Divorce and the Romance of Independence in Contemporary Japan
In contemporary Japan, much public and media attention is focused on a divorce rate now above thirty-three percent. This rising divorce rate reflects social change not only because more families are outside the normative mainstream but also because it reveals what many Japanese believe to be a striking reversal of gendered norms. Until recently most divorces were initiated by men and resisted by women, but now, popular discourse holds, it is the women who are divorcing decrepit and dependent men to find freedom and fulfillment. This book filters these discussions through public and private conversations about what divorce means, and how people negotiate the gaps between lives they want and lives that are possible. The book, based on fieldwork with men and women, posits that although divorce can seem to be freeing people from restrictive social norms, contemporary divorces are justified through neoliberal ethics of self-responsibility that leave many conflicted, lonely, and searching for new romantic attachment. Considering divorce and what people do to avoid it, the book traces contemporary Japanese debates about the possibilities for freedom within intimacy and the attractiveness of independence by contextualizing them within demographic, economic, and social shifts.
Chapter Overviews
The introduction, “Anxiety and Freedom,” contextualizes the rising divorce rate and popular perceptions of female agency within social, economic, and political changes throughout the postwar period. This chapter begins with evidence of general anxiety about the rising divorce rate. I argue that a legal change to the pension system in April 2007 prompted many people to suddenly view divorce as a newly real possibility and therefore either plan a future divorce or work to prevent the same. Such fantasies and fears about divorce reveal people’s changing, and conflicted, perceptions of what is acceptable in marriages, good for spouses, and beneficial for families.
Chapter 2, “What Can Be Said?” juxtaposes contemporary Japanese discussions about the benefits of articulating emotion in romantic relationships with anthropological debates about research methodologies to highlight how communication is being proposed as a corrective in both. The expanding market of marital counseling is increasingly likely to link divorce risk with “communication” problems. Although “communication” can euphemistically describe a variety of behaviors, marital counselors describe verbalization of the phrase “I love you” as a marker of marital health – spouses saying “I love you” make their marriages stronger. This advice marks a shift from previously acceptable styles of intimacy, specifically the idea that good love “should be like air,” always present but not verbalized. People with whom I talked were not completely convinced that articulated feelings are stronger and contested counselors’ advice. These discussions about how communication helps or hurts marriages parallel anthropological questions about the ongoing ethical dilemmas inherent to ethnographic fieldwork. With my informants who are struggling to determine when talking helps and when it hurts marriages, I describe my research methods to ask what I can say of what I heard and saw.
Chapter 3, “Dependence and Its Risks,” uses the example of tensions surrounding denotational practices in marriages to trace how people are negotiating ethics of individualism, cultural norms of dependence, and personal desires for romance. Contemporary marital counselors are likely to suggest that marriages are stronger when spouses do not call each other “mother” and “father,” a very standard cultural practice for the last century. With this tip, they suggest that the dependence made manifest when a husband calls his wife “mother” poses danger to marriages and strips romance out of relationships. I discuss this common advice as a reflection of neoliberal ethics that privilege independence as one mark of mature adulthood. Although counselors consistently suggest that less dependence will make marriages stronger, divorcing people have ambiguous reactions to the link between “good” marriages and independence, and this chapter examines how they attempt to balance the risk and attractiveness of dependence.
Chapter 4, “Voicing Divorce,” examines how the reasons and motivations people use to explain divorce have changed in recent decades and reflect new attention to selfhood. In the current moment, divorcing people explain, excuse, and justify ending their marriages with narratives radically different than those prevalent even twenty years ago. Rather than resorting to previously “acceptable” explanations such as male promiscuity or domestic violence, contemporary Japanese men and women are more likely to describe insufficient romance or a search for self as primary motivations to leave a marriage. In this chapter, I contextualize these changes within demographic shifts and ethical reformulations to describe how people are enacting, reformulating, or challenging social norms.
Chapter 5, “Beyond Mutuality,” analyzes the legal processes required to accomplish divorce. Because over 90 percent of divorces are legally labeled “mutual” and do not require the involvement of judges or lawyers, I examine how conflict, mediation, and bribery are pushed into private spheres. To file a legally “mutual” or “uncontested” divorce, both spouses fill out a divorce application form, sign their names, and add their name stamps. The form is then submitted to a local government office and, because both parties agree to the divorce, it is recorded without any more requirements. However, because legal precedents require that both spouses agree to divorce, many protracted negotiations occur as a spouse who wants to divorce attempts to convince the other to agree to it, often by promising material property or making no financial demands. I describe what this legal terminology of “mutuality” obscures and how divorces that appear to occur with no influence from family law are intimately, and constantly, shaped by legal categories and expectations. The chapter analyzes how legal patterns and processes suggest particular family forms as ideal, and the problems that people face when their experiences deviate from these normative ideals.
Chapter 6, “Buying Out,” investigates a common perception about divorce – that women’s financial resources are pushing the divorce rate higher – to describe how money factors into people’s divorce decisions and lives after separation. On one hand, many people suggest that the increasing divorce rate is the result of an increase in women’s employment. On the other, a rapidly increasing segment of Japanese people living in poverty are divorced women, particularly women with children. In this chapter, I describe how and when people use money to explain divorces, how couples negotiate dividing their common property, and patterns of post-divorce financial problems. In divorce especially, money is shot through with ideology, control, emotion, and symbolism. I analyze why money, as a key instantiation of dependence, freedom, and value, is a common explanation for divorce. In addition, I describe how money is regularly shared and split in divorces, and the common decrease in standards of living for divorced women.
Chapter 7, “Divorce in a Family Nation,” situates divorce experiences within Japanese social constructions of family to describe the elements of family life that people continue to find desirable. Drawing on recent anthropological literature about contemporary kinship I describe pervasive and normative images of what a family is supposed to be to discuss how people move toward and recover from divorce. Ideology of and about “family” in contemporary Japan performs two simultaneous actions. First, it links family membership with Japanese citizenship and individual families with the nation-state. Second, it describes the normative mainstream ideals of what family life should be. Families can enable people to “belong” in both senses, by making them a member of a specific family and by locating them in the mainstream of social relationships. In divorce, people are simultaneously shifting these two states of belonging – they are leaving or reorganizing particular families and also readjusting their relationship to the idealized mainstream. Although divorce could be seen as a critique of the norm, as a political act rejecting the normalized family or the institution of marriage, very few people understand it that way. On the contrary, men and women are more likely to describe their previous marriage as a failed attempt to enact an ideal they still find attractive. The majority of people are open to or actively seeking remarriage, and describe their previous marriages as something that didn’t work because of the specific people or contexts involved.
The conclusion, “Ends and New Beginnings,” summarizes the book’s findings by returning to the image of divorce as a specter lurking around both my male and female informants. Divorce can serve as a critical moment of refraction and reflection, when people verbalize the difference between the life they imagined and how they are currently living. Examining contemporary representations of ghosts haunting divorced people in Japanese horror films, I analyze how divorced people experience the ghostly remains of their earlier lives and former spouses to consider the threat or revolutionary potential that divorce can hold.