Intimate Disconnections

Divorce and the Romance of Independence in Contemporary Japan

Allison Alexy

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780226700953, 9780226699653
• eBook ISBN: 9780226701004
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In many ways, divorce is a quintessentially personal decision—the choice to leave a marriage that causes harm or feels unfulfilling to the two people involved. But anyone who has gone through a divorce knows the additional public dimensions of breaking up, from intense shame and societal criticism to friends' and relatives' unsolicited advice. In Intimate Disconnections, Allison Alexy tells the fascinating story of the changing norms surrounding divorce in Japan in the early 2000s, when sudden demographic and social changes made it a newly visible and viable option. Not only will one of three Japanese marriages today end in divorce, but divorces are suddenly much more likely to be initiated by women who cite new standards for intimacy as their motivation. As people across Japan now consider divorcing their spouses, or work to avoid separation, they face complicated questions about the risks and possibilities marriage brings: How can couples be intimate without becoming suffocatingly close? How should they build loving relationships when older models are no longer feasible? What do you do, both legally and socially, when you just can't take it anymore?
 
Relating the intensely personal stories from people experiencing different stages of divorce, Alexy provides a rich ethnography of Japan while also speaking more broadly to contemporary visions of love and marriage during an era in which neoliberal values are prompting wide-ranging transformations in homes across the globe.

PART I

The Beginning of the End

1

Japan’s Intimate Political Economy

Ando Mariko had been dating her boyfriend for four years when he first asked her to get married. They had met in college, when they both attended an elite university, and after graduation began jobs in the Tokyo financial sector. Although they didn’t work in the same company, they had similar jobs and experienced the requirements that come with such positions—lots of stressful work, long hours, evenings and nights socializing with coworkers and clients. As they approached their midtwenties, Mariko’s boyfriend thought it was time for them to get married. She wasn’t against it, exactly, but she did take time to think about what she would want from a marriage. She finally agreed to get married if her boyfriend would consent to two requests. First, she wanted to be able to live close to her mother, to help with support as she got older. Second, she wanted to be able to keep working. Throughout the postwar period, the unmarked expectation has been for Japanese women to leave full-time paid work either when they get married or at the birth of their first child. Although the majority of women eventually return to the labor market, usually after children are in school, at that point they are likely to hold part-time or underpaid positions. Mariko liked her job and had worked very hard to get it, and she wasn’t interested in quitting. Her boyfriend agreed to both requests and they got married in 2000, when they were both twenty-five years old.

Despite Mariko’s forthright attempt to build a style of intimacy that would fit her needs and plans, it didn’t take long for serious problems to manifest in her relationship. Although her husband kept his promises and had no problem with her staying at her job, he also had firm expectations about the division of labor within their new home.1 It became readily apparent that he expected her to be responsible for all the housework, from cleaning to laundry to preparing meals. She tried to get his help but, at best, he’d agree and not follow through; at worst, he’d refuse and make her feel bad for not being able to do what he felt she was supposed to do. Because she was still working a demanding job, Mariko found herself devoting her entire weekends to frantically accomplishing household duties. In between cleaning and doing laundry, she made and froze a week’s worth of meals, so that she and her husband would have something home-cooked when they came home exhausted. She kept up this blistering schedule for about a year before she had an epiphany: her husband hadn’t lied when he agreed to let her keep working after they got married. He’d meant it. But he’d also assumed that her paid work wouldn’t reduce her responsibilities for the housework. When she had articulated her desire to keep working, he understood that as permission to add paid labor to the roster of household tasks that he imagined as automatically her responsibility. They split a couple years after marriage, and Mariko says they’re still friendly enough. Her key insight, which she imparted to me in a tone reflective of a hard-won life lesson, was: don’t marry a housewife’s son. No matter what such a man says, he will always expect his wife to act like a housewife.

Mariko left her marriage not only because her husband was unwilling to share domestic responsibilities. She divorced her husband because his behavior—and the unstated requirements he held for her—reflected a very recognizable type of marriage she didn’t want and had intentionally worked to avoid. For much of the postwar era, normative models suggested that a breadwinning husband and stay-at-home wife create the strongest marriage and most successful family. Stereotypically, men worked hard from early morning until late at night and relied on their wives for domestic needs. In this model for intimacy, although spouses were tightly reliant on each other for some needs, they were less likely to share interests or emotional connections and therefore conformed to what I call disconnected dependence. Spouses in marriages built on such ideals were fundamentally linked through “practical” matters such as shared finances, at the same time that they self-consciously separated their hobbies, friendship groups, and emotional lives. But in the recessionary decades since the Japanese economic bubble burst in the early 1990s, the male breadwinner’s primacy has been challenged in both economic and intimate realms. Downsizing companies now shirk hiring full-time workers in favor of legions of contract workers who can easily be laid off. Simultaneously, marital guidebooks and support groups implore spouses to retire the disconnected dependence model for domestic intimacy, and people of all ages envision intimacies instead based on emotional connections and shared activities. Styles of intimacy that were idealized a few decades before are now being held up as predictors of divorce.

Throughout the course of my research, many people with whom I spoke assumed a clear, if simplistic, relationship between divorce, gender, and labor: when a woman gets a job that pays her enough, she will leave her marriage. More than a few men were incredulous that I was doing anything other than interviewing women about how much money they made. For these men, and others who shared their perspective, divorce happens when women can finally afford to support themselves and therefore no longer want to be married. This chapter takes seriously these energetic assertions that economics and divorce are obviously linked. I agree that they are linked but not because, as implied by economic determinism, money unconsciously motivates people’s decisions in intimate realms or because financial need is the only thing binding women to heterosexual marriage.

Instead, I argue, men and women diagnose marital problems and decide to divorce partially in response to models for intimacy that are themselves constructed through labor patterns, an interweaving I call Japan’s intimate political economy. In this term, I connect employment structures, tax systems, and gendered hiring practices with the conditions of possibility for intimate relationships. Throughout the postwar period, the intimate political economy has created powerful norms suggesting certain overlaps between familial, intimate, and labor spheres are more natural, healthy, and beneficial for everyone involved. In the current moment, as men and women contemplate divorce or work to avoid it, they are more likely to contest and refuse these previously normative linkages. As demonstrated in the examples throughout this chapter, men and women perceive real risk—to marriages and families, but also to individuals—emanating from the ways spouses work. During Japan’s postwar recovery, the intimate political economy dramatically shaped expectations and opportunities within heterosexual marriages; now it shapes how people decide to divorce.

Economic Miracles, Corporate Families, and Japan, Inc.

At the end of World War II, few people predicted that the Japanese economy would ever become one of the largest in the world. The defeated nation lay in ruins, not only from two atomic bombs but also from the extensive firebombing by Allied forces and the human and financial costs of decades of extensive colonial expansion (Dower 1999; Young 1998). But between 1950 and 1973, the Japanese economy doubled in size every seven years, and between 1946 and 1976, the economy increased fifty-five-fold (Blomström, Gangnes, and La Croix 2001, 2; Ikeda 2002; Johnson 1982, 6). By 1968, Japan had the second largest economy in the world as measured by nominal gross domestic product. This growth came to be labeled the Japanese economic “miracle” and, precisely because it was so unexpected, significant scholarly and public attention focused on analyzing what made it possible. Japan’s intimate political economy was fundamental to this recovery and shaped standard labor practices and expectations.

At the level of policy, Japan’s economic miracle was facilitated through a so-called “Iron Triangle” linking large companies, ministerial bureaucracies, and politicians through shared models for development and production. In this system, politicians advocated policy created in conversation with business leaders, which was then articulated by government bureaucrats as the standard to follow. Although any recommendations advocated by government ministries were always technically optional, this arrangement created extremely strong obligation, reciprocity, and debt between the three corners of this triangle. The tight partnership was eventually labeled “Japan, Inc.,” implying that the entire national economy was running as if it were a single conglomerate (Abegglen 1970, 35; Johnson 1982). This extended collaboration between government ministries, corporations, and politicians created stringent economic policies shaping the labor market as it transitioned from agricultural to industrial and eventually service economies. From the early 1960s until the early 1990s, this method for economic growth was so successful that Japan was, on one hand, lauded as having “lessons” for the United States and, on the other, represented as an existential threat to Western supremacy (Alexander 2002, 283; Vogel 1979).

Although the terminology “Japan, Inc.” was first created to describe high-level interactions, it translated into personal and familial realms as a commitment that regular people felt to the national project of growth. The miraculous national growth was manifesting in concrete improvements in people’s lives: Prime Minister Ikeda’s “income doubling plan” began in 1960, and within seven years average personal incomes had doubled (Moriguchi and Ono 2006, 162; Rohlen 1974, 11). In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, a range of Japanese citizens felt part of the larger project to return Japan to a global stage and then to grow the economy at a miraculous pace: housewives felt their labor was fundamental to national success; white-collar businessmen linked their success with that of their employer; blue-collar workers held a strong sense of how their labor contributed to national improvements; agricultural workers were proudly aware of how their labor improved the nation.2 In this national project, we see a “mobilization of a large majority of the population to support economic goals” (Johnson 1982, 307), what Cole evocatively calls a “community of fate” (1979, 252).

Such commitments were reinforced through common rhetoric that characterized an employee’s relationship to their employer as akin to a family bond. Reminiscent of Meiji-era political discourse linking all citizens as members of the same family (a topic I’ll discuss more in chapter 3), this rhetoric suggests that employers, managers, and employees at all levels were on the same team working toward success (Tachibanaki 2005, 61). Although such collectivizing rhetoric might be attempted in other cultural contexts, during Japan’s booming economy, it accurately described the shared goals and sense of community that many male, full-time workers felt (Sako 1997, 4). For instance, Rohlen (1974), conducting research in the 1960s and 1970s, found bank employees were sometimes organized through strict hierarchy and other times as a “harmonious” group of equals. Researching during the 1980s economic bubble, Kondo (1990, 161) suggests “company as family” was a pervasive idiom “shaping workers’ lives and creating disciplined, loyal employees who strive to achieve group goals.” In these ways, Japan’s miraculous economy relied on rhetoric characterizing labor as creating a family-like bond, with the attendant burdens of loyalty and responsibility. More broadly, Japan’s intimate political economy linked actual families with rhetorical families organized around labor.

Gendered Labor at the Core of a “Miracle”

Government and corporate policies facilitating Japan’s economic recovery were built through, and in turn reinforced, a deeply gendered labor market. Laws, standard hiring practices, and common norms pushed men and women into very different types of labor, both of which were fundamental to Japan’s economy. In general, men were most likely to have access to “regular” (seishain) positions, characterized by full-time work, the possibility of promotion, and at least an implicit promise for long-term employment. Although most commonly associated with middle-class men in white-collar positions, during the postwar economic recovery, these kinds of “regular” positions were available to men in different types of work from blue-collar manufacturing to business. Indeed, in contrast to popular images presenting postwar Japan as a “middle-class society” with minimal class differentiation, the labor market shifted between moments of greater and lesser income equality. For instance, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a labor shortage minimized the differences between remuneration offered to regular employees of small companies and to those at larger firms (Tachibanaki 2005, 60). Earlier in the postwar era, and after the economic bubble burst, male employees earned substantially different salaries based on the size of their employer. Throughout the postwar period, women, particularly wives and mothers, were most likely to be hired into nonregular, flexible, and marginalized positions that were no less vital to the labor market but rhetorically minimized in popular discourse and scholarship. These gendered hiring patterns fundamentally shaped Japan’s intimate political economy, linking employment with particular styles of intimacy.

Despite the diversity of employment possibilities, popular imagination in Japan and elsewhere often linked the postwar “miracle” economy with a particular character: the “salaryman.” Although the English term might suggest any man who earns a salary, the meaning in Japanese is quite specific.3 The quintessential salaryman is an overworked white-collar man in a relatively anonymous suit, with a conservative haircut and boring tie. He goes to work early in the morning and works long hours that are extended even further by mandatory socializing either with coworkers to build “team spirit” or with clients to improve business. He might get home very late at night, too late to see his children awake, only to wake up early the next morning to start the whole process again. Significant scholarly and ethnographic attention has been focused on the salaryman as a key social character in Japan’s long “miracle” economic boom.4 In the many comic books (manga) and films representing salarymen, their relatively privileged white-collar position belies the brutality of a daily grind keeping them from almost everything but work (Matanle, McCann, and Ashmore 2008; Skinner 1979). Although many people identified with the archetypal salaryman, wanted to become one, or wished the same for their sons, media commentary during the economic miracle highlighted the difficulties of the salaryman lifestyle, especially the long hours away from family and the daily requirements for work (Cook 2016, 3; Crawcour 1978, 245).

Such male laborers were only made possible by particular forms of domestic intimacy created through a gendered division of labor. Working long hours, augmented by obligatory late-night drinking, a salaryman rarely had time for anything else. For requirements of basic living—prepared food, clean clothes, paid bills—a breadwinner relied on his wife, who often accomplished all tasks surrounding the household and children. Decades of ethnographic research represents common gendered responsibilities for domestic spaces, family relationships, and childcare. Wives shouldered substantial domestic work ranging from buying food and preparing healthy meals to calculating and tracking a household budget and providing elaborate educational opportunities and support for their children (Allison 2000; Frühstück and Walthall 2011; Gordon 1997; Imamura 1987). The clarity of these responsibilities is visible in the ethnographic record but also in survey responses: in 1974, Ootake et al. (1980) found that husbands did less than 3 percent of their family’s housework. By 1981, for instance, Japanese married couples reported husbands did less than twenty minutes of housework, including childcare, each day, a figure that rose slightly to 2.5 hours per week in 1994 (Ishii-Kuntz 1994, 33; Tsuya, Bumpass, and Choe 2000, 208; see also Fuwa 2004). Precisely because women’s responsibilities were commonly understood to be vital to both the national economy and raising the next generation, housewives were given respect not always found in other cultural contexts, which translated into some collective political authority (LeBlanc 1999; Nakamatsu 1994, 100).

For decades, salarymen stood as a key symbol in the postwar Japanese political economy. Almost from the moment of the creation of the term “salaryman,” men who fall into this category have been simultaneously envied for their regular salary, pitied for the requirements that come with their job, and constructed as a synecdoche of the nation—a pinnacle of masculine power in a nation constitutionally forbidden to raise a military.5 The salaryman was such a common representation of Japanese men that when Roberson and Suzuki (2003) assembled a volume concerning Japanese masculinity, they subtitled it “dislocating the salaryman doxa.” Both within and beyond Japan, salarymen have been deployed as powerful and popular symbols of the postwar recovery, economic power, masculinity, or Japaneseness in general.6

For most of the postwar era being ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• A Note on Names
• Introduction: Anxiety and Freedom
• part i   The Beginning of the End
• part ii   Legal Dissolutions
• part iii   Living as an X
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix A: Profile Summaries
• Appendix B: All Quotes in Original Japanese
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index