Japan's New Middle Class: The Salary Man and His Family in a Tokyo Suburb (40 page)

In some ways, the mother's position is precarious. She is held responsible for the child's behavior and yet she does not have clear authority for laying down rules. If the father or mother-in-law disagrees with the mother, she must yield to their authority. Her only hope is that her relationship with the child is sufficiently close that the child will follow her wishes. Her authority position is not suffi-

[17] In a study in smaller city in central Honshu, Betty Lanham found that of 255 mothers using a threat, the most common kind was that someone would laugh at them (162 cases) or at their family (47). Many threatened that the child might become sick (116), that the mother would leave home (53), send the child to another house (49), or lock the child outside the house (42). Betty Lanham,
op. cit
.

[18] Clinicians at the Japanese National Institute of Mental Health have noted a regular syndrome centered on a pampered yet uncontrollable child caught between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law who both undercut the child's close relationship with the other. Neither is able to develop the kind of relationship with the child that leads to automatic compliance.

cient to produce compliance otherwise, and it is always possible for the children to complain to the father that the mother has been too strict. Even in the modern salaried families where the mother is given considerable freedom at home during the day, the husband may overrule some of her decisions. The techniques by which the mother builds a close relationship with the children may be viewed as a brilliant adaptation to the problem of managing the children without a clear mandate of authority that would permit her to exercise more direct sanctions.

Since the mother must get the child to do an enormous amount of work in preparation for entrance examinations, during the grade-school years she is in many ways like an assistant teacher and in the summer vacation like a regular teacher. Even when the child is in high school and the mother is unable to help with the content of the study, she must continue to bear the responsibility for seeing that the child puts in a sufficient number of hours of study. And even if she does not understand the content, she may hold the answer book and drill or quiz the child about his lesson. She does virtually everything the teacher does except give a grade for the course. The situation here is an intensification of the Mamachi mother's basic problem in dealing with her children: she must get the child to co-operate in doing his work without having the clear-cut authority to enforce it. It is a problem so serious that some mother-child relationships crack under the strain.

Yet many do succeed, and one of the basic means by which they obtain co-operation is to convince the child of the importance of the examination. So all-pervasive is the spirit of the infernal entrance examinations that she rarely needs to use special techniques to get the child motivated to achieve. The continual talk about report cards, school preparation, and examinations, along with specific concern about the child's performance is adequate to create an impression on the mind of the child, but the mother often consciously tries further to increase the motivation. She does not hesitate to play up the status distance between her family and a higher-status family in order to indicate the advantages of studying

hard.
^[19]
Because the Mamachi standard of living is low enough that minor differences in income determine which electric machines a family owns and how nice a toy a child can have, the Mamachi child is taught that the job he attains will make a crucial difference in the style of life he can lead and in the security which he can have later in life. The Mamachi mother does not hesitate to connect the importance of examination success, and hence examination study, with success in later life. Not only does she typically do little to ease the child's anxiety about examination success, but she even encourages the child's uneasiness. By creating this uneasiness about success, the mother encourages the child to respond to her direction. She need not force the child to study because the child himself is so anxious about his success that he "understands" and wants to co-operate with the mother. She passes on to the child the demands of the outside world not as an agent of the arbitrary outside authority but as an ally who will assist him in meeting these demands.

Creating anxiety about possible difficulties in making the wrong marital choice has similar functions. It increases the probability that the child will voluntarily want to co-operate with the mother.
^[20]
Most mothers do not consciously plan to make their children more anxious. But being anxious about their children's success and desirous of motivating the child to co-operate mothers create these anxieties almost instinctively.

[19] I am indebted to Tadashi Fukutake who first alerted me to this problem.

[20] Evidence from psychological testing reveals how deeply children have internalized the feeling that they should follow the mother's wishes in studying and in finding a spouse. Cf. George De Vos, "The Relation of Guilt Toward Parents to Achievement and Arranged Marriage among the Japanese,"
Psychiatry
, 1960, 23:287–301.

Having examined Mamachi families in some detail, we may now be able to understand how certain features found in Mamachi contributed to the amazing success of Japan in the modernizing process.

Although the contemporary Japanese social structure is in many ways different from the social structures of Europe and America, it is not simply a holdover from traditional patterns. The closed and legalized class system of the Tokugawa period has become an open class system. A predominantly rural nation has, in the last few decades, changed to an urban nation in which less than one-fourth of the male population earn their living from farming, fishing, and forestry. The landowner-tenant relationship has been weakened or destroyed by land reform.
^[1]
The
ie
is being replaced by the nuclear family. In the city, small firms have been giving way to large organizations and government bureaus, and the old paternalism is fast weakening.

In spite of all this change, the picture that emerges from this study of Mamachi, as of other studies of Japanese society, presents a relatively orderly and controlled life. This is particularly striking when compared to the massive disorganization in Europe and America during the industrial revolution and to the revolutionary disruptions in the Chinese family.
^[2]
Although Japanese themselves have been conscious of the strains of adjusting to rapid change, they have not experienced the massive social disorganization so characteristic of many Western cities and of developing countries during the rapid

[1] For a fuller description of the changes in rural Japan see Tadashi Fukutake,
Man and Society in Japan
, Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1962.

[2] Cf. Marion J. Levy,
Family Revolution in Modern China
, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949.

migrations to the cities. The divorce rate in the United States is now five times as high as in 1885, but in Japan it is one-third as high as in 1885.
^[3]
Although the crime rate has gone up slightly, it has not risen sharply enough to indicate any process of widespread disorganization.
^[4]
The process of migration to the cities has been amazingly steady,
^[5]
and the amount of job-changing has been relatively moderate. Unquestionably such rapid change has caused considerable strain in every Japanese individual and group, yet the disruption has remained within bounds, and a high degree of social order has been maintained throughout the transition to a modern society. It is important to consider features of Japanese social structure which have helped to maintain order at the time of the transition to urban industrial society and at the present time when the society has already achieved a high level of modernization.

In other studies, a number of features of Japanese society have already been shown to be important for the ease of Japan's modernization: a high degree of common national culture on the eve of modernization, political unity and stability, the high valuation placed on hard work and productivity, and the planning and organization of the Meiji leaders. Other features have emerged from the present study which are important to consider in the light of their contribution to this orderly process.

The Japanese stem-family system, whereby one son received the inheritance and continued living with his parents while other sons went elsewhere, facilitated a smooth transition from rural to urban society. The Japanese family lines have had a continuity over generations which perhaps is unsurpassed by any other country. Even under European feudalism, land worked by a family without an heir might revert to the crown to be reassigned, but in Japan the

[3] Cf. Takeyoshi Kawashima and Kurt Steiner, "Modernization and Divorce Rate Trends in Japan,"
Economic Development and Cultural Change
, 1960, 9:213–239.

[4] This evidence is analyzed in detail in the forthcoming work by De Vos and Mizushima.

[5] Cf. Irene Taeuber, "Family, Migration and Industrialization in Japan,"
American Sociological Review
, 1951, 16:149–157.

family would itself adopt an heir. Because the family line remained in a single household, it provided a stable unit for village organization. Not only did the kinship system lend stability to rural organization, but it permitted independence for the family which moved to the city.

The movement of second and third sons to the city made it possible for the family to avoid the dissipation of family wealth through multiple inheritance that occurred, for example, in China. It also avoided the confusion that many Chinese families experienced deciding how much each son would receive. The
ie
system required that the parents select a single heir, and since they made this decision while the children were fairly young, they avoided the prolonged adolescence and the tension of the Irish family where the heir was selected at a much later stage. The fact that parents and village elders were instrumental in placing the young children in the city reinforced the authority of the older generation and prevented uncontrolled movement of young people to the city whenever they might feel dissatisfied with their elders' decisions.

The sons who moved to the city knew that they would not receive any inheritance from their parents, and that they would be accepted back into the rural areas only temporarily in time of emergency. The young sons going to the urban areas therefore were fully committed to finding long-term work. They were willing to undergo long apprenticeships and to acquire skills useful at a later stage of life. Again this is in contrast to the migration in many countries where the migrating sons hoped to acquire money quickly and then return to their original home. Even if such migrants remained in the city indefinitely, they seldom had the perseverance to acquire the skills that would compare with the young Japanese migrant.

The younger sons who moved to the city essentially were free of family traditions. The care of elderly parents and the preservation of family property and traditions were left to the elder son who remained at the farm. The younger son came to the city at a time of life when he was able to learn new urban patterns, and there was no strong kinship or provincial association in the city which interfered with his rapid adaptation. Even close supervision from paternalistic employers in the city usually did not interfere with the essential autonomy of the nuclear family of parents and children.

Although there has been considerable mobility in Japan in the past century, it has been a movement from one tightly-knit group to another through prescribed channels. This control over mobility has depended in large part on the fact that the labor supply consistently has exceeded the number of positions available.
^[6]
Yet, with the exception of the period of the world depression in the 1930's, there has been a steady expansion of employment opportunities. As a result, people have felt optimistic enough about getting some kind of work in the city to be willing to exert themselves to obtain these limited opportunities. This has taken the form of laying careful groundwork in placing the second or third son who migrated to the city. The constant labor surplus has also permitted employers to take great care in hiring. Because groups have remained fairly tightly-knit, firms have been reluctant to take in people who are not properly sponsored. The widespread requirement of personal introductions has made it possible for local community leaders to maintain control over the emigration to the city. A person from the rural areas who has wanted a job in the city has had to go through channels in his local community in order to get a proper placement in the city.

Even in the cities today, although the crucial factor in gaining admittance to a good school or a large enterprise is the score on the entrance examination, introductions are also desirable. This insures that the child has the proper sponsorship of his family, his community, and his previous school and serves as a powerful sanction for an individual to avoid incurring the disapproval of his own group. Since the person who manages the introduction is in the position of a guarantor for the behavior of the person he introduces, he ordinarily introduces only young people whose families have shown proper allegiance in their original community. Who is hired and under what conditions still depends on market conditions relating to the individual's competence and the labor supply even though carefully controlled by one's original and new groups.