Embodying Difference: the Making Burakumin in Modern Japan

Recently I have read the following book. A book summary is attached.

Book title: Amos, Timothy. 2001. Embodying Difference: the Making Burakumin in Modern Japan. University of Hawaii.

Book summary:

Ch. One: The book suggests that the word ‘burakumin’ comprised of two parts: ‘buraku, meaning hamlet; and min to mean a person or people’ (p.3).The origins of many of these communities were thought to date back to 12^th century until 16^th century (p.3). In the 18^th century they were forced to live separately from the mainstream society (p.3). Although their outcast status was abolished in 1871, their upward mobility was still hampered. While there was a common narrative (master narrative) of the burakumin’s history on how they were discriminated by the mainstream society, yet upon close examination, some of these narratives were questionable, for example: could it be empirically verified? And to what extent was the discrimination that contemporary buraku communities now facing was the same as that experienced by historic outcaste communities?  (p.4) This book argues that there was a need to reconceptualise the buraku problems for two reasons: the master narrative was built on questionable foundations and the mainstream accounts tended to overlook the role burakumin and other interested parties had played in the construction and maintenance of the master narratives (p.5). A further problem with the master narrative was that it did not adequately deal with the ideational aspect of the buraku existence (p.14). This book argues that contrary to the master narrative, ‘burakumin’ did not simply represent a fixed, clearly delineable outcaste minority group (p.22).

Ch. Two: it offers a detailed account of the mainstream narrative of buraku history, and then it highlights the specific empirical and conceptual problems with the narrative. Then it demonstrates how the master narrative was currently being mobilized on the ground: respectively in 2 areas in eastern and western Japan. Finally it argues that re-configuring ‘burakumin’ as a generic label of marginality could be one way of re-imagine the buraku history (p.35).

Ch. 3: it discusses the master narrative, before demonstrating some of the empirical and conceptual problem inherited in it. Then it examines the ideational aspect of early modern outcaste. In the conclusion, it outlines an alternate way in viewing a history of discrimination in early modern Japan, reframing it within a larger history of discursively constructed difference (p.76).

Ch. 4: it points out that the Japanese government, the general population, scholars and others over time tended to construct a relatively uniform image of a tightly bound community known as ‘barukumin’ (p.113). But the reality was that marginalized people actually had unique, fluid, and often divergent histories. Despite that, the outcaste was often characterized by strong uniformity (p.113). This chapter presents a history of the ‘buraku problem’ from the beginning of the Meiji period up to the early 1930s. It analyses the discourse of social difference that emerged in the writing of the elites, and checks it against the real changes that had happened. The research showed that the master narrative of buraku history failed to retain much descriptive value. This chapter also shows that the 20^th century discourse of ‘barukumin’ followed no clearly determined linear path of development (p.117). Also, it should be noted that no straightforward link really existed in the transitional process from early modern outcaste communities to modern buraku communities (p.131).

Ch. 5 argues that far from being dormant or in decline, buraku communities under the leadership of the Buraku Liberation League (BLL) were actively engaging in liberation activism (149). In 1965, the Japanese government released its findings in a document called “The Report of the Dowa Policy Council”. This report formed the basis for subsequent government policy on the buraku problem. Cleary the Dowa Policy council saw the buraku problem had started in the premodern social status structure, and that problem persisted to the present in the form of low social position.  The modern buraku problem existed among the ‘Japanese nationals’. To have distinctions among nationals were considered contrary to the fundamental principles of ‘human rights’ (pp.160-1). According to this chapter, human rights culture was clearly perceived differently at the national and community level. At the national level it was seen as a futuristic place which could only be achieved through the appropriate teachings. At the community level, for example in Naniwa, a completely different aspect was taken. It was more about educating the non-burakumin about the Naniwa community (pp.186).

Ch. 6: The Burakumin often identified their history with present-day Japan in 3 ways: through the ‘victimhood’, ‘pride’, and ‘an appeal for national belonging’. ‘Victimhood’ meant a conscious decision to mobilize past experiences in to a collective narrative that identified and condemned discriminatory acts. ‘Pride’ referred to the victim chose to exemplify the intrinsic value of the buraku community. ‘Appeal for national belonging’ implied that, while concrete difference might exist between the buraku community and the mainstream society, these distinctions had to be legally protected by the nation-state (p.197). The chapter concludes that while the need for self-articulation through historical narrative was clear, relying on mainstream history to‘re-establish’ the reality of a problem was a precarious undertaking. The decision to constantly talk about ‘a history of difference’ meant that a resolution of the buraku problem based on the idea of assimilation became not possible (p.207).

Ch. 7: It became clear the ‘burakumin’, while being the dominant way in which social difference had been articulated in 20^th century Japan, was not the only way. ‘Buraku’ had largely been ignored as a term of reference by both the state and society. The state opted for the term ‘Dowa residents’ to frame this social difference. Mainstream society generally opted for silence and chose to ‘unname’ burakumin. All conflict was seen as unproductive and undesirable (p.212).  The central dilemma of buraku studies was that ‘buraku’ and ‘burakumin’ were illusions – they did not exist but simultaneously they were reality – they had a clear existence (p.223).

Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison

Recently I have read the following book. The book has four parts, some of its main points are:

Book title: Foucault, Michel; trans. Alan Sheridan. 1975. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. New York: Vantage Books.

Main points:

- part one was about the torture of the body. If the penalties in its most sever forms no longer address itself to the body, on what did it laid hold? Since it was no longer the body it must be the soul (p.16). Judges gradually took to judging something other than crimes, namely the ‘soul’ of the criminal. The question of the judge was not longer simply “has the act been established and is it punishable?” but also ‘what is this act?’ (p.19).

- this book was intended as a correlative history of the modern soul and a new power to judge (p.23).

- by an analysis of penal leniency as a technique of power, one might understand both how man, the soul, the normal or abnormal individual had come to duplicate crime as object of penal intervention, and in what way giving birth to man as an object of knowledge for a discourse with a scientific status (p.24).

- the body become a useful force only if it was both a productive body and subjected body. There might be“knowledge” of the body, this knowledge and this mastery constituted what might be called the political technology of the body (p.26).

- the public execution was to be understood not only as a judicial, but also as a political ritual. In some cases a ceremony by which power was manifested (p.47).

- there could be no doubt that the existence of public tortures and executions were connected with something different. Rusche and Kirchheimer were right to see it as the effect of a system of production in which labour power and therefore the human body had the commercial value that was conferred on them in an economy of an industrial type (p.54).

- we shall later see that the truth-power relation remained at the heart of all mechanism of punishment (p.55).

- part two was about punishment. The need for punishment without torture was first formulated as a cry from the heart or from an outraged nature. In the worst of murderers, there was one thing, at least, to be respected when one punished: his ‘humanity’ (p.74).

- we had to recount the birth and the early day of ‘leniency. The reform had to be situated in a process that historian had recently uncovered: crimes seemed to lose their violence, while punishment lost some of their intensity. There was a decrease in murders.  Frequent delinquency of the poorest classes was superseded by limited but skilled delinquency (p.75).

- this transformation could not be separated from several underlying g process. The first was the a change in the operation of economic pressures, a general rise in the standard of living, a large demographic expansion, an increase in wealth and property that needed protection (p.76).

- the criticism of reformers was directed so much at the weakness or cruelty of those in authority, as at a bad economy of power. There was too much power on the side of the prosecution which possessed almost unlimited means of pursuing investigation (p.79).

- the peasants’ refusal to pay certain state or ecclesiastical rent was not necessarily disapproved by the landowners, smuggling was very widely supported. In short, the reciprocal interplay of illegality formed part of the political and economic life of society (p.84)

- in the  second half of the 18^th century, the process tended to reverse, the popular target of illegality tended to be not so much rights, as goods: pilfering and theft tended replace smuggling, and armed struggle against the tax agents (p.84).

- bourgeoisie found it difficult to support illegality when it was a question of its own property. Nothing could be more typical of this than the problem of peasant delinquency at the end of the 18^th century (p.85).

- illegality was intolerable in commercial and industrial ownership: development of the ports, the appearance of great warehouse, huge workshop also necessitated a severe repression of illegality (p.85).

- the illegality of property was separated from the illegality of rights. This distinction represented a class opposition because the bourgeoisie was to reserve to itself the illegality of right: to ensure for itself an immense sector of economic circulation by a skillful manipulation of gaps in the law (p.87).

-the semio-technique with which one tried to arm the power to punish rested on 6 major rules: a. the rule of minimum quantity. B. the rule of sufficient ideality. C. the rule of lateral effects. D. the rule of perfect certainty. E. the rule of common truth. F. the rule of optimal specification. (pp.94-98).

- beneath the humanization of the penalty, what one found were all those rules that authorized, or rather demanded ‘leniency’, as a calculated economy of power to punish. But they also provoked a shift in the point of application of this power, it was no longer the body, it was the mind (p.101).

- to find the suitable punishment of a crime was to find the disadvantage whose idea was such that it robbed forever the idea of a crime of any attraction. It was a matter of establishing the representation of pairs of opposing values, or setting up a complex of obstacle-signs. These obstacle signs had to constitute the new arsenal of penalty. But in order to function they had to obey several conditions: A. it had to be as un-arbitrary as possible. B. this complex sign had to engage with the mechanics of forces: reduce the desire that made the crime attractive. C. one had to use a temporal modulation. Punishment could function only if it came to an end. D. for the convict, the penalty was a mechanics of signs, interests and duration. The punishment was directed about all at others, at all the potentially guilty. E. while torture was the example on terror. The examples now based on the lesson, the discourse, the representation of public morality. F. to make possible in society an inversion of the traditional discourse of crime, to extinguish the dubious glory of the criminals (pp.104-112).

- how could detention become in so short at time one of the most general forms of legal punishment?  The explanation usually given was the formation of a number of great mode of punitive imprisonment, appeared to have made it possible to overcome double obstacle constituted by the ago-old rule of law and the despotic function of imprisonment (p.120).

- the penitentiary techniques conceived in the second half of the 18^th century provided 3 institution to be set up with its own principle and developed in its own particular direction (p.121).

- the maison de force at Ghent organized penal labour above all around economic imperative. The reason given was that idleness was the general cause of most crimes (p.121).

- the Howard and Blackstone institution put into operation in 1779 when the independence of US put an end to deportation. The preamble of the bill written by Blackstone and Howard describe individual imprisonment in term of its triple function as example to be feared, instrument of conversion and condition for an apprenticeship (p.121).

- then came the Philadelphia model. It was associated in people’s mind with the political innovation of the American system. There was compulsory work in workshop, the prisoner were kept constantly occupied (p.124).

- it could be said that in the late 18^th century, one was confronted by three ways of organizing the power to punish. The first was based on the old monarchical law. The other two both referred to a preventive, utilitarian, corrective conception of a right to punish that belonged to the society as a whole (p.130).

- part three was about discipline. The classical age discovered the body as an object and target of power. What was new in the projects of docility that interested the 18^th century so much was that there were several new things in the project of docility. First there was the scale of control, it was a question of working it ‘retail’, individually, exercising upon it a subtle coercion. There was the object of control for economy, the efficiency of movement. Lastly there was the modality. These methods made possible the meticulous control of the operation of the body (p.136).

- the historical moment of the disciplines was the moment when an art of the human body was born. What was then being formed was a policy of coercion that acted upon the body. The human body was entering a machinery of power that explored it. A ‘political anatomy’ which was also a ‘mechanics of power’ was being born (p.138).

- if economic exploitation separated the force and the product of labour, let us say that disciplinary coercion established in the body the constricting link between and increased aptitude and an increased domination (p.138).

- the first of the great operations of discipline was the constitution of tableaux vivants, which transformed the confused, useless or dangerous multitudes into ordered multiplicity (p.148).

- discipline was no longer simply an art of distributing bodies, of extracting time from them and accumulating it, but of composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine (p.164).

- the success of disciplinary power derived no doubt from the use of simple instruments; hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement and the examination (p.170).

- in short, the art of punishing, in the regime of disciplinary power, was aimed neither at expiation nor at repression. It brought five distinct operations into play: it referred individual actions to a whole. It differentiated individuals from one another. It measured in quantitative terms and hierarchized in terms of value of ability. Lastly it traced the limit that would define difference in relation to all other differences (pp.182-3).

- examination introduced a whole mechanism that linked to a certain type of the formation of knowledge a certain form of the exercise of power (p.187).

- Bentham’s panopticon was based on the principle that at the periphery an annular building. At the center there was a tower. This tower was pierced with wide windows that open into the inner side of the ring. The periphery building was divided into cells (p.200).

- Panopticism was the general principle of a new political anatomy whose object and end were not the relations of sovereignty but the relations of discipline (p.208).

- discipline might be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it was a type of power. It might be taken over either by specialized institution, or by institution that used it as an essential instrument of particular nature (school, hospital) (p.215).

- if the economic take-off of the west began with the technique that made possible of the accumulation of capital, it might perhaps be said that the methods for administering the accumulation of men made  possible a political take-off in relation to the tradition, ritual, costly, violent form of power (pp.220-1).

- discipline was the unitary technique by which the body was reduced as a political force at the lease cost and maximized as a useful force (p.221).

- the extension of discipline method had received little attention compared with the development at the about the same time of many other technologies – agronomical, industrial, economic (p.224).

- part four was about prison. The reform laid down a different re-coding that was different from the mere juridical deprivation of liberty at the time of the ideologues. First was the principle of isolation, the isolation of prison from one another. (p.236).

- it should be noted that critiques of the prison always took one of the two direction: either that the prison was insufficiently corrective, or that in attempting to be corrective it lost its power as punishment, and that prison was double economic error: directly, by its intrinsic cost and indirectly, by the cost of the delinquency that it did not abolish (p.268).

- people no longer fighting against the tax farmers, the king’s agent, it was against entrepreneurs who introduced more machines, lower wages and longer working hours and made the factory regulation more strict that a whole peasant illegality developed. Those struggling know that they were confronting both the law and the class that had imposed it (p.274).

- the author fixes the date for the completion of the carceral system at 22nd January 1840 when the officials opened Mettray. It was the disciplinary form at its most extreme, a model in which was concentrated with all the coercive technologies of behavior (p.293).

Depression in Japan: Psychiatric Cures for a Society in Distress

Recently I have read the following book. A book summary and my comments are:

Book title: Junko Kitanaka. 2012. Depression in Japan: Psychiatric Cures for a Society in                              Distress. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University press.

Book summary:

In 2000 Japan’s Supreme Court ordered Dentsu, the biggest advertising agency, to compensate a very large amount of money to the family of an employee who was died of depression through work. Alarmed by this and similar legal disputes, the government implemented new mental health measures and policy changes to tackle stress-induced mental illness as a national problem, and signaled  the beginning of broad-scale medicalization of suicide and depression in Japan (p.1-2).

The goal of this book was to examine how depression had suddenly become a ‘national disease’ and how psychiatry had emerged as a new vehicle for curing the social ailment. This change was remarkable because Japan so far had resisted psychiatric intrusion into everyday life as psychiatry was reserved only for the severely ill. Because its stigmatizing effect, psychiatry’s expansion into the realm of everyday distress had been limited (p.2). Built upon recent anthropological analyses of medicaliztion and medical practices, this book investigates how psychiatry had come to provide Japan with a new understanding of ‘depression’.

 In contrast to the view of medicalization as a tool of top-down biomedical domination and homogenization, anthropologist had of late come to articulate competing views on the nature of the stress. Based on this approach, the book investigates how these views had generated new subjects via new or altered norms, knowledge, and concepts. The book argues that psychiatry had largely overcome Japans resistance by creating a new language of depression that closely engaged with cultural discourse about the social nature of depression (p.5). Focusing on what some they had called ‘Japanese-style’ fatigue-induced depression, psychiatrists demonstrated how depression was not only a pathology of the individual brain but was also rooted in the Japan’s culture itself (p.5). This book explores how the different forms of medicalization in Japan had come about, and what consequences it brought (p.6). Psychiatrists popularized depression by disseminating two contrasting yet complementary languages of depression: one is grounded on the biology which depicted depression as a disease in the brain. The other was the social language of depression which asserted depression was a socially caused pathology, suggesting that it was time to think of depression in social terms (p.9).

Throughout this book the author investigates whether medicalization had resulted in more diversified articulation of individual suffering and served to counter the effects of medicalization. (p.18). 

Psychiatrists had begun to have public voice in the political sphere. The author has demonstrated the conceptual and institutional linkage that psychiatrists had made between depression, work stress, and recession in order to demonstrate how the difference in medicalizaiton was stemmed in part from particular political and economic concern. (18)

The book has three parts. In part 1 (ch. 2-5) the author shows that the notion of utsubyo (or its predecessor utsusho) had a long historical root in Japan’s traditional medicine. Utsubyo was a category that indicated pathological stagnation leading to symptoms such as lack of energy dejection, and social withdrawal. In 1880s, Japanese psychiatrists began to discard this traditional medical idea by arguing that psychopathology including utsebyo was a matter of individual neurological defects existed independent of social environment (p.21).  The book shows how psychiatrists’ reinterpretations of the ‘biological’ had been essential for redefining depression as social pathology warranting legal, economic and political intervention. The book also shows how Japanese psychiatrists had successfully transformed depression into one of the most talked about illness today, suggesting that depressed people were victims of biological and social forces. (p.22).

The focus of part 2 (ch.6 -8) of the book was to examines how depression was actually talked about by psychiatrists and patients in local clinical practices (p.85). While psychiatrist had made fatigue from work stress an evocative theme, they did not think that this was the single cause of depression and neither was it the only object of their concern. At the beginning of part 2, the book tries to demonstrate how psychiatrists successfully persuaded patients about the pathological nature of depression. The author shows how psychiatrists tried to contain patients’ reflectivity and avoid intruding into the realm of the psychology in order to protect patients’ already fragile sense of shelf (p.85). Part 2 then explored where psychiatrists failed to persuade patients of the biological nature of the ‘depression’. This limitation became a focal point in psychiatrist’s confrontations with suicidal patients. In the end of part 2, the book examines how psychiatric persuasion actually worked in structuring  patient’s own understanding and experience of depression by calling attention to the peculiars ‘gendering’ of depression in Japan. In Japan men had been represented as likely to suffer from depression then women. Women rarely seemed to link the cause of their suffering to depression (p.86).

The focus of part 3 (chapters 9-11) was to look at the effect of medicalization beyond the walls of clinics and examine how lay people and other professionals drew upon psychiatry as a framework for expressing social ills. It also examines the changes brought on by medicalization in the realms of legal debates over overwork depression and suicide etc. (p.153). In the beginning of part 3, it demonstrates how claims of the social origins of depression had gained force through a series of worker’s legal victories. In the middle of part 3, it analyzes the overall effects of the medicalization in three realms – legal/political changes, public debates on antidepressants, and industrial management. At the end of part 3, it reconsiders the local forces of medicaliztion in light of global political movements (p.153).

Comments:

This book shows that the Japanese often create new words and terms, for example karoushi (death due to overwork) and ‘suicide of resolve’ to describe their society. This book also shows how Japanese male and female are treated differently in the society. It can be noted that in many the case of karoushi, the victims were male employees. Junko Iitanaka quotes what Dorinne Kondo has said in Crafting Selves that “in the larger context of Japanese culture, women’s narrative productions of identity in work are not part of the central storey. . .” (p.140) in order to support her observation that “in sharp contrast to the culturally evocative, sympathetic portrays of overworked salarymen in the popular discourse, until recently no clear master narrative had existed for female depression”. While she attributes the lack of master narrative on women due to the ‘three lacks’, I think this is also a reflection that Japan is still primarily a male dominated society. Overall this is a good book for understanding how depression has suddenly become a ‘national disease’ and how psychiatry has emerged as a new vehicle for curing the social ailment.

Beyond Common Sense: Sexuality and Gender in Contemporary Japan

Recently I have read the book below. A book summary and my comments are as follows:

Book title: Wim Lunsing. 2001. Beyond Common Sense: Sexuality and Gender in Contemporary Japan. London: Kegan Paul

Book summary:

In this book Lunsing first defines what was “common sense” to him (p.3). The theme of the book was to categorize people based on sexuality (on those apart from the mainstream/majority) (p.8). All his research categorization consisted of people who failed to fit into the Japanese common sense social construction of female/male gender according to sex biologically (p.13). He wants to see how people who perceived their personal sexual attributes as different from the one assigned to them by the society, how they saw and related themselves to the Japanese society (p.14). Lunsing argues that qualitative research was likely to be more reliable than quantitative because quantitative research depended greatly on interpretations by scholars, as such there was not much control compared to qualitative fieldwork (p.31).  

Chapter two discusses the research method, and the people and groups he had worked with. Then it discusses sampling techniques and methods of interviewing. Lunsing believes that experiential, reflective and critical activities ‘are the very strength of anthropology’ (p.35). Lunsing thinks that the most useful thing he could do was what he was doing, i.e. to write about himself/his group’s life in Japan so that society became harder to ignore them. (p.38). He has about 20 groups of interviewees. Of these, 9 consisted of gay men, one was gay and lesbian, and one was exclusively lesbian (p.39). An American scholar had once advised him not to fall in love with informants because it might produce a bias towards them. Yet Lunsing thinks that this was not a problem (p.61).

In chapter three Lunsing investigates the various construction of marriages (in Japan the tradition that one should marry was seen as common sense) and the examples on discrimination related to marriage (p.74). Chapter 4 investigates how people were coping on a personal level with a social system that did not fit their needs; how did those whose did not feel the need to marry tried to find alternative ways of life-style (p.120).

Chapter 5 discusses why people might remain single and how some had experimented with alternative relationship and living style which included to get marry and then to divorce, or to remain single throughout. Chapter 6 discusses strategies employed for coping with a social environment that often had little consideration for people whose lifestyle etc. were at variance with the social norm (p.209).

Chapter 7 discusses discourses and construction concerning gender and sex, and how they affected people who belonged to the various research categories (p.261). In chapter 8 the author makes the book more explicit by using 3 themes which respectively were: 1. space, gender and sexuality, 2. constructions of homosexuality, 3. selves. On top of these themes he also talks about the fourth theme: changes and development that had happened since his research (p.310). The author concludes that it was possible to live an openly gay, lesbian, feminist, or single lifestyle in Japan (p.337). He also says that since Japan, unlike many western countries, did not have clear cut national moral system bases on religion, it should be relatively easy to adapt smoothly to the needs of people with alternative lifestyles. The major change needed was to modify “common sense” to make alternative lifestyle acceptable to the majority of Japanese people. (p.345). Lumsing claims that the boundaries for changes were being explored. It seemed that most of the limits had not yet been reached, and where the permitted space could end was still not clear (p.346).

Comments

This book is informative and well organized, although long sentences that are difficult to decipher are used sometimes. The book explains a lot of terms on sexuality, and the situation in Japan. One issue raised by this book is whether a researcher should have a relationship with the interviewees; whether a researcher should be both the observer and the protagonist at the same time. From the view point of joshiki (common sense), I think it is problematic because the research may be biased by human emotion etc. and the neutrality of the data could be challenged, for example the interviewees who had a relation with the researcher may choose to give information selectively in order to appease the researcher. Based on this point I am skeptical about the stories told by some interviewees.

The other issue raised is about “common sense”. The author seems to suggest that common sense may not be reliable in guiding us in our daily life decision making. I think common sense has a lot of meanings.  In the opening line of one his most famous books, Discourse on Method, Descartes established the most common modern meaning of common sense and its controversies. In the 18th century Enlightenment, common sense came to be seen more positively as the basis for modern thinking. It was contrasted to metaphysics. Today, the concept of common sense, and how it should best be used, remains linked to many of the most perennial topics in epistemology and ethics, with special focus often directed at the philosophy of the modern social sciences. Perhaps Lunsing is using “common sense” as a tool to challenge the hegemony that divide human in the context of male and female biological sex, that comes to be taken for granted as the natural ordering of the world. Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff  took hegemony as “to refer to the order of signs and practices, relations and distinctions, images and epistemologies – drawn from a historically situated cultural field that come to be taken for granted as the natural and received shape of the world and everything it inhabits”. “Common sense” and hegemony seem to look alike.

Social inequality in Japan

Recently I have read the following. The book summary and my comment are as follows:

Book title: Sawako Shirahase. 2014. Social inequality in Japan. London and NY:                               Routledge.

Book summary:

According to Sawako Shirahase, from the 1970s to the 1980s, the buzz-word to describe Japan was: “the all-middle-class society” (p.3). In 1977 Murakami and Tominage both argued that there was a great homogeneity of lifestyle and outlook in Japan (p.4). Yet such confident assertions of Japan as an egalitarian society started to fade from the late 1980s into the 1990s (p.4).

Is the degree of inequality in Japan something so very different from those industrial societies of the West? Was its degree of inequality high or low? These were the major questions which the author wanted to take up in this book (p.5). Shirahase deals with these questions in seven separate chapters.

Chapter 1 of the book tackles the question of how unequal a society Japan was. Japan was used to compare with countries such as the America, Britain, Italy, France, Germany, Sweden and Taiwan. The author’s concern was where Japan stood among them (p.13). Chapter 2 was about female participation in the laborer force. Ch. 3 examines income inequality among households that had children. The chief explanation of the decline in fertility since 1990 was the reduced fertility of married couple. This chapter examines where the income gap had increased most, through looking into changes in the income distribution in families with children (p.14). Ch. 4 concentrates on unmarried adults in relation to the decrease in fertility. In the 1990s many people talked about the “parasite singles”. Since 2000 the media focused at the worsening of the youth labor market. The chapter looks at the economic welfare situation of households containing adult singles, distinguishing between the relatively young and the old. Ch. 5 looks at one aspect of the family as a basic social institution with its own normative structure, and examines the gender division of labor, and attitudes towards mother working outside the home. The chapter also looks at the attitudes towards working mothers in various countries and the relation of those attitudes to social structures. Ch. 6 looks at changes in income inequality in relation to the aging of population and generational changes. The chapter looks at the relation between the old age and household composition, using international comparisons to illuminate the differences in economic well-being among the aged. Ch. 7 concentrates on single-person household and compares Japan with other countries in respect to income distribution among the aged. This chapter also looks at the changes within three-generation households, and the difference it made, comparing with the situation in Europe where it was not the general practice for old people to live with their children (p.15).

To conclude the book Shirahase brings together the observation made, and views expressed in the seven chapters to answer the questions: First, was inequality in Japan representing a social problem that was shared by other major countries? Second, was inequality due to a process of population aging simultaneously with a falling birth rate a common feature to all countries, or merely a feature peculiar to Japan?  Third, was the discussion and concern expressed over increasing inequality, and its relation to the ageing/lower fertility, a feature special to Japan only, or was it a social problem common to all countries? (p.16).

Looking at the inequality in Japan, primarily economic inequality and comparing with other major OECD countries, the book confirms that inequality was everywhere (p.188). The structure of equality was rooted in the social institution created by the society, and as such it was changeable and controllable.

The book shows that the degree of inequality in Japan was neither especially high nor low. Although there were nothing stood out on inequality in Japan as a society, three unique features could be noted. First, there was more perception of inequalities than the degree of actual income distribution warranted. Second, a distinctive feature of Japan was that, in the labor market and within the family, gender differences were very great. Labor participation rate among women was not particularly low, but the gender wage gap in Japan was the highest among the countries. The third distinctive feature was the high poverty rate among single person households, and also among single-parent households. It was here that Japan had deviated from the norm.

It is especially noted that in Japan nearly 90% of the mothers of single-parent families had a job. The poverty was not because they did not work, but because they were the working poor. What helped them to survive was often by living with their parents instead of going out to work. This was a distinctive characteristic of Japan (p.193).

Comments:

The thoroughness of his research is amazing. The book reminds me that more than one hundred years ago Emile Durkheim, using the statistics, explored the differing suicide rates among European countries. Through a process of elimination, Dirkheim had successfully argued that it was the stronger social control among Catholics that was responsible for a lower suicide rates in their society. Conversely the Protestant society had a higher level of suicide because of its lower level of social control. Shirahase, like Durkheim, using charts and graphs, has convincingly given answers to the questions raised by her. Also, she is able to point out the solutions to the problems of social inequality. Overall it is a very good book.

The age of Hirohito: in Search of Modern Japan

Recently I have read the following book. Its key points and my comments are as follows:

Book title: Daikichi Irokawa, translated by Mikiso Hane and John K. Urda. 1995. The age of Hirohito: in Search of Modern Japan. The Free Press.

Key Points:

- History is rewritten constantly, for example the history on the Meiji emperor and Showa emperor (p.3)

- there are three theme in the book: the first one was ‘War and peace’ (it was about the peace-war-peace periods under Showa) running through the Showa period from seen from the perspective of the war victims. It was different from the conventional view that a small number of military men, with a carefully formulated plan of aggression, dragged the people and state along unwillingly into the War (p.9). The connotation was that the society as a whole should also be responsible for the War. The second theme was ‘The lifestyle revolution’: the agrarian society underwent fundamental changes into modernity. Modern urban lifestyle appeared in 1920s, increased quickly after 1945 and reached the upper limits by 1980s. The third theme was the most important: ‘The emperor and the people’. In 1945 the emperor and many top government leaders came through touched and untainted by their responsibility for the war. Through these three themes the author tries to understand the Showa period.

- the War ended when the emperor finally delivered his ‘Noble decision’ in 1945 to surrender. To absolve the emperor of all responsibility for the War because of his decision to end it would mean to ignore the facts presented in the book that showed the emperor’s involvement in war decisions when the Japanese was fighting the US in war theatre in South-east Asia etc. The emperor’s close advisors and scholars naturally wanted to defend him, but the emperor must have felt personally responsible for his poor leadership during the War (p.30).

- the introduction of major reforms by the Occupation authorities did not mean that the Japanese democratization was the product of GHQ directives only. The important players were not government authorities, but rather the popular organizations and the overwhelming number of people who enthusiastically embraced the reform measures (p.38).

- the 1960s glorious years of high-speed economic growth was also an important age in Japan’s lifestyle revolution which deserved closer examination. Three concepts were key to understand this age: the transportation revolution (the automobile society), the information revolution, and the emergence of a mass consumption society (p.59).

- today we tend to underrate the significance of the emperor’s power of supreme commandant in the years before and during the War. In that time the issue was extremely important. The argument that he accepted the decisions of the cabinet and even approved policies to which he personally opposed was clearly a mistake (p.81).

- on the international reaction to the emperor’s death in 1989, in Britain a newspaper concluded that “when he dies, there will definitely be a special seat reserved for him in hell” (p.115). A daily South Korean newspaper (the East Asian Daily) contained a sharp warning to the Japanese government and people for not having formally apologized for Japan’s brutal colonial administration and wartime deeds (p.137).

- the author does not defend the emperor system. The imperial court with its historical importance had an appropriate place in a truly modern Japan. He thinks that the emperor and his family should leave Tokyo and return to Kyoto imperial palace, his home community to enjoy life as a free citizen (p.146). The emperor should become the master of traditional japans culture so that no one could take advantage of the emperor or the court for any reason (p.146).

Comments:

- the writer is a well respected Japanese scholar. He needs not depend on a famous publisher to print his book.

- in the book the author mentions the several occasions that Japan’s road to War could be averted, the so called potential turning points in history.

- the writer implies that now Japan is modern, yet the emperor system is still there, there is a danger that it could be taken advantage by someone.

The Japanese Family in Transition: From the Professional Housewife Ideal to the Dilemmas of Choice

Recently I have finished reading the following book. The book summary and my comment are as follows:

Book title: Suzanne Hall Vogel with Steven Vogel. The Japanese Family in Transition: From the Professional Housewife Ideal to the Dilemmas of Choice. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Inc. 2013.

Book summary:

The goal of the book is to argue that the role of the professional wife had both constrained and empowered Japanese women. The book also suggests that the professional housewife ideal continued to cast a shadow over Japanese society today although its influence was fading (p.2).

The book presents the life stories of three ordinary professional wives for a period of over 50 years. They respectively were wives of a doctor (Tanaka-san), an accountant (Itou-san), and a business owner (Suzuki-san). The purpose was to gain an insight into the strength and vulnerability of postwar profession housewives, and to see how their roles shifted as they grew older and as the Japanese society changed (p.19).

The author first met these three housewives in 1958 that were living in a middle-class suburb in Tokyo. They were wives of professionals or “salarymen” and were called the sengyou shufu, i.e. full time “profession” housewives (p.4). As the research progressed, Vogel found that in many ways these Japanese wives were actually much more independent than she had thought (p.7). They had a separate role in the family which their husbands had little influence (p.7).

As a clinical caseworker/psychotherapist by profession, Vogel was able to discover how the cultural context affected the manifestation of psychological stress, for example the troubled youth in Japan, including the children of these housewives, tended to “act in” by withdrawing into their homes while the American youth like to “act out” by engaging in mischief of violence in streets.

The first professional housewife introduced was Mrs. Tanaka (Hanae). Her husband was a family doctor. Hanae was born in 1914. She was the second of 8 children who had attended a girls’ high school (p.24). At 44 she had five children aged 12 to 19 (p.23). Hanae’s children represented the majority of children who were born during or soon after the war. They had enjoyed improved technology. They had fewer siblings compared to their parents’ families. The female children put less emphasis on trying to become a professional wife (p.58). Vogel regarded Hanae as a natural fit for the professional housewife role, excelled and found fulfilment in this role (p.60).

The second housewife was Mrs. Yaeko Itou. Vogel found that she was less constrained by either the prescribed feminine manners or the mandates of the professional wife role (p.61). In Yaeko’s family the mukoyoushi pattern appeared in her mother’s line. Mrs. Yaeko’s mother was adopted into the Itou family (p.62). Yaeko went to Tokyo and entered a high school by the age of 13. In Tokyo she continued to follow her own interest and ambitions (p.66). When her parent tried to find her a suitable husband, she turned it down because he was not college educated (p.69).  Later she married Tokuzou in 1949. She gave birth to a boy (Ken), a girl (Mari) and then another girl (Katsuko).  Yaeko was surprised when Vogel told her that all her children were very much like her: they were smart, able, independent, realistic, sociable, strong and determined in pursing their own interest and own path in life (110). When Vogel reflected on Yaeko, she always pondered what price Yaeko had paid for her rebelliousness against the narrowly defined housewife/mother role of her day. She had been confronted with criticism, conflict, and had broken relationship with her children.

The third housewife was Mrs. Suzuki (Mieko). Married to a successful businessman, at the age of 38 in 1958 she had five children (p.114). While recognized the explicit authority held by men, she believed in equality in her heart and was aware of a wife’s covert power which was based on a strong alliance with her children (p.115). Often while she said ‘yes’ to his husband, she thought of ‘no’ in her heart (p.117). Vogel found the Suzuki children to be free and easy, fun-loving, open-minded, and warm-hearted (p.121). In conclusion, Vogel knew that when Mieko was raising her children she could develop a balance of power with her husband: she controlled the household. Yet during her husband’s retirement year, she was less able to control the home life, merely addressing her husband’s wishes. Feeling less in control, she clung harder to control her physical body instead. When she was on longer able to control the situation, her silent “no” took over.

In the final chapter Vogel tries to analysis social changes in Japan in two periods. From1960s to 90s, professional wives’ ideal for the Japan’s new middle class women was giving way to greater diversity and complexity. Arranged marriage dwindled, more women got jobs, some refused to marry men whose mother lived with them, the average age of marriage for women increased, and women achieved equality with men in education (pps.150-1). While the profession housewives ideal eroded, it was difficult for women to combine marriage with career. Although they had freedom of choice, they often filled with conflicted feelings (p.161). In the second period from the 90s to present, the established structures became less dependable; there was more freedom, more choices and fewer rules. A gap arose between men and women. While women pushed for changes, men were content with the status quo. When the status quo began to crumble, men were more confused about how to redirect their goals (p.169). Vogel concluded that for the women, it might be less a matter of finding alternative than a matter of adjusting to essential values of the professional housewife to a new era and new circumstance (p.177).

Comments:

The book is successful in showing how respectively 3 wives of the salarymen in Japan had changed over a period of some 50 years. Yet the book is difficult to read. The writer often uses a pronoun to start a sentence thus causing confusion as to what that pronoun was meant to represent, for example on page 46 second paragraph, and on page 52 last paragraph. The second confusion was caused by the repeating of ideas, for example the first paragraph on page 130. Also the usage of English idiom was difficult to understand, for example “to wait on him hand and foot” on page 134.  Furthermore, sometimes topics changed too much in one single paragraph, for example in the last few sentences on page 131. Apart from the above I think this is a good book.