A Jaunt through Japan: Japanese Family Life

I’m really glad Japan Society arranged for us to have both a suburban homestay and a rural homestay—if anything it helped highlight the fact that just like the United States, Japan is also filled with great variations when it comes to cultural or familial norms. Being able to debrief with the other teachers about our homestay experiences as well was incredibly useful, because in our discussion we found more divergences, but were also able to pull out some similarities and trends. Here’s what we found:

Seems like your average family in Japan maintains fairly rigid gender roles as a method of creating stability and functionality in the home. Most of our families had a structure in which the dad worked long hours and didn’t return home until 9 or 10 in the evening. Meanwhile, the wife generally stayed at home with the kids and took responsibility for cooking, cleaning, etc. I saw quite a broad spectrum of this—seemed like in my Arida family, for example, this role was more clearly defined, as in if the host dad wanted a coffee, he’d literally ask the wife to do it instead of getting it himself, whereas in Obu I saw the host dad help clear the table, do the dishes, play with the kids, all that. But in general, you definitely have a “men work hard, and women work just as hard at home” kind of system. I asked Yuki if she ever thought about going back to work, and she said yes, a little wistfully, but she didn’t seem resentful that she had quit her job for her family.

The really surprising thing to all of us was the fact that it’s apparently pretty standard for kids to sleep in the same room as their parents. For instance, in my host family in Obu, they had the 4-year old daughter’s bed pushed right up against the big bed in the master bedroom, with the crib just alongside for the baby. As Americans, we were all pretty shocked by this. But what about their intimacy as a couple? What about their private time? Several of us asked about “date night” and discovered that the concept pretty much doesn’t exist. In fact, Yuki told me flat out that it’s frowned upon for parents to hire a babysitter in Japan. The only way you can leave your house without your kids is if you have your parents watch them for you. What I understood from talking to Yuki is that she sometimes was able to go out with her friends and her husband was sometimes able to go out with his friends, but they more or less never went out together. This was pretty incredible to us as Americans. We’re basically the most individualistic and selfish society on earth and here we were being shown a life in which you’re expected to give up romance, privacy, and career (if you’re a woman) for your family.

So what about this family? Most of the families we lived with seemed fairly healthy and happy (keep in mind, these families self-selected to host a foreign visitor), and the kids were pretty well-behaved. You know how whenever you’re with parents who have young children, there’s always a moment sooner or later when the parent just lose it and start screaming? I never saw that happen even once. When I mentioned it to Rob, he suggested that that was probably a function of the parents not wanting to cause a scene in front of guests—even if this is the case, it’s still amazing to me that public child tantrums are avoidable. All of us remarked on how calm and laidback the families were. A “hands-off” approach seemed to be happening with the parenting. This contrasts quite sharply with your typical middle class American family you see in the streets, in which the scenario is usually that a kid starts crying and the mom is immediately slobbering all over herself to appease it. A lot of us commented that there were a lot of toys and very little TV. In my family, there was maybe a half hour to an hour max of children’s TV a day. I was astonished by how little TV there was. It kind of seems to fit with the lack of technology in general that we’ve seen here. I’ll get to schools later, but classrooms are basically just chalkboards. A lot of the hotel rooms we’ve been in have been kind of dated in terms of gadgetry and TVs. I can’t seem to find a coffeehouse that has even a single outlet. And I think we were all surprised by how few tablets, etc, we’ve seen in general circulation. It’s not as if technology doesn’t exist or that Japan is behind—obviously it’s not. It’s just that it’s not as present as we were expecting given this high-tech electronica image we have of Japan.

Now, I don’t know what any of this means, I’m just making observations, but I’m going to throw out there that Japan is just much more family-oriented than I expected. In the past few years, apparently, they’ve increased paid maternity leave to over a year. When a woman gets pregnant, she gets handed all this information on healthcare, vaccinations, an schools by the government. Even in the public sphere, the family is just present. I don’t have kids, so I can’t really be an authority on this, but I get the impression that kids are kind of supposed to be hidden. No one wants to know that a woman is nursing, much less see it. Everyone glares whenever a baby is crying or a kid is throwing a tantrum. I never thought about what a woman with a baby must have to do when she needs to pee, but in Japan, they’ve thought about it! Women’s bathrooms usually have stalls equipped with a baby holder for a woman to put her baby while she pees! There’s usually also a little boy’s urinal for a little boy to use in the women’s restroom so he doesn’t have to go to the men’s room alone. I saw public spaces for kids everywhere in Japan. In a bakery, I saw a little playroom to the side for kids. It’s really clear to me that Japan is a society that considers families in a way that the United States doesn’t.