Japan's New Middle Class: The Salary Man and His Family in a Tokyo Suburb (16 page)

Salary men have more time for recreation than small shopkeepers or independent professionals, and most of the recreational activities are with their friends from work. Because of the long distance from home to work, it is difficult to go home after work and then return

to the city for an evening of recreation. Various polls have shown that it takes the husband an average of two to three hours to get home. While commuting may require a long time, the transportation alone could not possibly take that long. It is rather that this is the time for recreation. After work, the men stop off someplace to sit and chat, have a drink and perhaps a bite to eat.
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Most company gangs have their own favorite hangouts: bars, coffee houses, small food-specialty shops, and the like. Here, by spending only a few cents, they can have long leisurely conversations. It is here that they talk and laugh freely about sports, national and world events or the daily happenings in the company, complain about bosses and wives, and receive the consolation of their friends and of the sympathetic girls behind the counter.

Some men, particularly the more conservative or serious, do not like the gay life of the company gang and prefer to come home at an earlier hour to be with their families. Those who do not always stop off with the boys may walk around for an hour or so seeing sights, looking at department stores, or playing
pachinko
(a popular kind of pin-ball machine),
go, shoogi
(Japanese chess), or mahjong—all easily available at public or private places on the way home.

Even those who do not participate regularly in the daily gang activities join in company-sponsored special activities such as field day, baseball, tennis, table tennis, fishing, or the overnight trip to an inn. Even government offices have special funds to cover the expenses of such excursions. At least part of the time on the trip is spent enjoying the hot bath, but there are other activities such as fishing, skiing, baseball, sight-seeing, and mountain-climbing. The camaraderie often reaches its peak in the evening with drinking and singing. Often the group is large enough to charter a bus or occupy most of a railway car, and the fun begins when they get on the train. Aside from trips paid entirely by the company, the gang can often take advantage of a company discount at special inns and restaurants, even for trips not officially sponsored by the company. In contrast to the American social hour or cocktail party, where

[2] In some Boston-Irish families studied by the author in 1954–1958 as part of a project directed by Dr. F. Kluckhohn and J. Spiegel, it was also common for men to stop off on the way home from work. In these families, as in the Japanese salary-man family, the wife and children have a relatively independent existence with the father less centrally participating in household activities.

one talks personally to one or two at a time, Japanese parties or trips are oriented to the whole group, except for hiking, sight-seeing, or bathing which require smaller groups and permit more intimate discussion. Although as many as twenty or thirty people may sit together listening to stories and joking, speakers are often more intimate than they are in private conversation. On such occasions men openly air their troubles and sometimes make personal confessions or tell jokes designed to correct personal problems within the group. At other times, someone in the group with special talent will tell funny stories or perform by singing or playing a musical instrument. Such group recreation is not limited to the salary man, except that he usually can enjoy recreational trips more frequently, and at company expense, and that his group is formed on the basis of place of work rather than on the basis of neighborhood, village, profession, religion, age, or kinship.

Generally those who stop off together after work are the ones who see each other most at work. Although it usually consists of the same positions sometimes people at different levels, who constitute a kind of
batsu
(clique) within the company, also go out together. Perhaps clique members have gone to the same school or have had a close leader-follower relationship for years, the leader offering guidance and help in return for loyalty and support within the company. Actually the clique may consist of a much larger membership than the small informal group which stops off on the way home, but even then the smaller informal group may be determined by membership in the bigger clique.

Because employees ordinarily expect to continue together for their entire careers and groups are so tightly integrated, maintaining smooth relationships is a much more critical problem than in the United States. Although everyone may be loyal to the group, minor differences of opinion (what Freud calls the narcissism of small differences) can create tensions upsetting to the group members. Going out together for recreation is crucial for keeping personal relationships strong enough to withstand the tensions which arise during the course of work.

Because most men belong to no group other than their work group they are sensitive to the slightest difficulties in personal relations. For example, some men are distraught about the way they

are treated by superiors.
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Others become envious of one of their group selected as a "fair-haired boy" by the superiors, especially if he begins to flaunt his favored status. But by relaxing together after work and going together on company trips, the men can maintain sufficient rapport and camaraderie that these complaints and rivalries seem minor.
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The problem of controlling competition also helps to explain the exclusion of wives from social activities. Because wives have less personal investment in the husband's work group, they are more prone to gossip and thus are considered to be a strain on group solidarity. Wives are likely to be jealous of other wives who have nicer clothes, homes, or more education, and may drag their husbands into their discontent. Furthermore, status differences among wives may not accord with status differences among the husbands at work. If one man has a little more money through his family, this need not influence his position at work but it would affect his wife's style of living. When asked why wives are not invited, salary men are not always sure. They all have a feeling that it would be a nuisance and interference to have them around. Some say it would cost too much money, and part of that expense would probably be in keeping up with wealthier colleagues. When wives do go out with their husbands, it is more likely to be with old school friends rather than with colleagues, and the group is likely to break into women talking with women and men talking with men. Wives are sometimes invited to formal occasions, but then there is little opportunity to gossip.
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[3] In sentence-completion items, salary men frequently referred spontaneously to difficulties they had with superiors. On items asking about troubles, their main concern was often their superior at work. Similarly they were often annoyed when their superior did not look after them or when they did not please their superior. Yet these men ordinarily have no alternative than to stay in this relationship and try to make it as good as possible. The only other possibility in most places would be transfer to another section within the company, which would not entirely end their difficulties.

[4] Following Durkheim, one can also say that this solidarity makes it possible for the group to enforce its norms on the members. It should be noted, however, that the integration into the organization accrues to all employees and is not based on occupational specialization. Cf. Emile Durkheim,
The Division of Labor in Society,
Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1947.

[5] Following this line of thought, one would expect that paternalistic companies with company housing would have serious problems because wives gossip about other women. Brief contact with one Mamachi small-company apartment project suggests that this is so. Mr. Jack Knowles, who investigated the internal dispute in theOji Paper Company, a company in northern Japan with company housing, reports that workers said they could get along with each other better were it not for the wives.

Even though wives are reluctant to express jealousy, everyone recognizes that they are often jealous of the office girls who not only do secretarial work, but also perform many informal services such as running errands and serving tea—services performed in a way to flatter the men in the office. In spite of the fact that peer group activities tend to be exclusively male, occasionally an office girl or a bar girl becomes a regular participant. Sometimes friendships with office girls develop into sexual relationships although these still seem to be relatively infrequent.
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Even when there is no sexual relationship, men naturally do become fond of certain girls at work. When the company has an overnight trip to the country, the girls from the office generally go along and sometimes may be particularly friendly with certain men. There is an aura of romance associated with the office girl, and it is now so common for single men to marry young girls working in the same office that this kind of marriage is given the special name,
shokuba kekkon
(literally, "work-place marriage"). Since most girls quit work on marriage, office girls are generally young, and it is not surprising that wives often feel concern about their husbands' relations with girls in the office. Japanese firms have a strict prohibition on women working in the same firm as their husbands, and require women to quit immediately if they marry someone in the firm. This tends to sharpen the separation between the firm and home and suggests to what extent the company recognizes the threats to work-group solidarity.
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[6] Professor Shinichi Asayama, the Japanese counterpart to Alfred C. Kinsey, finds that in recent years the amount of organized prostitution has greatly diminished but the number of Japanese men having some kind of sexual relationship with the women at their working place had greatly increased.

[7] It may be suggested that Americans are able to permit husbands and wives to go out together because the firm is not such a tight-knit group. In Japan the range of meaningful contacts is so limited that relationships with co-workers involves such intensity of feeling that rivalries and difficulties cannot be treated in an objective way or dismissed as unimportant. However, many large American firms with a close-knit executive group are also concerned with the threat of wives to the solidarity of the work group but the solution of the problem, as noted in William H. Whyte's description of the wives of management, is to bring the wives more closely into company affairs.

In answer to a sentence completion "women are . . . ," both men and women frequently described women as home-bodies, who do not enjoy going out.

If a man carries on an affair with a girl in the office, it need not disrupt his relationship with his wife. Long-lasting affairs involving considerable expenditures may lead to divorce, but wives who know or suspect that their husbands are carrying on affairs often resign themselves as long as the husband meets his family financial duties and still expresses his affection to her and the children. Some wives even say their husbands are milder and easier to deal with if they have a sexual outlet outside the home. Other wives are jealous about the husbands' relations to office and bar girls. They know liaisons exist, and because they are excluded from their husbands' office life, they are never certain about their office relationships. Ignorance is more likely to breed suspicion than bliss, but because the wife has no opportunity to see other employees or their wives who might give her accurate information, she generally resolves her feelings by denying the suspicion or denying that it matters even if such affairs exist.

Problems of the wife's jealousy of office girls may be illustrated by the case of a wife who knew a girl working in her husband's office. The girl reported to the wife that the husband was particularly friendly with another girl in the office. The husband denied the story, and the wife could not determine whether the story was true or not. She felt there were grounds why this girl might be spreading false rumors, but she also could see signs that her husband did not love her. This worry about the husband's fidelity led to the most violent arguments in the couple's long years of marriage.

Mamachi residents usually explain that wives do not go out with husbands because it is not a traditional custom, because it requires too much money, or because the wife should be protected from undesirable influences. Yet their reluctance to permit wives to go out with husbands has a strength which goes far beyond economic considerations or mere custom. It may be suggested that the husband is reluctant to permit any possible encroachment on peer group solidarity and also reluctant to give the wife full access to his peer group because she might be able to make an independent assessment of his occupational role which would alter her image of his position at work.
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The wife also wants to avoid any possible

[8] I am indebted to Ronald Dore who first called my attention to this problem. Most Mamachi wives have considerable respect for the husband and his position.Yet the fact is that in the firm they are often very subservient to various superiors, a fact not entirely in harmony with the authority and power the husbands enjoy in the home.

encroachment on the solidarity of her neighborhood group and because she lacks information about the husband's relations with other women, she resolves her feelings about his outside activities by considering them beyond her scope of concern and refusing to let them interfere with her marriage.

Because companies take in new members only once a year, the husband joins at the same time as large numbers of other men. In the welcoming activities, orientation program, and daily work, he is thrown into contact with his peers so that he has no difficulty in developing personal relationships. The wife, on the other hand, after her marriage moves into an unfamiliar and probably long-settled neighborhood where she has no friends. While she may make friends fairly quickly in some of the new housing developments in Tokyo, in Mamachi and other suburbs it still takes her many years to win personal friends. When we asked one family whether they felt lonely when they first moved to Mamachi, the husband immediately replied, "No, not at all," but the wife said with feeling, "Yes, very lonely." She went on to explain that even after several years in the community she still did not feel completely at home and that she did not have many close friends.