Divorce and the Romance of Independence in Contemporary Japan
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Intimate Disconnections Intimate Disconnections Divorce and the Romance of Independence in Contemporary Japan allison alexy The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London This book is freely available in an open access digital edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the University of Michigan. Learn more at the TOME website: openmonographs.org. This work is being made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non- Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2020 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2020 Printed in the United States of America 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-13 : 978- 0- 226- 69965- 3 (cloth) ISBN-13 : 978- 0- 226- 70095- 3 (paper) ISBN-13 : 978- 0- 226- 70100- 4 (e- book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226701004.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Alexy, Allison, author. Title: Intimate disconnections : divorce and the romance of independence in contemporary Japan / Allison Alexy. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2019045142 | isbn 9780226699653 (cloth) | isbn 9780226700953 (paperback) | isbn 9780226701004 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Divorce—Japan. | Marriage—Japan. Classification: lcc hq937.a549 2020 | ddc 306.89—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045142 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). For my mother, Alice Gorham Contents A Note on Names ix Introduction: Anxiety and Freedom 1 part i The Beginning of the End 1 Japan’s Intimate Political Economy 35 2 Two Tips to Avoid Divorce 60 part ii Legal Dissolutions 3 Constructing Mutuality 85 4 Families Together and Apart 108 part iii Living as an X 5 The Costs of Divorce 135 6 Bonds of Disconnection 155 Conclusion: Endings and New Beginnings 177 Acknowledgments 183 Appendix A: Profile Summaries 187 Appendix B: All Quotes in Original Japanese 191 Notes 199 Bibliography 215 Index 241 A Note on Names All names and identifying details included in this book have been made pseudonymous and have been written in the Japanese order with family names first. In the Japanese language, there are many degrees of familiarity demonstrated by the name you use for someone. Adding - sama to a name, for example, demonstrates your belief that the other person deserves a lot of respect. To a lesser degree, adding -san is often the polite thing to do and is a respectful way to refer to people with whom you have a professional rela- tionship. Usually, - san is added to a person’s family name. Although calling someone Tanaka- san could be glossed as Mr. Tanaka, Mrs. Tanaka, or Ms. Ta- naka, it does not seem nearly as distancing in Japanese as it does in English, and instead just sounds polite. In more intimate relationships, names often get truncated— Makiko becoming Maki or Ma, for example— and gendered suffixes can be added. Thus if I am very close friends with a woman named Tanaka Makiko, I might call her Maki- chan or Ma- chan, whereas a stranger would use Tanaka- san or maybe Tanaka- sama. Following these conventions, although I have changed all names in the book, I represent different kinds of names as a way giving the reader a sense of relationships. Each name is a negotiation that demonstrates the quality of our relationship, and I have maintained these variations in the pseudonyms I am using. Thus, I refer to some people using -san, some by first names, some by nicknames. There is nothing systematic, but the complexity reflects the reality of our relationships. Many people referred to me as Ally, Ally-chan, or Ally- san, which conveniently capture the sounds of both my first and last names. introduction Anxiety and Freedom In February 2006, I stepped into an elevator with a middle-aged Japanese man. I had never met him before and we had no connection but, presumably noticing that I did not look Japanese, he struck up a conversation by politely asking why I was in Tokyo. When I explained I was researching divorce and contemporary family change, he responded with a bit of nervous laughter and then said, “All the men I know are scared. We’re all scared.” With little prompt- ing from me, this man volunteered his fear of divorce or, more specifically, his anxiety that his wife would divorce him against his will. He shared these very personal worries even before he introduced himself. Yamaguchi- san’s will- ingness to discuss these fears with a stranger was matched by his assuredness that he wasn’t the only one feeling anxious. As scared as Yamaguchi-san was of getting divorced, he was sure other men were in similar positions because divorce was a threat hanging over many of them. As we walked to the nearest train station, he elaborated on his reasons for worrying that his wife might leave him, including their separate hobbies and friend groups, as well as his career that kept him frequently out of their home. Those reasons were no less real for being so common, but divorce was also in the air. A recent legal change stood to provide divorcing wives more financial stability than ever granted before. This seismic shift had made Yamaguchi-san, and other married men like him, suddenly more anxious that their wives would abandon them. At the same time, other people felt distinctly different emotions in imagin- ing divorce. A middle- aged woman, Nagako- san giggled as she told me about her plans to divorce her husband. She was gleeful at the thought. As a house- wife in her midfifties who had supported her husband’s career for more than twenty years, Nagako- san embodied stereotypes of gendered labor division in Japanese postwar society. She started narrating a litany of her husband’s 2 introduction serious faults a few minutes after I met her. She had been unhappy in the mar- riage for years but finding email evidence that he had been having a long- term affair was the final straw— or almost the final straw. At our first meeting, in a support group organized around family issues, Nagako-san had not yet made legal moves to divorce her husband but was visibly enjoying her plans to do so. In contrast to Yamaguchi-san, for whom divorce portended only looming solitude, Nagako- san veritably exploded with joy imagining all the possibili- ties divorce could manifest for her. As she described it, divorce symbolized a vital step toward freedom and happiness. Although divorce has been legal in Japan for centuries, and the divorce rate has risen unsteadily throughout the postwar period, early in the twenty- first century divorce in Japan rapidly became a newly visible and viable op- tion in ways it had never been before. People who had never before thought seriously about divorce were fantasizing about leaving their spouses. Some moved past fantasizing to explicit planning and took concrete steps to end marriages. Others were anxious they might get suddenly abandoned. Such fears and fantasies were reflected in popular media, which were awash in dis- course about divorce. Television dramas that centered around divorce gar- nered surprisingly high ratings especially with older viewers, and newspapers and weekly magazines published “how to” guides about requesting divorces or navigating the legal process, as well as “how not to” advice about improv- ing a marriage (Saitō 2005). Daily talk shows offered quizzes to measure mari- tal strength and often tailored answers by gender and age, suggesting certain actions, for instance, that older men might take to improve their marriages. Guidebooks gave generalized advice, such as in Divorce Makes Some People Happy but Others Miserable and Definitely No Regrets: The Easy Guide to Di vorce (Yanagihara and Ōtsuka 2013; Okano 2001). But publishers also targeted smaller segments of readership with advice books titled Parents and Children after Divorce, My Husband is a Stranger, and The Best Divorce Strategies for Men (Himuro 2005; Okano 2008; Tsuyuki 2010). The government and local municipalities published new websites advising men and, especially, women about their legal rights after divorce. People who sought therapeutic counsel- ing found many more options than had been available ten or twenty years before, and anyone interested could now easily find on- or offline counseling sessions, support groups, or therapists. With all of this activity, divorce had become a more viable option in mainstream consciousness, and many people were thinking, planning, worrying, and fantasizing about it. Although it was slightly unusual for Yamaguchi- san to strike up a conversation about divorce with a stranger in an elevator, that kind of spontaneous attention to the topic was not as extreme as it might seem, given that debating the risks and hopes anxiety and freedom 3 surrounding divorce had become a mainstay of popular, private, and govern- mental discourse. This book examines divorce as a moment of personal and familial transi- tion, situated within a broader context in which previous norms, social con- tracts, and implicit guarantees are no longer secure but might nonetheless re- main attractive to some people.