The Position of Japanese Women Reconsidered

Author(s): Chizuko Ueno

Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 28, No. 4, Supplement: An Anthropological Profile of
Japan (Aug. - Oct., 1987), pp. S75-S84
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research
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CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 28, Number 4, August-October I987
? I987 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved OOII-3204/87/2804-0023$I.00
The Position of
Japanese Women
Reconsidered
by Chizuko Ueno
CHIZUKO UENO is Associate Professor at Heian Women's College
(Shimotachiuri Karasuma, Kamikyo-ku, Kyoto). Born in 1948, she
received her M.A. in sociology from Kyoto University in 1974.
She has been Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University (i982-
83) and the University of Chicago (I983-84) as well as at the Na-
tional Museum of Ethnology and Tokyo University's Institute for
Asian-African Studies. Her research interests are women's studies
and Japanese studies. She has published (in Japanese) Reading the period Onna-Daigaku (A Discipline for Women), based
Japanese Domestic Labor Debate (Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, I982), Ex-
plorations in Structuralism (Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, I984), Capital- women is one-sided. That a text is "authorized" does not
ism and Domestic Labor (Tokyo: Kameisha, I984), Can Women
Save the World? (Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, I985), The Joy of Woman-
hood (Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, I986), and Searching for Self-Identity
(Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, I987).
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The recent achievements of the new "people's history"
and women's history in the reinterpretation of the folk-
lore studies of early modem Japan provide the basis for a
new perspective on Japanese women's issues. Most of
the literature appears to depend on texts or observations
in the "public" realm, with the implicit assumption that
the goal of women's liberation is to be as "industri-
alized" as men. This creates the misleading impression
that Japanese society is "backward" in terms of women's
issues.' It conveys a partial truth but is somewhat bi-
ased. To reach a fairer and more accurate appraisal of the
position of Japanese women, a number of issues have to
be taken into consideration, among them the distinction
between the symbolic order and daily praxis, class differ-
ences, social spheres, types of social organization, and
social change.
First, the symbolic order must not be confused with
reality. As Ortner (I974:69) argues, "culture as ideol-
ogy" often distorts, hides, and even contradicts reality.
For instance, to regard Confucianism as an "authorized"
ideology in Japan and consider a text such as the Edo-
on the Confucian ethic, an oppressive ideology for
necessarily mean that it is accepted or even practiced.
Moreover, considering the literacy rate in premodem so-
ciety, the number of people who owned or had read a
copy (and thus how influential it was) is doubtful. Fi-
nally, even among cultural discourses including folk-
tales one finds many beliefs and practices in marked
contradiction with the Confucian ethic. Culture in its
symbolic aspect is itself manifold.
Second, historical research based on written texts of-
ten ends up being about the ruling class and its ideol-
ogy.2 A class structure is held together by segregating
each class from every other; a class society consists of
various subcultures that minimally mix and sometimes
are even prohibited from transgressing "boundaries."
Feudal Japan placed the samurai class at the top of the
class structure and left the peasant communities a good
deal of autonomy. The samurai class did not intrude into
the local community structure enough to reorganize it
but rather left community units intact and took advan-
tage of their structure for purposes of taxation and con-
trol. Recent studies in "people's history" have shown
that autonomous community structures were well pre-
served throughout feudal Japan. Japanese society, with
its complex class structure, may present completely dif-
ferent pictures depending on the point of view of the
class concerned.
i. If, for example, one takes the proportion of women in Parliament
(3%) or women's average wage compared with men's (53% in i 985)
as a measure of women's "liberation," Japan no doubt is "back-
ward" in this regard.
2. Literacy is very much a matter of class. The literacy rate during
the Edo period is believed to have been as high as 30% but applied
only to the upper class. The Onna-Daigaku, for example, is be-
lieved to have been given to girls who were marrying out to teach
them how to obey their husbands, and this practice was limited to
the samurai. The Confucian ethic is a samurai ethic that would not
have extended to the lower class.
S75
 S76 1 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 28, Number 4, August-October I987

Third, Japanese society is also organized in terms of I960s. The next period, that since the I970S, has shown
age and sex, and the sexual segregation system cannot a number of changes that indicate the collapse of this
simply be called "repressive" of women, for, while ex- national culture in various respects. In this period a cul-
cluding women from men's world, it also provides them tural-historical complex established in the Meiji period
with a secure shelter through their own autonomy and has become a "tradition" that is confronting a new phase
resources (Rosaldo 1974). Women's power in the domes- of social change.
tic sphere is not negligible and sometimes compensates Taking these factors into account, my argument will
for their low status in the public sphere. focus on the everyday life of the ordinary people (jomin)
Fourth, it makes a great deal of difference whether one who constituted a majority of the population rather than
takes as the unit of social organization the ie (household) on texts written by or for the ruling class. Thus, my
or the village community.3 The ie is a principle rather focus is on the ordinary subculture rather than on the
than an entity, and the community may also be so. A "dominant" culture, on the assumption that the latter
village as an empirical reference may be organized either never truly dominated the former.
on the ie principle and its genealogical alignment or on Emphasis on ordinary people in folklore studies dates
that of the community, with individual members al- to the work of Kunio Yanagita (i875-i962), a founder of
located accordingly. Most researchers of village com- Japanese folklore studies (Yanagita i963-65[i9i0]). For
munities have taken their samples from villages that are him (as for most people at that time) jomin meant "peas-
more ie-oriented, but "people's historians" and folklor- ants." In view of the historical context, in which ordi-
ists have found more egalitarian, community-oriented nary people were confronted with profound social
villages with a strong system of age-groups. Community change, Yanagita tried to place folklore studies on a ret-
organization based on peer-group relations often pene- rospective foundation. He felt an urgent need to do so
trates the household and prevails over the ie principle.4 because his objects of study were rapidly disappearing.5
The ie-oriented village-organization model has been In the wake of the "people's history" of the I96os,
widely accepted by students in Japanese studies because historical and sociological studies, which long had had
it is harmonious with the samurai model of organiza- nothing to do with folklore studies, rediscovered or rein-
tion. If, however, one examines a more community- terpreted Yanagita (Tsurumi I974). The definition of jo-
oriented village, where peer-group sanctions penetrate min had shifted from peasants to urban workers, who by
the autonomy of each household, the image of Japanese then constituted a majority of the population, and the
society changes dramatically. Precisely which cultural issue was twofold: first, the study of jomin culture had
inheritance is carried over by modem social organiza- to focus on ordinary urban rather than rural people, and
tions such as the industrial enterprise remains a ques- second, in order to explain this transformation of the
tion for investigation. concept of jomin, a need arose to define what was "tradi-
Finally, it is necessary to consider diachronic issues of tional" for them.
social change, for society is a construct with a complex Yanagita and his students left a great deal of documen-
history. In this regard, what is "traditional" becomes thetation on ordinary women in the period before industri-
context. The mores and customs created in the Meiji alization had fully penetrated village life. On the basis of
period tend to be regarded as "traditional" by most Japa- this documentation, I will attempt to reconstruct these
nese today, but this is a confusion of a relatively new women's position in the premodern village community
"tradition" with an older one. From the point of view of and then, applying Yanagita's methodology in modern
social history I define as premodern Japan the period up urban settings, describe their transformation from peas-
to the Meiji 30S (the I9Ios), when community disorgani- ants' wives to the wives of urban workers. Next I will
zation accelerated rapidly. This was followed by modem briefly describe the new phase of transformation since
Japan, which constituted a national culture until the the '70s. Although cultural traits have survived through-
out these historical stages, they have been transformed
to fit different socioeconomic settings. I will also discuss
3. Nakane (1970), following Hsu's (I963) proposition that a social the current interpretations of these social phenomena,
structure is based on its smallest unit of organization, that is, the contrasting the extremes of the male-dominant and egal-
family, describes Japanese society as based on a "vertical" family
itarian approaches, and attempt to offer a more balanced
structure. The family is, however, not necessarily the smallest unit
of social organization, and social organization on a larger scale is view of women. Cultural inheritance in a certain histor-
not simply an extended version of the family. ical setting works in both positive and negative ways. It
4. Ie-oriented village organization has a tendency to break up along plays ambiguous and sometimes ironic roles in society
genealogical lines into household units, whereas community-
as a cultural-historical construct.
oriented village structure is preserved intact, with peer-group sanc-
tions ruling over each household (Irokawa I983). In the course of a
popular struggle against the company responsible for industrial pol-
lution in Minamata, villages that were more community-oriented
maintained solidarity while the more ie-oriented tended to accept
the compromise offered by the company and dropped out one fam-
ily after another. Ie-oriented organization is more often found 5. Yanagita was antimodernist in that he sought to establish folk-
among the newly developed or urbanized villages, community- lore studies on the basis of nostalgia and modemist in that he
oriented organization in more isolated and older villages in this attempt to base a concept of a nation-culture (obviously a product
area. of the modem nation-state) on jomin culture.

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Women's Status in Premodem Japan
One view of the status of women in premodem Japan
assumes that it was lower than in the modem period;
this often derives from the identification of history
with
social and economic progress and thus with the libera-
tion of women. This view may be called the "liberating
history," a feminist and materialist version of evolu-
tionism (Takamure I9772, Inoue I967). Another view is
that the position of women was higher in premodem
times than it is now, on the assumption that the farther
back in history one looks, the higher is the status of
women (Hiratsuka I971). This view, the obverse of the
first, may be called the "oppressive history." To avoid
becoming trapped in a "developmentalist" approach,
either negative or positive, I will examine women's
status in agricultural in comparison with industrial soci-
ety. Modemization is defined as industrialization, which
can be both "liberating" and "oppressive."
Yanagita, with his students, conducted extensive sur-
veys in early modem villages (Yanagita i964) and was
astonished to find how respected the female head of the
household (shufu) was in an agricultural household. The
wife of the household head, she was known by a variety
of folk terms, such as "oldest woman of the household"
(ie-to i) and "head of the household" (ie-nushi). The
male household head was expected to represent the
household to the outside world, whereas the female
household head was actually the head of the household.
The shufu, literally the "main woman," was the leader
of the other women in the household and supervised
their activities. There was only one shufu in each house-
hold, even in an extended family with i 5-20 members
in a village such as Shirakawa, which was well known
for its large households. The follower women were usu-
ally unmarried sisters of the household head or the suc-
cessor, divorced sisters who had retumed home, or
daughters-in-law. There was no way to become a shufu
other than marrying the head of the household or the
successor (who was usually a firstborn son), and such
opportunities were rare. Although the status of daugh-
ter-in-law, usually wife of the successor, was lower than
that of his unmarried sisters, Yanagita recorded a folk
song related to their status difference in northeastem
Japan: "Whatever luxury and freedom sisters enjoy/
There's no way for them to become head of the house-
hold." Conflicts between mothers-in-law and daughters-
in-law in which the former exploited the latter were well
known, but this was conceived to be the necessary train-
ing of her successor by the current female household
head in house management and house tradition. How-
ever low the status of the daughter-in-law, and it was
sometimes the lowest in the household, her future was
assured.
It may be more appropriate to call this woman the
daughter-in-law than the successor's wife, for she was in
fact a wife of the household and not just the wife of the
firstbom son. Yanagita records in some northem villages
a wedding ceremony that shows how this situation was
ritualized in the marriage contract; the bride exchanged
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UENO Position of Japanese Women Reconsidered I S77
cups of sake with the bridegroom three, then three more,
then three more times, but before doing so she had to
exchange cups with his parents, her future parents-in-
law. The wedding ceremony was thus an adoption ritual
rather than a marriage contract between two individ-
uals. The family first adopted the girl as daughter-in-law
and then married her to the successor of the household.6
Accordingly, the most suppressed members of the
family were the brothers and sisters of the household
head and his successor; they had very little hope of in-
heriting the patrimony. Male siblings other than the
firstbom son were called "uncle" (ohi), because even-
tually they became uncles of the successor, the firstbom
son of their eldest brother. A firstbom son was expected
to marry, while his brothers were not and usually re-
mained single all their lives.7
As a son succeeded his father, there was a succession
ritual for his wife as well. According to Yanagita's mate-
rials, some villages had a custom of retirement of the
household head at the age of 40, after which he assumed
charge of household rituals and village festivals, living in
a sacred world rather than a secular one. The retirement
ritual was accompanied by a ritual transmission of the
rights of the female household head from mother-in-law
to daughter-in-law called "transmission of the ladle"
(Shamoji-watashi). The ladle, used to serve rice, sym-
bolized the female household head's rights: she had ex-
clusive control over the distribution of rice, the most
important staple and a form of currency in a nonmone-
tary economy. Control over rice meant control over the
domestic economy, and it was in the hands of the female
household head. This feature survives in part among
contemporary housewives who control the money in ur-
ban middle-class households. According to Yanagita,
there was even a northeastem village in which the
daughter-in-law did not move into her husband's house
until the ritual transmission of the rights of the female
household head. By this time she had become the
mother of several children, but she did not bring her
children and belongings to her husband's house until she
had become female household head; in this way conflict
6. This is why the ie system cannot simply be called familism.
Although the ie is held to be based on blood ties, both in reality and
by rule it is more heavily dependent on contractual relations with
those who become family members by marriage or adoption. In-
deed, marriage is in fact a form of adoption; the rights of the female
household head are transmitted to daughters-in-law rather than to
daughters or sisters, and if there is no son to be the successor a boy
is adopted to inherit the property rather than its going to brothers
or nephews. Where family property does go to these latter, they
must first be adopted as sons.
7. This does not, however, mean that they were celibate. They had
access to unmarried women and widows in the village. Namihira
(i985) reports of Shirakawa that wives took up separate residences
where husbands visited them. The children of a large household
might include some whose mothers resided with their brothers.
Succession rules distinguished between the children of a firstborn
son and all others. Uncles and their children thus belonged to the
household as something like slaves.
 S78 1 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 28, Number 4, August-October I987

with her mother-in-law, which was very common preceding year by the first imperial constitution. This
among patrilineal extended families, could be avoided.8 and the first family law, promulgated in I919, made di-
While the northeastern villages were more ie-oriented, vorce more difficult. The relatively high traditional di-
among southwestern villages the age-group system had vorce rate up to this time has been explained in two
more control over community life. This system was the ways, one male-dominant or elitist and the other egali-
basis of egalitarian communal solidarity among villag- tanan or populist. Under patriarchy, a man was able to
ers, covering work exchanges and marriage alliances. It divorce his wife at his whim by writing a letter saying in
also controlled mating; marriage was exogamous in three and a half lines that he wanted her to leave. An
terms of each household and village-endogamous (Se- illiterate man could give his wife a piece of paper with
gawa 1972, Noguchi 1974). At the age of initiation (I4 or and a half lines (literally lines rather than words)
three
I5 for boys, the time of first menstruation for girls), on it and have her leave. The populist explanation, in
young people left their parents' houses to live in com- contrast, sees the traditionally high divorce rate as com-
munal houses (yado) for males and females respectively. mon practice among ordinary people, both men and
These houses usually belonged to leading villagers, who women. A divorce experience was by no means a social
were called "houseparent" (yado-oya) and with whom stigma for women, as virginity was not valued even in
the young people entered into a fictive kin relationship. the first marriage (as what we know about premarital
This was an effective institution for the socialization of promiscuity shows). That divorce may have been stig-
children within their peer groups; agricultural knowl- matized in the upper classes is suggested by the Onna-
edge, survival skills, crafts, and social norms were trans- Daigaku's assertion that a virtuous woman is never mar-
mitted from elder to younger. As soon as they moved ried to more than one man in her life-a norm that was
into these communal houses, young people began mat- not entirely upheld even among the elite. Men inclined
ing; boys would visit girls at the girls' house by night. Asto consider the family genealogy tended to take wives
in other Asian and Polynesian societies, they were from equally influential families, and this presumably
rather promiscuous. When a boy wanted to marry a girl limited their ability to treat their wives at their whim.
or she became pregnant, his houseparent would visit her As men used their sisters and daughters to build al-
father with sake, asking that they be allowed to marry. liances through marriage, they did not hesitate to re-
The father could hardly refuse, because if he did the marry them to men in other families when a marriage
future bridegroom's peer group might threaten him by ended. Male-centered decision-making power over di-
withholding labor cooperation. This could be fatal, be- vorce is part of a patriarchal myth that may have been
cause the age-group of young men was a powerful ag- true for part of the samurai class.
ricultural labor collective. The first family law established nationwide the patri-
The "people's historian" Irokawa (I974) argues that archal and patrilineal family system known as the ie
such villages were more egalitarian, autonomous, indi- system. This may seem contradictory to those who con-
vidualistic, and democratic than they have been por- sider the ie system "traditional"; it was in fact "tradi-
trayed. Thus the "oppression" hypothesis with regard to tional" only for the samurai class.9 What was new about
the peasants of feudal Japan has to be abandoned to the this family law was that it extended the samurai's exclu-
extent that they maintained peasant autonomy; feudal sively patrilineal succession rules throughout the na-
landlords tolerated their autonomy and even took advan- tion. The ie system can in this sense be truly called an
tage of it for taxation and control. invention of the Meiji government, modern rather than
The cosmos of the villagers, both in the symbolic or- premodern (Ito i982, Aoki i983).
der and in work organization, consisted of two autono- There was in fact an argument within the Meiji ad-
mous groups defined by sex. When men had a festival, ministration over extending the ie system and eliminat-
women had one of their own, or men and women partici, ing the possibility of cognatic inheritance (ane-katoku)
pated in the same ceremony in different ways. Family frequently found among commoners. Among wealthy
issues were also discussed among peer-group members, merchants and farmers in the late Edo period, it was very
and women could look to them for support. Men could common for a son-in-law to be adopted as husband of a
not be as arrogant or exploitative of women as they firstborn daughter as head of the ie.10 This possibility
might have been without this peer-group sanction. To was eventually rejected and subsequently denigrated as
the extent to which this "women's world" was main- the uncivilized practice of commoners. Although the
tained, women were not isolated from each other. Meiji restoration abolished the hierarchy of social
classes-warriors, peasants, craftsmen and merchants-
in which the main distinction was between warriors and
The Origin of the Ie commoners, democratization meant not the "com-
moner-ization" of the samurai class but the "samuraiza-
The year Meiji 3' (i9i8) saw a remarkable drop in the
divorce rate as a consequence of reforms instituted the 9. The samurai class accounted for 3% (or io% if families are
included) of the population in the Edo period.
8. Yanagita has been accused of romanticizing the position of io. This is a deliberate strategy for maintaining and enhancing the
shufu. Aware of the rapid social change of the late Meiji period, he family business, because these households have the opportunity to
may have been inclined to view the older way of life more favor- choose an able and loyal man from among their apprentices or
ably, but his statements are in fact based on carefully collected kinsmen as the next manager, whereas the family property is cer-
ethnographic data. tain to be inherited through women.

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tion" of the commoners. When social change abolishes a
hierarchy, it is always the lower class that wants to es-
cape the imposed class distinction in habits and behav-
iors. Thus the ie system, modeled on the patrilineal fam-
ily system of the samurai household, was established by
Meiji family law.
There was in addition a more serious change in mar-
riage customs. The community-oriented system of sanc-
tions by the age-group was declining; villagers no longer
observed village endogamy. The folklorists of the
Yanagita school who did such good ethnography on vil-
lage autonomy also reported its disruption. Some
wealthy households began to resist sending their daugh-
ters to the girls' house and to try to keep them chaste as
a resource for marriage alliance with other equally
wealthy households. If they could find no matching
ily within the village, they broke the rule of endogamy
and sent their daughters to other villages. Thus long-
distance marriage became common, and in order to
gather information about possible matching alliances a
go-between or mediator (nakodo) was needed. It can be
said that the arranged marriage that is now considered
"traditional" became so only in the late Meiji period, at
least as far as the commoners were concerned. In the
beginning, with these exceptions, the age-group of vil-
lage youth, which exercised control over the village
girls' sexuality, retained power by threatening violence
and withholding cooperative labor, but as some house-
holds became more economically independent com-
munal sanctions proved less effective.
Noguchi (I974) has reported the way in which the age-
groups were crushed by the Meiji government, which
introduced the school system to replace the age-group
system as an institution for socialization and education
for boys and girls. Primary-school teachers, policemen,
and officials initiated the disbanding of the age-groups,
declaring the institutional promiscuity that they en-
couraged barbaric. Noguchi (I973) writes that by the
I9IOS they had been transformed into Seinen-dan (youth
association) and Shojo-kai (maiden's association) and
that the word shojo (virgin) made its first public appear-
ance in this connection. The seemingly "traditional"
marriage for Japanese women, in which they are married
as virgins to strangers, has thus only become so since
that time."
The Transformation of the Housewife
According to Segawa (1979), one of Yanagita's students,
the term okusan, the address term associated with the
referential shufu, was also applied in the late Meiji pe-
i i. The social background of this change was the community disin-
tegration that had begun at the end of the Edo period. The rules that household suddenly dropped from five to three, indicat-
had prohibited transfers of landownership to outsiders were losing
their force, and a peasant indebted to an urban merchant could be
forced to relinquish his land and become a tenant. Some wealthy
peasants bought land from their neighbors and accumulated
enough to become large landowners. Households in the process of
growth were very conscious of the stratification of households,
especially with regard to marriage.
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UENO Position of Japanese Women Reconsidered I S79
riod to married women in urban households, where
there was no longer any "main" woman because there
were no subordinate female members. Derived from
okugata, literally "lady in the back room," it had origi-
nally applied to the wife of a samurai. Umesao (i982
[1957]) says of his mother, a merchant's wife in Kyot
who had been born in the Meiji period, that she was
careful to call okusan only a certain kind of customer-a
woman of the rising class of officials, businessmen, and
teachers: "Okusan were those who lived in subsidized
official residences, often bargained arrogantly with the
merchants, and spent all day talking with other okusan
in the neighborhood. In fact, the wives of policemen,
teachers, and businessmen tended to call each other
okusan. What made them different from women like my
fam- was that they did not work." A careful observer,
mother
he did not miss the cynical smile that accompanied his
mother's use of the term; respectfully as she was behav-
ing, she knew that these women had less power than she
over the household economy. Industrialization had
made it possible for most men to establish their own
households on a nonagricultural basis and had thus
greatly increased the number of households. The nu-
clearization of the family had also made it possible for
every married woman to be a shufu, but the power of the
role had shrunk. Being female household head meant
nothing more than being the wife of an urban wage
earner in a modern conjugal family. It was, however,
considered prestigious because urgan wage earners had
higher status than peasants, because these women did
not have to work as hard as peasants' wives, and be-
cause, however limited, it echoed women's power in the
premodern household. Contradiction arose between the
terms shufu and okusan, the former referring to the head
of a peasant work collective and the latter modeled on
the samurai family, with its sexual division of labor be-
tween breadwinning husbands and child-tending wives,
in which women were more reproducers than producers.
It is understandable, then, that the "modern" family sys-
tem is modeled on the samurai family rather than the
peasant one. The samurai's life-style was the prototype
for that of the modern wage earner: he commuted to the
lord's residence every morning and returned home in the
evening, and he was transferred back and forth between
the capital and his home town in alternate years. The
shift from the old middle class, mostly self-employed
small-commodity producers and landowning peas-
sants, to the rising middle class of wage earners, white-
or blue-collar, meant the samuraization of the whole
society.
The I96os saw the completion of Japanese moderniza-
tion: the rapid acceleration of social change, the final
attack on rural communities, and the nationwide spread
of urbanization. The average number of members of a
ing first the widespread nuclearization of the family and
second the tendency for women to have no more than
two children. The number of wage earners exceeded that
of those employed in family businesses, including ag-
riculture. Yanagita's concept of commoners had meant
peasants, but the basis of the nation had now shifted
 S8o I CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 28, Number 4, August-October 1987

from villagers to urban residents who were mostly in-
dustrial employees.
This social change affected women in two ways. On
the one hand, it meant the completion of the modern
sexual segregation of businessman-husband and house-
wife, in which women were isolated from each other in
tiny nuclear households. While men's traditional male
bonding had been transformed into a group-oriented
work organization, women had lost their communal
women's world. On the other hand, the life-styles of
women rapidly diversified. Economic growth presented
many employment opportunities for married women.
Japanese industries suffered a constant shortage of labor,
and in order to draw married women into the labor mar-
ket employers invented the part-time job. The category
of part-time worker did not appear in official labor statis- no more of him than that he be healthy and therefore a
tics until the 1970S, but when it did it already con-
stituted io% of the labor force. It should be reiterated
here that part-time work was an invention of employers
rather than the result of women's demand to work. Thus
"pull" factors and "push" factors worked together to
create a new life-cycle pattern for women. When one
considers that only a few decades ago there were almost
no employment opportunities for married women in
their 30s and 40s, it is striking that by the '8os part-time enjoy a middle-class standard of living, while other
work had become the most popular choice of Japanese
women.
The term "full-time housewife" (sengyo-shufu) ap-
peared in this context in the early '70S. It was, of course, ous than single-income ones. The economic infrastruc-
semantically redundant, because by definition a house-
wife had no other job. That Takeda (i982 [I97I]), in a
groundbreaking article in a popular women's magazine,
should have defended the housewife role as "the ideal of
the liberated human" shows that housewives were con-
scious of having become a social minority and felt their
identity threatened. By the late '70S they were already
confronting the question posed by their peers who had
gone to work, "Okusan, why don't you get a job?" Con-
trasting with full-time housewife status was that of
housewife with a part-time job (kengyo-shufu). Women
entering the postreproductive and postnurturing stage at
once found themselves with extra time and realized that
the household's educational expenses were growing as
its nurturing responsibilities shrank. In addition, the
structural stagflation of the Japanese economy in the
'70S meant that men could no longer be the sole reliable
breadwinners. Households were in need of supplemen-
tary income: a contribution by women.
Thus the period since the '6os has seen a diversifica-
tion of housewives into three categories: full-time
housewives, housewives with part-time jobs, and full-
time married women workers. The proportion of mar-
ried women falling into the latter two categories is now
45%. Housewives who work full-time throughout their
reproductive years are limited to particular professions
and family and housing arrangements, though gradually
increasing in numbers, and still account for only 2o% of
their cohort. Although most women, regardless of age,
take it for granted that they are to leave work when they double-career couples and lower-class ones in which the husband's
have children, the strength of this norm has decreased in
accordance with the needs of the society, first with the
decision to have no more than two children and then
with the limitation of maternal devotion to the first
three years of the child's life. When their second chil-
dren start school, women are no longer expected to stay
at home. 12
The prevailing view conveyed by the mass media ap-
pears to be more a matter of socioeconomic class than
one of cultural ideal. To take advertising as a "folkloric"
text, one of the most popular commercials shows a mid-
dle-aged woman who has just started working as a part-
time saleslady. Referring to the product she is selling,
she says, "A husband is better healthy and absent." This
phrase explicitly represents the cultural ideology of
women's autonomy in the household: the wife expects
reliable breadwinner. Nonetheless, she goes to work be-
cause he is not a capable enough breadwinner to support
the family by his income alone. A couple of neighbor
housewives come by and find her selling a commercial
product and talk about her: "Poor Mrs. Yamada. She has
to go out to work. They bought a new house, and it's
heavily mortgaged." Thus, although she lives in a subur-
ban middle-class setting, she has to work in order to
women of her peer group need not do so.
The middle-class ideal is, however, rapidly becoming
inaccessible. Double-income families are more numer-
ture is affecting the "traditional" sex-role assignments
that became "traditional" only a half-century ago. Japa-
nese society is now in the process of a new compromise
between its cultural inheritance and new socioeconomic
environments. The middle-class ideal is still the woman
as mistress without a job. Ironically, rural women have
less role conflict than urban women because their tradi-
tion of female leadership of workers' collectives enables
them to go out to work without any obstacles. This
again shows that the middle-class ideal of the female
household head is modeled on the samurai housewife.
Conclusion
Although women's issues in Japan have much in com-
mon with those in most developed industrial societies,
there are some cultural features specific to this setting:
i. Women's control over the household. Urban Japa-
nese housewives have inherited the shufu's traditional
rights and power over the household. Women enjoy rela-
tive autonomy under the conditions of sexual segrega-
tion of social spheres. As far as family issues are con-
i2. The most determinant factor by far in the diversification of life-
styles among housewives is the income level of the husband. Full-
time housewives can most frequently be found in a solid economic
situation; housewives who work part-time tend to be married to
men who regard their wives' supplementary income as necessary.
Where married women work full-time, there is polarization of elite
income is too low to support a family.

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 UENO Position of Japanese Women Reconsidered I S8i

cerned, husbands rarely interfere with the decision
making of their wives, which sometimes extends to the
realms of kinship relations, investment in children's
education, and even the buying of houses. The scope of
women's power in the household extends to any issue of
concern to family members, for it is they who are re-
sponsible for the household. In the Western tradition,
economics is more the concern of men, but not so in
Japan. 13
This exclusive responsibility is a source not only of
power but also of oppression. The burden of motherhood
sometimes drives a young woman to kill her children
and herself or to have a nervous breakdown, especially
when she lacks the women's cooperative network once
referred to as "communal motherhood." The increasing
number of working wives since the I96os has caused a
dramatic shift from single-income to double-income
families. Husbands can no longer support their families
alone, and they recognize that the supplementary in-
come obtained by their wives is necessary. This has
greatly affected power relationships (Hata I985 ),14 but
has not meant any reduction in women's housework re-
sponsibilities and instead has forced them to play the
dual role of mother-wife and wage worker. Sociologists
have seen the possibility of role conflict in this situa-
tion, but there is in fact a cultural compromise that
avoids it. Women justify going out to work as part of
being a good mother. One working wife, aged 42, reports:
"I work outside the home to send my son to school.
Otherwise we could not afford his education. Since edu-
cation is the only thing we can leave him, this is what I
can do as a mother." Motherhood, ironically, is driving
women out of the home.
2. The mother-dominant family. The Japanese family
is mother-dominant and child-centered. Women have
ultimate control over children: their discipline, educa-
tion, and achievement. In the patrilineal family system,
where being a mother was the only way for a woman to
I 3. The sexual division of labor between breadwinner husband and system of ancient Japan it was the sister-brother rela-
economically dependent wife is commonly believed to be the basis
of women's subordination, but this is not necessarily the case in mother-son relationship. Although the cultural model of
Japanese families; more than 90% of Japanese husbands turn over
their entire incomes to their wives.
I4. In addition to the fact that Japanese women already enjoy a
good deal of control over their husbands' incomes, their own in-
comes are under their complete control. According to the cultural with the advent of the nuclear family the wife monopo-
norm, men are expected to support their families themselves, and
women's supplementary income is to be negligible and invisible.
This rule works both ways: On the one hand, despite the fact that
women's income is necessary to maintain the household, there is a rather than wife has given the woman ample reason to
tendency on the part of men to deny this, thus making women's
oppression worse and more complicated. Although her income
goes into the household budget, the wife's contribution is not
counted. Furthermore, since she is doing something culturally dis-
sonant, she cannot expect any help in reducing her housekeeping
responsibilities. On the other hand, women retain traditional con-
trol over their husbands' incomes while they save their own money community, women lived in their own world, and it
at their own whim. Although sometimes these funds are used for
their own pleasure, in some cases they are invested to produce
capital and property not in their husbands' names but in their own.
The attitude is that the husbands' money is communal property
while their own is personal.
have ensured membership and access to power, mother-
hood was exploited. The cultural burden of motherhood
works differently, however, in the urban nuclear family.
Whereas they used to be considered the property of the
patrilineal family, now children are considered the ex-
clusive property of their mothers. Only a few decades
ago, divorce for women meant leaving their children
with their husbands or, more precisely, with their
mothers-in-law. Today most men willingly give up cus-
tody of their children following a divorce, rarely insist-
ing on even joint custody. The cultural assumption that
children must be cared for by women, which used to
keep women in the patrilineal family, now works to
strip divorced men of family life.
The fact that there are far fewer conflicts regarding
custody in connection with divorce presumes a certain
sociocultural background. First, the understanding of
motherhood shared by men and women precludes any
consideration of the possibility of single fatherhood. Sec-
ond, because of biased socialization most men are vir-
it incapable of child rearing. Third, in the nuclear
tually
family there is no other woman than the wife (e.g., a
mother-in-law or a sister) to take care of the children.
Finally, fathers usually have not established good rela-
tionships with their children, whereas their wives will
have shared their complaints about them with the chil-
dren, and this makes it unlikely that children will
choose paternal custody. That the patrilineal pattem of
child custody following divorce has changed so dramat-
ically indicates that the patrilineal family system is
firmly aligned with motherhood.
3. The mother-son relationship. It is generally under-
stood that the efficient Japanese businessman becomes
powerless and dependent as a child when he returns
home, thus forming a "harmonious complementarity"
between "inside" and "outside." Although the "har-
monious complementarity" is doubtful, the cultural
ideal for two persons of opposite sex is modeled on kin-
ship relations that contain no conflict, such as sister-
brother, mother-son, and father-daughter. In the clan
tionship that dominated; in the ie system it is the
the mother-son relationship for the married couple con-
flicts with the real mother-son relationship in an ex-
tended household, when the mother-in-law disappears
lizes the "mother" role and becomes a despot in her
realm. The traditional cultural emphasis on mother
be powerful in the household. Since there is no woman
more senior than the mother, her power is unlimited.
This may, however, be a cultural conspiracy that moti-
vates devotion in women only as mothers.
4. Autonomy in the women's world. In the traditional
seems that a large part of the "women's problem" is
derived from their isolation as a result of the destruction
of that world. During the UN Decade for Women, a
nationwide campaign encouraged women to "participate

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 S82 1 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 28, Number 4, August-October ?987

in society." This did not necessarily mean going out to
work; government policy on women's issues, both at the
national and at the local level, women's grassroots
movements, and commercialism together provide
women with a variety of opportunities to go out to meet-
ings, civic activities, adult education, sports, pleasure,
and so forth. No one blames a woman for going out, and
a husband does not complain as long as she is there
when he comes home.
Two features of Japanese culture support the renewed
"women's bonding" created through these activities.
First, the traditional sexual segregation itself helps
women to live in "sisterhood." Secondly, as long as
women stay in the new "women's world," Japanese hus-
bands do not interfere.'5 This bond is strong enough to
provide mutual aid, and, importantly, it is based neither
on kinship nor on neighborhood relations but on shared
tastes, feelings, activities, and orientations. Its strength excludes the father, who has disappointed her, and pos-
is demonstrated by the nature of the resources that are
mobilized in the event of a death, although commercial
funeral service now replaces the traditional mutual aid
based on kinship and neighborhood and women rely on
their peer-group relationships to survive widowhood.'6
As we have seen, "traditional" cultural traits have a
paradoxical function when they are placed in a modern
urban setting. Some Japanese are prepared to defend Jap-
anese family structure and values, contrasting them to
such serious family problems of Western society as di-
vorce, drug abuse among the young, geriatric care, and so
on.'7 Comparatively speaking, Japanese couples are
more stable (at the cost of a sharp separation of men's
and women's worlds), Japanese children are better-
disciplined (at the sacrifice of women to motherhood),
and Japanese elderly people are better-cared-for (at their
daughters-in-law's expense). The Japanese family system
works well both as a stabilizer of family composition
and as a reproductive institution. Certain political argu-
ments have indeed suggested that the combination of
high technology and the family tradition is the basis of
the society's stability and prosperity. However, serious
pathology does arise out of this sociocultural climate.
Whereas family violence in the American context is
generally violence toward children by adults (child
abuse), in Japan it is generally violence on the part of
children toward their parents, especially their mothers.
Child psychologists consider it a reflection of "develop-
mental delay"-a result of delayed separation from the
mother. Young matricides tend to have been regarded as
"gentle" by their classmates and are simply spoiled chil-
dren acting out in adolescence the "negativism" that
they should have experienced in early childhood, when
it would have been harmless. Incest also contrasts with
the American situation in an interesting way. While
father-daughter incest tends to receive most attention in
the American context, in Japan it is mother-son incest
that is most prominent. It is not that the son rapes his
mother but that the mother seduces her son. This is the
final and fatal way for her to establish an alliance that
sess her son completely. Any relationship between a
dominant mother and a dominated son shares this inces-
tuous aspect to a certain extent in that the mother pre-
vents her son from becoming independent.
These two social-pathological phenomena point to the
cultural-historical complex that structures the reproduc-
tion of the Japanese nation. Sexual segregation excludes
women from the public sphere; women seek power in
the domestic sphere as mothers; a dominant mother pro-
duces a dominated son; a dependent son becomes a con-
cerned man who shows loyalty to a group; and so forth.
Although Japan seems to be a well-organized society, its
organization has many side effects. A culture cannot be
judged simply as good or bad. We need to keep in mind
that what is "traditional" is simply a historical con-
struct, that the function of traditional cultural traits
varies with the context, and that the results are often
ambiguous and paradoxical.
Comment

D. P. MARTINEZ
i 5. One thing that Japan did not import during the process of Institute
Wes- of Social Anthropology, Oxford University,
ternization is the couple culture. Since wives do not have to appear
Oxford, England.
with their husbands at social affairs or entertain their husbands'
guests at home, they enjoy relative freedom. In the couple culture,
a divorced woman tends to lose almost all of the social life that she Ueno's article is important for many reasons. Just on the
participated in through her husband, whereas with sexual segrega- general topic of Japan, it is welcome because, although
tion of social spheres, she can maintain her own relations with the years since the 1970S have seen a proliferation of
other women. It is interesting that the couple culture, in which
divorce leads to diminished social life, has a higher divorce rate publications on Japan, much of that material continues
than obtains under sexual segregation. It perhaps make sense in to propagate long-held Western attitudes towards the
that where men and women share less there is less tension between "land of the rising sun." Japan is still portrayed as a
them. mysterious and beautiful country peopled by a homoge-
i6. I am now conducting a field survey on this revived women's
neous population all given to Zen meditation and prac-
bond, which seems to solve a good part of the women's problem.
I7. It is very likely that what has happened with the debate on tising various arts such as the tea ceremony, flower ar-
Japanese management will also apply to a possible debate on Japa- ranging, and calligraphy-a country where workaholic
nese family issues. The debate over the management styles of Japanbusinessmen still follow the precepts laid down by an
and the United States has apparently ended in a victory for the ancient samurai and where the women remain "wom-
Japanese side, producing considerable self-confidence with regard
to its group orientation, collectivity, and paternalism as positive anly-kind, gentle, faithful, pretty," just as Basil Hall
values. Chamberlain described them in his Things Japanese in

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 UENO Position of fapanese Women Reconsidered I S83

I9o5. The Japanese themselves have done little to dispel Perhaps this can be explained not by a model of
these notions, publishing, in Japanese, a whole literature samurai versus merchant or peasant class but by an ur-
known as Nihonjinron (literally "ideas on the Japanese") ban-versus-rural model that still holds in modern Japan.
that is concerned with explaining-to other Japanese- For any of the classes below that of samurai, women
why Japanese society is essentially inscrutable to the were essential as partners in a division of labour which
foreigner and, implicitly, different from any foreign was based on the household as the unit of production.
soci-
ety. The few studies that do not fall prey to this mythol- For the nobility, women were reproducers and political
ogizing are welcome but must also be considered with pawns; for the commoners, women were both producers
care, since they frequently veer to the other extreme of and reproducers. Also, the town "commoners," espe-
depicting Japanese society in exactly the same terms as cially merchants, began to emulate samurai values long
Western societies. before the Meiji Restoration. It was in the rural areas,
More specifically, Ueno's article touches on the one distant from the city centres, that women were allowed
area in which this problem has arisen time and time the autonomy that Ueno describes. Yet within each
again: women's studies. Feminist writers on Japan, most sphere, the samurai "wife" and the peasant "partner,"
often American, have deplored the manner in which women had high status. The shift in women's role, it
Japanese women are "oppressed" in a modern society seems to me, has occurred not so much with the cre-
which theoretically gives women a great many legal ation of the Japanese middle class nor with the adoption
rights and, since April of I986, allows them equal oppor- of new definitions of status as with a move from rural
tunity in employment. It is evident to anyone who has work patterns to urban industrialization.
spent any length of time in Japan that this view of the For example, during my own fieldwork in a small Japa-
Japanese woman is somewhat one-sided. True, the aver- nese fishing village, I was often presented with instances
age Japanese housewife is more fashion-conscious than of women's power and status both within the household
her American counterpart; she places more importance and outside in the wider community: a wives' club (fu-
on her domestic skills than it is now fashionable to do; jin-kai) that was more efficient in its elections, organiza-
and only rarely does she try to combine a career with tion, and decision making than any of the men's groups
marriage. But the power over the household and its econ- (and the women boasted of this as well); an elected
omy that a Japanese housewife wields is evident even to official who could not assume office until his wife reluc-
the casual observer. This dichotomy is one which many tantly gave him permission; men who referred all eco-
Japanese women feel is important and frequently mis- nomic decisions to their wives; women listed as heads of
understood by Westerners: public power is not essential, household instead of their daughters' husbands; and a
it is autonomy in the household that counts. It is on this traditional system of production based on the sexual di-
household autonomy that a woman's status is based. vision of labour which made it impossible for a man to
Using Japanese historical material and anthropological support his household without the cooperation of his
theory, Ueno seeks to elucidate this so-called contradic- wife.
tion. From the very start she succeeds in putting her The population shift that Japan's industrialization re-
finger on the major flaw in most feminist arguments on quired has contributed to the loss of women's power in
Japanese women: "most of the literature appears to de- the community outside their households. In large cities,
pend on texts or observations in the 'public' realm, with women's groups are not as active and cannot be as in-
the implicit assumption that the goal of women's libera- volved in the community's organization as they are in
tion is to be as 'industrialized' as men." The point is well smaller towns and villages. By contrast, as in the pre-
worth repeating, for the typical feminist model often Meiji era, in modern rural Japan a woman's status is
misses the point when dealing with Japan; what Japa- related to her household's status, and she has an active
nese women want is not necessarily public power. Thus role in shaping this status. In urban Japan, her status has
the historical processes that have shaped the modern come to depend on her husband's relative status as a
woman's attitudes to work, the family, and community company employee and not necessarily on how much he
need to be reviewed in order to understand why these earns. The company for which he works, the university
Western feminist models do not work in the Japanese case. he attended, his hobbies: all are determinants of the
Where Ueno's own model becomes a bit confused is in wife's status. A man's status is also linked to his ability
its discussion of the modern class system. Japan, like the to support the family without requiring the labour of his
United States, has a huge middle class or, better said, a wife. So, the household is no longer the basic unit of
large percentage of households that consider themselves production: the wife is not a productive partner in the
to be of the middle classes. This large class has, since the economic sense but maintains the household's status by
Meiji Restoration, been subject to the process of both filling the role of wife and mother. This is a shift in
industrialization and samuraization while also adopting women's power and status (it was always important to
certain values from foreign societies. Yet, whatever new be wife and mother), a closing in of a wider sort of au-
values the middle class has adopted are based on old thority that women still retain in rural areas.
values: we are seeing a shift in Japanese society, not a Ueno herself points out some of the problems which
radical change. Ueno's assertion that the new middle this shift in women's roles has created, the major one
class has adopted values that have little to do with their being that inflation has forced many women to take up
pre-Meiji values is a bit too simplistic. part-time work, at the very time when urbanization has

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S84 1 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 28, Number 4, August-October I987

succeeded in isolating women from the traditional vil-
lage women's groups that provided support and auton-
omy in the past. A modern housewife who is a good
mother does not work outside the household; she has
lower status, and her husband has lower status, if this is
so. Yet, with inflation, a wife's labour is becoming in-
creasingly important in urban areas. Given the con-
tinued Japanese emphasis on hierarchical and group rela-
tions, the problem for the modern urban housewife in
Japan is not liberation in the Western sense-not the
right to have a career-but re-establishing an identity
outside the household which has value in a Japanese
context.
Ueno hints at this problem but sidesteps it to concen-
trate on the problems that have been created by this
turning inwards of a housewife's authority and auton-
omy: the centering of a woman's dominance on her chil-
dren. Ueno presents us with these "traditional cultural
traits" whose w orking is "ambiguous and paradoxical"
without telling us of any of the strategies Japanese
women have resorted to in order to achieve their own
"liberation." Ardent Japanese feminists have success-
fully pushed for conventional forms of "liberation" in
the public sphere: equal employment, equal pay, day-
care centres for working mothers, and encouragement of
higher education for girls as well as for boys; one hopes
that all of these will bring changes for succeeding gener-
ations. This, however, has not solved the major problem
of the woman who is content with her role as housewife
but has lost her autonomy in urban society. Yet, Japa-
nese women do find ways of creating autonomy outside
the household: they return to traditional forms of reli-
gion, join new religious movements, or even start move-
ments of their own; they become politically active, con-
cerned over such issues as nuclear power and world
peace; they travel, often with other women or old school
friends, and not just in Japan but all over the world; they
take up foreign languages and group activities such as
sports. By mentioning none of these modern strategies
Ueno gives us too bleak a picture of what historical pro-
cesses have wrought in modern Japan. By not discussing
the question of status in more detail she does not make
the Japanese case as clear as she otherwise could. Yet,
she does succeed in giving the Western observer a new
perspective on Japanese women's issues, a necessary and
valuable addition to the literature.
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