Japan's New Middle Class: The Salary Man and His Family in a Tokyo Suburb (44 page)

The increased material comforts make homelife easier and relieve the wife of some of the greatest drudgeries, thus giving her greater freedom to pursue hobbies, social visiting, or other interests of her own. Children acquire more freedom earlier and parents, convinced that they need to adjust to the greater freedom and the higher standard of living demanded by their children, are reluctant to oppose the children's desire for more independent activities and more travel. Still, high-school-aged Mamachi youth are much more protected than their American counterparts, and dating and marriage occur at correspondingly later ages.

Just as traditional samurai compared their competing loyalties to their lords and their families, present-day salary men sometimes joke about their mixed loyalties to their companies and to their families. If he were transferred to an out-of-the-way city, and the family refused to go, for example, would the man give up the company or the family? If a company trip and a family trip occur on the same day, which one will a man choose? In general, however, the husband keeps up with both. He still goes out with the company gang after work and occasionally goes on company trips. But he also spends a moderate amount of time, especially on weekends, with his family. Although the wife may join the husband with another young couple from the firm for occasional outings, as a whole, the family life still remains sharply separated from the life of the company. In some families the husband has become a full participant in the warm family circle, but in most he does not share all the intimacies of the wife and the children.

It is too early to predict what will result from the increased questioning of the salary man's way of life and the search for new patterns which bring greater personal satisfaction. The dynamism, the vitality, and the sensitivity to national and international trends make it im-

possible to predict whether frustrations will become more acute. However, despite the serious disruptions in late adolescence and early adulthood, despite the problems with public nuisances and the re-evaluation which is taking place, most people in Mamachi still have a strong sense of purposiveness and public discipline. The purposiveness which underlies the questions and doubts comes not from ideology, and not even from the material prosperity, but from close ties in the most fundamental groups: family and place of work. Despite the more rapid changes of the last decade, and despite the search for a richer life beyond salary, these social bonds still provide a framework of meaning for those who live in Mamachi.

At the outset of the field work my wife and I were interested in the middle-class family, but not particularly in the salary man. Our interest in the salary-man family emerged gradually during the field work and analysis of data as we were struck by its uniqueness and importance in modern Japan. We had originally gone to Japan to get information on middle-class Japanese families to compare with the results of a study of Irish-American, Italo-American, and old-American families, in which I had participated.
^[1]
Our research problem had two parts: (1) the determination of Japanese family patterns to contrast with these other ethnic groups; (2) the contrast between families of emotionally disturbed and "normal" children. It is the first problem which is reported in the present work. In order to make our research design comparable to the earlier study we decided to find six families with an emotionally disturbed child and six families with "normal" children,
^[2]
and to see these families intensively, at least once a week for a year or more. Furthermore, we hoped to be participant-observers in middle-class Japanese life and

[1] This study was under the direction of Dr. John Spiegel and Dr. Florence Kluckhohn of the Department of Social Relations, Harvard. Among the research reports are: John P. Spiegel, "The Resolution of Role Conflict Within the Family,"
Psychiatry,
1957, 20:1–16; Florence Kluckhohn, "Family Diagnosis: Variations in the Basic Values of Family Systems,"
Social Casework,
1958, 39:1–11; Ezra F. Vogel, "The Marital Relationship of Parents of Emotionally Disturbed Children: Polarization and Isolation,"
Psychiatry,
1960, 23:1–12; Ezra F. Vogel and Norman W. Bell, "The Emotionally Disturbed Child as a Family Scapegoat,"
Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalytic Review,
1960, 47:21–42.

[2] An emotionally disturbed child was defined as one sufficiently ill to be judged as needing treatment by clinicians at the Japanese National Institute of Mental Health. "Normal" was defined as the absence of any pathology obvious enough to be judged worthy of psychiatric treatment by the family, school, and clinical psychologists who administered the projective tests.

to familiarize ourselves with relevant research by Japanese scholars.

Our approach to field work was a result of our graduate training in sociological and psychoanalytic theory, our experience doing clinical and home interviewing under psychiatric supervision, and our participation in interdisciplinary projects. My wife had worked for several years as a psychiatric social worker and had done home interviewing as part of an interdisciplinary research project. I also had had experience in clinical work with psychiatric patients and with parents of psychiatric patients. Consequently our approach to anthropological field work was heavily influenced by an interest in subtleties of relationships which comes from intensive personal contacts.

In Japan, we tried as much as possible to develop close relationships with people in our community. We lived in Japanese-style homes in Japanese neighborhoods in which we were the only foreigners. To have intimate contacts with the Japanese we felt it essential to conduct our work in Japanese. We had some language-training before going to Japan, and most of our first year there was spent in intensive language study. We had developed contacts in Mamachi during this first year and made a number of visits there before moving to Mamachi in June, 1959, where we then lived as participant-observants for slightly more than one year. We conducted our field work in Japanese from the beginning, regardless of communication problems. However, we tape-recorded many interviews in order to go over the material later with Japanese assistants to insure accurate understanding. Even when our command of Japanese was elementary, most people made an effort to talk in simple Japanese and to elaborate when we did not understand. Although the process was sometimes time-consuming, it is our feeling that much was communicated even when our language ability was minimal. Language difficulties made it difficult for us to catch subtleties of meaning, but it also caused us to be more sensitive to nuances of facial expressions, gestures, and tone of voice. When studying taped interviews with assistants we learned we had frequently misunderstood words and phrases, or at times even entire sentences, but we rarely had misunderstood a person's feelings or the general import of the conversation.

From the beginning, we presented ourselves to Mamachi residents

as social scientists. But in our own minds our model was not the detached scientist who keeps his feelings out of his work. We felt we could learn more by participating in the life of the local community than by trying to remain aloof. We defined ourselves as foreigners interested in forming friendships and learning about Japanese life. To the extent that we retained scientific detachment, it was not in restricting our participation but in later analyzing the nature of this participation and what it meant for an understanding of the studied families.

Some fellow American social scientists have asked us how we can be certain our informants told us "the truth." I would prefer to phrase the question not "Did they tell us the truth?" but "What truth did they tell?" For example, when I asked one man why he moved to his present residence, he explained it was convenient to his office and nearby relatives. His wife told my wife confidentially that they moved because a fortune teller had told them that their old home was facing the wrong direction and might bring them bad luck. Some people might call the husband's answer a cover-up. I prefer to interpret it as one part of the truth, a reflection of genuine embarrassment about believing a superstition and a desire to be modern and scientific, especially when talking with a representative of the modern West.

We had expected that questions about sex or personal finance would meet with the greatest resistance, but these topics seemed easier for the Japanese to discuss than their superstitions or information which might adversely reflect on their status in the community. When we asked questions about folk beliefs and superstitions, most denied any interest and said they no longer believed or practiced superstitions. It was only by observations of shrines, ceremonies, and by chance remarks that we were able to find some of this information. For example, when I inquired what was around a boy's neck, the mother looked embarrassed and replied that it was an amulet for luck. She spontaneously continued by explaining that it was only a toy and that they did not really believe it brought good luck. Her embarrassment and apologetic tone, as well as the man's failure to acknowledge the family's going to a fortune teller, convinced us that superstition is more widespread than people verbally indicated. However, what is considered folk belief varies from country

to country, and just as some Western practices would seem superstitious to Japanese, so they talked freely about some practices that appeared to us as folk beliefs. For example, they believe that a number of diseases can be helped by hot springs, and medical specialists advise wearing a
haramaki
(special cloths to cover the stomach) at night even in the hottest weather to avoid
nebie
(a cold caught while sleeping).
^[3]
However, we are not in any position to give a quantitative estimate of the extent of superstition except to say that it is more common than people report.

Similarly with regard to matters which might adversely affect a family's community reputation, we suspect that a number of things were not fully reported. No family told of any relative who had been involved in any kind of crime, but many told of rich and famous relatives. Even the few cases of marital problems and divorce we heard about from normal families were usually told only after we had developed a close relationship. Several families were reluctant to tell us about their ancestors, and while this may reflect a conviction that the past should not be considered important, it is our feeling from other incidental information that these families were not proud of their background. Hence, without making independent investigations about their relatives, which would have been extremely time-consuming, we do not feel we can talk with confidence about certain aspects of their backgrounds or to discard the possibility that some relatives might have more problems and less fame than we heard about.

On the whole, however, we felt that Mamachi residents were as willing to talk about their lives as Americans we had previously interviewed. Americans were also reluctant to talk about their own violations of law or of mental illness in the family. However, the areas of sensitivity were slightly different. Although the Americans felt sufficiently removed from peculiar relatives to talk of them in a completely detached way, the Mamachi residents felt closely identified with relatives and were therefore ashamed of any misconduct. American sensitivities centered on the invasion of privacy (especially sex and family finance) which was not the object of particular

[3] Many Americans similarly believe that feet are unusually sensitive to cold, but this would appear as folk belief to Mamachi residents who go barefoot at home even in very cold homes in winter without catching cold.

sensitivities in Mamachi once a relationship of trust had been established.

There is no simple answer to the question of "What truth?" because it depended on context and situation. To be sure, we watched for the standard clinical clues, the slips of the tongue, the spontaneous expressions of feeling, the latent meanings in the association of one idea with another. In addition to this, we felt it important to see the persons in a variety of situations.

Most people behaved differently when seen by a man than by a woman; they behaved differently when a third person was present than when interviewed alone; they behaved differently in different groups; they behaved differently when first introduced than after further acquaintance. But people we met for the first time early in our stay behaved differently on that meeting from people we met for the first time later during our stay when we knew better how to behave and could relax and talk with them more freely. People behaved differently in formal and in informal situations. Men behaved differently when drinking, when at home, and when in their office. Children behaved differently at home and at school.

We saw people privately and in groups, in their homes and ours. My wife visited tea-ceremony and flower-arrangement groups and attended meetings for mothers of nursery-school children. I saw men in their offices as well as in their homes. We visited the schools, greeted people in the streets. We attended formal parties on special occasions. We saw people when their children were present and when they were absent, and at different hours of the day.

Many of the opportunities to see people in a variety of circumstances was provided by our very intensive contact with the six well families who had specifically agreed to have us visit at least once a week for more than a year. It is perhaps characteristic of Japanese society that we were introduced to these families by the local grade-school principal, who was introduced to us through an acquaintance of a friend of ours. The wives in the six families formed a little club for such varied purposes as discussing problems of coping with us, giving us parties, learning Western cooking from my wife, and teaching her how to cook Japanese delicacies in return. This group of six ladies, which calls itself the "Vogelkai" (the Vogel club), has had several meetings since our return to the United States.