Japanese Women Balk at Marriage and Childrearing - Part II

I found that Foreign Policy article about Japanese women on the Family Scholar's blog over a week ago while I was slogging through the worst of this cold/flu/creeping crud that I still have not completely shaken off. David Blankenhorn posted it.

The article described the growing dissatisfaction Japanese women have about their second-class status and dreadful treatment when it comes to marriage -- dissatisfaction so pronounced that many of them have chosen to forgo marriage and childbearing. Japanese wives are expected to shoulder the household chores, wait on their husbands (including peeling his apples for him), and raise the kids. Japanese men poo-pooed their complaints, calling them "the twittering of birds."

There are many American women who hear of these complaints and think "Hmmm mmm. I can relate." American women have postponed marriage and childbearing for years for similar reasons of dissatisfaction. They have also postponed jumping onto the "traditional" family bandwagon because they wish to first graduate from college, establish a career, and have a decent salary under their belts before going the family way. With more societal rights and economic independence, more married American women have the ability to leave unsatisfactory, dead, and abusive marriages. Women file the majority of divorces these days, and one reason they do so is because they can. These trends concern the pro-marriage crowd (including David Blankenhorn and fellow Family Scholar's blog participants Elizabeth Marquardt and Tom Sylvester) and our White House, so we are stuck with social experiments in marriage promotion on the people who have the least ability to protest -- poor mothers, children, and fathers. The drive to "preserve marriage" and to "stop divorce" by the pro-marriage and fathers' rights crowds is really about finding ways to enforce a particular family form (namely, the heterosexual, male-headed, "traditional" two-parent family of man, woman, and their biological or adopted offspring) onto people who do not fit the so-called "norm," such as gay people, single moms, and divorced moms. Another purpose of this drive is to prevent women from divorcing their husbands. All the talk of marriage promotion, divorce prevention, single and divorced mom bashing, disallowing gay marriage, and the horror stories about the effects of so-called "fatherlessness" on children is about preserving the "traditional" heterosexual, two-parent household - with the man in charge as head of that household. That important point - the straight man's leading role as head of the family - is often overlooked in blogosphere and other discussions I've seen about gay marriage.

The changing trends in American marriage and divorce make for an entirely new blog post. There is far too much to delve into now, and it would take me off on a tangent I don't want to follow at the moment. While I enjoyed the entire Foreign Policy article, this portion caught my attention:

[Author Yoko] Haruka, a witty, 30-something essayist and television personality from Osaka, describes with clarity and biting humor the exasperation of Japanese womanhood in two recent books—collections of eminently readable essays called Kekkon Shimasen! (I Won’t Get Married!) and Hybrid Woman .

Haruka begins I Won’t Get Married! by describing her treatment at her own father’s funeral: She was told to sit and to walk behind her five brothers—younger as well as older—and made to understand that she wasn’t wanted on the receiving line to greet relatives and family friends.

Haruka warmly admires her sister-in-law, who must put up with endless verbal abuse from her eldest brother, and her mother, who lives with them. The sister-in-law manages to smile self-effacingly even as she scurries to provide for their material needs, right down to putting a cold beer in her husband’s hand as he steps out of his nightly bath. Haruka is exasperated by a favorite aunt who talks about her search for an "ordinary woman: to be her daughter-in-law. What the aunt means is a woman who will gladly make do with the 200,000 yen (less than $1,800) a month her son brings home, and who has no aspirations of her own.

Shortly before finding this article, I read a plea from an Indian wife who was at her wit's end dealing with her husband's family. She had been married for six years. Two years ago, her brother-in-law moved in . Her in-laws "visited" for six months last year. Compare what she wrote to Haruka's comments.

My mother in law was a disaster. She would constantly degrade me, try to separate me from my son, and make all sort of bizarre allegations. For her, only she was the best at everything. She would tell me that her family would eat no less that 5 dishes at any one time. Her food was being provided courtesy of my husband paycheck, no less. She was an aloof, manipulative, and user of people's money. She brainwashed my husband, and make sure he was on her side.

My husband and I are amicable 2 days out of the month now, the other 28/29 days we fight. Mostly about his brother, who is lazy, doesn't pay any bills, doesn't like working as a shoe stock person, doesn't EVER cook or clean up the house, his room smells like crap...etc. etc. After the blackout this past summer, I came home exhausted, my sisters were with me and we all started cooking, my brother-in-law sat in the living room reading the paper. Is that annoying or what? He does that often, just stays in his room, until food is ready. I don't want to be the "bitch" so I don't say anything. I wait for my husband to do it (which RARELY happens). My b-i-l also goes to school part-time, so that is his contribution to society. Plagiarism rarely crosses his mind. He is also very defensive if I ever tell him he did something wrong. He doesn't get it that people in this country respect their privacy. People in this country work hard. I held a full-time job and went to school full-time, and would come home and help my mom cook and clean. All my brother-in-law knows his how to sleep, eat, and smoke. He is a male chauvinist. It is disgusting and very unfair.

In Indian culture, the eldest son (this woman's husband) is traditionally responsible for supporting his family. As always in these cases, the brunt of the work falls on the women. I have learned that this sort of abyssmal treatment of wives is not unusual in Indian and Asian cultures. The Domestic Violence Hotline will refer South and South East Asian women in these situations to services that will help them. The Hotline also provides free translators for up to 150 languages. I had e-mailed David Blankenhorn about all of this when I first read the article, and he was kind enough to post an excerpt of my mail on the Family Scholar's blog.