Constraint, Power, and Intergenerational Discontinuity in Japan

ABSTRACT

This article uses ethnographic data to explore intergenerational relationships as they are both constructed and contested within the confines of the discourse of filial piety in Japan. I argue that the current state of intergenerational relationships in Japan can neither be characterized in terms of an abandonment of traditional values of filial obligation nor in terms of a tacit acceptance of those values. Instead, contemporary Japanese experience intergenerational relationships in a social matrix that includes co-existing, and in some respects contradictory, discourses and associated matrices of power that at once encourage a lifestyle centered around the nuclear family and are characterized by independent decision-making while also emphasizing expectations of co-residence and commitment to filial obligations.

KEYWORDS:

• Intergenerational relationships
• Japan
• power
• filial obligation
• gender

Notes

1. All names used in this article are pseudonyms to protect the identities of my informants; interviews were taped and then transcribed by the author.

2. In fact, yomeshuto is not a new problem. See Masuoka et al. 1962.

3. In Japan, it is common for a woman without male siblings to marry a man who takes her name and is adopted into her household, much in the same way the women marry-in to their husband's family if co-residence is involved.

4. The implication here is that by leaving, she is being an unfilial child and not carrying out her responsibility to her parents and family.