness to cooperate that determines how much help men will receive.” The answer that a

manager’s occult capacity for “personal charm (jintoku)” determines “women’s willingness to

cooperate” (Ogasawara 1998, 156) is unlikely to satisfy analysts or other women for long, but

even while it does, what must still be said about managers’ personal charm: its components,


20

sources, limits, liabilities, substitutes, counterfeits, the terms and general conditions of its tactical

deployment, techniques of resistance? Max Weber knew personal charm as “charisma,” how

you get people to want to do what you want them to do, rather than power, making people do

things they don’t want to do. Why are we reluctant to think that women as well as men might be

motivated by their own sense of responsibility to the duties allotted them by the institutions of

which they are part and which they willingly support? Why must women’s willingness to

cooperate arise from motivations originating in men rather than the goals of the organization of

which they are part?

Then did husbands not consent but capitulate? Lebra argues that men are different at

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

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

her services are and always have been absolutely necessary, in Japan as everywhere, but what, if

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

dependent child, mothers are not authoritarians but enablers.


21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

world, notwithstanding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

indulgence (Kondo 1990, 295-296).


22

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The dynamics of the stem family, with only one married couple in each generation, place

a great deal of responsibility for the prosperity of the ie on the shoulders of wives while

permitting them a high degree of autonomy to discharge that responsibility well. Formal

authority relations shift between generations with retirement of the still-capable household head

in favor of his successor and the daughter-in-law replacing her mother-in-law, as implausible as

this might seem away from Japan. And because wives indulge their husbands at home more or

less affectionately as an extension of childrearing practice, the question arises: because mother

indulges her child, to whom she is superordinate, and because she indulges her husband in much

the same way, is she not therefore his superordinate, the way a boss is at work, at least in the

home certainly and perhaps everywhere women indulge masculine importunity? Does the fact

that husbands rely implicitly on their wives for everything ‘domestic’, where ‘domestic’ includes


23

management of family finances, make wives their husbands’ superordinates broadly or only

locally? Does she not truly rule the roost? After all, there is no evidence that husbands delegate

domestic responsibilities and resources to wives. This is just how couples live.

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

autonomous responsibility and affectionate indulgence – has allowed the wide characterization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Although we are living today through a period of significant reaction throughout the

world, the status of women in Japan today does not depend on the modifications the role of

housewife has undergone during the last half of the 20th century and into the present century.

The gender status of men and women arises fundamentally from complex strategical relations


24

within the ie as a corporate stem family and its place in wider society. This corporate stem

family does not now and never in the past did require many children. One daughter, certainly

two children, can be enough to discharge the household head’s wife’s reproductive obligation to

the ie into which she has married. More is not better. Nor does she need, any longer, to have

children early in her life, or many, to be sure of the survival of one. The guidelines of the Japan

Society of Obstetrics and Gynaecology for the use of human reproductive cells observe that

artificial reproductive technologies (ARTs, so often sought by women trying to become pregnant

after age 35) “are meant to be for the preservation of a couple’s lineage” (Castro-Vásquez 2017,

176): surrogacy is banned (Castro-Vásquez 2017, 31). He notes further, following one woman’s

explicit comment, “basically getting pregnant is a woman’s duty,” that it is women who must

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

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

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

lack of sexual spontaneity required by various ARTs.

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

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

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

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

great personal autonomy with which to discharge their obligations to their ie. But this status can

never lead to a “gender-free society” in which “women and men not constrained by socially and

culturally formed distinctions . . . will jointly participate on the basis of their individual

character” (Osawa 2005, 162). At present in Japan men’s and women’s behaviors alike must be

justifiable as contributions to their ie, or “people will talk” (Holloway 2010), as the invective


25

directed toward “parasite singles” shows (Tran 2006). Japanese deprecate selfishness. Is there

any act on behalf of the continuity of his ie more personally selfless than the retirement of the

household head, unless it is the implicit, now explicit, renunciation of claims on its estate by

second sons? But then, how could people anywhere live without socially and culturally formed

distinctions, gender-based or otherwise? What symbols would we draw on for guidance under

uncertainty?

An historical structural explanation for an historical structural problem holds more

attraction at every level. Imamura (1987, 83) suggests that “The freedom of the housewife

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

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

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

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

Ultimately women’s relatively high status in terms of personal autonomy in Japan, and their

relatively low level of gender equality compared to women of other wealthy nations, never did

and does not now rest on a status competition between husbands and wives: women’s current

status is not something women won from men historically but find themselves unable to repeat

today notwithstanding both women and hosiery are said to have become noticeably stronger

following World War II.

Goldstein-Godni (2012, 196-97) identifies with surgical precision the points of

intersection between the conservative policies of the State today and the use of status

competition to drive mass circulation magazines for women, to show that “the policies advanced

to promote gender equality since the 1990s have been in fact pronatal policies more than a

product of a genuine attempt to produce a gender-equal society.” It is noteworthy how fully


26

these policies continue to fail: in Japan pronatal policies are neither conservative nor compatible

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

this same weak understanding of gender relations and more specifically to a profound aversion

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

Godni 2012, 197). No effective agent or process in Japan is working to change the basic

structure of the ie. The logic of ie formation has always required only, and functions today most

smoothly with only one boy; and his older sister when he has one. It obliges women to provide

this child and raise it well. Rather than understand trends in Japanese reproduction as “prevalent

tendencies toward childlessness”(Castro-Vázquez 2017, 48), families are overwhelmingly

reaching their goal of one or contingently two children, but not childlessness if at all possible.

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

the focus of the research. Research documenting recent changes in Japanese family life is

abundant (Mackie 2014; Mathews 2014), and it is not uncommon to read that the accelerating

pace of change in family life makes its future more than typically difficult to foretell (Shoji 2014,

6). Research documenting aspects of family life that seem to be changing less rapidly if at all

can also be found with little difficulty (Castro-Vázquez 2017; Hertog 2011; Roberts 2016).

Although the present article does identify and discuss a number of secular changes in family life

in Japan, because it does not make a methodological distinction among several Japanese words,

all of which can be rendered ‘family’ in English, it ought, I think, to be taken as falling more

toward the continuity end of the change spectrum. The decision to not mark out and separate ie

with the term ‘lineage’ from kazoku with the term ‘family’ arises from the observation that the

effects on gender relations of the domestic and public practices of family life examined in the

present article are substantial but remain largely tacit in Japanese discourse. Second sons


27

inevitably and invariably leave the setai (household), kazoku and ie of their birth,

notwithstanding connections they do maintain with their parents and siblings. The ancestors of

the ie continue to be second sons’ ancestors although newly married second sons do not have an

ancestral altar. An adopted son-in-law is not giving up membership in the ie of his birth to join

his wife’s ie, which membership gradually and implicitly dissolves as he leaves home, with his

marriage, as he establishes his own household, and simply over time. There is no departure or

separation ritual that marks out this change of identity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

in the dynamics of the perpetuating family that justify the gender inequality which structures

employment practices and role relations in other institutions in Japan today.


28

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