Japan's New Middle Class: The Salary Man and His Family in a Tokyo Suburb (33 page)

Within the home, a family member takes his shoes off, stretches out on the tatami mats, and changes to more comfortable robes. In the winter time, everyone sits in the
kotatsu,
enjoying the warmth of the family circle, both literally and figuratively. Here, under the same quilt, family members eat, read, talk, and watch television. Older children may study while others in the same
kotatsu
are talking or watching TV, and younger children may lie back and fall asleep with their feet hanging in the
kotatsu
. Generally, a family with two or three children will sleep in one or two rooms. Though many people explain that this is because Japan is such a poor and crowded country, even families that have more rooms generally have the whole family sleeping in one, two, or at most three rooms, their mats lined up close together, everyone enjoying the comfort of being close together.
^[3]

[3] In answer to a sentence-completion question which read, "When the family gets together . . . ," the most common response was that it was
yukai
(a lot of fun) and
nigiyaka
(bustling with activity). Both replies have positive connotations indicating that people think of the family as a pleasant and comfortable place.

In relation to the outside, the family feels like, and is viewed as, a single unit. Family members do not ordinarily air their quarrels to any but the most intimate friends who can be relied on not to repeat secrets.
^[4]
Indeed some caution about inviting guests springs from the fear that family weaknesses might be revealed.
^[5]
While family members often politely derogate their family to outsiders,
^[6]
they carefully avoid saying anything that would reveal their family's true weaknesses. After many months of close contact with us, two or three people mentioned some item of disparaging information about a relative; until that time all members had been vague when discussing topics that might have revealed this family weakness. When the family is worried that a child may not get into a specific school, even the other children will try not to reveal to what school he is hoping to be admitted.

Gifts to a family member are regarded as a gift to the entire family. When, for example, my wife gave a gift to a child his mother did not tell him to thank us for the gift. She thanked us directly herself, and later my wife and I were thanked by the husband and the grandfather who lived in the same home. The thank you was not in the form of "Our child enjoyed your present," but "We thank your family for your kindness." Similarly, a child may bring back a memento from a school trip for a family which had done a favor for his parents.

Families rarely go out together, except for occasional Sunday outings to visit relatives, a park, or a department store, but the fact that almost all inns now have a family bath indicates some increase in families visiting inn houses. Perhaps one reason why families do not travel together more frequently is the lack of money and a

[4] One exception is the case of third parties who were informed of internal family problems with the hope of bringing outside pressure on another family member to behave properly. The most common example is the wife who tells a close friend or relative about the husband's failure to meet his responsibilities to his family, hoping that they will try to encourage the husband to mend his ways. Conditions must be had, however, to warrant such a step.

[5] One lady explained that it was unwise to give maids a day off, not because they would get used to too much leisure, but because they might spread family secrets or rumors in talking with others in the community.

[6] For example, a family routinely calls its house its "small dirty house" and among friends a husband may refer to his wife as his
gusai
(foolish wife). It is even permissible for a husband to illustrate how foolish his wife is, providing this is not really likely to affect the listener's estimate of his family's status.

convenient means of family transportation, that is, the automobile, for wealthy families who have cars do more traveling together. Probably, however, the more important deterrents to family travel are the feeling that someone in the family must always be left as
rusuban
to protect the house and the feeling that it is easier for a family to relax at home than in public.

As united and relaxed as the family feels at home, it is considered improper for family members, especially husband and wife, to display affection in public. Husbands and wives holding hands or walking arm in arm are still regarded as a bit unseemly. In public, a husband carefully avoids saying anything complimentary to his wife about her cooking, appearance, or cleverness and it is equally inappropriate for the wife to compliment her husband in public. Nor is it polite for husband and wife to talk privately in the presence of guests unless they obviously discuss the care and comfort of the guests. Family solidarity is thus beyond the purview of outsiders. Some young husbands are known by their friends to be madly in love with their wives since they spend most of their free time with them, but even a man's close friends often have only very indirect clues of how fond he is of his wife. This is not because family solidarity is weak, but because in contacts with outside groups, the family wants to display its loyalty to the larger group. Just as whispering is sometimes considered impolite in Western societies because of its exclusiveness, so family members displaying mutual fondness in public are regarded as impolite. It is neither desirable nor necessary to display the inner family solidarity in public.
^[7]
Like an eagle who hides his claws, the family hides its reserve of solidarity from public scrutiny.

Within the family, various coalitions unite or divide the members. However, before considering the diadic relationships of husband-wife, grandparent-grandchild, and parent-child (the latter discussed

[7] One may speculate that because of the tight in-group feelings, people are especially sensitive to being excluded. With such sensitivity to feelings of exclusiveness, a cardinal principle of true consideration is to avoid arousing the feeling that another person is an outsider.

in the next chapter), it is necessary to consider a basic pattern of emotional alignments. Internal cleavages are not unique to the Japanese family. To turn the traditional Japanese proverb around, even though brothers are united against the outside, they do quarrel within their gates. It is not always the person of low status who has difficulty gaining acceptance within the group. In the office clique, for example, the boss who senses that his men strain to be polite to him and stop their joking when he arrives, also feels left out. This is precisely the problem of the typical Mamachi father in relation to his family. He is treated in many ways as a high-status guest in the home, a welcome, friendly, and even jovial guest, but one who stands on the periphery of the intimate circle of mother and children.

The linkage of the children and mother and the exclusion of the father is not an entirely fixed and stable pattern. Sometimes family coalition patterns change from day-to-day or year-to-year. At times the father may have a particularly strong relationship with one of the children, and at other times the mother and father may be united against the children. A teen-age daughter may unite with her father to complain about the mother's strictness at the same time she unites with her mother to plot how to get the father to buy more things for the home. But in almost all families we saw or heard about in some detail, the most common emotional cleavage was between the father on the one hand and the mother and children on the other.

One woman, for example, explained that she dislikes Sundays because her husband is home the whole day and consequently she and the children cannot relax. Another woman confessed that it is better for the father to come home a little late and eat supper separately because when he is home the children must be more restrained. They cannot talk, bustle around, and enjoy the supper hour when the father is at home. Another lady who suffers from psychosomatic difficulties has a husband who does some traveling as part of his work; her difficulties become worse when he is stationed at the home office and comes home early every night, and improve when he is away.

The coalition of mother and child is not necessarily hostile to the father. It may mean only that the mother and children share things

which are not shared with the father and that they see themselves as united for common objectives which are different from those of the father. The basic alignment is manifested in many ways: the reserve of the wife and children in the presence of the father, the secrets they keep from him, the plots of the mother and children for dealing with him. The children and the wife are to some extent on perpetual good behavior when the father is present. Like American students with their professor, they may joke and talk freely with their father about many topics, but they may relax more freely and tell other kinds of jokes in his absence.

The cleavage with the father is further reflected in the discussions of allocation of family resources. Since the budget is divided between the husband and the home and the salary is limited and regular, everyone is aware of how much he spends and how much everyone else spends. The consciousness of which expenses are "for father" and "for the rest of the family" is perhaps heightened by the fact that the father's recreational activities are completely separate, and neither the wife nor the children share his pleasures. Among friends, a man is expected to spend freely, as if he had no concerns about money, and membership in a company gang inevitably involves expenses. From the point of view of the wife and children, the important fact is not whether he spends to satisfy his own pleasures or to meet social pressure, but that the more he spends the less they have for their use. The mother spends virtually nothing on herself, but she wants to maximize the amount of money available for the children and home. The cleavage may be smaller if the husband goes out rarely and spends little but larger if he drinks a great deal, frequents company hang-outs, and maintains a girl friend. In either case, however, the mother and children are interested in minimizing the husband's outside expenditures, and children tend to feel that the mother is on their side in wanting to buy them more toys, clothes, or candy if only the father would bring home a larger portion of his pay check.

The cleavage between father and family is accentuated by the amount of time the mother and children spend together without the father. In comparison with the American middle-class mother, the Japanese mother spends more time with the children, the father less time. As one would expect, following Homans, this time dif-

ferential alone would make the children and mother more attached to each other than to the father.
^[8]
Indeed, the intensity of the father's attachment to his work group makes it difficult for him to have the reserve of energy required for an equally intense involvement in internal family affairs. Because the wife and children center virtually their entire world in the home, they have an intensely close relationship which it is virtually impossible for the father to share.

The father's power also contributes to the emotional distance between him and the rest of the family. Because the wife and children know that the father may become firm or demanding, they are cautious, reserved, and rarely completely at ease in his presence. It is true that the salary man's authority is not so great as the authority of small shopkeepers or others whose wives and children work alongside them. But compared to the United States his power is a compelling force in family life.

Some fathers at times try to break into the mother-daughter coalition. When the children are in bed the father may talk with the mother about her problems and lend a sympathetic ear to her difficulties in dealing with the children. Or he may try to upset the coalition by telling the mother to stop babying the children so much and to make them do things on their own. Or he may respond sympathetically to the children's wishes or their complaints about their mother's treatment of them, thus getting one or more of them aligned with him against the mother. Such solutions are generally temporary. More commonly the father accepts the coalition of mother and children as a fact of life, treats them kindly while keeping his distance, and satisfies himself that they are considerate and look after him. Although the father is sometimes sorry to feel left out and would like to feel closer, at other times he prefers to keep some distance and is pleased that the family does not try to encroach on his life.

Although this coalition of father versus the rest of the family involves strains, it almost never leads to an open rupture for there are

[8] The argument would be consistent with the work of Homans that more interaction increases liking but that authority inhibits liking. See, for example, Henry W. Riecken and George C. Homans, "Psychological Aspects of Social Structure," in Gardner Lindzey, ed.,
Handbook of Social Psychology,
Cambridge, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1954, pp. 786–832; George C. Homans and David M. Schneider,
Marriage, Authority, and Final Causes,
Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1955.

many satisfactions in the familial system as well as social restraints preventing an open break. Without the family, the father would be lonely. At the barest minimum, it provides him a group where he belongs and can turn to in time of sickness, trouble, and retirement. The family looks after his welfare, sees that he is properly fed and clothed, and properly cares for his belongings. Children run to look after his comfort. He derives stable emotional support from his wife which is not equaled by any of his shorter-term contacts with women outside the home. He derives pleasure from having children and he takes pride in their accomplishments.