Contemporary Japanese Thought

In writing about “Japanese Mothers”—an expression that is all too often written with a capital M—we must begin by tentatively acknowledging their existence rather than by baldly declaring their disappearance. This paper will thus straddle the two realms of presence and absence, keeping a foot on either shore. Instead of a static group of “Mothers,” timelessly present or absent, I will discuss the historical transformation of the concept of “Mothers,” and the social context of that transformation.

Absence is a tempting and tenable position to take on the “Mothers” question, since the word implies a cultural representation rather than a clearly defined subgroup of actual women. “Mothers” with an uppercase M does not equate with “mothers” with a lower-case m. No person is born a mother, or even born to be a capital-M “Mother;” it is a role that is learned and then internalized in the process of gender socialization. Not all women give birth, so women have no absolute natural destiny to become mothers. Even the details of mothering remain undetermined, controlled neither by anatomy nor by instinct, because the experience of mothering varies widely through time and space as well as among individual women. Simplistic and reductionist theories such as sociobiology are helpless to explain this diversity and fail on many other points as well, such as the hatred a woman may feel for her children, an emotion clearly disallowed by any theory of “selfish genes.” If the goal of the genes is to survive by taking an individual body merely as a vehicle, as Richard Dawkins tells in his well-known theory on “selfish genes,” self-sacrifice of mothers to give a longer survival to their children, i.e., their genes, can nicely fit in his theory, and therefore reinforces the conventional stereotype of a self-sacrificing mother. In reality, however, the lived experience of motherhood includes the ambivalence of both love and hate, and women are about to break the silence imposed by “sacred motherhood” to tell of their own child-hatred and child-abuse.¹ It is not a sociobiological fate, or a predesigned control by genes, but a social norm that prohibits them from admitting the negative feeling of mothers toward children.

With no capital-M “Mothers” hardwired into human nature, transcending time and space, might we at least isolate a less universal instance—the “Mothers” specific to a particular culture? At first sight this is tempting, but it is a temptation that should be resisted. The “culture” of this approach is all too often ahistorical, exerting a deterministic force over all within its sway. Convention rather than anatomy then becomes destiny; but we are still dealing with an immutable and metaphysical force, albeit one that is more modest in scope.

Contemporary cultural criticism has carefully deconstructed the notion of “culture” itself: how it is formed, what it implies, how it affects people, what results from it—and, in particular, who operates it and who benefits from it. Only after construction of the notion of “culture” in the universe of discourse can we begin to ask questions about something called “cultural identity.” Unlike the “collective gene”—or the “collective unconscious,” as a Jungian might put it—“culture” is a historical product subject to constant historical change.

Historical studies on gender and sexuality have challenged even ties that seem irrevocably grounded in biological reality, such as mother-child and gender relationships, pointing out that these have undergone constant historical change and differ according to class, ethnic group, and region. Scholars of women’s studies have also challenged any universal notion of motherhood defined as self-sacrifice and dedication. A French social historian, Elizabeth Badinter, has demonstrated that the intimate tie between mother and child was established only after the formation of the strongly child-centered family.² Seen in this new light, medieval historiography constantly testifies to the relative indifference of mothers to their children. Mothers rarely breast-fed their babies and were willing to send them to foster parents in rural villages. The mortality rate was high due to malnutrition and poor treatment, but parents cared little whether babies survived. The later decline in infant mortality, which is often attributed simply to improvement in physical circumstances, was also caused by mothers’ increased care of and attention to their children.³ Breast-feeding is now the norm for modern mothers, though it used to be regarded as a humble job for nannies and poor women.

Here I argue that motherhood is neither nature nor culture but rather a historical construct. I support this assertion by tracing the representation of “Mothers” in modern Japanese literature. The concept of “Mothers” is not an endowment from biology or fate. It came into existence during some period of the past and is thus in no sense necessary, a fact that cultural ideology tries to mask with its repression of all questions of historical origin. Despite its carefully cultivated ahistorical air and aura of being a mythical archetype or collective gene, the category of “Mothers” is a manufactured one that can be discontinued at any time. This paper concerns the market for this cultural product, and whether the concept of “Mothers” will enjoy the same consumer acceptance in the future as it has in the past.

In Seijuku to sōshitsu: haha no hōkai [Maturity and loss: Collapse of “mothers”], first published in 1967, the well-known literary critic Etō Jun cites an episode from a contemporary writer, Yasuoka Shōtarō.⁴ It is from Yasuoka’s 1959 novel Umibe no kōkei [Scenes by the seashore], which consists of the childhood memories of a male protagonist, Shintarō, who is identified with the author himself. Shintarō’s mother would sing a lullaby:

One reason Shintarō’s mother becomes so attached to him is that she is not satisfied with her husband. He is a military officer, but Shintarō’s mother is ashamed of his relatively low status. The close mother-son bond thus excludes the father, who is described as “shameful.” Shintarō shares his mother’s feelings of shame toward his father, sympathizing with her miserable life. His mother keeps telling Shintarō not to be like his father, which would be the greatest disappointment she could suffer. But who could satisfy her and meet all her demands, apart from a perfect hero of fantasy? When your life is in the hands of your husband, it becomes difficult to be satisfied with him in terms of emotion, affection, status, wealth, and even personality. Too much is at stake to consent to any departure from the ideal.

Etō points out that a sense of shame and frustration toward husbands did not exist in premodern society, where women were required to raise children to be similar to their fathers. Confined by the feudal class structure, a person born into the peasant class had no alternative but to remain there. Modernization, however, has given people the “equal opportunity” fantasy of climbing the social ladder through education, thus creating a sense of shame in those who fail to climb in society.⁶

Out of this sense of shame and frustration, Shintarō’s mother tries to make an ally of her son and thus compensate for the disappointment of her life:

The shame she feels about her husband is experienced as her own shame, as she is responsible for this wrong choice, or was fated to marry him. Though she invests a great deal of expectation in her son, the very fact that he is the son of this shameful man threatens her with future betrayal and disappointment. Even if she is fortunate enough to have a son with great attainments, unlike his father, that son will be destined to rise into another world, leaving the culture that he and his mother belonged to. Her achievement, which is embodied by the future of her son, results in her abandonment by her son, leaving her alone in the old world.⁷

Etō notes that this phenomenon is peculiarly modern and did not exist in a society of fixed classes.

Current social history of mothering has revealed a totally different view of motherhood, and has thus historicized the cultural concept of “Japanese Mothers.” Mothering varied with class. Biological motherhood was the norm for upper-class women, but they were not expected to raise children by themselves. Such humble jobs as breast-feeding and washing diapers were undertaken by nannies and maids. Among lower-class women, who were mainly villagers, women of reproductive age were more producers than reproducers. Because their labor was in high demand for farming, they were not allowed to devote themselves to child rearing. In an extended household, grandparents, less productive in their old age, tended to take care of young children; otherwise, children were generally neglected while their parents were working in the fields.

Most different of all is the fact that child care required much less care and skill than it does in contemporary society. For one thing, the period of socialization was relatively short. At the age of seven, children were considered useful sources of labor: if not employed in their own households, they were sent to wealthier homes by their parents as maids or manservants, or even sold into prostitution. Second, communal motherhood and shared responsibility eased the workload of mothers, especially those who were inexperienced. Third, a high fertility rate allowed women to take advantage of their older children, usually the girls, to oversee younger brothers and sisters. Sometimes, the greater the number of children, the easier the task was for the mother. This helps to explain parents’ opposition to compulsory education at the beginning of the Meiji period, for it took children away from home, thus increasing the amount of work the women themselves had to do.⁸

The construction of a new idea of motherhood took place in the Meiji period as part of the process of modernization. A young woman historian, Koyama Shizuko, has demonstrated that the concept of “mothers who educate” did not exist before this time.⁹ Her careful investigation of Tokugawa Confucian texts shows that their authors did not consider education a maternal duty. On the contrary, the role of women was restricted to the mere provision of biological life; it was assumed that they were too stupid to impart anything more abstract to their offspring. Koyama discovered that Confucian ideology was itself “modernized” during modernization: the demand for a “wise mother” was added in defense of women’s education at a time when it was under attack from nationalist reactionaries. Thus the slogan “A good wife and wise mother” was in fact not oppressive but progressive in its contemporary historical context.

Ironically, Etō describes the cultural archetype of Japanese “Mothers” in Yasuoka Shōtarō’s novel only to show how it goes into decline: Shintarō, the spoiled son, has strong ties with his mother and shares her shame over his father, identifying himself with her. At the same time, he is the object of the shame directed toward his father, since he is, after all, his father’s son. It is very unlikely that he will do better in life than his father has, and Shintarō is aware of his limits, if nothing else. Precisely because his father has disappointed his mother, Shintarō is fated to disappoint her again. Hence he blames himself and at this point identifies with his father, becoming a timid son. His sense of powerlessness and helplessness makes him want to stay under the control of his mother—or, rather, indulge himself in dependency on her—which satisfies his mother’s hidden agenda of keeping him under her control. Here mother and son are in a secret alliance that excludes the father. Since the father is in any case psychologically absent, Shintarō, a Japanese Oedipus, is free from the threat of castration. He can rest comfortably in his intimate ties with his mother, which might be called amae or, in a more modern, English term, codependency.¹⁰

The Japanese Oedipal triangle in the modern family, therefore, consists of a disappointing father, a frustrated mother, and a weak-willed son. Up to this point the Japanese version of modern family romance is nicely described by Etō. However, since he does not provide the female counterpart to the Oedipal story, let us look at such a family from the perspective of a daughter: while the mother establishes a close relationship with her son with the expectation that he will compensate her in the future for her disappointment in her husband, she is rather indifferent to any daughters, assuming that they will not marry out. A daughter thus shares with her brother the shame directed toward the father, although, as a woman, she does not have to identify herself with him; nor does she identify with her mother, who provides her with nothing but a role model of angst and despair. Unlike her brother, however, she does not have even a theoretical chance of taking control of her own life. Whether or not she can escape from her mother’s fate depends on her future husband, whose personality and attributes are largely beyond her control, as her mother’s case demonstrates. Her future is uncertain, with no promises or guarantees. Thus the Japanese Electra becomes an irritating daughter, self-centered and present-oriented. With no sympathy for her father or mother, and no responsibility to help right the wrongs of their lives, the daughter becomes the most scathingly critical member of the family.

Kojima Nobuo’s well-known novel, Hōyō kazoku [Embracing family] (1965), gives an exact depiction of this Japanese version of the modern family. Etō’s Seijuku to sōshitsu provided a powerful reading of this text, which helped make it a milestone in postwar Japanese literature. While most literary critics were embarrassed and frustrated by Shunsuke, the antihero who tries to repair the damage to his family and fails every time, Etō was among the few who reacted positively to the book, which he believed succeeded in portraying the postwar Japanese family in the process of dissolving.

In Kojima’s novel, Shunsuke’s family consists of a typical couple—a disappointing husband and a frustrated wife—and their insecure children. The marriage of Shunsuke and his wife, Tokiko, based on “love,” is the postwar product of a relatively egalitarian society, and they at least try to live a modern family life. Mutual failures of communication and self-centeredness between husband and wife are well described in a style that borders on caricature, yet these are universal traits of the modern family. Once conventional roles have been banished from the household, its members face harsh realities, only to find that the persons at their side are unknown to each other.

Shunsuke is obsessed by the idea of maintaining an ideal modern family, but behind this obsession is his desire to establish an ultimate shelter for himself, with his wife as its guardian. As long as Tokiko plays the role of shufu, more appropriately translated as “head of the house” rather than “housewife,”¹¹ and provides her husband with attention, care, and a sense of security, Shunsuke’s family remains peaceful. But this peace is bought at the cost of a steadily building resentment and regret on the part of Tokiko as she plays the role of the “Mother.” The peace is finally broken when Tokiko reaches the limits of her toleration and commits adultery with a young American soldier, George. Even after the truth comes out, Tokiko blames her husband, who, she claims, is responsible for causing this accident. Shunsuke, who has been trying to play the role of a family patriarch, fails ridiculously at this crisis. Afraid of losing Tokiko and, accordingly, his family, he can do nothing but helplessly tolerate her behavior. Here he acts not as a responsible, mature, adult male, but as a weak-willed son afraid of being deprived of his sanctuary. His powerlessness is thrown into sharp focus by the answer of George, his wife’s lover, when asked whether he feels responsible: “Responsible for whom? All I feel responsible for are my parents and my country. Nothing else.”¹² The irony is palpable: a young American solider from the land of individualism, and an adulterer to boot, is brought in to articulate a transcendent moral, the ideal of a father, which postwar Japan has lost.

Unlike Shintarō’s mother in Yasuoka’s story, Shunsuke’s wife in Kojima’s story no longer accepts and endures the prescribed role of motherhood. Though the closeness of the mother-son relationship is more or less a modern product, modern motherhood takes an ambiguous form. While Shintarō’s mother epitomizes the “accepting mother,” Shunsuke’s wife represents the “rejecting mother.” Shintarō’s mother takes her tie with her son as fated, whereas Tokiko’s link with Shunsuke is relative and unfixed, since “love” marriages are based on choice. Tokiko will not endure her frustrations forever; she tries to compensate for the inadequacies of her life through her own actions. Nevertheless, since she cannot take responsibility for her own life, she still needs someone to blame things on.

The ambiguity of the “accepting mother” and the “rejecting mother” lives within the same woman. Motherhood has become conditional, depending on what the mother’s children achieve. Etō highlights the obsessive motherhood of Shintarō’s mother, who would accept her son even should he become a criminal, only to emphasize the fact that it no longer exists. His intention is to show that this unconditional trust toward a mother, or perhaps better, this form of culturally constructed motherhood, has been lost forever.

According to Etō, the loss of the concept of the unconditionally “accepting mother” is the result of women’s internalization of industrialism. As a literary critic and sensitive observer, Etō does not idealize women or femininity, nor does he set women outside the historical process of modernization. As with all historical processes, men and women were both involved in modernization, although gender differences imposed different forms on the two groups. Women’s desire to “catch up” with modernization is epitomized by Tokiko’s hidden desire to catch up with her husband, the cause of her frustration. To her, modern life and the modern world remain a bright, glittering ideal. Since the United States symbolizes this “modern world,” Tokiko will never be truly able to tolerate her husband, for when he had a chance to study abroad, he went there by himself, leaving her and their children at home. Her revenge is adultery, an act by which she takes America into her “womb” in lieu of her missed chance to penetrate its territory. Despite Shunsuke’s hidden desire to have Tokiko play the role of the “accepting mother,” Tokiko can no longer accept the acceptance demanded of her:

Behind the hidden rivalry of Tokiko with her husband (itself the outcome of the co-education which American occupation policy brought to Japan) lies her subconscious desire to catch up with men. She wishes for freedom and independence, as her husband enjoys them. In turn, her envy and resentment toward her husband result in her self-humiliation.… In other words, she has internalized misogyny, a low self-evaluation as a mother and wife.

Nature is destroyed in the process of industrialization, and as a result women have to root out their “motherhood” as the price of participation in modern society. Women’s “nature” cannot be the one sacrosanct area in the midst of this disintegration, despite men’s self-centered fantasy of preserving such a shelter for themselves. Women are not just passive victims of man-made illusions but active accomplices who work together with men to promote historical processes.

Industrialization allocated to women the status of “nature” as opposed to “culture.” Note that this “nature” is constructed by “culture” as its residual category. The only way women can survive in industrialized society is either (1) to accept their status as second-class citizens, or (2) to internalize misogyny, viewing themselves from an adopted male perspective. To make matters worse, women who do succeed in this internalization are defined as “neurotic” because they fail to accept their femininity. Freud said that women who “wanted to be like men” suffered from “penis envy.” To a psychoanalyst, the cure is defined as inducing a female client with this mental disorder to return to where she belongs so that she can accept her predetermined inferiority. The “neurotic” woman, who by definition is already castrated by the culture, must thus castrate herself again under his guidance so as to enjoy “the happiness of the slave.” Freudian theory is nothing but a product of modern family romance, and this is why it has become so expert at explaining women’s misogyny as a form of “neurosis.” But it cannot pretend to be a universal interpretation because both Freudian theory and its romantic roots are themselves products of the modern era.¹⁴

One of the earliest Japanese students of Freud, Furusawa Heisaku, asserted that the Oedipal complex could not be universal and proposed an alternative model, which he called the “Ajase complex,” as early as the 1930s.¹⁵ The term is borrowed from ancient Buddhist legends. Ajase was the name of an arrogant tyrant in the time of the Buddha. Like Oedipus, he killed his father and usurped the throne. He put his mother in jail and did not feed her well, since she persisted in remonstrating with him about his evil deeds. She suffered from the deeds of her son but considered them something she herself should feel guilty about. When Ajase found his mother tormenting herself with blame, he came to realize what he had done to her. By identifying himself with his mother, though not with his father, he became mature and responsible. Thus the tale of Ajase provides a model of growth by which an immature son can become an adult man.

Furusawa developed this concept in response to his doubts about classical Freudian theory, according to which the initial pre-Oedipal stage of close relationship between a mother and son is obstructed by a third person, the father. As the legitimate possessor of his wife’s sexuality, the father does not tolerate his son’s incestuous desires, and threatens him with the possibility of castration. Unable to compete with his grown father, the son represses his desire for the mother (which forms his subconscious) and identifies with his father (or phallic symbol, in Lacanian terms) hoping to get a substitute for the mother in the future. In the process of growth, the son successfully internalizes his father’s prohibition and establishes a phallic order that forms his “superego.” The problem lies in trying to apply this model to the Japanese situation, with its absence of strong, potentially castrating father figures. To do so seems to predict that the son will fail to develop a superego, and will thus be doomed to immaturity and moral weakness.

Furusawa’s theory of the “Ajase complex” is an attempt to show how, without the interference of their fathers, Japanese men can grow morally in relation to their mothers. As “accepting mothers,” Japanese mothers tolerate anything evil you have done and suffer for your deeds. If you do not succeed in life, it is your mother who is blamed and tortured by your father for her failure. She demonstrates her pain, and her endurance of it, before your eyes. In this process you internalize your mother’s, rather than your father’s, discipline, which eventually gives rise to the Japanese counterpart of a superego. Furusawa was trying to explain how the Japanese could be as ethical as Westerners, even though the process of psychological development varied with cultures.

Furusawa’s theory seems to work well in the case of the relationship between Shintarō and his mother. However, a self-made film critic by the name of Sato Tadao questioned the continuing validity of this model, based on his observations of the contemporary TV dramas of the 1960s and 1970s.¹⁶ He observed the historical transformation of women, who in larger and larger numbers were declining the role of self-sacrificing mother. Japan had passed into the age of Shunsuke and Tokiko, with women more self-centered, seeking their own benefit and comfort. In common with Etō, Satō declared this historical process irreversible and irresistible.

It might seem easy to blame women for their lack of morality and responsibility, but men are not qualified to do the blaming, because they have abandoned their responsibility by their absence. In Katei no yomigaeri no tame ni: Hōmu dorama ron [For the revival of the family: On home dramas], Satō asks what will happen to Japan in the future if the nation loses the moral foundation of self-sacrificing mothers. Whatever the answer to that question, by the end of the 1960s the process of change had relegated Furusawa’s theory of the Ajase complex to the status of a historical footnote.

In August 1993, the University of British Columbia held a conference on amae in modern Japanese literature with the participation of the well-known psychiatrist, Doi Takeo, who proposed the idea of amae, or codependence, as the key to understanding Japanese culture. At that conference Tsuruta Kinya made an important comment that was either neglected or ignored, though it touched on a point both important and, in retrospect, obvious: though amae is understood as mutual codependence, no one has ever theorized about it from the side of the supplier of amae. Amae has always been analyzed from the standpoint of the person who receives tolerance, generosity, and self-sacrifice from the other party. As long as this emotional supply is maintained, the person who receives it can keep his or her “sweet” relationship, and it is easy to imagine that loss of the source of its supply will be a painful experience. But how does this relationship look to the other party, whose participation and cooperation are essential? Is it such a “sweet” experience to be emotionally exploited, to give endless forgiveness and tolerance on demand? Upon examination, this seemingly mutual codependence is revealed to be one-sided. This is particularly significant because the asymmetrical relationship of codependence often involves questions of gender relations.

We can get an idea of the answer to these questions by looking at recent studies of pathological codependence. Amy Borovoy, a young anthropologist, conducted a survey among wives of alcoholic men in Japan.¹⁷ Alcoholism is known to be a mental disorder, and being the wife of an alcoholic is also considered a mental disorder. Alcoholism is an addiction, like other drug addictions, driven by feelings of insecurity and an identity crisis. Wife-of-an-alcoholic-man syndrome, as it is called, is also a kind of addiction, an addiction to the sense of being needed and depended on, again based on insecurity and an identity crisis. Between the two there is thus a perfect match between the depending and the depended-on. This forms a vicious cycle in which both parties are trapped; although a form of “codependency,” the relationship is hardly mutual because the roles cannot be reversed. There are alcoholic women, but the husband-of-an-alcoholic woman syndrome is virtually unknown. Women’s alcoholism tends to lead to family disintegration and divorce because there are few men who will stay in such a marriage.

Just as alcoholic men have formed a mutual-assistance group named Alcoholics Anonymous, so their wives have formed a similar group for mutual support. Since violence often goes with alcoholism, they often get beaten by their husbands, sometimes beaten to death. Despite repeated violence they rarely run away; when they do they usually come back home, by choice, not force, remaining in the vicious cycle. These women are aware of their problem and their need for help, yet they cannot help themselves.

Based on her survey and participant observation of the support group. Borovoy found a continuity between ordinary women and the wives of alcoholics. This is hardly to be wondered at, since the wives themselves are ordinary women, not alcoholics. They tend to play the role of the cultural ideal of “wife” to an extreme, and end up becoming addicted to being depended on. Borovoy named this cultural ideal sewa nyōbō (the caring wife)—a wife who assumes the role of a mother and provides limitless care, attention, generosity, tolerance, and forgiveness. These wives need to keep someone dependent on them and, because dependency is the key source of their identity, they are inclined to work against the other party becoming independent. This is similar to the overprotection of children by Japanese mothers, which ends up spoiling children and making them more arrogant and self-centered.

Borovoy sees the cultural ideal of sewa nyōbō as a means to exploit female identity and sexuality. Because a nature of caring and nurturing is so deeply embedded in feminine identity, such a woman’s greatest fear is being deprived of someone to take care of. Needless to say, this “nature” is not a nature these women were born with, but one that has been constructed by “culture.”

It was not until 1970, with the rise of the so-called second-wave feminism, or Women’s Liberation, in Japan, that women began to question the dilemma generated by the acceptance of low self-evaluation and self-internalized misogyny. Japanese feminism rejects this dilemma, not motherhood per se, focusing not on women but on man-made society, that is, patriarchy. It is patriarchy that has created this dilemma in which some women oppress others, thus acting as agents of patriarchy themselves:

Japan is often described by the cliché “mother-dominated society.” This in turn is often misunderstood as indicating matriarchy. However, we have little if any firm evidence in the past, let alone the present. Matriarchy is a red herring: “mother dominance” in Japanese society must be seen as an aspect of patriarchy, in which the “Mothers” represent male fantasies and re-present patriarchal thought. It is these “Mothers” who teach their sons to reproduce patriarchy in the next generation. “Transvestite patriarchy” might be the best name for it: male dominance hiding behind the skirts of the “Mothers.” It is a form of male dominance which keeps its female agents, the “Mothers,” between itself and its victims, so that these “Mothers” can absorb the resentment of their sons and the aggression of their daughters. Since it is able to deflect hostility from itself to its female agents, “transvestite patriarchy” is more difficult to identify and overcome than more direct versions of male dominance.¹⁸

Feminism has challenged Freudian theory, since the only alternative to such a challenge is to accept meekly the status of a second-class citizen. To be sure, feminist psychoanalysts such as Julia Kristeva have tried to create a female version of psychological development that would be less oppressive. In this they have partially succeeded, but their perspective has remained limited to that of the daughter, while that of the mother has been consistently neglected. For example, Kristeva, who is a mother herself, proposed an idea of “abjection,” through which a child sees her mother in the confrontations that are a part of the process of development. This is fine enough from the perspective of the child, but what mother would be comfortable with “abjection,” if she were aware that she was being cast in such a negative light?

As a distinctive literary critic, Etō has the sensitivity to select the works that mark major turning points in cultural history. Among them have been controversial texts such as Murakami Ryū’s Kagirinaku tōmeini chikai burū [Almost transparent blue] (1976); Tanaka Yasuo’s Nantonaku kurisutaru [Somewhat crystal] (1981); and Yamada Eimi’s Beddo taimu aizu [Bedtime eyes] (1985) in the 1970s and 1980s—works of which Etō himself has always been more supportive than critical.

These works are representative of the children who have refused maturity and embraced instead the distinctive traits of “irresponsible sons” and “irritating daughters.” This historical change is more evident in the case of women, who now do not hesitate to take advantage of men and society for the sake of their own welfare. Since society offers them only a limited set of alternatives, they have reason to be increasingly frustrated and present-oriented.

Here we see the sons and daughters of Shunsuke and Tokiko in Hōyō kazoku. They are concerned exclusively with themselves. These children, now in their thirties and forties, are the historical product of postwar Japan, where the family has dissolved into a chance collection of individual people. Their first priority is their own material and mental welfare; little time is left over to maintain the family. Divorce and single parents have become common, and any stigma attached to them has largely disappeared.

In the late 1980s, these spoiled children became parents themselves. This third generation of the Japanese modern family, the grandchildren of Shunsuke and Tokiko, took as their cultural heroes figures from popular comic magazines. For instance, Tsumugi Taku, a woman comic writer well known to the mass audience, wrote a story entitled Hotto rōdo [Hot road] (1986–1987) about the daughter of a family headed by a single mother. Haruki, age sixteen, joins a group of young motorbike gangsters and gets involved with their leader, Yoshiyama, age eighteen. Yoshiyama cares nothing for his life and will take any risk simply to drive as fast as he wishes. Because of her insecurity and emptiness, Haruki shares her boyfriend’s despair, but her divorced single mother, belonging to the baby-boom generation, is too immersed in herself to notice her daughter’s delinquency. Living on the money her wealthy ex-husband sends, she has nothing to worry about but her latest love affair. Trying to catch her attention, Haruki one day says to her mother, who is waiting for her latest lover to arrive, “If only you could behave like a mother.”

The children of this third postwar generation are all too aware of how fragile the family is. But since, as young children, they cannot survive without a family, they are extremely conscious of any symptom of family disorganization. They may even invest a great deal in maintaining their family by voluntarily assuming the role of “good child.” They are self-aware enough to understand that they are playing a “family game,” and by playing that game, they force their parents into compliance with its rules. For them, the family is no longer a secure shelter they can rely on without question, but an ongoing project that must be managed and even negotiated.¹⁹

The current popular literature is full of frank accounts of women’s experiences during pregnancy and mothering. Popular women’s comic writers, such as Uchida Shungiku and Tajima Miruku,²⁰ talk openly about their experience of pregnancy and mothering; about the sexual desire of pregnant women; about the physical pleasure of being suckled during breast-feeding; about hostile emotion toward babies; and about their own self-centeredness and conflicting demands. Contemporary women are allowed public expression of their negative feelings toward their children, or even toward having a family at all, without fear of retaliation. They talk about and even publish accounts of their personal experiences of child abuse. None of this fits within the received model of motherhood, yet none of it has worse consequences for its authors than a flurry of criticism and some free publicity.

The shock and criticism that these accounts can still evoke tell us that the cultural code of “Mothers,” which has dictated to women what they should and should not feel when bearing and raising children, still retains some of its old force; the relative mildness of the reaction, compared with the drastic sanctions that such accounts would surely have earned in earlier times, shows to what extent the cultural ideal of “Mothers” has decayed. Until recently, a woman who became a mother felt as the code would have her feel and blamed herself for her weakness if she transgressed it. Now the boundaries of the permissible have become much wider. Some women writers, like Kōno Taeko in Yōji gari [Child hunting], have sketched a nightmare of child-hatred out of their hostile feelings.²¹ But it is precisely the ghost of the old “Mothers” ideal which gives her visions their disturbing quality. Once this ghost is dispelled, child-hatred will become no more than one of many emotional reactions possible to the biological mother.

Motherhood is neither nature nor culture. It is a historical product, subject to historical change. Can the old ideal of Japanese “Mothers” be maintained in the present? Or is it already gone beyond all hope of recovery? Only by a further deconstruction of these “Mothers” can we hope to propose answers to such questions.

This essay by Ueno Chizuko was first published in U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, English supplement, no. 10 (1996), pp. 3–19. It is reprinted here (with several minor changes) with the kind permission of the author and journal. A subsequent Japanese translation, titled “Josō shita kafuchōsei: ‘Nihon no haha’ no hōkai” [Transvestite patriarchy: Collapse of “Japanese Mothers”], has appeared in Ueno Chizuko ga bungaku wo shakaigaku suru [Ueno Chizuko’s sociologization of literature] (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 2000), pp. 103–128.

Author’s note: This paper was originally a keynote speech at the Conference of “Mothers” in modern Japanese literature held at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, in August 1995. I would like to thank Professor Kinya Tsuruta for his organization and invitation to the conference, all the participants who gave me comments and suggestions, and Dr. Gary Arbuckle for his professional editing of my paper.

10. The well-known concept of amae, proposed by the Japanese psychiatrist Doi Takeo, is too often used to characterize Japanese culture. (See Doi’s Amae no kozō [The anatomy of dependence] (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1971). It requires careful examination for the following reasons: first, amae should be translated as “code-pendence” but not as “interdependence;” and second, as I discuss later, this codependence is based on an asymmetrical power relationship, which can by no means be mutual.

14. It should be noted here that the impact of so-called second-wave feminism, which started in 1970 in Japan, goes beyond the scope of modern misogyny, though it is often misinterpreted as a “catching-up” strategy for women to be like men. Second-wave feminism shaped itself as counter-industrial thought from the beginning. Feminism questioned modernity, which imposed on women the status of second-class citizens. For further arguments, see my “The Japanese Women’s Movement: The Counter-Values to Industrialism,” in Modernization and Beyond: The Japanese Trajectory, ed. G. McCormack and Y. Sugimoto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and “Nihon no ribu” [Japanese women’s liberation movement], introduction to Ribu to feminizumu [Lib and feminism], volume 1 of Series: Feminism in Japan, ed. Ueno Chizuko et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1994).