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.
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 CitationMasuoka 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.