New Pressures Alter Japanese Family's Geometry
By HOWARD W. FRENCH,
Stuart Isett/Corbis Sygma
The New York Times
July 27, 2000YAMATO, Japan -- When a serious courtship began nine years ago with the man who was to become her husband, Yukari Takada grew tense with apprehension over an ancient predicament in Japan that has only grown more urgent in an increasingly childless age.
As the second daughter in a family of only two children, Miss Takada was already feeling strong pressure from her parents to preserve their family name. Furthermore, since her older sister's husband was a firstborn son who would have to care for his parents, she expected that the burden of nursing her own parents in their old age would fall upon her shoulders.
So when Makoto Takimura, a reporter with the local newspaper, finally overcame his shyness and proposed, Miss Takada accepted, but with the request that he come to live with her in her parents' house and adopt her family name. This would reverse the longstanding practice in Japan of a woman joining her husband's family, taking his name and caring for his parents.
"My mother really wanted him to become an adopted groom," said the 34-year-old woman, who teaches classical Japanese music. Adopted grooms are men who take their wives' names, an age-old but fading custom.
In the end, the young couple agreed on the kind of hybrid living arrangement that sociologists say is rapidly redefining the Japanese family in response to pressures as varied as falling birthrates, the world's most rapidly aging population, sky-high real estate prices and persistent economic uncertainty after a decade-long recession.
To the consternation of some in his own conservative farming family, Mr. Takimura agreed to an arrangement almost unheard of just a generation ago: living with his wife's family, and assuming the burden of eventually caring for his mother-in-law, now a widow. He held the line, though, on the question of his own name, as evidenced by the dual shingles at the entrance to their two-story home in this suburb of Yokohama; one bears his mother-in-law's name and the other bears his own. His wife took the name Takimura.
"My parents were very reluctant to have me come live here, and said that if Yukari's family insisted on this, they should come and visit, to make their case directly, and pay their respects," said Mr. Takimura, 39. "From my family's way of thinking, living like this was a big sacrifice. To drop my name on top of that would have been difficult to accept."
It helped that Mr. Takimura had an older brother who accepted primary responsibility for their parents' care.
As compromise arrangements like that reached by the Takimura family grow in number, experts say the Japanese family is shifting from a model that was once heavily centered on male-based succession and inheritance, to one of highly variable geometry. The shift's driving force is the increasingly open and sometimes raw tug of war between the parents of brides and grooms to determine which side will reap such vital benefits from their children as care in old age and maintenance of the family gravesite.
Japan's elderly are the beneficiaries of this country's economic golden age of the 1960's and 1970's. Many have huge personal savings, and immensely expensive urban real estate as a result. And, consequently, the contest between families for the allegiance of children has become inevitably intertwined with struggles over inheritance rights. Indeed, more and more men are being lured away from their own families toward those of their wives by the promise of financial security.
"There is a very big competition taking place for the care that the children's generation can offer the elderly," said Mariko Fujiwara, research director of the Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living, in Tokyo. "Suppose you have both a son and a daughter. The chances are that you prefer to have your own daughter take care of you in old age, rather than depend upon my daughter who marries your son. You might not get along with your daughter-in-law, but you know your daughter very well."
The struggles that are increasingly taking place along these lines are eroding the male-driven family structure common in Japan. The problem is only intensified by the fact that many families now have only one child, making the struggle for children's loyalty particularly fierce among aging parents.
"The fact that more wives' parents tend to live locally in the city makes it more reasonable for the daughters to bring their husbands into their parents' house, even though they accept the husbands' name, which is a very twisted arrangement," Ms. Fujiwara said. "Instead of patrilineal and patrilocal families, we are quickly moving toward a system that is bilateral. There is no difference between the status of the husband or wife's family. Often, wealth, property or social status determine which side wins."
In the case of the Takimura family, Shigeko Takada, the 66-year-old mother of Yukari Takimura, shifts from the indirectness and euphemism typical of women her age to a matter-of-fact manner when discussing inheritance.
"If someone is taking care of me, it is only natural for me to leave my property to them," she explained in the living room of her handsome, two-story home. "Of course, I should also leave something for my other daughter."
Mr. Takimura was hearing his mother-in-law's intentions for the first time, but also made it clear that property considerations had helped sway his decision about which family to live with.
"My salary was not big enough to buy a house in Yokohama," he said. "I figured as long as I live here, I don't have that problem. Maybe eventually, I thought, I would inherit the house."
The effects are still subtle in many cases, playing themselves out behind the closed doors of the home, but many experts say that ultimately among the most important consequences of the emergence of the wife's family as a powerful force will be the strengthening of the role of women themselves in Japan. They now stand to take a large stride toward equality with men.
By reputation, Japanese husbands are a fairly callous lot, prone to spending scant time with the children, doing almost no housekeeping and staying out late several nights a week drinking with buddies from work. A traditional adage told here captures both the husband's and the wife's roles with the three commands uttered upon his arrival home in the evening: dinner, bath, bed.
"Women are becoming much stronger in Japan, and their strength often derives from the strength of the parents, including their financial strength and property holdings," said Masahiro Yamada, a sociologist at Gakugeidai University in Tokyo. "We call young men living with their wives' families in urban areas apple polishers, meaning they are always trying to be more considerate of their wives' needs. If not, they risk being thrown out."
"Women are well aware of this new power, and are growing much less patient with their husbands, and susceptible to anger."
As a firstborn son, Hiroshi Shimazawa, 45, a writer for the Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspaper in Tokyo, was expected to live with his parents, but he took up with his new wife's family instead.
"It is well-known that wives often don't get along with their in-laws, so in the interest of harmony I agreed that we would live with her family instead," he said.
As in most such decisions, there were other, complex considerations, he allowed, from the fact that his wife's family's home was more convenient for his commute to work, to the fact that his wife was pregnant and it made sense to have her near relatives since his workday often stretched late into the evening.
Eventually, in fact, Mr. Shimazawa and his parents-in-law agreed to purchase land together in Chiba, a southern suburb of Tokyo, and build a two-story house, with the living quarters joined by an external staircase.
Since their wedding in the mid-1980's, though, Mr. Shimazawa said he has felt the growing influence of his wife's parents over his marriage.
"It is true that if we have a little quarrel my wife can always run up to the second floor to get away from me," he said, chuckling. "If I look for the positive side, though, when she goes upstairs, her parents often say that what she is quarreling about is a petty thing, and she will come back down and maybe the whole thing will be forgotten."
Asked how he had accustomed himself to this kind of oversight by his wife's parents, he sighed. "Sometimes, I admit, I want to get away for a while," he said. "I just feel like going on a trip alone."
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