Rearing the Family, Moving Society: Rethinking Gender, Kinship, and Work Through Japan’S Fathering Movement

Home , Akira Nagatsuma, Company Man (Heroes), Cooking Papa, Hachiro Okonogi, Ikigai, My Sons

Rearing the Family, Moving Society: Rethinking Gender, Kinship, and Work through Japan’s Fathering Movement

Nicholas Michael Feinig

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Department of Anthropology University of Toronto

Rearing the Family, Moving Society: Rethinking Gender, Kinship, and Work through Japan’s Fathering Movement

Nicholas Michael Feinig

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Anthropology University of Toronto

2020 Abstract

Based on fieldwork conducted in Tokyo from 2015 to 2016 around the non-profit organization “Fathering Japan”, this ethnography follows the practice of fatherhood among participants of ikumen movements. Often translated as “childrearing man”, ikumen refers to fathers who actively engage in chores and childcare. Ikumen movements emerged as Japan’s powerful corporations weakened following the economic downturn of the early 1990s. Neoliberal restructuring across the following decades has further undercut the financial stability of households as secure fulltime positions with a “family wage” are replaced by precarious contract work. With dual income homes becoming the norm, ikumen have become a key figure in the renegotiation of the gendered division of labour. While originally a grassroots effort led by activist fathers campaigning for the recognition and legal protection of paternity leave, the ikumen concept has since been adopted by the state and industry. Recent state initiatives promote ikumen as national heroes shoring up the nation’s sagging birthrate and economy, while branded “masculine” lifestyle publications hail ikumen as fashionable consumers. In this context, how do ikumen movement participants negotiate the existing middle-class masculine norm of the salaryman – a salaried corporate worker – and this emerging model of nurturing fatherhood? By closely attending to the complexities and nuances of the everyday practice of fatherhood among ikumen, this dissertation documents how these men weave their experience as fathers and employees together with family history and memory. In this process, they cultivate diverse forms of relationality beyond the parent-child bond. By enacting caring fatherhood in their homes, communities, and workplaces, they also compose fluid and flexible masculine identities. The dissertation argues that the “fathering” or “rearing” of a child is a practice that not only changes iii men’s relationship with children and spouses, but also forges new kinds of relationships with neighbors, “papa” friends, co-workers, and society. iv

Acknowledgments

With the exception of names provided in this section, in the list of references, and public or celebrity figures, all names contained in this dissertation are pseudonyms.

My studies were made capable by the financial support of the School of Graduate Studies and Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, the Dr. David Chu Scholarship in Asia Pacific Studies, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and grants from Yokohama National University.

I want to begin by extending my deepest and most sincere thanks to my interlocutors, both within the fathering movement and without. The fathers and mothers I came to know over my time in Tokyo were accommodating and patient as I oriented myself in their world. To the members of specific organizations, namely Fathering Japan, I owe a special debt of gratitude. Their drinking parties and lectures, shared books and articles, and social media exchanges are at the heart of this dissertation. I hope that, in my own small way, I’ve captured a bit of the change to which they have dedicated their lives. In particular, I am grateful to Tetsuya Ando for welcoming me in the early stages of my research, and to the support and friendship of Shinobu Okido throughout the project. Her knowledge of Fathering Japan continues to be an asset and I consider myself very fortunate to have met her. Without the assistance of Noriko Suzuki, a co- presenter at a conference I attended in 2015, this project may not have been possible. It was thanks to her kindness that I was introduced to Chizuko Ueno and the women of WAN, with whom I continue to enjoy a fruitful professional relationship. Ueno-sensei subsequently provided a vital introduction to Ando-sama.

I am thankful to have made many wonderful friends in Japan who helped to facilitate both my research and life in a foreign country more generally. In the early, sometimes frightening days of fieldwork, Kathryn Goldfarb’s assurance and assistance were a real comfort. It was through Kathryn that I met Glenda Roberts, who warmly welcomed me to her zemi at Waseda University. The zemi members were equally welcoming and provided me with the academic community I felt I was missing while abroad. Hiro Matsubara and Asato Saito, then of Yokohama National University, were wonderful hosts during pilot work. I am very grateful for Matsubara-sensei’s continued support and concern for me and hope I can one day repay his kindness. Special thanks to my good friends Matthew van Etten, Kiyoto Mashima, and Michel Marion for enriching my life in Japan.

In Toronto, I consider myself very fortunate to have worked alongside some of the brightest people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. Here, I can acknowledge only a few. Shayne Dahl and Nate Renner, as researchers who also worked in Japan, were a great resource (and better drinking buddies). Johanna Pokorny has likely read more of this dissertation than anyone outside of my committee, and I’m happy to say her influence is very much visible in the final draft. William Hebert, too, played a crucial role in shaping my thinking. This dissertation is much better for it. Sarah Williams’ brilliant work on midwives has been a productive counterpoint for my own. Throughout the writing process, and indeed my entire graduate education, the insight and encouragement of Andrea Muehlebach, a valued member of my core committee, along with that of Jesook Song and Lisa Yoneyama have been constants. I also thank them for serving as my dissertation’s examiners. My external examiner, Miyako Inoue, is a very welcome addition and I am grateful both for her time and for her research, which greatly influenced my own thinking. I v appreciate the comments provided by members of the Dissertation Writing Workshop in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto from 2018 through 2019. A special thanks to Sarah O’Sullivan and Shirin Gerami, great friends without whose constant belittlement (“empowerment”) and distraction this dissertation would have been finished far sooner. Their intellectual contributions are also evident throughout this text.

I met Shiho Satsuka when I was only 19, a student in her third-year undergraduate course. It was because of her intervention that I pursued graduate school, travelled widely, and met some of my dearest friends. I have always admired Shiho’s sharp mind, incredible work ethic, and intellectual curiosity, and consider myself very fortunate to have worked so closely with her for more than a decade. She set my bar for success, and I owe my strength as a writer and researcher to her standards. Sandra Bamford has always had a confounding level of faith in my abilities and I am thankful for that. Where I saw weakness in my work, which was a frequent occurrence, Sandra saw strength. Our meetings always gave me peace of mind. Working in tandem with Shiho, I could not have asked for better supervision. My deepest thanks to you both.

To my parents, Ann Voyame and Harry Feinig, and my brother Matthew Feinig: thank you. Being apart from you, along with my uncle Mike Feinig, oma Louisa Feinig, uncle Jerry O’Sullivan, and grandpa Arthur Voyame, over the course of fieldwork is perhaps my greatest regret in undertaking this project. I’m trying to make up for this lost time now. To my father, Harry, a note (should you ever read this). Through this process I learned, finally, to see what a tremendous, exceptional father you are; something Matthew and I took for granted growing up (not knowing any father figure save you). On the subject of fatherhood, your example is worth infinitely more than this dissertation.

Finally, to Katy Wang. I realized early on I could never complete this dissertation for myself, but I could do it for you. I love you.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments...... iv

Table of Contents ...... vi

List of Figures ...... ix

Notes on Transliteration ...... x

Glossary of Terms ...... xi

Chapter 1 Introduction ...... 1

1.1 Rearing Fathers ...... 1

1.2 The Fathering Movement ...... 10

1.3 Fathering and Kinship ...... 14

1.4 Fathering, Gender Performance, and Care ...... 23

1.5 Fathering and Masculine Archetypes ...... 29

1.6 Methodology ...... 39

1.7 Dissertation Outline ...... 48

Chapter 2 The Modern Father ...... 52

2.1 Boom and Bust ...... 52

2.2 Fatherhood and Modernity ...... 56

2.3 The Meiji Restoration: The Household as Practice and Legal Imaginary ...... 63

2.4 The Showa Period, Post 1945: Salarymen and Sengyō Shufu ...... 74

2.5 Ikumen as a State Project ...... 81

2.6 Ikumen as Consumers ...... 91

2.7 Conclusion ...... 98

Chapter 3 The Ikumen Backlash ...... 99

3.1 Critiquing Ikumen...... 99

3.2 Ikumen Modoki...... 105

3.3 Yarisugi Ikumen ...... 121 vii

3.4 An Organization for the Elimination of Ikumen ...... 130

3.5 Conclusion ...... 134

Chapter 4 The Papa Switch ...... 135

4.1 What Ought a Father Do? ...... 135

4.2 Natural Mothers, Mechanical Fathers ...... 143

4.3 Kazuyuki: An “Independent” Father ...... 151

4.4 Hormonal Mothers, Rational Fathers ...... 155

4.5 Koji: Diverse Histories ...... 161

4.6 Switched On, Switched Off ...... 171

4.7 Conclusion ...... 179

Chapter 5 More Than Chores ...... 181

5.1 Doing Chores, Doing Gender ...... 181

5.2 Departing from Daikokubashira ...... 187

5.3 Mama Care ...... 202

5.4 Mama Care as Technique ...... 213

5.5 Conclusion ...... 228

Chapter 6 Rearing the Community ...... 230

6.1 Men Out of Place ...... 230

6.2 Ikimen ...... 237

6.3 The Fathering Circle ...... 242

6.4 Fathering for All? ...... 246

6.5 Growing as Ikimen ...... 252

6.6 Making Papa Friends ...... 255

6.7 Papakai and the Deconstruction of the Nomikai ...... 262

6.8 Ikimen Papakai ...... 266

6.9 Conclusion ...... 275 viii

Chapter 7 Ikuboss ...... 277

7.1 Rearing the Company: Work-Life Balance Reform and the Case of Matsuri Takahashi ...... 277

7.2 Navigating Corporate Subjectivity ...... 284

7.3 Ikuboss Parameters...... 291

7.4 Making Ikubosses...... 294

7.5 Representing Ikubosses ...... 298

7.6 Managing as a Father: Noritoshi ...... 303

7.7 Efficiency and History: Tomohiro ...... 309

7.8 Redefining Reproduction: Keiichi ...... 314

7.9 Individualism and Diversity: Makoto ...... 318

7.10 Conclusion ...... 323

Chapter 8 Conclusion ...... 324

8.1 Conclusion ...... 324

References ...... 334

List of Figures

Figure 1. The poster from the Sam campaign………………………………………………….(93)

Figure 2. Ikujiren’s May Day poster…………………………………………………………...(93)

Figure 3. The “office samurai” or “ikumen samurai” appears on a childcare leave request form designed by the Ikumen Project………………………………………………………………..(96)

Figure 4. An international comparison of time spent on chores and childcare by gender prepared by the Ikumen Project………………………………………………………………………….(98)

Figure 5. An ad from the FQ Japan web magazine featuring the “SLINGBOX”…………….(102)

Figure 6. A comic strip from Tottori Prefecture’s “The Real Life of the Ikumen who Tries his

Best”…………………………………………………………………………………………..(120)

Figure 7. An illustrated example of ninpu taiken from “Becoming a Father in Saitama”………(157)

Figure 8. A pregnancy and child development timeline from “Papa Switch On! The Road to Gifu

Ikumen”……………………………………………………………………………………….(159)

Figure 9. An anecdote featured in “Papa Switch On! The Road to Gifu Ikumen”. The narrator recounts attempting to playfully breastfeed his child while co-bathing………………………(176)

Notes on Transliteration

In this dissertation, Japanese names are denoted in the English style with the given (“first”) name preceding the family (“last”) name. The modified Hepburn system (Hebon-shiki) is used to romanize the Japanese language. Long vowels are indicated using macrons (ā, ī, ū, ē, ō), with the exception of proper nouns that are commonly written in English without macrons (ie. “Tokyo”).

Glossary of Terms

Throughout this dissertation, Japanese terms are accompanied by an English language translation when they are first introduced. In instances where the particular kanji used to write the word convey crucial elements of its meaning that are lost in the process of translation, they have been included alongside the romanticized text. The following is a list of key Japanese terms and phrases repeated throughout the text. Those that occur only once alongside their translation are omitted.

Romanization Japanese Definition

Amae 甘え Lack of self-reliance; depending on others

Arubaito アルバイト Part-time work (German loan word)

Ba 場 Place; spot

Bukatsu 部活 School club activities

Bureikō 無礼講 Free and easy gathering where rank is temporarily suspended

Daibāshitei ダイバーシティ Diversity (English loan word)

Daikokubashira 大黒柱 Central pillar (of the home)

Danshi 男子 Man; boy

Fāzāringu ファザーリング Fathering (English loan word) xii

Furītā フリーター Freeter; person subsisting on part-time work

Hi seishain 非正社員 Non-permanent employee

Ibasho ga nai 居場所がない Without a place to belong

Ie 家 Household; lineage; the physical structure of the home

Ikemen イケメン Handsome man

Ikimen イキメン A man who participates in his local community

Ikuboss イクボス A manager dedicated to improving work-life balance in their company

Ikuji 育児 Childcare; child-rearing

Ikumen イクメン Child-rearing man

Izakaya 居酒屋 Japanese bar that also serves various snacks

Karōshi 過労死 Death by overwork

Kazoku 家族 Family

Kōhai 後輩 Junior (at work or school)

Kosodate 子育て Child-rearing

Meishi 名刺 Business card xiii

Mikoshi 神輿 Portable shrine

Modoki もどき Pseudo-; Mock-

Mōretsu 猛烈 Go-getter

Ninpu taiken 妊婦体験 Pregnancy experience

Nomikai 飲み会 Drinking party

Papa パパ Papa (English loan word)

Papakai パパ会 A gathering of fathers

Ryōsaikenbo 良妻賢母 Good wife, wise mother

Sararīman サラリーマン Salaryman

Seikatsu 生活 Livelihood; way of life

Sekkyoukuteki ni 積極的に Proactively; assertively

Seishain 正社員 Regular employee

Sengyō shufu 専業主婦 Housewife

Senpai 先輩 Senior (at work or school)

Settai 接待 Business entertainment (of clients)

Shakai 社会 Society

Yarisugi やりすぎ Overkill; doing too much 1

Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Rearing Fathers

“Men who rear change the family. Society moves” (Sodateru otoko ga kazoku o kaeru. Shakai ga

ugoku) — The Ikumen Project slogan

This is an ethnography of a group of men in Tokyo who are learning to be fathers. They read textbooks, attend lectures, author and circulate blog posts, and watch instructional videos; content produced and popularized by non-profit organizations and government initiatives dedicated to changing Japan’s deeply entrenched gendered division of labour. They begin from a place that assumes no prior knowledge of childcare or familial intimacy. They learn the mechanical skills of warming milk and changing diapers, but also to hold their child, to listen to its heartbeat. They learn to care, too, for their spouses. They learn to listen to their needs, to appreciate their experience as women and mothers, and to follow their guidance. Through this process of learning, fatherhood becomes something more: more than a kin relation, more than familial intimacy, more than the home. The same attention and investment that fosters connections within the home fosters connections to other fathers, forming networks of solidarity.

It creates and strengthens, grows, and develops community organizations, schools, and workplaces. Fathering is an imperfect project: one that is taken up with differing motivations and levels of interest, full of ambivalence and contradiction, success and failure. But it is one through which I argue that these fathers, who I refer to as members of the “fathering movement”, are building relations beyond kinship. It may be unusual, then, that I want to open this account with the story of a friend and father who is not one of these dedicated few— the sort of man whose story might otherwise be lost in a sea of “super daddies” and “house husbands”. He also happens 2 to be the sort of man to which the fathering movement aims to appeal: a man who, quite unexpectedly, feels without a place.

Yuta1 held his daughter aloft, at arm’s length, staring at her quizzically. The child, only a few months old, returned his gaze in kind. We sat aside his wife, Ai, who was tending to its fussing twin still strapped into her stroller. Yuta, a self-proclaimed salaryman (sararīman), had been grappling with the reality of fatherhood. Initially dismissive of the prospect of contributing any labour to the upkeep of the home, I had observed his awkward, tentative steps into parenting.

Waiting outside of a restaurant in a Yokohama shopping complex, he poked and prodded his child, as if she were some alien specimen from a faraway planet. Holding her beneath her arms, he gently waved her to and fro in the air between us. Ai cast a weary gaze towards her husband.

In conversations beyond the example playing out in front of me, I had heard that these early days of parenting had been rocky. Yuta worked long hours as a software engineer and spent those evenings he had free drinking with colleagues. “There is no need for me to help” he explained to me when I asked him about his responsibilities as a father. “My wife is at home every day. She plays with the kids, she feeds them. Every day, I am trying my best at work”. Their roles as husband and wife, in his mind, were firm and satisfactory.

Yuta’s description of the division of labour in his home echoes the old adage “otoko wa shigoto, onna wa katei” (men should be at work, women should be at home2). It recalls an idealized time in Japan’s past where the home was managed by sengyō shufu, “professional housewives” (Ochiai 1996), and the workplace dominated by salarymen, proud corporate

1 All names of research participants in this dissertation are pseudonyms with the exception of public figures.

2 This phrase is translated in many different ways into English because this particular Japanese grammatical construction is verb-less. I follow Ayami Nakatani’s (2006) translation here. 3 warriors (Dasgupta 2013; Ueno 1994) who drank heavily, worked long hours, and supported the home and nation through zealous self-sacrifice. Salarymen have such symbolic weight in Japan that they have been described as the “archetypical citizen” (Mackie 2003: 203). This “postwar

Japanese family system” (Ochiai and Filler 2005) is synonymous with the nation’s economic miracle. Although historians have rightly called into question the ubiquity of this household arrangement (a subject I return to later in this introduction), it carried— and continues to carry— remarkable ideological cachet (Dasgupta 2011). However, Japan, like many other nations, continues to grapple with the implications of the second demographic transition (see Lesthaeghe,

2010). Over two tumultuous decades of economic uncertainty, a rapidly aging population and low birth rate have raised significant concerns, in academia and at large, as to the utility— and sustainability— of the nuclear household (Miyasaka 2008; Peng 2012). During the post war period, Japan’s unprecedented economic development was supported by strong ties between corporation and family, with the former providing family health insurance and childcare benefits

(variably in lieu of or in partnership with the state) in recognition of the unparalleled commitment required of its male employees (Ueno 2009; Yoda and Harootunian 2006; Morris-

Suzuki 1998; Sato 1999; Gerteis 2011; Kimoto 1997; Gottfried and O’Reilly 2002). The secure white-collar positions that enabled this particular welfare system have been in rapid decline since the collapse of the bubble economy in the early 1990s (Yoda and Harootunian 2006; Standing

2011; Mosk 2008). In this new era of neoliberal reform, Japan’s well documented shift towards widespread precarious employment (Standing 2011; Driscoll 2007) has been coupled with draconian cuts to spending on social services and safety nets (Allison 2012; Miura 2012).

Moreover, the post-bubble era has seen more women enter the workplace as a consequence of both legal reforms, including The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination

Against Women of 1985 and the Equal Employment Opportunity Law of 1986, and the 4 increasing necessity of dual income homes (Mackie 2003). The result of these changes has been a significant care labour deficit as men and women face overwhelming demand on their time and finances (Allison 2012; Ohinata 2000; Ueno 2009).

Yuta is part of the shrinking group of men who are able to secure a permanent, salaried, white collar job. He proudly self-identifies as a “salaryman”, reflecting some awareness of the increasing rarity of men who could do the same. A young man of 26, Yuta never knew the sense of plenty that marked the peak of Japan’s boom years. Instead, he and his peers came of age in a time of insecurity. In post-bubble Japan, Inoue (2016) explains, “this new political economic reality brought a kind of popular cynicism and disenchantment to teleologies and grand narratives that previously functioned to provide people with the symbolic world of meaning- making in their lives” (163). Chief among these is what was once described to me as the “narrow path to a good life”— the transition from prestigious high school to prestigious university to prestigious corporation and the post-war family system that both supported and was produced by this trajectory (see Brinton 2011). This “grand narrative” resonates with fewer people each passing year. With a fertility rate of 1.4 as of 2017, the second lowest growth rate in compensation per hour worked among OECD nations, and irregular and temporary employment composing roughly 30 percent of all workers (a figure that grows year over year), the biological and social reproduction at the heart of this narrative is increasingly strained (OECD 2019).

Contemporary ethnographic research conducted in Japan has revealed in its stead a growing sense of loss and placeless-ness. This is captured most succinctly by a phrase to which Allison

(2012) draws special attention: “ibasho ga nai” (without a place to belong3). There are a

3 Allison translates ibasho ga nai as “without a place to call home”. A literal translation is simply “without a place to be”, but the connotation is one of fitting in. An oft repeated phrase in articles on loneliness and social isolation in Japan is “shokuba ya katei de jibun no ibasho ga nai” (at work or at home you don’t have a place you belong”), 5 multitude of examples4 of this phenomenon well documented by anthropologists that reveal a fraying social fabric and a profound sense of alienation.

Yuta, like many other fathers I met over the course of fieldwork, feels a similar sense of alienation. However, unlike the freeters or hikikomori who are so often the subject of discussion,

Yuta does not live in precarious conditions. His salaried position was a blessing. Yet, over drinks in smoke filled bars, he would confess disillusionment with his work. These were not the typical complaints of a haggard employee butting heads with incompetent managers (stories of which

Yuta also shared). This was a deeper ambivalence. He felt no connection to the future of his company and, he confides, no desire to produce his best work despite public claims to the contrary. His salary was not large enough to promise luxury purchases down the road. Career advancement extended his hours more than his pay. Another father in similar circumstances eloquent described it as a violation of Japan’s social contract (shakai keiyaku): companies expect their employees to embody the ideal of the salaryman while offering less and less in return. In his search for purpose in life (ikigai), Yuta had begun to look to the home.

which invokes the home directly but distinct from the term “ibasho”. I prefer to translate “ibasho” as a “place to belong”, as the English “to belong” better mirrors the breadth of application in the concept of “ibasho” and relies less on universalizing a conception of “home” as a point of reference for feelings of belonging.

4 “Freeters” (furītā), those who work exclusively in part-time and casual positions, compose a growing segment of the workforce. With this loss of access to permanent employment, freeters face economic insecurity, judgement from peers and family members, and a sense that “adulthood” represents an inaccessible ideal (Cook 2013; 2014; 2016). NEETs (not in education, employment, or training) and the often sensationalized hikkikomori (social isolates who often refuse to leave the home) have received a great deal of attention. Uninterested or unable to work, these individuals live in a state of self-imposed isolation. Men laid off late in their careers or who retire are treated with hostility by their wives and children as they spend more time in their homes. Without a role left to fulfill, they have been derisively referred to as “industrial waste” (sangyō haikibutsu) or “wet fallen leaves” (nureochiba, which stubbornly cling to brooms in the same way these men cling to their wives). Seniors, isolated from their families and neighbors, pass away unnoticed in their apartments (Allison 2013) or suffer abuse and neglect at the hands of their reluctant caretakers (Kimio in Fujimura-Fanselow 2011). 6

This confluence of symbolic and structural disorder that has characterized the “Lost

Three Decades5” (1990 to present) has certainly had a destructive effect on many communities.

Yet, as a researcher I was drawn to what I saw as a tremendous diversification in ways of living that seemed to be emerging in Japan, specifically a litany of so called “masculinities” oriented around practices of care for both the self and others, that made conscionable the reorientation

Yuta was now exploring. Of particular interest to me was the tremendously popular ikumen.

Derived from the Japanese ikuji — “child rearing”— and the English “men”, ikumen represent an inversion of the gendered division of labour: playing with children, helping with homework, organizing events at school, and assisting with cooking and cleaning. The term itself, coined in

2006 by advertising company Hakuhodo, is a play on the word ikemen (handsome man). Ikumen emerged amongst a plethora of similar neologisms attempting to capture the subversive masculinities that gained traction in the press in the new millennium. Alongside kajidan6, bento danshi7, and soshokukei danshi8 (among many more), ikumen were seized upon by the press and academia as an archetype of “new fatherhood” (see Gregory and Milner 2011; McGill 2014).

On a global scale, anthropologists, gender theorists, and sociologists were tracking the development of similar clusters of male gendered practice in an array of sites. In North American and European contexts, researchers have identified significant shifts in relation to expectations of

5 The “Lost Two Decades” is the more common moniker. However, counting back to the bubble collapse from the time of writing, we’re now technically approaching the end of the “third lost decade”.

6 Literally “chore boys”— men who perform household chores.

7 “Bento boys”— men who pack their own lunch to bring to the office (see Yuen 2014 for an illuminating discussion).

8 Literally “herbivorous boys”— men characterized by sexual disinterest or passivity in relationships with women (see Charlebois 2013; Saladin 2017). 7 the gendered division of labour (Roberts 2017; Kramer et al. 2013) as families there encounter economic hurdles similar to those in Japan. This has led to a spike in attention to men’s domestic role and changing responsibilities particularly in dual income families. Such is the level of this attention that we have seen the emergence of a new space for the theorization of what is being called “caring masculinities” (Elliot 2015), under which studies of “new fatherhood”— fathers who contribute to childcare and/or chores, often as primary caregivers— are typically nested

(Børve and Bungum 2015; Burnett et al. 2013; Cannito 2019; Ranson 2001). This is a nascent subfield that attends to what Gutman (1997) lamented was a lack of scholarship dedicated to understanding masculinity outside social worlds dominated by aggression and violence. Work exploring caring masculinities is predominantly concerned with the role played by these men in the overarching project of gender equality. As a result, these studies tend to be evaluative in nature. There are numerous examples (see Bridges 2010; Masters 2010; Wilkins 2009; Barber

2008; Messerschmidt 2010). Anderson (2009) has influentially argued that so called “inclusive masculinities” upend existing structures of gendered inequality. In his study of the mythopoetic men’s movement, Messner (1993) concludes that these softer expressions of masculinity may in fact undermine efforts in favour of the emancipation of women, a line or argumentation he continued in his 2007 analysis of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s public displays of compassionate masculinity. Heath’s (2003) study of new fatherhood among Christian men shows increased participation in childcare is coupled with a renewed emphasis on the submission of women to men in the home.

When I arrived in Tokyo in September of 2015 to begin my investigation of ikumen, I was surprised to find that assessments of fatherhood based around temporality— “new fathers” marking progression and change versus their backward predecessors— were commonplace.

Indeed, they constituted much of the popular discourse surrounding ikumen (which I address in 8 detail in Chapter 3). Were these fathers actually helping with housework, or was the division of labour more or less the same as it had been in during Japan’s boom years? Did they represent a new kind of “softer” masculinity, or was this a repackaging of traits associated with salarymen?

Were they motivated by a desire to raise their child, or a desire for time off work? In short, was this truly a change in the behaviour of fathers as they took on more feminized care work, or was it more of the same inattention and disinterest in progressive trappings? These discussions oscillated between two points: the figure of the salaryman, framed as the embodiment of tradition and patriarchal masculinity, and the figure of the ikumen, which subversively challenged this status quo by upending the gendered division of labour and claiming belonging among the global community of modern, “new fathers”.

Yet, whenever I encountered these assessments in the existing literature, in popular articles, or in conversations with friends and interlocutors, I would recall my dinner in

Yokohama with Yuta. Despite his insistence on a rigidly gendered division of labour, I had watched Yuta swaddle his children, feed them, and change them. He was learning— slowly, uncertainly, bashfully— to care for them. These were skills that did not come naturally to him.

Neither did simple interactions— play or displays of affection. Lowering his daughter onto his lap, Yuta begins to gently pinch her cheek. He increases the pressure until the child lets out a small squeak. Amused, Yuta repeatedly pinches the child, pausing to look at me with a smile.

Quickly, those squeaks turn to tears. Exasperated, Ai snatches her daughter away. She scolds

Yuta in a sharp whisper: “what are you doing? She was so quiet”. She returns the child to the stroller alongside her sister, stroking her head, before shooting Yuta a cold glare. Visibly deflated, Yuta packs their belongings into their tote bag before shuffling off to inquire about the wait. He pauses by the stroller to pat his daughter on the head. “Sorry for corporal punishment” he says in English, looking to me to confirm that he had used the word correctly. In his attempts 9 to stake out belonging outside the workplace, Yuta had encountered hurdles integrating himself into the home. This was clear from his strained and distant relationship with his spouse and his tepid and confused interactions with his child. Yuta is ambivalent in his relation to fatherhood, torn between corporate expectation and his own desire for something more. Like many men in post-bubble Japan, he struggles to enmesh himself in meaningful relations in the home and in the corporation. He feels alienated from the labour of both production and reproduction. Yuta gestures at me to follow as he leaves his wife with the children. Out of earshot of Ai, he strikes up conversation with me once more. “Perhaps it is the case, as you suggested, that the idea

‘otoko wa shigoto, onna wa katei’ (men are work, women are the home) is changing. In Japan, this kind of change is difficult” he tells me.

Yuta’s story is not a triumphant one, but it helps to direct attention to a critical issue that emerged for me in the field. In elucidating the strategies and techniques promoted and disseminated by the fathering movement for parenting, I saw less of the effects of Japan’s current economic and social conditions on the family and instead saw the effects the family— and fathers in particular— are having on communities, schools, corporations, and politics in Japan

(however difficult these effects are to realize, as Yuta suggested). Without omitting them or ignoring their importance, I intervene in this ongoing discussion on fatherhood in Japan as a pragmatic response to demographic change or a response to discourses on gender equality, which tend to uncritically replicate the narrative of the state. This focus may be overly deterministic, assuming that the family is a unit defined by blood and shaped by exigency. Instead, I look to fatherhood in Japan as something pursued agentively by men seeking pleasure and meaning beyond work and to combat feelings of social alienation.

My study examines fatherhood as both a description of kin relations and a subject position from which relations— kin and otherwise— are produced. I follow my interlocutors in 10 calling the practices that produce these relations “fathering” (fāzāringu). While fathering is rooted in an originary kinship relation (that is, the one doing the fathering is recognized as the socially legitimated “father” to one or more children), its scope extends far beyond kinship.

Fathering produces relationality inside the home and outside the home. It is a “kinship making practice”, but one that blurs domain boundaries between the private and public. Rather than ask exclusively what the attribution of fatherhood means for mother/child/family, I argue that we should ask how the kin relation of fatherhood enables new sorts of practices which have ramifications beyond what we typically recognize as “kinship”.

1.2 The Fathering Movement

This dissertation attends to the discourses and activities promoted by what I call the fathering movement9. The fathering movement encompasses an array of non-profit and community organizations, activists, government offices at the municipal, prefectural, and national levels, and men and women invested in changing the division of labour in the home with attention to the role of the father. Ideologically, the fathering movement is indebted to the activism of preceding men’s groups, which are addressed in Chapter 2. Functionally, it owes a great deal to an alliance forged between the largest and most influential of these organizations—

Fathering Japan— and the state.

To understand the origins of this alliance, we need to trace the history of recent government interventions into the gendered division of labour back to the “1.57 shock” of 1989, when census data revealed a then record low fertility rate of 1.57 children per woman. The

1980’s saw major legislative changes which had a significant impact on the gendered

9 For reasons that will become clear in Chapter 3, I have avoided the alternative moniker of the “ikumen movement” given the baggage the term ikumen has accumulated since its introduction some 15 years ago. 11 composition of Japan’s labour market. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of

Discrimination Against Women of 1985 and the Equal Employment Opportunity Law of 1986 had greatly increased female employment in tertiary industry (Mackie 2003). Reports from the

Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare concluded that women in the work force delayed marriage or opted out of the arrangement entirely as their employment prospects improved

(Kelsky 1999). Government organized fertility initiatives in the 1990s targeted these working women, improving the accessibility of public daycare (the so called “Angel Plan” of 1994) and implementing more robust childcare leave laws (notably the Young Childcare Leave Law of

1991). These policies came into effect at the peak of the asset price bubble collapse. As austerity measures were implemented to curtail lasting economic damage, families were called on to fill the void left by shrinking corporate benefits and state cutbacks (Allison 2012; Yoda and

Harootunian 2006; Standing 2011; Driscoll 2007). In a 2001 proposal outlining its vision for a post-Fordist, Japanese-style social welfare (tellingly entitled “Improvement of the Basis of

Family”), the ruling LDP couched neoliberal reform in an appeal to motherly love and a sense of familial obligation. It was a strategic invocation of the values that once brought communities together: a revival of the Japanese citizen duty-bound to the nation, family, and nation-as-family.

The goals of the LDP’s proposal were twofold: to marshal individuals (specifically women) to compensate for the receding state and to encourage the growth of families by tapping into supposedly immutable, gendered facets of the Japanese identity.

Reams of demographic data showing a continued decline in the national birth rate indicated that these early interventions were largely unsuccessful. In spite of significant improvements in hiring practice and contract language, working women comprised a very small subsection of the total population of Japanese women of childbearing age (Ito and Izumi-Taylor

2013). Statistics also showed that working mothers were overwhelmingly single (meaning that 12 they were unlikely to make the decision to have another child) (Raymo et al. 2014). Data culled from its own studies had shown the state that it had overestimated the influence of employment on marriage (neglecting other important variables such as the severity of the recession) and of marriage on childbirth (Retherford et al. 2001). With these missteps fresh in memory, a 2002 study produced by the National Institute of Populations and Social Security Research (NIPSSR) identified a notable decline in the fertility of married couples. New mothers expressed profound feelings of loneliness and isolation from the broader community and were reluctant to revisit or exacerbate ongoing difficulties with the birth of additional children (see Jolivet 1997). A sister survey conducted by the NIPSSR in 2003 found that households in which men made significant childcare contributions were more likely to yield additional children. These findings marked a turning point in government policy. The state began to problematize a perceived lack within nuclear family units rather than a lack of nuclear family units. The inner machinations of the family itself became the primary target of technical intervention, and in turn the scope of active state intervention grew to include fathers in addition to mothers.

The state’s framing of the problem that emerged from these studies was deceptively simple: fathers were not present in the home. In 2002, the Ministry of Health, Labour, and

Welfare’s revised “Plus One Measure Against the Declining Birthrate” included provisions for altering men’s “work-life balance” by reducing working hours and instituting mandatory parental leave for new fathers. Measured against the metric of paternity leave, this initial foray bore little fruit. Fathers experienced so called “paternity harassment” in the workplace, discouraged by superiors and colleagues from taking advantage of legally guaranteed leaves of absence (Otake

2014). Crucially, sociological research revealed profound anxiety among fathers concerning their relationship with their children: they had been hailed as fathers, as though the designation existed 13 a priori, and found themselves without the skills they felt were necessary to fulfill this role (see

Iwata 2014; Ishii-Kuntz et al. 2004; Steinberg et al. 2000).

The obstacles to increasing male participation in the household proved to be more complex than the state had previously imagined. The primary metric through which “fatherhood” was assessed— that is, the percentage of men taking paid leave for the purpose of childcare— was relevant only in a tangential sense. The state had attempted to alter the relationship between men and the corporation as a means of altering the relationship between men and their families rather than address fathers directly. Moreover, the father had only been rendered as an absence, not as an active presence or set of qualities that might be replicated in other homes. The state’s fatherhood question was bifurcated: what sort of fathers should there be, and how can men be molded in this ideal image?

Ikumen, as a concept, had coalesced concurrent with, but independent from, these early state-led interventions. The popularization of ikumen was due in large part to the efforts of two prominent NPOs, both established in 2006 (the same year ikumen was coined by the marketing company Hakuhodo), that advocated for increased paternal involvement in the home: Fathering

Japan and the Ikumen Club. Some 4 years later, in a January 2010 Lower House Budget Meeting, the Minister of Health, Labour, and Welfare Akira Nagatsuma voiced his desire to popularize ikumen (Aoki 2010). In June of that same year, the Ministry launched the Ikumen Project. The

Ikumen Project was able to successfully leverage the networks formed by the burgeoning grassroots fathering movement. The work of Fathering Japan, specifically, was aligned with the state’s ongoing struggle to effectively intervene in the dynamics of the home, and so the two struck up this fruitful partnership. A former Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare employee described the Ikumen Project to me as a kind of marketing arrangement between Fathering Japan and the Ministry and less a formal attempt at coordinated programming. Fathering Japan founder 14

Tetsuya Ando’s promotional savvy, knowledge of the business world, and public profile made him an attractive partner. The Ministry contracted marketing giant Dentsu to create the campaign. It was suggested to me by the same employee that Dentsu had their own motivations for participating. A year prior, the company had coined the term “papa danshi” (“papa men”, men who enthusiastically perform chores and childcare) to refer to a growing sub-section of consumers of childcare related products. Promoting ikumen nationally led to significant expansion of this market fragment. This collaboration between the state, the non-profit sector, and industry led to a period (from roughly 2011 to 2015) now retroactively referred to as the

“Ikumen Boom”. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the Ikumen Project proved to be a resounding success from a marketing standpoint. Posters, guidebooks, training videos, annual ikumen award ceremonies: the Ikumen Project helped to saturate digital channels with ikumen.

While I explore the ramifications of the Ikumen Boom in greater detail in Chapter 2 and Chapter

3, it was a period of tremendous growth in influence for the fathering movement generally and

Fathering Japan10 in particular.

1.3 Fathering and Kinship

This study took shape, in part, due to a simple problem: there is a dearth of ethnographic work dedicated to the study of fatherhood as a practice. Anthropological studies of masculinity have thrived since the early 1990s (eg. Bourgois 1996; Gutman 1997; Goodfellow 2015; Inhorn and Naguib 2018; Inhorn 2012), but much of our existing knowledge of fatherhood is the by- product of rich studies of motherhood or asides in more extended engagements with the subject

10 The Ikumen Club was far more active during this period than it was over the course of my fieldwork project. In fact, several interviewees told me that the Ikumen Club was defunct, though it seems to be sporadically active on social media. 15 of masculinity (eg. Faier 2009; Allison 1994). This apparent disinterest in taking the “doing” of fatherhood as a subject of anthropological inquiry is a holdover from the assumption (imported by anthropologists working out of Western European and North American institutions) that the

“domestic sphere” was the site of reproduction, governed by kin relations, and gendered female.

This has meant that the pursuit of knowledge about the lifeways of men has focused on the

“public sphere” and production. To the extent that there is an interest in the father’s ties to the family, they have typically been understood through provision: that is, how these ties are realized through productive labour (see Allison 2013).

While fatherhood as a practice has largely been ignored, paternity has long been subject to anthropological inquiry. In recent years, studies of new reproductive technologies (NRT) have led to a renewed interest in the basis of paternity. Bamford (2019) writes that NRT studies

“…have precipitated a radical re-questioning of what it means to be ‘related’ to other persons and other species” (7), unsettling the assumed biological basis of kinship (see Inhorn 2012;

Strathern 2011). In the case of paternity claims, the biological basis of kinship has long been fraught territory (Strathern 2011). Aaron Goodfellow’s (2015) “Gay Fathers, their Children, and the Making of Kinship” is a nuanced ethnography of gay American fathers and a departure in terms of scope and focus from work dedicated solely to NRTs to the extent that the author explores the lives and memories of fathers acting “as fathers”. Goodfellow focuses on the

“mimetic and performative aspect of making kinship and family” (2015: 17), arguing that the

“uncertainty that haunts paternity” is not unique to those who must adopt or conceive through surrogates. Rather, it is the overdetermination of parentage for gay couples— that one or both parents are observably and necessarily “unrelated” by blood— results in different approaches to how their relationship to their children is performed. While NRT studies reveal the complexity behind common sense notions of biological relatedness, their primary interest is the bio-medical, 16 legal, and social process(es) through which paternity is determined, claimed, or denied. Here,

Goodfellow’s work dovetails with the literature on NRTs not only because his interlocutors make use of this technology, but because he is ultimately concerned with the inconsistency and slipperiness of paternity (see also Borneman 1997).

While ethnographic studies of fatherhood are indeed rare, fatherhood has long been a subject of problematization for academics in Japan. However, this dissertation marks a significant shift from (primarily domestic) pre-existing studies of fatherhood in Japan published under the banner of sociology, which have focused on the father’s physical and symbolic absence from the private sphere. Indeed, Psychiatrist Doi Takeo (1973:185) described Japan as a fatherless society (chichi naki shakai), pathologizing an overemphasized bond between mother and child. Early inquiries into fatherhood focused on the socialization of children and the unique role that fathers might play as an authority figure to disrupt this perceived maternal dependence

(Nakatani 1999; Ohinata 2000). This research often replicated similar studies conducted in

Europe and North America which emphasized the importance of the mother to the intimate labour of care and fathers to play and socialization, aligning the former with the private sphere and casting the latter as a representative of the public sphere. While these ideas were and remain influential, they stand in contrast to a parallel body of scholarship inspired by Japan’s feminist movement and the emergence of men’s studies, driven by the pioneering work of Ito Kimio

(Inoue, Ueno, and Ehara 1995). Rather than search for a natural or proper gendered order, these scholars and activists argued that gender ideology had removed men from the private sphere to their own detriment (Ito 1993). Men, like women, suffered under patriarchy. For example,

Kasuga Kisuyo’s (1989) influential research on single fathers emphasized their marginalization as a result of widely held beliefs about the gendered division of labour. Where in previous studies the ubiquity of the salaryman, of households with children, and existence of a 17 standardized gendered division of labour therein was assumed, men’s studies revealed the diversity of life courses in Japan (see Lebra 1998; Roberson and Suzuki 2003; Ishii-Kuntz 2009).

In recent years, pioneering studies of ikumen, spearheaded by the work of Ishii-Kuntz (2019), have begun to circulate, but this body of work is primarily statistical, and policy focused.

My primary intervention in this existing body of scholarship, then, is to shift our conceptualization of fatherhood from a fraught and contingent kin relation characterized by attendant legal and social responsibilities to fatherhood as a practice. My research provides rich textual and ethnographic material to elucidate what, exactly, this practice entails and how it is taught to men. I borrow the movement’s term “fathering” in my analysis to draw attention away from “fatherhood” as a description of the relation between my interlocutors and their family to what they do as fathers. “Fathering”, an English loan word, was popularized by Fathering Japan, the key organization within the fathering movement and one with which the majority of my interlocutors were affiliated in some capacity.

Crucially, fathering departs from its English language referent in its scope and scale. It is organized around a very loosely conceptualized labour of care captured by the word “iku” (to rear or to raise). In Fathering Japan’s framework, the first prerogative of the father is ikuji11 (育

児) (childrearing), caring for and safeguarding the growth and development of their biological children. This is accompanied by a “rearing of the self”, ikuji (育自), the journey of a father to become a more assured and informed parent. Through the first two ikuji’s, the father develops a greater awareness of the dependence of his family on the wider community: doctors, teachers,

11 The wordplay here depends on the consistent use of the character 育 (iku) paired with a different character — variously 自 (ji, self), 地 (chi, area), and 次 (ji, next)— to create a neologism that is a homophone of 育児 (ikuji, childcare). The subsequent ikuji’s are only intelligible by virtue of the independent meaning of the rotating character. Therefore, each compound must be read (the characters must be visible). 18 and other parents. This initiates the “rearing of the area”, ikuji (育地), wherein the father works to strengthen communal ties. Through these grounded practices, the father develops a greater consciousness of gender inequality, sexism, and the importance ensuring the world continues to be habitable and peaceful for future generations. Action taken in the service of these loftier principles is ikuji (育次), “rearing the future” (literally “rearing next”). Structuring the four ikuji’s as homophones, an intentional rhetorical flourish by Fathering Japan, collapses the distinction between these categories. Although we can differentiate the ikuji of childcare from the ikuji of the community in a concrete sense (changing a diaper is indeed a different activity than organizing a festival), we are invited to think of them as being part of the same class of actions.

The practice of “fathering”, then, is rooted in the kin designation of “father” yet untethered by the kinship relation itself. It is at work across an array of supposedly distinct spheres: a father “fathers” or “rears” his home, his community, his corporation, his nation. I argue that fathering blurs the boundaries between these spheres. Following McKinnon and

Cannell (2013), I use fathering to question the notion “…that kinship has been effectively cordoned off in the domestic domain and has become irrelevant to the operations of modern economic and political institutions” (12). I draw from the work of anthropologists of kinship and feminist anthropologists in the 1980s, who highlighted and unsettled this separation of the domestic domain in analyses of kinship and gender. This critique developed at the point of convergence of two different lines of anthropological thought which depended on this separation.

The first was that of feminist anthropologists in the 1970s grappling with the perceived universality of women’s subordination and gendered inequality. Rosaldo and Lamphere’s edited collection Woman, Culture, and Society (1974) influentially claimed that "all contemporary societies are to some extent male-dominated, and although the degree and expression of female 19 subordination vary greatly, sexual asymmetry is presently a universal fact of human social life”

(3). The essays in this volume traced this asymmetry across a set of dichotomies that might vary in content from context to context but remained rigid in the replication of the dialectic relationship between male and female: nature and culture, domestic and public, and reproduction and production. The givenness of these categories and of this framework— along with the original premise of women’s universal subordination— were quickly called into question

(Leacock 1981; Sacks 1982; Collier and Yanagisako 1987). The thrust of these counter arguments was that these categorial distinctions seemed salient in the context of industrial capitalism (Rapp 1979; Reiter 1975) but did not necessarily carry the same significance elsewhere. Moreover, the way the masculine and feminine map out over these binaries could not be assumed even in those instances where anthropologists were able to locate similar dichotomies. As Yanagisako and Collier (1987) would later write, analyses that employ these separations without reconstructing them using historic and ethnographic data “…assume the difference we should be trying to explain” (1987:29).

The second was the separation of the domestic domain and the politico-jural domain in structural-functionalist accounts of kinship (Fortes 1945; Evans-Pritchard 1940; Malinowski

1930). Following the publication of W. H. R. Rivers’ essay, “The Genealogical Method of

Anthropological Inquiry” in 1910, anthropological fieldwork was increasingly concerned with the collection of kin terms as a means of elucidating an underlying social structure. Viewed as an essential element of all societies, kinship could be used for the purposes of cross-cultural comparison. The genealogical method lent itself to the unified theorization of human society, providing British social anthropology the air of scientific objectivity it craved. Malinowski’s early efforts to elucidate the “processes of the extension of kinship from its extremely simple beginnings in plain parenthood, to its manifold ramifications and complexities in adult 20 membership of the tribe, clan and local group” are particularly pertinent here (Malinowski

1930:25). For Malinowski, this extension presumes a division between the kinship of the family and a separate, larger social world into which kinship might be transposed. In the later work of

Fortes (1945) and Evans-Pritchard (1940), “interpersonal kinship” was separated from the

“political-jural”. Interpersonal kinship was thought to be a universal feature of all human societies and, via lineage systems, the dominant form of social organization in “primitive” societies. A state governed political-jural sphere, meanwhile, was the defining characteristic of

“modern” societies. Where kinship was once seen as the organizing force behind political, economic, and religious relations, it was now constrained by them, subordinated by modernity, secularism, and rationalism. The result, McKinnon and Cannel (2013: 8) write, is the relegation of kinship to tradition, memory, and custom— connections to the past preserving a shared notion of humanity that must be defended from the amoral force of progress:

On the one hand, we think of it (family) as a key to identity, morality, and personal and

social wholeness. On the other hand, at the back of most people’s minds is an idea that, in

the past, life was organized around and through kinship more than is the case today.

Recognition of the institutional complexity of modern life easily shades into the feeling

that modernity is a space in which kinship is constantly under threat of being lost. We

may feel that we have to work to sustain, and sometimes to recover, those ties of

relatedness.

Kinship sits alongside politics and economics as separate elements that, when integrated in concert with one another, were understood to organize societies. While it was difficult to parse the boundaries of these domains in the “kin-based societies” so often the subject of early anthropological research, they appeared separate because they performed different social functions and were shaped by different “constitutive forces” (McKinnon and Cannell 2013:13). 21

The “forces” delineating kinship were those of biological reproduction, lineage and descent, and consanguinity.

It was precisely these supposedly universal foundations of kinship that subsequent theorists would critique in an effort to unsettle the primacy of kinship in anthropological analyses. David Schneider’s influential work, American Kinship: A Cultural Account (1968), argued that North American kinship systems were ordered according to relations of “blood” and relations of “law”, the former being of the “order of nature”, the latter of the “order of law”.

Schneider showed that these distinct domains were connected by reproductive sex, but the distinction between “social” and “biological” kinship was ultimately a cultural one specific to

North America. Schneider’s subsequent publication, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984), argued that prior anthropological studies of kinship had transplanted and elaborated upon this understanding of the basis of kinship, assuming it held true in other contexts by virtue of a belief in the universal significance of procreation in establishing kin relations. As an array of studies have since illustrated, in various contexts kinship is less a question of biology than of shared labour, co-residence, shared meals, and the exchange of property (Carsten 1995, 1997, 2000,

2004; Schneider 1984; Weston 1991). This unsettled the logic of constitutive forces in politics, economics, and kinship that originally allowed for their domaining.

In Gender and Kinship: Essays toward a Unified Analysis, Collier and Yanagisako saw these two lines of thought and critique meet at the intersection between gender and kinship. Not only were these two areas of inquiry inseparable, the authors argued, but analyses of both had been overdetermined by biology. Gender and kinship were the products of history and culture, not nature. This argument set the stage for Delaney and Yanagisako’s later work in Naturalizing

Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis (1995). Here, the authors show how domains are essentialized through appeals to realms that are thought to precede and exist beyond culture: 22 nature (understood through scientific inquiry) and the divine (understood through religious belief). This separation means “…religion seems to be about god rather than about gender; the family seems to be about reproduction and childrearing rather than about gender and religion”

(Yanagisako and Delaney 1995:12). Yanagisako and Delaney advocate for a violation of taboo in anthropological analysis: reading across domains to reveal the inner machinations of naturalization and sacralization, particularizing them and historicizing them.

Fathering is a unique and compelling example of the way kinship might “undo” the domaining in which it is implicated. Japan’s fathering movement upsets the boundaries between women and men (Chapter 4), nature and culture (Chapter 4), home and corporation (Chapter 7), and private and public (Chapter 6). Echoing Yanagisako and Delaney’s (1995) call, fathering is itself an invitation to read across these spheres. This is not a case of kin-like relations replicated outside recognized bonds of consanguinity— the use of kin idioms out of place (see Lazar 2018).

I argue that the practice of fatherhood for my interlocutors is a mode of relating to others; a way of seeing social relations coloured by the lens of their own kinship relations. The fathers I came to know did not see other fathers, co-workers, or community members as kin. Yet, they drank, commiserated, shared, volunteered, and managed not as co-workers, supervisors, or concerned individuals, but “as fathers”. These corporate (Chapter 7) and communal (Chapter 6) relations are not “kin-like”, yet their basis is nevertheless an originary kinship relation between the father and his family members. Equally important in my analysis is the many instances in which this relating through fatherhood becomes a source of tension. Fathering and fathers are subject to criticism and suspicion from spouses, friends, and co-workers. There are boundaries for inclusion and exclusion, sorting dedicated fathers from supposed pretenders (Chapter 3). 23

1.4 Fathering, Gender Performance, and Care

Within the fathering movement, gender is taught and understood as having a biological basis. Nevertheless, in the strategies of fathering practice it imparts to students, gender is explicitly performative, intentional, and open to reorganization. The late 1980s through the mid-

1990s was a period that Piscitelli and Simoni call “an effervescent intellectual moment for gender studies” (2019: 294). Rejecting “classificatory theories” that assumed the givenness of the categories of “male” and “female” (Connell 1996), new perspectives viewed gender as fluid and situational and called for explorations into the way plural masculinities are variably defined through social interaction in different contexts (Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994; Strathern 1988).

Gender was reconceptualized as something that is “done”, continually reconstructed through social interaction (West and Zimmerman 1987; Butler 1990). How is gender “done” through fathering?

In “Doing Gender12” (1987), West and Zimmerman distinguish sex, sex categorization, and gender using the case of Agnes, an individual seeking a male to female sex transition who learned to perform as a woman to convince medical staff to consent to her reassignment surgery.

The authors argue that gender is not something an individual “is”, but rather something they

“do”. This process of “doing”— of enacting through various practices a gendered self— is shaped by normative conceptions of behaviour for men and women. The quality of these norms

12 Doing Gender influenced the study of gender in four critical ways. First, it shifted focus away from the role of socialization as the basis of gendered differentiation, positing instead that the way one does gender changes over time in response to social change (see Green 2005; Risman 1998). Second, it undermined structural approaches to understanding gender. Structural approaches posited a certain economic calculus behind gendered difference but failed to account for persistent enactments of gender in spite of changing material circumstances (the continued disproportionate allocation of household labour to women even after they begin to contribute income to the family’s finances, for example). Third, Doing Gender drew attention to the way gendered behaviour is made to appear “natural”, concealing its discursive construction and maintenance. Finally, and crucially, the notion that gender is “done” opened the possibility of gender being “undone”— the revolutionary potential to alter gender politics. 24 depends on the given context, but in principle they exist cross culturally as a category. In this framing, masculinity and femininity are reconceptualized from natural properties aligned with biological sex categories to properties of a changeable social system. Gender, then, is dynamic, shifting, and emergent.

To the extent that gender is “done”, West and Zimmerman’s original work can be seen as a “theory of gender conformity” or “gender maintenance” (Deutsch 2007). Gender is done in with the “constant risk of gender assessment” (West and Zimmerman 1987: 13). This omnipresence of gender norms in each act of compliance or resistance makes it difficult to see what, other than some base and irrepressible need to perform otherwise, would compel an individual to subject themselves to judgement. The motivation behind resistance, and the possibility of change, are difficult to grasp (see George 2005; Heather et al. 2005).

In contrast, “undoing” gender has been seen as a richer analytic because of its capacity to reveal change. The concept of undoing gender was first introduced by Butler (2004) in her collection of essays by the same name and has since been altered and adopted by scholars including Deutsch (2007) and Risman (2009). Butler’s entry point into this discussion was her preceding, seminal publication “Gender Trouble” (1990), released a few short years after Doing

Gender. The spine of Butler’s argument is the notion of gender performativity. Butler states that

“acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means” (1990: 173). Gender emerges and is reproduced through the repeated, ritualistic performance of acts that are associated with masculinity and femininity. Much like West and Zimmerman, Butler sees gender as something that is done rather than something that simply is. Gender, then, might be “undone”, “opened to a displacement or subversion from within” (Butler 2004: 47) that allows for resistance against 25

“restrictively normative conceptions of sexual and gendered life” (2004:1). Butler reasons that if bodily surfaces might “naturally” be made legible as “male” or “female” through certain kinds of staging and performances, then they might be denaturalized through performances that upset this categorization. Parody through exaggerated gender performance is one means of undoing gender by revealing “the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the natural and the original” (Butler 1990: 41). Taking a similar tack, Deutsch (2007) defines “undoing gender” as

“social interactions that reduce gender difference” (122) and calls for work that looks for resistance over conformity13.

I take fathering itself as a gender performance that has the capacity to “undo” gender in a

Butlerian sense. This is despite the fact that the instruction provided by the fathering movement is largely based on a biological distinction between mother and father (see Chapter 4). What the fathering movement supports, though, is a consciously performative approach to the labour of care: strategies and techniques for tending to one’s children and spouse. Central to this instruction is understanding how these acts are read by others (Chapter 5), bringing men to an understanding that contributing to the labour of the home is more than rote exchange. Rather, the repeated, ritualistic performance of acts is itself the essence of fatherhood, producing relations of fellow feeling in the home (and beyond). My informant’s awareness of gender as a performance denaturalized “motherhood” and “fatherhood” (Chapter 4). It was an undoing of the gendering of

13 West and Zimmerman (2009) would later question the capacity of any actor to “undo” gender. Responding to Butler’s call to focus on the way researchers “find boys and girls, women and men ‘undoing gender’” (Butler 2004), West and Zimmerman see in any act of departure from a fixed set of gendered expectations a persistent sense of accountability to them— not an outright abandonment. West and Zimmerman see undoing gender as a “change in the normative conceptions to which members of particular sex categories are held accountable” (2009:117). The nature of this accounting and these normative conceptions is historically contingent, but the dialectic relationship between the enactment of gender and the norms against which it is enacted remains constant. Gender, here, is “redone” more than it is “undone”. West and Zimmerman, then, insist on the fixity not of gender itself, but the dialectic relationship between the performance of gender and gender norms. 26 acts of care: that feeding, bathing, touching, cleaning— indeed, all the facets of the labour of reproduction— were fluid, and might be allotted and performed as couples see fit.

It is at this point that my work intersects with recent studies attending to what is being called “caring masculinities” (Ellliot 2015). Broadly speaking, caring masculinities reflect a perceived global trend towards the prioritization of reproductive labour by men. Barbara Laslett and Johanna Brenner define reproductive labour as “the activities and attitudes, behaviors and emotions, responsibilities and relationships directly involved in the maintenance of life on a daily basis, and intergenerationally” (1989: 382–383). Reproductive labour includes the biological reproduction of human life, the everyday maintenance of that life through the labour of care, and the reproduction of the social system through education and socialization. Reproductive labour is inextricable from care labour in a more general sense. Tronto’s (1993:103) definition of care, for example, interpolates many of its qualities:

On the most general level, we suggest caring be viewed as a species activity that includes

everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in

it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment,

all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.

Reproductive labour was of particular concern to second wave feminists, who argued that the division between the domestic as the site of reproductive labour and the political-jural as the site of productive labour was the root cause of gender inequality (Pateman 1988; Rubin 1975).

Reproductive labour constituted a vast amount of unpaid labour performed predominantly by women (Mackintosh 1981; Stolcke 1981). Socialist feminists saw this unpaid labour as a gendered form of capitalist extraction of value (see Eisenstein 1979; Luxton 1980). This perception of reproductive labour as inherently exploitative began to shift in the early 1990s with the emergence of a moral philosophy that took as its basis acts of care (Gilligan 1982; Ruddick 27

1989; Tronto 1993). This “ethics of care” focuses on the “values of caring — attentiveness, responsibility, nurturance, compassion, meeting other’s needs — traditionally associated with women and traditionally excluded from public consideration” (Tronto 1993: 2—3) as a political ideal that recognizes the right of citizens to receive care and the legitimization of citizens that give care. For Held (2006:10), “‘the ethics of care values emotion rather than rejects it... such emotions as sympathy, empathy, sensitivity, and responsiveness are seen as the kind of moral emotions that need to be cultivated’’.

In these early theorizations, the association of care labour with women and femininity was largely taken for granted. In the decades that followed, however, more attention has been drawn to men who perform the labour of care. Responding to the increasing interest in caring masculinities within European critical studies on men and masculinities, Karla Elliot (2015) argues for a practice-based framework for the concept. Elliot outlines three characteristics of caring masculinities. The first is the rejection of domination. Following Kittay (1999), care begets relations of dependence that can become inequitable should the care giver assert their power over the recipient. Drawing on hooks’ (2004) discussion of non-denominator culture, in which the author calls for “disloyalty” to patriarchal masculinity and not an outright rejection of masculinity, Elliot sees caring masculinities as a refusal of this potential for domination. The second characteristic of caring masculinities is valuing the affective, relational, emotional, and interdependent qualities of care. These values are figured in contrast to the stoicism, detachment, and repression associated with hegemonic masculinity. The third characteristic outlined by Elliot is the reorientation of pre-existing masculine values around care. The author provides an example lifted from Hanlon’s (2012) study of Irish fathers of the coupling of “respect” with

“love” and not “fear”, as was so often the association under authoritative patriarchs. In this tripartite conceptualization of masculine care, Elliot recognizes a kind of revolutionary potential. 28

While caring masculinities operate in the service of gender equality by resisting expectations of gendered conduct, their influence runs deeper still. Elliot writes: “From a practical perspective care work changes gender. An ethos of affective, relational, non-dominating care like the one described here can…motivate people to support care. In other words, an ethos of care helps to cultivate more care in people. Care begets care” (2015: 255).

While the fathering movement could easily fall within this framework of caring masculinities, I hesitate to bracket these practices as characteristics of a particular masculine typology (an issue I expand upon in the following section). Whether or not care work does indeed “change gender”, I argue that the labour of care is the primary mode of performing masculinity within the fathering movement. Attention to the minutiae of chores and childcare— going about these tasks with the proper disposition— is part of the production of masculine subjects (Chapter 2, Chapter 4). It indexes affective ties to kin (Chapter 4, Chapter 5) and a kind of class status as a “modern”, globetrotting man with the means to support the consumption habits such a lifestyle demands (Chapter 2). This means there are an array of strategies and logics that shape the performance of the labour of care, each of which plays to a different audience: partners, other fathers, community members, potential love interests, and employers, among many others. However, this inordinate focus on the performative dimension of chores and childcare was a source of tension in the field (Chapter 3, Chapter 4). As Butler (1990) explains, gendered performances always have the capacity to fail: their inability to capture, perfectly, their referent is inherent to the performance itself. Claims of ikumen status might be met with suspicion by women wary of men who might hide behind the label (Chapter 3); chores that appear as a “favour” performed for a partner, rather than an obligation, breed feelings of resent and frustration (Chapter 5). 29

Caring masculinities also mark a sharp distinction between the labour of care/reproductive labour and productive labour. This did not hold true for my interlocutors. For the fathering movement, the line between household and corporation is fuzzy. This is evident not only in metaphor, where households are often conceptualized as companies and parents as managers (Chapter 5), but in the scope of the movement’s undertaking. I show how the performance of reproductive labour is shaping productive labour as fathering is translated into managerial strategy in workplaces in Japan (Chapter 7).

1.5 Fathering and Masculine Archetypes

Are ikumen a departure from or renewal of salaryman masculinity? Though an important one both for my interlocutors, I argue that the question itself is fraught. This binary division between past and present, resistance and continuity, is the basis of the majority of studies of masculinity across a vast array of field sites (see Bridges and Pascoe 2014 for an exhaustive list; for Japan specifically see Hidaka 2010 and Mizukoshi et al. 2016). The focus in these instances is gender regulation14 as both a subject and as an analytic. Connell’s (1995) notion of hegemonic masculinity, which provides a framework for understanding regulation, remains a cornerstone of contemporary studies. Drawing on feminist and Marxist sociology in her original formulation,

Connell employed Gramsci’s hegemony, a mechanism of enforcing class-based hierarchy through which subordinate groups are impelled to conform to a way of being promoted by a

14 Butler’s analysis of norms in relation to gender in “Gender Regulations” (2004) is a useful point of entry. Butler writes: “The question of what it means to be outside the norm poses a paradox for thinking, for if the norm renders the social field intelligible and normalizes that field for us, then being outside the norm is in some sense being defined in relation to it. To be not quite masculine or not quite feminine is still to be understood exclusively in terms of one’s relationship to the ‘quite masculine’ and ‘quite feminine’” (2004:42). Building from this premise, Butler posits that gender is itself “…the apparatus by which the production and normalization of masculine and feminine takes place along with the interstitial forms of hormonal, chromosomal, psychic, and performative that gender assumes” (2004:42). 30 dominant group, to reconcile the existence of inequality among men with inequality between men and women. For Connell, hegemonic masculinity legitimizes patriarchy in practices of gender as a kind of Weberian ideal type. The form it takes is shaped by specific cultural ideals of masculinity but does not necessarily embody them completely. Allowing for this variation across cultural contexts, Connell attributes some general characteristics of hegemonic masculinity including its favouring of wealth, strength, heterosexuality, sexual potency, and stoicism. The ability to fully enact hegemonic masculinity is limited by one’s access to different forms of social and economic capital. As a result, hegemonic masculinity creates a dominant group that is able to better— but never perfectly— fulfill its requirements and dominated groups that aspire to its ideal. The primacy of these hierarchical relationships is crucial to Connell’s argument. She writes: “We must also recognize the relations between different kinds of masculinity: relations of alliance, dominance, and subordination. These relationships are constructed through practices that exclude and include, that intimidate, exploit, and so on. There is a gender politics within masculinity” (1995: 37). For Connell, hegemonic masculinity exists in tension with

“subordinated” masculinities which embody qualities that are antithetical to its ideal. Men in this subordinate position may feel anxiety over their inability to enact hegemonic masculinity.

Contrastingly, the gap between their experience and expectations of masculine conduct might also spur them to critique it.

At the time of publication, Connell’s work was significant in that it helped to move the discussion of masculinity beyond the masked ethnocentrism of psychological and biological explanatory models. In keeping with advances made in the study of the femininity through the

70s and 80s (see Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974), her work also opened space to consider the co- existence of multiple masculinities. While a fair reading of Connell emphasizes her focus on this interaction between these different forms of masculinity, the separation of the singular 31

“hegemonic” from plural but similarly bounded “subordinates” makes them appear as calcified, dueling concepts (see also Collinson and Hearn 1996; Hearn 2004). Theorists have since taken issue with this binary distinction. Demetriou (2001) has influentially argued that Connell’s model of hegemonic masculinity is totalizing and without room for contradiction. Demetriou uses the term “dialectical pragmatism” to describe the way in which, rather than existing in static contrast, subordinate and hegemonic masculinities are co-constituted through reciprocal exchange. In following Gramsci, Connell positions hegemonic masculinity within a hegemonic class of men. This forecloses the possibility of appropriation and change within and between both hegemonic and subordinate masculinities to the extent that class identities are fixed. The strength of hegemonic masculinity, Demetriou argues, comes precisely from its ability to capture and incorporate on the basis of pragmatism those elements of subordinate masculinities that allow it to maintain its supremacy. In this sense, Demetriou’s argument mirrors closely West and

Zimmerman’s (2009) clarified position, which stresses the malleability of gender as performance and gender as a set of norms in contrast to the durability of the dialectic relationship between them. The poles of hegemonic and subordinate masculinity have the potential to transform one another through exchange, generating “hybrid masculinities”, “…the selective incorporation of elements of identity typically associated with various marginalized and subordinated masculinities and–at times–femininities into privileged men’s gender performances and identities” (Bridges and Pascoe 2014:246).

In a similar vein of critique, Donaldson (1993) argues that the theoretical focus on hegemonic masculinity in the wake of Connell’s work may have had the unintended effect of overdetermining the reading of complex gendered subjects. Hegemonic and subordinate masculinities are very difficult to cleanly parse, especially in the context of ethnographic research. However, by taking up this framework for interpreting masculine relationality, 32 researchers risk casting their interlocutors as static “hegemonic” or “subordinate” types, thereby reifying these categories. This also has the effect of limiting the ability of theorists to see masculinity as something dynamic and contextual, shifting in meaning for individuals over time.

As Inhorn (2012) explains, the life histories Connell presents to defend her position present masculinity as a sort of inevitability— an accumulation of experiences resulting in a static final version of one’s masculine identity. Inhorn writes: “This sort of application undoes the goal of theory, it casts men as either normal or deviant in relationship to some fixed masculine ideal, thereby hampering study of various masculinities’ interrelationships and historical contingencies.

When applied, then, the theory of hegemonic masculinity frequently obscures the very relationality, fluidity, and dynamism that is was developed to explain” (2012:28).

There have been efforts to play within the dialectic relationship in ways that maintain this

“relationality, fluidity, and dynamism” in recent scholarship of masculinity. The concept of hybrid masculinities, which Demetriou outlined in his critique of Connell, has been widely applied as an alternative framework for interpreting the relationship between hegemonic and subordinate masculinities. As Bridges and Pascoe (2014) explain, research on hybrid masculinities “is centrally concerned with the ways that men are increasingly incorporating elements of various ‘Others’ into their identity projects”. In this sense, hybrid masculinities are meant to capture the dynamic outlined by Demetriou through which hegemonic masculinity is able to appropriate elements of subordinate masculinities but posits that these “hybrids” stand apart as distinct categories of masculine identity. As a result, much of the critical work regarding hybrid masculinities has been in service of determining if they advance or index advances in gender equality (Anderson 2009; McCormack 2012) or if they serve to reproduce existing gendered, sexual, and racial inequality (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; Messerschmidt 2010;

Messner 1993, 2007). Work in this body of literature shows that this is often a difficult 33 distinction to make (Wilkins 2009). Masters (2010) shows how anti-rape campaigns targeting men realign their targets with hegemonic masculinity by valorizing their “strength”. Barber’s

(2008) male hair stylists simultaneously resist feminization while distancing themselves from blue collar workers, who they see as reproducing structures of gendered inequality through regular acts of misogyny.

As I understand the concept, there are several issues with hybrid masculinities that limit its usefulness as an analytic. The first is that, despite being developed as a critique of Connell’s early model of hegemonic masculinity, hybrid masculinities are dependent on his initial distinction between hegemonic masculinity and subordinate masculinities. Hybrid masculinities, though variously constituted, are essentially groupings of hegemonic and subordinate masculine qualities. They turn the dyad of Connell’s initial theory into a triad by offering a third (or fourth, or fifth…) bounded category. Even this is difficult to say with certainty. As they are formulated by Connell, subordinate masculinities are never wholly submissive or resistant to hegemonic masculinity. As they still exist in a state of partial subjugation with hegemonic masculinity by virtue of their imperfect replication of its qualities, what separates hybrid masculinities from subordinate masculinities? If we no longer assume that such a firm distinction exists, hybrid masculinities lose their explanatory power. Moreover, using hybrid masculinities as an index of gender equality is a fraught proposition. Gender equality as a political project does not translate uniformly across different social contexts. As Bridges and Pascoe (2014) explain, discussions of hybrid masculinity have primarily developed out of analyses of the practices of white, heterosexual men in the United States and Europe who mobilize practices associated with subordinate masculinities to conceal their own privilege (see Fefferman 2018). In so far as studies are limited to this scope, one could assume some shared context of discourse on gender equality. That assumption does not hold elsewhere. Clinging to a universalist conceptualization 34 of what gender equality entails means researchers risk misreading is significance when invoked by informants, occluding its historicity, or missing the way it is shaped by transnational flows.

Working through the concept of caring masculinities presents the same set of issues as hybrid masculinities. Elliot’s framework “…is not intended as a homogenizing character description of the ‘new man’” (2015:241), and I do not read it as such. However, I am wary of adopting the concept of caring masculinities to describe what I observed among my interlocutors because of the way it reproduces what I see as persistent issues in the theorization of masculinity.

As the bulk of research regarding caring masculinities has been conducted in Western Europe and North America, there is an understandable paucity of work on the subject in other parts of the world. It is important to recognize that discourses on fatherhood are increasingly transnational. In the fathering movement, images of ambiguously “Western” fathers are commonplace and statistical data culled from Northern Europe (among other locales) revealing patterns in contributions to household labour is used to pathologize Japanese men’s behaviour

(Chapter 2, Chapter 3). In this way, knowledge about caring masculinities— the sort that anthropologists produce— influences the caring masculinities “found” elsewhere.

Furthermore, caring masculinities are dependent on a “non-caring” masculinity from which they mark a departure. In the existing literature on caring masculinities, this role is largely fulfilled by a context specific hegemonic masculinity. This replicates the dialectic relationship between hegemonic and subordinate masculinities that has rightly been problematized by gender theorists. Indeed, caring masculinities appear to be yet another sort of subordinate masculinity, with all the baggage that entails. We need to be able to account for the discursive basis for the perceived uniqueness or difference the label “caring masculinity” marks. As this dissertation illustrates, this distinction is produced in dialogue with men who orient themselves in relation to different masculine figures or archetypes, reifying them in the process. Finally, the idea of 35

“change” or “newness” that characterizes the study of caring masculinities occludes the many ways men have historically contributed to the labour of care. By taking for granted that these masculinities are novel, we limit inquiry into the why and how of their novel appearance. The newness of these masculinities, the marking of departure from the past, is a powerful motivating force behind their propagation.

A self-professed ikumen expresses exhaustion and satisfaction in raising his newborn to a small group of thoroughly impressed female co-workers, though his wife moans that he spends more time playing video games than he does doing chores. A man out drinking with his co- workers passes around his phone so his associates can flip through an album of photos of him wearing a baby carrier on a weekend family camping trip. A father on a lecture circuit to evangelize the joys of taking paternity leave and spending more time with one’s children is sternly lectured by his wife for leaving her for weeks as the sole care provider at home. What utility do the categories of hegemonic and subordinate masculinities have here, save tempting us to seize on stories like this and begin the process of sorting: one is a salaryman, one is not; one favours gender equality, one undermines it. We should be wary of taking for granted masculine identities that appear to be “hegemonic” or “subordinate” and— remembering Collier and

Yangisako’s (1987) warning of similar, often ethnocentric dyads— uncritically recreating the dialectic relationship between them. In Japan, there is indeed a strong dichotomization separating the supposedly hegemonic salaryman masculinity and the subordinate ikumen masculinity, but I argue this division in and of itself has little analytic utility. Instead, I look to how and why these

“masculinities” become salient categories; the interactions through which they are grouped, bound, and made intelligible. I question the novelty of ikumen and account for their temporality, across generations (Chapter 2) and within a single life history (Chapter 4). I explore how fathering movement member’s understandings of masculinity are conceptualized in relation to 36 the salaryman archetype, but also in relation to fathers in Western Europe and North America

(Chapter 2, Chapter 7).

I draw on emerging approaches to masculinity that are upsetting the dominance of the hegemonic/subordinate analytic. Inhorn (2012) offers a compelling option that draws on

Raymond Williams’ (1977) concept of “emergence”. In “Dominant, Residual, and Emergent”,

Williams concludes that no social order is totalizing in its dominance. Instead, new forms of relating and meaning making that are not bound to the dichotomy between dominant and oppositional continually “emerge”. This focus on that which is novel versus entrenched ideals and their subversive corollaries shapes Inhorn’s “emergent masculinities”. She writes: “When applied to manhood, emergent masculinities encapsulate change over the male life course as men age; change over the generations as male youth grow to adulthood; and changes in social history that involve men in transformative social processes” (2012: 40). Emergent masculinity begins from the premise that “…manly selfhood is not a thing or a constant; rather, it is an act that is ever in progress. Men must act as men in different ways from moment to moment and in different contexts” (Inhorn and Wentzell 2011:803). Writing against reductionist accounts of masculinity in the Middle East, Inhorn uses the concept of emergent masculinities to emphasize new forms of masculine practice and their intersection with embodiment and new forms of technology— specifically health technology— as they arise in ethnography. The focus across these three areas is change; to “… account for their (men’s) nuanced and constantly evolving responses to their changing social worlds and physical bodies” (and, I would add in keeping with

Inhorn’s overarching argument, access to and level of interaction with new technologies).

“Emergent masculinities” captures the general sense of change and diversification among conceptions of masculinity that seem to be occurring in very disparate sites across the world. In the Middle East in particular, where a history of colonial influence and recent conflict have 37 generated and circulated propagandist images and narratives of dangerous masculine otherness with its roots in an unchanging orient, this attention to change is also a valuable political project.

Working through emergent masculinity challenges us to identify which practices or assemblages of practice are “novel”. Where do emergent practices come from? Are they responses to immediate exigencies, fabricated in context by men or groups of men? Do they have deeper historical roots, surfacing only when a constellation of economic and social conditions facilitates them? Inhorn is keenly aware of the importance of historicity, but the provenience of the “bits and pieces” (Demetriou 2001: 350) from which identities are cobbled together are difficult to determine. For Aletta Biersack (2016:204), that point may be moot if “emergent masculinities may be continuous or discontinuous and to any degree with the masculinities of the past”, but I argue that it is difficult to divorce emergent masculinity from the discourse surrounding their

“newness” (not to mention the difficult of periodizing “masculinities of the past”). Discussions happening in situ about the novelty of certain masculine practices influence our understanding— and our informant’s understanding— of their emergent quality. In sum and in short, it is important to ask how emergent masculinities are “branded” as novel, modern, or marking change in general, and to investigate the extent to which this branding influences their character

(Chapter 2, Chapter 3).

Wentzell (2013), like Inhorn, attends to masculinity as something emergent and processual, but takes a slightly different path. In her study of erectile dysfunction among

Mexican men, Wentzell turns to science and technology studies (STS) to develop a framework for documenting change in masculinity. The author draws on Annemarie Mol’s (2002) framing of disease as a “composite object”. Tracing the process through which atherosclerosis is diagnosed and treated across different medical institutions, Mol finds that different practices and entities “hang together” to produce the appearance of singularity: the disease named 38

“atherosclerosis”. Mol’s composite objects are contextual and multiple but are presented as unified through social practice. Inspired by composite objects, Wentzell proposes a model for

“composite masculinities”: “contingent and ﬂuid constellations of elements that men weave together into masculine selfhoods” (2013: 28). These elements “…are drawn from the entire gamut of men’s life worlds: their ideas and emotions, experiences, embodiment, relationships, and context”, creating individual interpretations of what it means to be a man or woman (2013:

28). The social and economic status15 of an individual limit the elements available to them with which to “weave together” composite gendered selves. Wentzell’s approach is particularly useful for tracing change, responding to a key critique of the hegemonic/subordinate model of masculinities. Calling attention to how and why masculinities “hang together” differently across time and context is as vital as delineating the qualities of masculinities in a given time or context.

By adding or removing elements of composite masculinities, individuals can maintain a sense of continuity or consistency even in periods of upheaval.

I value Wentzell’s approach because it allows us to see how many facets of life may not be explicitly, consciously, or consistently gendered by informants “hang together” with those that are to present a cohesive gendered self. Rather than cleanly separate or periodize the elements of my interlocutor’s conceptions and performances of masculinity, I look to why

“salaryman” and “ikumen” are invoked: the work these concepts are made to perform. My informants sometimes adopted strong positions, claiming, for example, to be “a salaryman” (as

Yuta does), or rejecting the ikumen label firmly. Yet there is always ambivalence, contradiction, and flexibility in these supposedly cut and dry positions. Rather than take this as a reflection of a

15 Connell (1995) made a similar assertion regarding the ability of any man to embody the hegemonic ideal. 39 dialectic relationship between hegemonic and subordinate masculinities, a “cultural” tug of war being won or lost, I let these elements “hang together” in my analysis.

1.6 Methodology

Beginning in October of 2015, I spent two years living and working in Tokyo with the intent of building relationships with members of the fathering movement. Of those two years, I spent 12 months formally conducting research. I had been given the all clear to begin investigating Fathering Japan by Tetsuya Ando via email prior to my arrival thanks to the assistance of friends at WAN, a feminist activist organization located in Tokyo. I resided for the initial 3 months of my stay in Nerima ward at the northwestern edge of the city and the remaining 21 in a series of apartments in Setagaya ward to the southwest on the banks of the

Tama River. Both are largely residential, middle class neighbourhoods which are easy commutes to commercial centres like Ikebukuro and Shibuya. Regardless of the location of my accommodations, I attended events all over Tokyo and its suburbs. I also frequented Yokohama and Kawasaki where several of my informants were located. I collected data through three primary channels: long form interviews with fathers of varying levels of engagement in the fathering movement, non-fathers (the majority of which were in some form of corporate employment), mothers, and non-profit and government personnel; participant observation conducted in parenting classes and seminars, family focused events, informal gatherings of fathers, and in the homes of select interlocutors; and educational materials and commentary circulated in print, classrooms, popular parenting blogs, social media, or through government channels.

Thanks in large part to its ability to capitalize on the momentum of the Ikumen Boom, the work of Fathering Japan exerts an overwhelming influence on the movement’s direction and thought (and, by extension, the content of this study), but I have consciously avoided making this 40 monograph an ethnography “of” Fathering Japan. By altering the scope of my work to attend to the fathering movement writ large, I attempt to capture the very loose coalition of intensely localized groups of men whose voices may otherwise be occluded entirely by the organization’s powerful messaging. My work here is ultimately dedicated to understanding fatherhood itself. I am indebted to the generosity of a host of fathers whose diverse opinions and experiences greatly influenced the trajectory of this project. Where my commitment to anonymity permits, I distinguish the group membership of my interlocutors. However, “membership”, in the context of the fathering movement, is a slippery and fluid concept.

The nature of Fathering Japan’s membership, for example, is such that actual

“membership” is difficult to gauge in the field. Certainly, there are a set number of individuals paying an annual membership fee16 but, as many fathers explained, simply paying a fee does not ensure a lasting or meaningful connection to the organization. Rather, membership takes the form of intensely localized groups known as fathering circles, which will be explored at length in

Chapter 6. These Fathering Circles are entirely independent. They can be founded by any individual with an interest in building a local community of fathers and owe no service to

Fathering Japan proper. They serve as important local spaces for fathers to meet with likeminded men, swap stories, share food and drink, and build networks of support. Given all it has to offer, fathering circles may appeal to men regardless of their awareness of Fathering Japan proper.

Similarly, many fathers with whom I spoke were avid consumers of Fathering Japan’s educational content or regular attendees of events at which Fathering Japan members spoke but would not identify themselves as “members” of the organization. They may instead describe

16 I was frequently told that there are around 500 fee paying members of Fathering Japan, though there are many, many “members” who are not formally registered in this manner. The fee is 10,000 yen per year. It provides access to a “members only” mailing list and forum. 41 themselves as members of a fathering circle, members of smaller fathering NPOs, or not acknowledge any sort of shared affiliation beyond their identity as a father.

Movement and interaction between non-profits and fathering circles add further wrinkles.

Early in the course of my fieldwork, I encountered several small, predominantly Tokyo based fathering non-profits such as Himitsu Kessha Shufu no Tomo (“The Secret Society of Friends of

Househusbands”). and the Super Daddy Association. These organizations formed after the peak of the Ikumen Boom and are heavily influenced17 by the work of Fathering Japan. I quickly realized that outside of existing as distinct administrative groups, it can be difficult to draw firm boundaries between organizations within the fathering movement given its relatively small size.

By way of example, at one event sponsored and organized by the Super Daddy Association I attended in Harajuku, the keynote speakers were two members of Himitsu Kessha Shufu no

Tomo, one of whom I recognized as lecturing regularly on behalf of Fathering Japan.

In the face of this fluidity and indeed ambivalence regarding formal associations within the movement, I found an allegory mentioned in passing to be particularly revealing. One interlocutor, a former instructor and lecturer for Fathering Japan, described the organization as a

“radio tower” broadcasting a signal across the nation rather than a regimented group of activists.

This resonated with my experience speaking with fathers, who would often float in and out of conversations and ideas popularized by Fathering Japan while weaving in their personal experiences and opinions. For members of other fathering NPOs, there was some distinction between their stated values and those of Fathering Japan, though as activists within the fathering movement they were certainly well versed in its teachings.

17 Himitsu Kessha Shufu no Tomo calls itself a “non-certified Fathering Japan organization”. Its membership has a great deal of overlap with Fathering Japan proper. 42

While keeping in mind these loose affiliations and general ambiguity surrounding membership, the importance of Fathering Japan to the fathering movement cannot be understated. Indeed, its published materials seem to make up the bulk of content circulated and consumed by the fathering movement. Moreover, the vast majority of parenting guides, lectures, and resources circulated by government offices or large corporations are developed in partnership with consultants who are affiliated with Fathering Japan. As a result, many of the central ideas are recycled from Fathering Japan’s key text, “The New Papa’s Textbook” (2013).

Expanding on the strategies presented therein is the subsequent publication “New Papa’s

Working Style” (2014)18. I also reference “The Book to Change Papa from ‘Tough’ to

‘Interesting!19’”(2017), a publication I interpret as a post Ikumen Boom follow up to The New

Papa’s Textbook. Less a guidebook than a reflection on changes in the discussion surrounding the gendered division of labour, this book is closer to social commentary than explicit instruction. These texts figure heavily in my analysis, reflecting their ubiquity. I also consulted publications from other non-profits, as well as the numerous self-published titles from Fathering

Japan members and fathering movement members generally. I draw on government produced handbooks, guides, and videos, which are varied and numerous. While there is a great deal of redundancy in content, I attempt to present a representative sample of materials to illustrate their relative consistency.

18 Fathering Japan released two subsequent texts once I left the field: “Papa and Mama’s Childrearing Strategy” (2018) and “Papa’s Primer Guide to Making Your Family Smile” (2018). I do not address the content of these books directly because they were not available to my interlocutors during fieldwork and were released well into the development of this dissertation, though I expect their presence would be felt in any subsequent research projects.

19 While this text was not in circulation during the period of my stay in Japan during which I was conducting interviews and observation, I reference it here because it attends to the issues that were prominent at the time. So, while my interlocutors would be unfamiliar with its content, its commentary was certainly relevant to the moment in which I was conducting research. 43

The criteria used to select participant fathers, then, were fluid. I quickly learned that seeking out participants who self-identified as “ikumen” was problematic20. With the assistance of a Fathering Japan volunteer, who I refer to in this dissertation as “Bun”, I was able to meet several prominent members of the organization. Attending parenting classes targeting fathers held throughout Tokyo— both in conjunction with and independent of Fathering Japan— also resulted in connections with several interlocutors who had no organizational level involvement in the fathering movement. From these initial contacts, and with Bun’s guidance, I was able to expand my network of contacts through referrals. As a result, I spoke with fathers representing a wide range of levels of engagement with, or knowledge of, the father movement— from those who had never heard of the Ikumen Project to those who were among the first members of

Fathering Japan.

There are four critical decisions related to methodology that I made over the course of fieldwork that deserve mention here as they exerted a strong influence on the scope of this ethnography. The first was to seek out employment. On settling in Tokyo, I developed a network of contacts with the assistance of Bun, a Fathering Japan volunteer who acted as my field consultant. I made a habit of checking for Fathering Japan related events and attending as I was able, later expanding my criteria to any public events that targeted fathers. I secured slideshow files and took pictures as I was able, gathered any printed materials, and took notes. While this was a productive entry point into the fathering movement that resulted in some beneficial contacts, the content of the events themselves is frequently recycled. While I had been able to schedule some weekend interviews or make trips to the bar with fathers on Friday evenings, I

20 See Chapter 2 and Chapter 3. 44 found the sort of total immersion I had expected from doctoral fieldwork to be quite difficult to achieve. After nearly 4 months in the field, Bun helpfully pointed out that fathers typically worked Monday to Friday and preferred— understandably— to spend time with their family on the weekends and not anthropologists. The best way to immerse myself in their lifestyle, we reasoned, was to find employment that mirrored their own so I could draw on that well of shared experience. I was able to secure a position at a private school21 that would accept me as an integrated member of the staff, meaning I would take on responsibilities and attend meetings as a salaried employee22. While interviewing for the position, I mentioned my research interests to the principal, who excitedly told me of the school’s father’s association. He invited me to join them on the occasion of their next meeting, the results of which are described in Chapter 6.

Working at the school did indeed aid in immersion. While not at the same level of intensity as a corporate environment, I was able to experience firsthand the demands of the workplace. I spoke to co-workers about their experience with parental leave, saw the effects of overtime, became familiar with the social obligations that come with employment, and watched certain work-life balance policies translated into practice. In one particularly memorable morning meeting, the

21 I did not conduct any research in the school itself or involving any students. My engagement as a researcher was limited to father’s association events and meetings which took place outside of school hours, though my position at the school helped me to develop a better understanding of working conditions in Japan. This includes the school culture festival I describe in Chapter 6, which, while held on school grounds, is an event open to the public. It was fortunate that the father’s association members I happened to speak with were not the parents of any of my students. This was a question I opened with to screen out participants who may have a conflict of interest.

22 Most teaching positions available to foreigners in Japan are severely limited in scope. In these working environments, foreign staff members are typically cordoned off from Japanese staff. However, I was invited to join an institution with integrated staffing. The school’s large number of kikkokusei students (students who have studied abroad and are returning to Japan) meant that there was a need for qualified English-speaking teachers and not supplemental foreign staff. The school considered my graduate degree, along with post-graduate certification in TESOL from a joint Woodsworth/OISE program, to be sufficient credentials. The majority of the foreign instructors were proficient Japanese speakers, and as such the institution showed much greater flexibility (to the extent that several staff had been offered seishain salaried positions and management roles). This was important as it allowed me to involve myself in some of the administrative and managerial level discussions and activities from which a foreign staff member might otherwise be excluded. 45 principal announced that it was “Premium Friday” to a chorus of laughs from the bullpen.

Premium Friday, a government initiative to encourage employees to leave early on the final

Friday of each month, had gained little traction. Here, I saw for myself the reason why: it was treated as a joke by those in charge.

The second methodological decision was to expand my criteria for research participants.

This was born of two formative experiences. The first occurred while I spoke with a veteran

Fathering Japan member (featured in Chapter 6). Discussing my research interests, he warned me that Fathering Japan represented “the top 1%” of fathers: the most dedicated and invested. If I were interested in how fatherhood was changing in Japan, I would be well served to speak to men who did not have an organizational role. The second was not a single event, but an early inability to find self-identified ikumen with whom to speak. The reasons for this are complex, and explored at length in Chapter 3, but I quickly came to realize that I was likely overdetermining the scope of my project. I decided to speak to any father or mother interested in chatting about their experience as parents, and to think more closely about their awareness of the fathering movement afterwards. While I did try to heed the warning against speaking to only exceptional fathers, the issue of class in the more traditional sense was persistent. The scope of my study is such that it selects for men who are able to take time from work for their children, which means they were overwhelmingly in white collar positions, self-employed, or professionals. This was drawn into sharp relief for me in a discussion at a papakai23 attended by an advisor to the organization. Bun tactfully guided our discussion while refilling the advisor’s glass, asking if Fathering Japan was only for men who could “afford” to parent as a hobby. The

23 Papakai (see Chapter 6) are drinking parties held by groups of fathers. 46 advisor, along with several other man seated at the table, vehemently disagreed, pointing to the efforts of the organization to alleviate poverty and support youth (the “Tiger Mask Foundation”) and its campaign for the rights of single fathers. Bun, ever the skeptic, wondered aloud what the difference was between “membership” and “charity”. While Fathering Japan and the fathering movement certainly have a message to convey to men regardless of their background, it remains unclear to what extent it accounts for men from all walks of life. Future inquiries into the fathering movement could and should explore this issue of class, including fieldwork outside of the relatively wealthy Tokyo area (which likely played a role in constraining the breadth of my network of interlocutors).

The third methodological decision was to drink with my informants. I would argue that, given the strong corporate background of most of my informants, this was unavoidable.

Fortunately, there are some useful insights from other anthropologists working in similar conditions on how to navigate the murky waters of research methods and inebriation. Partanen’s

(2006) revealing of the “Geertzian” structure of and for drinking takes on particular importance in the context of Japan. Indeed, izakaya (bars known for serving snack foods) and nomikai

(drinking parties, typically for members of formalized groups— corporations, clubs etc.) have proven significant spaces for ethnographic observation (see Moeran 2005; Ben-Ari 1989;

Christensen 2012; Hendry 1994). But how does one conduct research when, as Palmer (2010) notes, ethnography of this sort entails the risk of “over participation”? McDonald and Sylvester’s

(2014) study of university bukatsu (after school clubs) drinking practices provided useful guidance. The authors emphasize that, from a methodological standpoint, the goal as a researcher is to demonstrate some degree of what Ben-Ari (1989: 54) referred to as “social nudity”. While refusing to drink would have been met with a touch of suspicion by my informants, I managed my intake to ensure that I was able to take notes as necessary but was convincingly convivial and 47 frank enough in conversation to match the tone of my party. As McDonald and Sylvester elucidate through their work, drinking is a practice— a skill set developed alongside athletic ability in university bukatsu. In the same way, anthropologists must cultivate their drinking skills, working to understand ritual practices and expectations of behaviour. My frequent outings with salarymen (both for the purposes of research and for socialization) were very instructive in this regard. Formal interviews were never conducted under the influence of alcohol, and I was diligent in prefacing my work to attendees at these drinking events upon my introduction.

The final methodological decision was to draw from and engage heavily with social media and digital content. I look back on my original formulation of this project bemused at my naivety. I had not accounted for the heavy use of social media by my interlocutors in my initial outline of methods. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the primary space in which the fathering movement is visible is digital. This should come as no surprise. Connecting distant fathering circles across the country, sharing photos of their children, promoting workshops, sharing articles: this is the most common and consistent engagement with the fathering movement for most men. Coupled with exacting work hours and their dedication to family time, social media channels like LINE (a popular messaging application), Instagram, and Facebook make up the bulk of communication between fathers (not to mention with their spouses).

Instagram in particular is home to “celebrity” ikumen and daddy influencers with large followings that continue to capitalize on the trendy image of the involved father. Youtube, too, hosts instructional content and vlogs from fathers that document their day to day activities.

Parenting forums I was directed to by informants were a wealth of information and were helpful in highlighting ongoing discussions surrounding the division of labour at a more grounded level.

This is leaving aside resources from NPOs and the government available only through their 48 respective websites. Suffice it to say, while far from a “digital ethnography”, this ethnographic study was conducted in a heavily digitized context.

1.7 Dissertation Outline

In Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, I delve into the fallout of the Ikumen Boom. Upon my arrival in Tokyo, I found the fathering movement at a point of transition. Ikumen had lost their sheen.

Developing my discussion out from a political scandal involving a Diet member’s plans to take paternity leave, I chart shifting perceptions of fatherhood in general and ikumen in particular among men and women in Tokyo. In Chapter 2, I argue that the Ikumen Boom was not as novel as it appears. I show that fatherhood has always been central to conceptions of modernity in

Japan, tracing this thread through the reforms of the Meiji Restoration and the post-war economic miracle. The contemporary fathering movement is built on the foundations laid by previous activist groups, drawing inspiration from the transnational flow of images and ideals of fatherhood and accelerated through the concerted efforts of the state and business interests. In

Chapter 3, I unpack the cynicism that the popularity of ikumen evoked, exemplified by the figures of the ikumen modoki and yarisugi ikumen. I argue that these figures are indicative of deep-seated insecurities reflecting contemporary labour conditions. Fathers are eager to distance themselves from the “part-timers” of the domestic sphere and seek to establish themselves as unmarked contributors to the home. Similarly, women object to the discourse of exceptionalism surrounding ikumen, arguing that male contributions to household labour underscore, as opposed to overturning, latent gender inequality in Japan.

In Chapter 4, I explore the mechanism through which fathers are “produced”. This is captured in the metaphor of the “papa switch”. Behind the fathering movement’s engagement is the assumption that men cannot “naturally” become fathers. They must attune themselves to their wife and child in order to replicate the sort of consciousness that is assumed to arise organically 49 from the mother’s somatic connection to her progeny. The discourse on the papa switch is laced with the language of the digitized business world, invoking the image of man as machine.

Moreover, women’s bodies are examined at the level of biology, emphasizing sexed differences.

This division closely follows the symbolic distinction between men as culture, women as nature outlined by Ortner (1974). However, examples of men actually “turning on the papa switch” shows that the emergence of a “consciousness of fathering” is far more complex. These formative experiences often involve the shattering of the illusion surrounding a mother’s natural inclination towards childcare; gaps in expectation that profoundly change the way men view the gendered division of labour. Moreover, some men argued that fatherhood was about “choice” in a social context where their ability to choose their path through life felt severely constrained.

In Chapter 5, I reveal the strategies promoted by the fathering movement and employed by fathers in their negotiation of the division of household labour. Of principle importance in the fathering movement is chore work as a form of care labour performed for one’s spouse. This

“mama care” emphasizes chores as the basis of a couple’s partnership rather than the strict division of labour associated with the authority figure of the daikokubashira (pillar of the home).

Instruction in the performance of chores treads a fine line between casting the mother as a teacher-manager within the home and insisting that chores be performed independently by fathers. The heart of the matter seems to be the earnestness with which a father goes about the labour of the home, which is conveyed in all manner of subtleties surrounding the mechanical performance of the chores themselves. However, in practice the negotiation of household labour is a delicate process. While chores are a medium for relationality and a way of belonging within the home, couples are not so easily able to compartmentalize what chore work means: how it is read by themselves and by others inside and outside the home. Such is the complexity of chore 50 labour and its negotiation that certain entrepreneurial fathers have turned consulting on this issue into their profession.

In Chapter 6, I examine the diverse communities that have emerged from the fathering movement. I begin with the central issue of placelessness among fathers, who are met with suspicion in the feminine coded spaces where childcare takes place. I discuss the “fathering circle”24 through the eyes of a veteran leader of one such group. Here, men are able to engage and connect with other men outside the confines of corporate sociality in their capacity as fathers. The fathering circle is less about childcare per se than building relationships freely with men from all walks of life. In so doing, certain familiar corporate drinking rituals are repackaged and repurposed, making this transition smoother for company men. I then turn to the involvement of fathers in PTA activities. The PTA has traditionally been the purview of mothers, though the fathering movement has strongly advocated for increased participation from fathers. I look at a rather peculiar school “father’s association”, an organ distinct from the PTA and an absolute rarity in Japan, and the minor controversy surrounding it.

In Chapter 7, I take a critical view of the translation of fathering into the corporate world.

Fathering Japan’s “Ikuboss Project” is dedicated to promoting work-life balance and gender equality in the workplace by specifically targeting managers for training. Against the backdrop of Japan’s continuing struggles with the karōshi (death by overwork) issue, ikuboss were beginning to figure into the state’s plans for workstyle reform. Reviewing ikuboss corporate training material reveals the marriage of empathy and business strategy: a world in which understanding the needs of one’s employees contributes to the company’s bottom line. In a

24 Sometimes referred to as a “papa circle” (papa sakuru). 51 competitive, globalized business arena, Japanese corporations are looking beyond the work hard play hard model of the salaryman to the successful practices of their international competitors, which value inclusion, diversity, and work-life balance. The ikuboss framework is unique in the sense that it applies a familial logic to its reforms. Managers are implored to see their company as a father, to connect with employees through a shared identity as familial caregivers. In discussions with self-proclaimed ikuboss, I saw the importance of fatherhood in the context of management invoked in surprising ways: as a logic of efficiency, as a method of modernizing business practices, and as a means of undermining the supremacy of profits in favour of stronger ties between employees and their communities.

Chapter 2 The Modern Father 2.1 Boom and Bust

Bulbs flash, shutters click. Film crews line the walls of this ritzy Ginza high-rise conference room. Camera men shoot b-roll while reporters primp their hair and review their notes. The unprecedented media attention has given this forum on fathering a sense of importance, urgency— even glamour. Japan’s major television, print, and digital media outlets have assembled here to feed the story dominating this month’s news cycle: that of tonight’s keynote speaker, Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) Lower House lawmaker and Kyoto’s No. 3 district representative, Kensuke Miyazaki. A handsome, stylish man in his early 30s, Miyazaki sits nervously at the front of the lecture hall surrounded by parenting advocates and business leaders. The lights positioned around him seem excessively bright. Even from the back of the lecture hall, his discomfort is palpable.

Miyazaki rocked the LDP several weeks earlier when he announced his plan to take paternity leave, anticipating the forthcoming birth of his first child with his wife and fellow lawmaker Megumi Kaneko. Speaking to the BBC, Miyazaki clarified his motivations: “In Japan, only 2.3% of new fathers take paternity leave. The government wants to raise it to 13% by 2020, but it’s still a long way off, so I thought by declaring that I wanted to take paternity leave as a lawmaker, I could set an example and cause a bit of a stir” (BBC 2016). Along with 10 male

LDP colleagues, he formed a study group to make rules concerning child-care leave for Diet members. This was the first time in parliamentary history that a man had applied for paternity leave— publicly, at least, though it is impossible to say how many similar requests had been quietly whispered and dismissed behind closed doors. 53

Miyazaki had become the avatar of parenting and work life balance activists across

Japan; a protagonist in an intergenerational struggle played out in the country’s most public arena. The headline: “LDP lawmaker faces off against his party’s old guard over childcare leave plan” (Japan Times 2016). While cynics levied accusations against Miyazaki of attention seeking and political opportunism, the debate’s primary focus was his responsibilities as a public representative. Many found the idea of an elected official taking a leave of absence bank rolled by the taxpayer to be an especially egregious example of government waste. Politicians are exempt from the protections of Japan’s Labour Standards Act, which includes provisions for childcare leave, because their service to constituents is not considered equivalent in kind to the labour of workers subject to industrial relations. Happy to make their disapproval known publicly, his opponents harangued him relentlessly in the media. Hachiro Okonogi, the deputy

Diet affairs chief, stated that male lawmakers taking childcare leave was “inappropriate”, questioning whether the public would ever approve of such a decision (Japan Times 2016).

Secretary general Sadakazu Tanigaki raised concerns over the potential effect of absent Diet members on important parliamentary sessions where “… one vote can make a difference in the outcome” (The Guardian 2016). Behind closed doors, criticism was even harsher. One Diet committee reprimanded Miyazaki for “maligning the reputation of all Diet members” through his actions (The Telegraph 2016).

Miyazaki was not without supporters, of course. The reverberations of his declaration were significant enough to draw a response from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe himself. In a meeting between the two, Abe was quoted as saying “there may be divided opinions but (what

I’m doing is always) supported by half and opposed by the other half. That is what being a politician is about” (Japan Times 2016). The fathering activist groups I was embedded in— especially Fathering Japan— were deeply invested in his story. Miyazaki was a high-profile 54 father with political clout. If he could navigate party infighting and strike the right balance between looks and substance in his public appearances, his efforts could result in a real coupe for the movement. With Japan’s major legislative body on board, widespread reform in labour law regarding parental leave for public officials could inch closer to reality. Miyazaki was suddenly the most famous— and arguably important— “ikumen” in Japan.

Since the term was coined in 2006 by the PR firm Hakuhodo, ikumen has served as a conceptual anchor for workplace reform efforts and policy drafted to address the nation’s fertility issues. The word itself is a neologism combining the Japanese word “ikuji” (child rearing) with the English word “men”; a tongue-in-cheek play on the word “ikemen” (“handsome man”).

Ikumen was ranked in the Top Ten Words of the Year (ryūkōgo) in 2010, the same year the

Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare initiated the Ikumen Project; one of a multifarious set of initiatives meant to shore up the nation’s falling birth rate and promote gender equality in the home and workplace25. With its inauguration came a mass media campaign that implored men to

“declare themselves ikumen”: to make public their desire to parent and to share their experience with other men. At this time, ikumen and the issues of paternity leave and childcare associated with them reached the peak of their tremendous popularity: a period known as the “Ikumen

Boom “. Fueled by fashion focused publications like “Fathering Quarterly Japan”, the market for fathering goods— “masculine” strollers, baby carriers, parenting guides, and branded clothing— grew exponentially. The gregarious, media savvy chairman of Fathering Japan, Tetsuya Ando, had done wonders to reshape the public discourse surrounding fatherhood. Along with a select few senior members of the organization, he was a regular on the morning talk show circuit,

25 See Introduction for more details. 55 growing more and more influential with each passing year. With the blessing of the state and buy-in from the private sector (with their interests split between revising internal HR policies and targeting ikumen as consumers), the winds of social change seemed to be favouring ikumen.

Fathering Japan and the other NPOs within the fathering movement were strong supporters of Miyazaki publicly. Yet, among the fathers in attendance that night in Ginza— and those observing from afar— I heard murmurs of uncertainty. While conservative law makers have never had any qualms voicing their disapproval26 of men (and women) taking childcare leave, opposition towards Miyazaki was increasingly coming from those ostensibly aligned with his relatively progressive agenda: parenting and childcare activists, labour reformers, and mothers. Could Miyazaki be trusted to represent the interests of fathers? Were his motives truly rooted in his transition into fatherhood? Did he understand the issues; not just for fathers, but for mothers struggling in similar conditions? Could his uninformed efforts jeopardize the work of activists? Crucially, these concerns were not limited to Miyazaki himself. I heard similar ideas expressed while conducting interviews, in media commentary and thought pieces, and in conversations with friends and acquaintances on the topic of ikumen generally— suspicion, frustration, resent. Watching and listening carefully from the crowd that night and reflecting on the furor since Miyazaki’s declaration, I was troubled: why were ikumen falling out of favour?

Over the course of Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 of this dissertation, I unpack the ikumen concept against the backdrop of the Miyazaki case in order to answer this question.

26 There are numerous examples that might be referenced here, but Kumamoto City Assembly Member Yuka Ogata, barred from the assembly for bringing her infant in November 2017, was one high profile case that emerged around the same time as Miyazaki’s. The following year, Ogata was once again ejected for “sucking on a cough drop”, which she interpreted as a retaliatory act (The Guardian 2018). 2.2 Fatherhood and Modernity

In this chapter, I grapple with the “novelty” of ikumen, disputing the narrative of intergenerational conflict used to explain the furor around Miyazaki’s declaration. It would be an oversimplification to read the Miyazaki case— or the backlash against ikumen in general— as reactionary rabble rousing or, as domestic media outlets suggested, strictly expressing a division between older social conservatives and the younger progressive crowd. Miyazaki’s invocation of his own kin related responsibilities and desires revealed the Diet’s internal dysfunction and its inability to reconcile the Abe administration’s progressive family policies (exemplified by the

Ikumen Project) with the disinterest of lawmakers in seeing them bear fruit and the legal and bureaucratic knots (in this case politicians unrecognized by the Labour Standards Act) that delimit the recognition of kin relations27. Proactive fatherhood, as a facet of the kind of “gender equality” increasingly enshrined in law and corporate policy in the world’s major economies, appears as an index of modernity (Crespi and Rupini 2015; Connell and Wood 2005). As a concrete “manifestation” of the state, the inability of the Diet to resolve the Miyazaki issue suggested a gap between Japan and its peer nations along a universal, linear trajectory towards modern statehood. Paternity leave was part of a larger ongoing debate on this topic. For example,

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s visit to Tokyo that same year served as an occasion for interlocutors and news media alike to comment on his newly appointed “gender equal” cabinet, which stood in sharp contrast to Abe’s male dominated one28. Through Miyazaki, not

27 As Diet members have historically been almost exclusively men, this disconnect with the Labour Standards Act had been largely invisible for decades. This issue was first popularized by Seiko Hashimoto, a member of the House of Representatives and former Olympian who sought maternity leave in 2000.

28 Abe’s subsequent fourth cabinet reshuffle in 2018 would leave a sole female appointee. 57 only can we see the “…particular cultural understandings about kinship, marriage, family, and relatedness (that) organize, inform, and naturalize what will count as the nation and citizenship and how these intersect…with contrasting visions of the state”, but the way in which these are always constituted in relation to other national imaginaries (McKinnon and Cannell 2013: 23—

24). The significance of ikumen as a figure of modernity is lost if we treat this conflict as a nationally bounded dialectic contest between ikumen, as a subordinate masculinity, and hegemonic salaryman masculinity (Connell 1995; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). “Western” fathers, imagined as a monolithic global community of men with a modern and desirable lifestyle built on proactive engagement with their families, figure prominently in the ikumen discourse.

However, as I will illustrate in this chapter, this connection between fatherhood in Japan and in the imagined West has far deeper historical roots.

I argue that kinship, and fatherhood specifically, is integral to the “discursive complex”

(Ivy 1995: 5) of modernity in Japan. I will demonstrate that contemporary ikumen are no exception. My analysis intersects with ongoing discussions in the anthropology of kinship that contest the assumption that modernity entails a loss of kinship’s “organizing force” to the political and economic. McKinnon and Cannell argue that “…models of social evolution, development, and modernity have been overdrawn in such a way that it is nearly impossible to assess, or even consider, the ways in which kinship actually operates beyond the domestic domain in so-called modern societies” (2013: 8). Yanagisako similarly challenges the “absence of kinship in metanarratives of transnational and global capitalism [that are fueled by] an evolutionary model of modernity that posits a steady, global march away from the fetters of family and kinship bonds” (2013: 100). Writing against an “evolutionary model of modernity”, or what Sakai called modernity as a “developmental teleology” (2001: 191), contests the lasting influence of the very earliest frameworks for the interpretation of human society in the discipline 58 of anthropology that saw the significance of kinship recede as the social order grew more

“complex”. This line of thinking can be traced from Sir Henry Sumner Maine’s influential

Ancient Law (1861), which argued that “primitive” societies were organized based on kinship and “modern” societies on law, through to Lewis Henry Morgan’s (1877) theory of societal progression from “primitive promiscuity” through to monogamy. I take these recent calls to resist the domaining practices associated with “modernity” as a disciplinary intervention or corrective as much as an analytic shift. While I am invested in this project, I also question the role played by kinship relations— and, in my case, fatherhood specifically— in the way modernity itself is conceived.

My understanding of “modernity”— a notoriously slippery and contested concept— draws heavily from Latour’s (1993) formulation. For Latour, the modern— “a new regime, an acceleration, a rupture, a revolution in time” (1993:10)— must be defined in relation to a stable, archaic past. If the modern is simply that which is not this archaic past, then as a category it is contingent and fluid. This fluidity gives it a normative power: whenever or wherever it is located, the modern embodies the qualities of a given present. Latour explains that the archaic past is typically associated with non-capitalist systems of production, tribalism, and superstition.

In contrast, modernity is associated with the nation-state, capitalism, scientific thought, empire/colonialism, and globalism. While these traits are relatively consistent across an array of geographical and temporal contexts, Latour is not claiming that these are objective or stable definitions. Rather, he takes the neat division between modernity and the pre-modern as an illusion, one that conceals the “hybrids”— unsortable or unresolvable elements that resist schematization— that arise through their imperfect separation. The perception of modernity as a linear unceasing movement towards an elusive future stands in stark contrast to the messy and often contradictory experience of change on the ground. 59

Turning to the specific example of Japan, Marilyn Ivy’s (1995) work is a useful point of orientation. Ivy was concerned with Japan’s “confound(ing)” position as a “great assimilator”

(1995: 1), processing and incorporating at incredible speed the trappings of modernity while maintaining what is understood at home and abroad as an inviolable “cultural” core of

“Japaneseness”. This modernity is “…not only the urban energies, capitalist structures of life, and mechanical and electrical forms of reproduction that came into sharpest relief in the Japan of the 1920s” (1995: 4). Rather, she argues (1995: 5):

It indicates the problem of the nation-state and its correlation with a capitalist colonialism

that ensured Japan would be pulled into a global geopolitical matrix from the mid-

nineteenth century on. It indicates as well the changes effected in identities and

subjectivities, through the emergence of individualism and new modes of interiority; in

relationships to temporality, through the emergence of "tradition" as the background

against which progressive history could be situated; and in institutional procedures,

through what Foucault has called individualization and totalization: bureaucratic

rationalisms, Taylorized modes of production, novel forms of image representation, mass

media, scientific disciplines.

From this loose definition, Ivy sees the modernity of Japan as inseparable from its constitution as a nation-state and colonial power29 and a dialectic relationship with the West. Ivy writes (1995:

4):

29 For Etienne Balibar "every modern nation is a product of colonization” (1991: 8), either as colonizer or colonized or, in Japan’s case, both. 60

Japan is literally unimaginable outside its positioning vis-a-vis the West. Like other

colonized or near-colonized polities, Japan as a nation-state was instaurated in response

to the threat of domination by European and American powers in the mid-nineteenth

century. It is arguable that there was no discursively unified notion of the "Japanese"

before the eighteenth century, and that the articulation of a unified Japanese ethnos with

the "nation" to produce "Japanese culture" is entirely modern

Modernity here rests on a “cartographic and civilizational imaginary of the globe” (Sakai 2005:

193), spatially and temporally separating a modern West from the pre-modern Rest (Sakai

2001:7). In this rendering, the West— like Latour’s modernity— is better conceived as an imaginary, a shifting and mobile idea that is “…always associating itself with those regions, communities, and peoples that appear politically or economically superior to other regions, communities, and peoples” (Sakai 2001: 1).

My focus in this chapter is the notions of kinship and the relation between family structure and the state that were shaped in reference to the imaginary West. To the extent that this entailed the promotion of particular logics for establishing and structuring families associated with Europe and North America (the free selection of partners, romantic love between spouses, two generation or “nuclear” households etc.), there are elements at play here that recall

Homi Bhabha’s colonial mimicry (1994). The mimic is an always imperfect replication of the colonizer by the colonized. The uncanny closeness to the colonizer’s position is marked by an excess or a lack that brings to attention the original uneasy division between colonizer and colonized. Historians have documented Japan’s aspirations to “honorary whiteness” (Doerr and

Kumagai 2012; Russell 1998): recognition from the nations it saw as its Western peers and 61 separation from the non-Western nations subjugated by their imperial power30. This mimicry took diverse forms from beauty practices of skin lightening to the frequent use of loan words

(Wagatsuma 1967; Russel 1991).

However, I follow Sakai (2001; 2005) in resisting the reduction of modernity to modernization and modernization to Westernization. To do so reproduces the hierarchical relationship between the West and the Rest. The former appears active, the latter passive; recipients in a unidirectional flow. For Sakai, the flow is always “bi-directional” (2005: 197—

198). More than this, Japan has already always been “of” the West historically and geopolitically, though much effort through history has been put into rendering the West as an externality to Japan. As Harry Harootunian (2000) shows in his dense volume “Overcome by

Modernity”, for some the symbols of wealth and modernity increasingly visible in urban centres and mass media in Japan in the 1920s and 30s threatened its “cultural heritage” and sense of ethnic, national identity. The 1942 symposium “overcoming the modern” (kindai no chōkoku), for which Harootunian’s work is named, represented an effort by Japan’s intelligentsia to confront the relationship between Japan and the West.

While I do not consider the way Japanese understandings of kinship would come to influence life in North America and Western Europe in this chapter31, I discuss the strategic concealing of the provenience of imported notions of kinship. Family in Japan was repeatedly recast as “tradition” as its institutional contours were remade in reference to an imagined,

30 This far pre-dates World War II. Negotiating a place in the West’s racial hierarchy was the backbone of Japan’s shift to imperial power itself post-Meiji restoration (see Morris-Suzuki 1998; Fujitani 2013; Fujitani, White, and Yoneyama 2001).

31 I return to this topic briefly in Chapter 7, where I discuss the impact of the “Japanese corporation” (and it perceived familial character) on American businesses. 62 modern family in the West. Over section three and four, I aim to unsettle the assumptions that colour both academic and popular commentary which take for granted the novelty and distinctly

“modern” character of men’s involvement in chores and childcare (see Frühstück and Walthall

2011). I work through two lines of reasoning. First, I illustrate the contingency of family structure in Japan, and the tension between this contingency and the repeated efforts of the state to regulate it in a way that makes it appear natural and inviolable. This regulatory project was a core component of efforts to orient Japan as a sovereign nation-state in relation to the West.

Second, I turn to historical studies that highlight the diversity of kinship practices. I ask how and why, in relation to the pursuit of modernity, these practices were promoted or occluded. I focus on two historical eras: the Meiji period, which marked the beginning of Japan’s industrialization, and the post-war span of the Showa period, which is associated with the emergence of the salaryman and sengyō shufu.

In sections five and six, I draw a line from the Meiji and post-war eras through to ikumen.

There are salient features that unite the renderings of fatherhood across these three historical eras. First, the father is consistently imagined as a leadership figure in a project of nation building and competition with the West. Second, the stability of the father is dependent on both concealing the disparities between the lived experience of families and their discursive construction, and the blurring of boundaries between “modern” fathers and their “traditional” forebearers. Third, fatherhood has served as a domaining discourse, separating the domestic from the public and the family from the corporation. In the figure of the ikumen, kinship remains at the heart of conceptions of modernity and the valorization of global capitalism in Japan. 63

2.3 The Meiji Restoration: The Household as Practice and Legal Imaginary

The history of family in Japan is one of struggle with the pressures of adapting to a model of domestic organization that would garner recognition from Western powers and support the nation’s rapid industrialization. An historical approach that focuses on the way kin relations were defined and codified by the state reveals increasing rigidity. However, scholars dedicated to understanding the everyday practices of families subject to these new economic and political pressures prevent this narrative from becoming totalizing, drawing attention to the persistently porous boundaries between public and private and between masculinity and femininity despite their separation in law. The Meiji Restoration (1868) marked the beginning of Japan’s rise towards statehood, driven by a desire to maintain its sovereignty after bearing witness to Western colonial dominance in the port cities of China and the East Indies. A continued emphasis on

Japan’s philosophical tradition was crucial to the modern state project: the principle of filial piety, one of the foundations of the household or “ie”, also provided the logical basis for loyalty to the Emperor as the “father of the nation”, and by extension the Meiji government (McLelland

2012). Fatherhood writ large became one of the primary sites of Japan’s modernization project.

This required new institutional practices and the promotion of new ways of thinking about the role of the father in the household. A particular vision of the proper organization of the ie, specifically as a series of vertical relations undergirded by a system of succession and inheritance that privileged the first-born male heir of the household, was reified through legal reforms

(Kurosu 2011; Ueno 2009). When the Meiji Civil Code was finally promulgated in 1898, it represented a set of “…measures that sought to organize, rationalize, and control all aspects of the population from early education through to marriage and child-rearing” (McLelland

2012:17). The replication of the dynamics of power that organized the state at the national level 64 was enforced, through law, in the relationships between individuals. Under the supervision of the Meiji government and through the codification of ie, Japan became a self-proclaimed ‘family state’ (kazoku kokka) (Garon 1997:318).

This codified, legal representation of the household is only a single understanding of ie, a term that is actually comprised of multiple, layered meanings. Anthropological and historical studies centered on folk kinship practices highlight this gap between the legal parameters of family post-Meiji Restoration and the diversity and flexibility of kinship in practice.

Anthropologist Dorinne Kondo brings together many of these varied meanings of ie in a single definition by framing it as “… (a) corporate group(s)… units of production and/or consumption, encompassing the roles of corporation/enterprise/household” (1990:122). This reflects Kondo’s interest in the dynamics of the small, household enterprises in which she conducted ethnographic research in the 1980’s. However, feminist scholar Chizuko Ueno (2009) and sociologist Emiko

Ochiai (1996) have made similar arguments for the “household as corporation” in other academic contexts, lending it further credence. From this perspective, the ie can be understood as an organization composed of a set of positions, as opposed to a set of kinship relations, that exists at physical locus. Of these positions, two are unwaveringly rigid and must be filled at any given time: the married couple which hold the headship (acting as “corporate trustees” as per

Kondo’s analogy). There is, however, a great deal of flexibility in the way in which these positions are filled through the host of marriage and adoption options available to the ie (Kondo

1990:127). While kinship is one of the primary grounds for inclusion in the unit, other methods for inclusion exist which are numerous and complex, ranging from adoption to apprenticeship

(McLelland 2012:16; Saito 2011:468). It is crucial to note that these are selective mechanisms.

Unlike systems of consanguinity, there is an element of merit at play here; a decision-making process with the continued success of the household corporation at its core. This is also 65 illustrative of a larger, recurring theme in the literature of ie: the contrast between the immutability of structural requirements and the practicality, and fluidity, of the means through which these requirements are met. This mixture of stability and flexibility works in service of the continuity of the ie regardless of extenuating circumstances. In the pre-Meiji era, the ie, and not its individual members, was enshrined in law as the holder of property rights, and an end to the family line would result in the dissolution of its collective material wealth as it atrophied through external marriages and adoptions (McLelland 2012:16; Saito 2011:468). Beyond material wealth, the ie was capable of accumulating and retaining “intangible property” (“cultural capital” or reputation, for example) in perpetuity (Kondo 1990:120).

However, the household head was given sole ownership of the ie and its property in the statutes of the Meiji Civil Code. This stood in contrast to the long standing, pre-Meiji practice of vesting property rights in the ie itself. The state also recognized the authority of the head in all matters concerning the ie (McLelland 2010:510). This extended to decisions regarding marriage and domicile, allowing the head to disavow the desires of other ie members with the full legal support of the state (Ronald and Alexy 2011:3). These representative powers were explicitly vested in the paternal head of house, emphasizing both the patriarchal nature of this system and the increasing legal importance of kinship relations. Article 970 of the Civil Code explicitly altered the system of ranked preference in determining succession, ensuring that succession by the eldest son was a legal necessity. Under these new guidelines, preference was given to close relatives over distant relations, legitimate children over illegitimate children, men over women, and with attention to seniority (Kondo 1990:169). Ie membership was further restricted to those individuals “with the same surname” (Kondo 1990:169). This meant that non-kin employees and apprentices tied to the family enterprise were no longer eligible for legal recognition as ie members outside of marriage and adoption arrangements. 66

Original plans for the Civil Code involved a rote translation of the Napoleonic Code civil, including enlisting the aid of French legal scholar Gustave Émile Boissonade (Rohl 2005:177).

Issued in 1890 and due for enforcement in by 1893, the Old Civil Code became a major issue for nationalist groups as part of what was perceived as an ongoing attack on tradition and custom in the name of modernity. Chief among the concerns of those opposed was the lack of basis for statutory law in Japanese practice. France and Prussia had long drawn from a Greco-Roman heritage of Latin statutes, which their respective civil codes unified and rendered in a common tongue. The influence of Chinese and Korean law, alongside a history of civil strife and internal divides, meant that Japan had developed under a form of legal pluralism based on regional court and clan law. Members of the neo-traditionalist faction in favour of postponing the promulgation of the civil code pointed to these logical inconsistencies as evidence of a domineering Western influence. Perhaps the most influential voice of dissent belonged to conservative legal scholar

Hozumi Yatsuka, whose work would serve as the legal foundation of the Meiji conceptions of kokutai and setai. Scholar Kato Hiroyuki had previously introduced these principles in early debates over the nature of Japan’s modernization project. Kato defined kokutai (a word which is perhaps best translated simply as “sovereign”) as the “national essence”, the history of tradition and custom that formed the basis of the distinctly Japanese polity. Seitai, in contrast, described the form of the state apparatus and its bureaucratic organization. While seitai was flexible and ever changing, Japan’s kokutai was durable and immutable. A Western system of governance was palatable as an alteration of seitai as it would have no meaningful impact on its kokutai. In an effort to provide a legal correlate for these conceptions for the purposes of drafting the Meiji

Constitution of 1889, Hozumi defined kokutai as the locus of sovereignty, vested in either an individual (a monarch) or the people (in a democracy). Hozumi justified the monarchal locus of the Japanese kokutai as a logical extension of its household system (in Rohl 2005: 178): 67

In the household, the head of the house, representing the authority of his ancestors,

exercises his patriarchal authority over the family. In the state, the emperor, representing

the authority of Amaterasu Omikami, exercises sovereign power over the state.

In his 1891 publication “If the Civil Code is Enacted, Loyalty and Filial Piety will be

Destroyed”, Hozumi returns to this definition, arguing that law, social function, and ethics are inexorably connected (Rohl 2005:178). A hybrid European model of citizenship, which promoted autonomy and individualism, would not be true to the Japanese kokutai and the family system that served as its foundation. Hozumi moves to reinforce this position in relation to

European polities by naturalizing the arrangement. The author argues that consanguinity is the natural basis for any social group, and that the organization of the state under the primogenitor is part of an organic progression as communities grow in scale. To Hozumi, Japan was the “most natural state”, for it had as its head the divine descendant of Amaterasu, and all Japanese were bound by shared ancestry and patriarchal authority to this sovereign. A civil code that had as its foundation the rights of the individual without considering his position within this household model would not be an accurate reflection of what was seen as a “distinctly Japanese” polity.

The family and the principles of ie that had been discursively ingrained in Japan’s constitution became the focal point for the drafting of a revised, “distinctly Japanese” civil code.

The resultant Meiji Civil Code was legitimated through a complicated process of consolidating its manufactured definition of household, shaped largely through contrast with the model of family-state relations located in the modern West by thinkers like Hozumi, with pre- existing scholarship in an effort to provide evidence of its inviolability. As previously mentioned, the core of the administrative household was the conjugal couple, but headship and its attendant rights were restricted to the patriarch through the Meiji reforms. The reasoning used to legitimate this organizational effort has a precedent in the pre-existing Confucian body of 68 literature, despite the fact that these texts were rarely indicative of the lived reality of the

Japanese commoner. Historian Sumiko Sekiguchi highlights the following passages from The

Confucian Classic of Rites (2010:98):

“The men should not speak of what belongs to the inside [of the house], nor the women

of what belongs to the outside . . . Things spoken inside should not go out, words spoken

outside should not come in... The observances of propriety commence with a careful

attention to the relations between husband and wife. They built the mansion and its

apartments, distinguishing between the exterior and interior parts. The men occupied the

exterior; the women the interior”.

In the context of the newly capitalist Meiji Japan, the division described here took on additional, economic meaning. Men, increasingly called to waged positions in factories or non-family enterprises, required women to tend to domestic matters. As the recognized head of house by

Meiji law, men also retained the right to publicly represent their household. The inside/outside dichotomy, then, was propagated through industrialization in order to mobilize household labour.

This division of gendered duties into public and private spaces was enforced in law, and discursively validated through these texts. This is reflected in the writings of prominent thinkers like Yukichi Fukuzawa, who wrote “that men pursue their duties without while women govern within is the principle of division of labour (bungyō no mune)” in Minkan Keizairoku (Popular

Political Economy), 1877 (in Sekeiguchi 2010:98). Philosopher Ai Tetsujiro echoed these sentiments, stating that “once a family is formed, a necessity for husband and wife to divide their labours arises. That is, the husband goes outside to pursue his business, while the wife stays inside to perform the housework” (in Sekeiguchi 2010:102).

While these neo-Confucian writings helped to solidify the state’s framing of ie, appeals to this philosophical tradition required the careful modification of texts in order to avoid 69 contradiction. Confucian virtue uses the individual as its center, with ethical obligations extending in concentric circles outwards (Ueno 2009:65). In this model, filial piety in the family

(which occupies the circle closest to the individual) is of greater importance than loyalty to the state, creating a space for conflict. The “blood tax riots” sparked by the Military Conscription

Ordinance of 1872 is an example of such a conflict (Ueno 2009:66). In order to forge a family state ideology, the gap between loyalty and filial piety had to be bridged discursively. Confucian scholar Nagazane Motoda published Yogaku Koyo (the Elements of Education for the Young) in

1882 (Ueno 2009:66). In this work, the Confucian virtue of ko, chu (filial piety—loyalty) had notably been reversed (printed as chu—ko, loyalty—filial piety) (Ueno 2009:66). The presentation of the two ordered virtues as one word, chu—ko, not only places and emphasis on loyalty over filial piety— it makes the two seem inseparable as a unified concept. Significantly, the Meiji Civil Code was instituted following a new system of compulsory education established in 1872 (Hendry 1981:19). Borrowing from Yogaku Koyo, Japan’s state issued moral textbooks blurred the previously clear division between service to the Emperor and service to one’s parents. The foundations of the family state were, in effect, the product of the conscious and purposeful manipulation of principles drawn from this philosophical tradition.

The principle of “one husband, one wife” was promoted, with this pairing re-envisioned as the nucleus of the “modern family” (McLelland 2012:18; Hendry 1981:25). This new, two generation (parents and children) system marked a fundamental departure from the multigenerational households of the past. Wives were not recognized as legal persons, meaning they were incapable of holding property or retaining parental rights, privileges they had previously held in de facto (Redman 2008:1194; Ronald and Alexy 2011:3). It was with the weight of this re-envisioned significance of the family to the national project that the distinctly

Western discourse of ‘familial love’, based on a foundation of love and fidelity between man and 70 woman, began to be propagated (McLelland 2012). The ideal of the ‘good wife and wise mother’

(ryōsaikenbo), for example, draws heavily from the role of the woman in the European household (McLelland 2012; Hendry 1981). The ryōsaikenbo was envisioned as “a companion and friend to her husband, equal to him and able to discuss his work rather than wait on him like a servant”, with the term becoming ubiquitous in official discourse on the subject of women as imperial subjects (McLelland 2012:20, Hendry 1981:25). This notion has been attributed to the work of Nakamura Masanao, although there was talk of ‘wise wives and wise mothers’

(kenpukenbo) towards the end of the Tokugawa era (Sekeiguchi 2010:101). Masanao was inspired to write his influential essay ‘On Creating Good Mothers’ through his translation of

Samuel Smiles’ “Character”, published in 1871 (Sekeiguchi 2010:101). The way in which this discourse was manifest in policy, including measures taken to end concubinage and the effort to impose permanence on marriage arrangements, reflects the Victorian values of thinkers like

Smiles and not the more egalitarian customs of Japanese commoners. These historical texts were reinterpreted through the lens of the family state and mobilized in order to link the juridical discourse of family to notions of tradition. In doing so, the state effectively positioned ie, as defined in law, as a product of Japanese history, in spite of the force exerted by the work of thinkers in Europe on the shape the codified ie eventually took. Japanese subjects were shaped as individuals positioned themselves in relation to this discourse of history, drawing on a shared sense of heritage in order to construct a distinctly “Japanese” identity.

In practice, however, questions concerning the importance of guidelines for succession, inheritance, gender, and labour— all of which were stringently defined and codified in the Meiji period— appear secondary to ensuring continuity (as per Kondo’s analysis). Historian Tessa-

Morris Suzuki argues that, throughout the late Edo period, a more rigid, patriarchal interpretation of ie based on the rules of primogeniture was common among the elite samurai class, and its 71 customs were duly observed (1998:114). However, statistical data suggests that the samurai accounted for less than 3% of Japan’s population over this stretch of time. Based on similar measurements but accounting for extended familial relations, anthropologist Richard Ronald and

Allison Alexy estimate that roughly 10% of Japanese households had strong ties to these practices (2011:3). For the remaining 90%, family life in rural communities or among the common folk of urban centers must have been coloured by its own unique set of considerations.

Morris-Suzuki has also suggested that observance of the customs of ie was regionally specific, stating that “…vertical ie relationships had been more strongly emphasized in the eastern and northern parts of Honshu than in Western Japan, where horizontal links between people of the same generation within the village community had long been a key element in the social structure” (1998:114). Ronald and Alexy show that ultimogeniture and matrilineal systems of inheritance were also quite common in western Japan, corroborating Morris-Suzuki’s claims

(2011:3). Hironobu Kitaoji (1971) illustrated these intricacies by mapping family structure in small villages and recording lay terminology for household rank, arguing that (predominantly

Western) anthropological researchers had been misled by an overreliance on established methods of determining kinship that leaned heavily on consanguinity, and by a deeper, linguistic incommensurability.

The portrait of pre-Meiji familial relations these analyses paint is very much in line with

Kondo’s framing of the ie as a relatively egalitarian arrangement for the majority of those residing in Japan. Women could serve as the head of the ie if needed, and were often given authority over finances, marriage arrangements, and business deals (Hendry 1981; see also Ueno

2009). Moreover, traveler’s accounts suggest the participation by the male head of house was not uncommon (Uno in Bernstein 1991; Jolivet 1997). Given that grooming a suitable heir to take over management of the ie was within the purview of their responsibilities, fathers would 72 oversee elements of a child’s education and care (Uno in Bernstein 1991; Nakae 2007; Ota 1994;

Mashita 1990). In addition to the productive labour of a given ie— be it agriculture or craftwork— fathers who acted as the head of house would also assist in reproductive labour like cooking, upkeep of the home, or shopping, although the consensus among scholars of this period is that this work was primarily done by mothers and grandmothers unless the support of extended kin networks was unavailable (Miyasaka 2008; Nakae 2007). This was owing in large part to men’s shorter and more flexible work hours at the time, particularly among those in the lower samurai class (Mashita 1990). Uno (in Bernstein 1991) charts this fluidity in the performance of household labour during the Tokugawa period, showing that the labour of both production and reproduction took place within the home with the cooperation of men and women from multiple cohabiting generations (see also Walhall 1991). Bernstein (1991) argues that this division of labour meant that womanhood wasn’t dependent on motherhood, and that the flexibility of succession rules meant motherhood wasn’t necessarily biological. Valuing competence and contribution afforded women a greater degree of self-determination32.

In conjunction with the new legal restraints imposed by the Meiji Civil Code, industrialization shifted men’s productive labour to non-household corporate entities. The physical distance this created between men and the home, along with the reduced emphasis on succession in the industry of the ie to secure its financial future, limited their contributions to the everyday labour of care through the transition into the Taisho period (Uno in Bernstein 1991).

Yet here, too, we must give careful consideration to the persistent flexibility of household labour.

32 I include under the topic of “self-determination” more varied sexual practices. In rural areas, extramarital affairs pursued by women were not uncommon, and divorce or divorce-like separations were administered with deference to wives and with the consent of the broader community. Men, too, enjoyed a greater level of sexual freedom than the state’s vision of ie might suggest. As Gregory Pflugfelder (2012) notes, homosexual/erotic relations received tacit approval. 73

Pre-empting McKinnon and Cannell’s (2013) call to follow kinship’s flow back into the political-jural sphere, Nolte and Hastings distance ryōsaikenbo from its Victorian roots and from its more contemporary usage. Describing the virtues it encompasses— modesty, frugality, and hard work, among others— as constituting a “cult of productivity”, Nolte and Hastings show how middle and upper class women were impelled to contribute charitably outside the home while lower class women worked in factories just as men did. As Bernstein (1991) concludes, the family state “…in effect turned the home into a ‘public place’— the state writ small, blurring distinctions between the public and the private. Women’s vital function as cornerstones of the family made them civil servants of sorts” (7).

The institutionalized ie was not the only vision of the modern family that arose in the

Meiji era. In his analysis of the periodical Jogaku Zasshi (the Woman’s Educational Journal),

Jean-Michel Butel shows how owner Iwamoto Yoshiharu used the publication towards the end of the 19th century as a “…place of reflection on the specificities of Western love, the poor nature of pre-modern types of love and the need to transpose this particular kind of love— the only one befitting a civilized nation— to Japan” (2012:68). Iwamoto, much like the anthropologists that would later turn their gaze on Japan, saw the way marriages were arranged as the basis of social structure. A Christian reformer, Iwamoto sought to empower women with

“Victorian respectability” through “practical education and moral guidance” (2012:71). He called for a shift from the “traditional” ie to the hōmu (home, an English import word), in which man and wife were bound through conjugal love that they pursued freely (in contrast to arranged marriages). In this instance, the relationship between the ie— a newly invented tradition that was at the very same time the cornerstone of modernization efforts— and the modern West was erased in a discourse that re-establishes the boundaries of tradition and modernity before the ink on the Civil Code had dried. 74

The “modern” family took shape during the Meiji Restoration through institutional and discursive erasures that aligned it with the realm of tradition in spite of the heavy influence of legal definitions of households from and moral texts produced in Western Europe. Attention to the lived experience of households in Japan prior to World War II reveals tremendous tension with these legal interventions in the structure of the home. This historical data illustrates the persistent instability of the division between public and private, men’s and women’s labour, and production and reproduction: areas of chief concern for the state’s modernization project. In the following section, I trace similar reforms that unfolded in the post-war era. I highlight similar logics applied in shaping the dynamics of the nuclear household in relation to the West— here chiefly the United States, an occupying colonial force driving reforms based largely on its own image— and concealing them in appeals to an immutable cultural essence.

2.4 The Showa Period, Post 1945: Salarymen and Sengyō Shufu

The Potsdam Declaration of July 26, 1945 ended open combat in the Pacific Theatre and formalized the Japanese surrender to Allied forces. This marked, in the words of Allied policy makers, the beginning of Japan’s “moral re-education” (Borton 1947:251). The ensuing effort to undermine and re-shape pre-existing structures of state power occurred on discursive and administrative levels. Claiming that the foundations of Japan’s family state logic were thoroughly shaken, the American led occupation envisioned the rise of a new nation based on their own democratic values in policy documents and propaganda materials (McLelland

2012:53). The sweeping institutional reforms that followed specifically targeted what

Occupation forces referred to as Japan’s “feudal” customs in an effort to root out the perceived basis of the country’s “barbaric” militarism (McLelland 2010:517). Paradigms of gender and family quickly came to the fore of Occupation policy, framed as vestiges of a “toxic ethos” that 75 was conducive to the rise of totalitarian rule. In a concerted effort between the occupation forces, their appointed cabinet, and the NHK (Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai, Japan’s public broadcasting corporation), the patriarchal ie was associated with premodernity (despite its emergence during

Japan’s rapid modernization) and a home that mirrored the nuclear families found in the United

States was promoted. In the realm of law, the New Civil Code of May 1947 made a series of profound changes in an effort to make households conform to the nuclearized standard. This redrafting of the civil code removed the legal basis for primogeniture and the absolute authority of the household head, supporting a more democratic notion of citizenship and household membership. Article 14 of the New Civil Code abolished discrimination based on “race, creed, sex, social status, or family origin”, ostensibly bringing the rights of women in line with those of men across all contexts (McLelland 2010:517). Furthermore, matters of inheritance, property, and divorce (and all other matters pertaining to marriage and family) would be addressed with all parties, regardless of sex, given equal legal footing (McLelland 2012:26, McLelland 2010:517).

These legal changes reflect the way that women’s rights became intimately associated with the democratization of Japan, and how their “liberation” (and ability to embrace and recreate an American system of values) became a cornerstone of Occupation policy. This emphasis on liberty was coupled with an ideology of individualism. Film and publications engendered a popular aesthetic of Western romance in the general population, evoking images of chivalry and passion, intimate and personal, in front of large audiences. As in comparable regimes of Fordist production, the gendered division of labour supported the expansion of both corporations and the newly minted middle class. An emphasis on the conjugal couple, Western notions of romantic love, and the nuclear household worked in tandem to gender and accentuate the division of labour in a manner benefitting Japan’s subsequent economic development. It is during the post-war era that the figures of the salaryman and sengyō shufu are sharpened, 76 although historians have traced their development through historical antecedents. Earl Kinmonth

(1981) has argued that gekkyū tori (monthly salary receiver) and koshiben (civil servants named for the lunch box—bento— that would often be attached to them at the hips— koshi) of the Meiji period might be recognized as “ancestors” of the post-war salaryman. Kinmonth (1981) dates the actual term “Sararīman” to 1916, when it appeared in the work of cartoonist Kitazawa Rakuten, a pioneer of modern manga. While relevant, these associations should be treated carefully.

Okamoto and Sasano (2001) argue that the samurai-to-salaryman genealogy33 contributes to the invented mythos of the salaryman, allowing it to draw its authority from the well of “tradition”.

As was the case of the ie during the Meiji Restoration, these careful inclusions blend the edges of modernity into tradition.

Describing the ubiquity of the salaryman, Miller (1995:20) writes: “In popular media and books, and even in scholarly work, the general portrait of life and work in Japan inevitably entails an assumption that the ‘typical’ Japanese person is an urban, middle-class worker”. As a

“folk model”, the salaryman operated as a point of evaluative contrast; a means of calibrating social behaviour and economic success (Miller 1995:20). The salaryman has attracted considerable ethnographic attention (see Nakane 1967; Plath 1964; Rohlen 1974; Vogel 1963;

Allison 1994), particularly as American interest in Japan’s unprecedented economic success created demand for greater insight into their corporate practices. Looking to the representation of salarymen in Asashi Shinbun articles from the post-war era, Okamoto and Sasano (2001) argue that the nexus of state and industrial-capitalism subordinated the household and recast men solely as workers and taxpayers. The extent to which the figure of the salaryman accurately captures the lived experience of Japanese men prior to the bubble collapse has been extensively

33 A common association captured glibly in Plath (1964:35) as “scratch a salaryman, find a samurai”. 77 questioned. Socio-economic and demographic change are frequently cited as the driving force behind axiomatic appearance of the salaryman. This includes the rapid economic expansion with a focus on white-collar employment, the development of urban areas as families were driven out of the city proper by rising land prices, the post-war baby boom, and a decline in multigenerational households. This is complicated by the idea popularized at the peak of Japan’s boom years that “90 percent of the Japanese are middle class” (Kelly 1986:605). This figure came from self-reported survey data, reflecting the pervasiveness of the idea of middle class belonging rather than an objective statement on the relative income of households across the nation. Still, the presumption of middle-class status meant that the salaryman label was applied liberally. Yet, if the emergence of the salaryman was indeed the result of economic exigency, we would expect to find them well represented in research. On the contrary: as Dasgupta (2011) explains, “even at the height of Japan’s economic ascendancy in the 1970s, only a minority of

Japanese men would have fallen within the strictest definitional parameters of the category of

‘salaryman’” (373). Demographic research on salaryman households further muddies the waters.

Takeuchi (1997) notes that the number of households headed by salarymen increased from roughly 10% prior to the war to 50% by 1955, then reaching 75% by 1970. Returning to

Dasgupta (2011), the number of salarymen in Japan depends entirely on the strictness of the definition we employ. Takeuchi’s criteria for salaryman status is fulltime employment status with a monthly salary. While these are certainly relevant traits, the relationship between salarymen and the corporation runs deeper than this definition suggests.

Despite their limited numbers, the salaryman and their elite employers, along with their principles of life-time employment, seniority-based wages and promotions, and commitment beyond “standard” working hours, stood as ideals. This is due in large part the partnership between the Liberal Democratic Party and industry, referred to as “Japan Inc.”, and the extent to 78 which the state worked to promote these corporate policies. The seniority-based wage system was intended to grow alongside the employee. As junior staff fresh out of university grew older and married, so too did their wage grow to include allowances for dependents. This “family wage” system bound wives and children to the corporation at a conceptual level as pseudo- employees, but this association also had tangible effects on the household. Family members were expected to make sacrifices for the sake of the corporation— chief among them compensating for the absence of the father (Meguro and Shibata 1999). The large wage packet the father earned allowed for a single income home, but only to the extent that the labour of the home became the sole purview of his partner. This ideal arrangement is captured in the saying “behind a man’s success is the support of his wife” (naijo no ko) (Keiko Funahashi 1999:94; Meguro and Shibata

1999:66). This arrangement— sometimes referred to as the “family corporate system” (kazoku kigyō kan kankei)— was further supported by a range of corporate policies like subsidized corporate housing and an early retirement system for female employees who marry (kotobuki taisha, “happy resignation”) (Meguro and Shibata 1999). The government contributed through policies like the spousal tax exemption instituted in 1961 and the institution of compulsory home economics courses for women in 1963 (Meguro and Shibata 1999).

In post-war Japan, family fueled the growth of corporate capitalism not just through contributing remunerated and unremunerated labour, but through consumption. “My home-ism”

(mai hōmushugi), the once popular phrase or concept still circulated today, captures the ideal of a well cultivated and kept domestic space filled with the sort of consumer electronics Japan was producing en masse. Allison (2013:22) describes this as “…at once a consumer dream and social contract— what people came to desire and what they received in return for working hard, for sticking to a normative life course, and for staying focused on the small picture”. In Princess 79

Michiko, the “commoner34” that would marry Prince Akihito in 1959, Japan found an unlikely emblem of “my home-ism”. Having met during a double’s tennis match at a resort in Karuizawa, the narrative of the royal marriage was one of the sort of romantic love popularized following

World War II. A successful student fluent in English and French, Michiko reflected her father’s penchant for European fare developed over frequent business trips abroad. Heralded as the

“people’s princess” (minkan kara no okisaki), Bardsley captures the sentiment of women’s magazines published at the time: “Michiko represents the best of postwar progress. She has internalized a sophisticated sense of Western culture without losing the common touch” (2002:

62). The rabid attention to Michiko’s life as a new royal brought heightened attention to the material furnishings of her home, her manner of dress, and hobbies, all of which reflected a distinctly European aesthetic and character. From her brand name appliances in photos of her posing, apron-clad, in her kitchen, depictions of Michiko’s everyday life embodied the consumptive fantasy of the post-war family in spite of an obvious but unspoken class gap.

Dedication to corporate employment in the post-war era furnished impressive material wealth, but it came at the cost of a male presence in the home. While notions of intimate, familial love facilitated Japan’s economic development, new concerns regarding absentee fathers and the breakdown of the family began to emerge as long work hours and branch transfers drove men away from their wives, children, and parents. Subsequent studies and debates on fatherhood in

Japan have been concerned less with fathers per se than their physical or symbolic absence

(Nakatani 1999; Ohinata 2000; Yamato 2008). However, emphasis on the role of the mother in the post war era contributed, at least in part, to this erasure of men from the home (Miyasaka

2008; Ohinata 2000). Much like the concept of ryōsaikenbo in the Meiji period, transnational

34 Princess Michiko was not of a royal lineage, but her father was among the wealthiest businessmen in Japan. 80 exchange in the form of medical and psychoanalytical studies conducted abroad played a crucial role at this time. The occupation’s concern with childhood and maternal health (Ozawa 1989) was coupled with an insistence on a scientific approach to childrearing (Masataka 1999). What was seen as the overindulgence of Japanese mothers, in particular, was thought to limit the ability of their children to grow into independent adults. While this aversion to indulgent motherhood informed policy after the war, Bowlby’s attachment theory, the result of a study of children in foster homes who experienced developmental delays due to the absence of their mothers, proved especially influential when it was introduced to Japan sometime after its original

1958 publication (Ohinata 2000; Tama 1985). Bowlby’s framing of maternal deprivation, along with the later work of Klaus and Kennell in the 1980s on mother-infant bonding, helped to revive discussion around “traditional” motherhood and discourse and imagery closely aligned with ryōsaikenbo (Masataka 1999; Ozawa 1989). Masataka describes what emerged as a discourse on

“Japan (as) the originator of maternal society”, emphasizing the perceived uniqueness of

Japanese motherhood while aligning women with notions of tradition and history (1999:46).

In sum, the figures of the salaryman and sengyō shufu were the product of Occupation policy, a project of economic revitalization following the devastation of World War II that drew on a model of kin relations associated with the success of the United States. The modern family, productive and consumptive in a way befitting the kind of industrial capitalism that helped to rebuild Japan, was as much a fiction as the ie it was meant to displace. It reflected the lived experience of relatively few families, yet through invented appeals to history it appeared as part of a longer tradition: the latest expression of an irrepressible “Japanese culture”. In the following section, I look to how ikumen are similarly associated with national revitalization, transnational comparison, and invented tradition. 81

2.5 Ikumen as a State Project

The fanfare and pageantry surrounding the Ikumen Project and its strong partnership with

Fathering Japan has occluded the long history of fathering activism in Japan and early state efforts to encourage paternity leave. This occlusion has contributed, in part, to the alignment of ikumen with notions of modern, global fatherhood. In their genealogy of Japan’s Men’s

Movement (menzuribu), Oyama and Otsuka (1999) emphasize the influence Otoko no Kosodate o Kangaerukai (The Men's Group Rethinking About Childcare) on the trajectory of subsequent activism for gender equality in the home. Established in Tokyo in 1978, Otoko no Kosodate o

Kangaerukai was born out of a 1977 symposium about childcare for young boys. Oyama and

Otsuka (1999: 46) provide a quote attributed to founding member Tateo Hoshi describing the group’s objective:

Let’s dispose of the unfairness of childrearing that has been forced on women, not by

men cooperating in child rearing, but by denying a way of life that is driven by

production and dehumanized by work and regain humanity by stepping into the realm of

life-production (not meaning birth per se but meaning things that are in opposition to

material production) called child-rearing.

The anti-capitalist sentiments expressed here are unmistakable. For Otoko no Kosodate o

Kangaerukai, childrearing was a form of critique and resistance towards corporate Japan and a way of decoupling masculinity from productivity. The feminized labour of reproduction is framed here as a means of regaining “humanity” and is held in dialectic opposition to the labour of production.

Otoko no Kosodate o Kangaerukai precipitated the founding of other grassroots activist groups advocating for male participation in childrearing that were critical of the government and 82 participated in active resistance against sexist policies. In 1980, Kiyoshi Masuno founded the organization “Otoko mo Onna mo Ikuji Jikan o! Renrakukai” (Child Care Hours for Men and

Women Network). Referred to by its abbreviated name “Ikujiren”, the original goal of the group was the extension of the childcare provision in the Labour Standards Law of 1947 to include men35, although the group’s stated aim was to “reduce parents' work hours in order to alleviate the burden placed on day care teachers, who work extended hours, as well as on children themselves”.

Unlike some of the smaller groups that coalesced around the same time, the political activities of Ikujiren are relatively well documented36. In 1986, Ikujiren member and oil company employee Kenji Tajiri began a “childcare strike”. Tajiri would arrive late to work and leave early in order to take his child to and from daycare. Normally, this would be grounds for dismissal, but by describing his actions as a “strike”, Tajiri— a union member— was able to leverage existing labour laws protecting striking workers from retaliation. Ikujiren had a hand in shaping the Parental Leave Law of 1992, which allowed both men and women to take a year of leave after the birth of a child. The group also proposed revisions to the same law to the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare in 1996 in favour of instituting a father-quota system for childcare leave similar to those found in Northern Europe. Some 5 years later, Ikujiren member

Tatsuhiko Nakasaka delivered a letter to then British Prime Minister Tony Blair encouraging him

35 This is according to an interview with Ikujiren member Masaki Matsuda recorded in an edited volume by Fujimura-Fanselow (2011).

36 Ishii-Kuntz (2003: 212) suggests that the middle-class background of most Ikujiren members may account for their increased visibility. She also notes that this was a point of debate with members of the predominantly working class Otoko no Kosodate o Kangaerukai. 83 to take childcare leave for the birth of his child in order to “set a path for people all over the world”.

In the late 1990s37, around the peak of Ikujiren’s influence, the Ministry of Health,

Labour, and Welfare launched its first major campaign to promote active fatherhood. Unlike the subsequent Ikumen Project, this was not a collaboration with Otoko no Kosodate o Kangaerukai or Ikujiren, although it was developed in consultation with academics and childcare activists38.

Building from a 1998 White Paper in which the Ministry called for a more “hands on” approach to childcare from fathers, the “Sam campaign39” was a massive undertaking. Roberts (2002) reports that nearly 500 million yen was spent on the campaign, securing full page advertisements in 48 newspapers, 1 million posters, and television and radio ads. The namesake of the campaign, Sam, was an artist and husband of the popular musician Namie Amuro. The centerpiece of the campaign was a full-page print ad of Sam in light garb and a ponytail holding his child (Figure 1). The bolded text at the top of the photo boldly states: “Men who don’t do childrearing, we don’t call ‘dad’”. The extended text at the bottom of the photo reads as follows:

17 minutes a day. That is the average amount of time men spend on childrearing.

Although it takes two to make a child, it’s as if the mother is raising the child all by

herself. It’s no wonder women don’t think it is easy to bear children. If pregnancy and

childbirth are work that only women can do, isn’t childrearing also an important job for

37 Since the 2003 ‘Act on Advancement of Measures that Support the Fostering of the Next Generation’, Japan has sought to reaffirm the importance of the family and strengthening the father's role’ in the household a response to the nation’s fertility crisis (Boling 2015). The Sam Campaign actually predates this formal focus on fatherhood.

38 Roberts (2002) singles out an Hoikuen o Kangaeru Oya no Kai (Association of Parents Concerned about Daycare) member, Akiko Fukouin, as the source of the idea behind the Sam campaign.

39 I borrow Roberts (2002) nomenclature for this initiative here. 84

men? We want fathers to better know the joy and difficulty of childrearing. We want

them to think more about the children who will carry the 21st century for us. Please

become a wonderful dad who has the time to gaze deeply into his child’s heart.

While Roberts (2002) notes that the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare were pleased with the reception of the campaign overall (particularly among women), some Ikujiren members were vocal critics. As a successful and wealthy artist, Sam did not represent the interests of fathers hamstrung in their efforts to parent by exploitative work environments. The Ministry of Health,

Labour, and Welfare was propagating a vision of exceptional fatherhood by leaning on celebrity role models. A parody poster prepared by members of Ikujiren for May Day reads “Men who don’t do childrearing, we don’t call dad? Then let us do childrearing without constraint!” (Figure

2). The poster continues: “Companies that don’t let their employees go home, we don’t call them corporate citizens. A country that doesn’t bear responsibility for childrearing, we don’t call a rich country”. 85

Figure 1. The poster from the Sam campaign (in Steger and Koch 2017).

Figure 2. Ikujiren’s May Day poster (in Roberts 2002). 86

This history of conflict with the predecessors of the contemporary fathering movement is largely occluded by the Ikumen Project. The Ikumen Project was a clean slate, the chance to reboot the state’s approach to encouraging father’s participation in the home under a new brand identity and in partnership, rather than conflict with, activists on the ground. In some ways, the messaging of the Ikumen Project has addressed some of the early concerns expressed by Ikujiren.

However, there is also a continuation of the strategy and philosophy behind the Sam campaign: the problematization of the behaviour of fathers in Japan, the insistence on the continued productive labour of the father in addition to his reproductive duties, and childrearing as the site of national revitalization. The Ikumen Project “aim(s) at the growth of society as a whole along with system reform”. The project statement reads:

Ikumen means men who enjoy childrearing and grows (as an individual) or a man that

thinks they want to live such a life in the future. As ikumen increase, the way of life for

wives, the possibility of children, and the way of being as a family will undergo a big

change. Thus, society as a whole should grow richer. This is the vision with which the

Ikumen Project was founded.

Established with the goal of increasing paternity leave to 13% by 2020, the Ikumen Project positions itself as an initiative of great consequence for the future of the country. In this way, it leverages ongoing discussions concerning the nation’s aging population, which are often apocalyptic in character, to imagine instead a prosperous future earned through (male) sacrifice.

Notably, the Ikumen Project’s messaging has evolved since its inception. Hannah Vasallo (in

Koch and Steger 2017) describes promotional material issued at the initiative’s inception in

2010. In a Superman parody, the poster features a father tearing apart the iconic suit, tie, and shirt of the salaryman to reveal the Ikumen Project logo. Here, the ikumen is framed as “mild 87 mannered Clark Kent”, but this façade conceals his true exceptionalism. The father here does not choose between nation, company, and family: he fulfills his obligations to all three in a monumental display of strength. The reference to Superman— an icon of American values— also suggests that ikumen is a figure that draws knowingly and purposefully from a well of meaning aligned with the West. For all its subversive qualities, it is an unmistakably normative rendering of family. The post-war order and the recursive quality of family/state/corporation— including the omnipresence of American influence— is altered, but not upended.

During my fieldwork, the Ikumen Project’s messaging strategy had shifted. Moving away from the salaryman imagery infused with American bravado, a curious new mascot has appeared. Clad in the garb of a samurai, this stern faced ikumen character carries a child on his back and a bottle, not a katana, slung through his belt (Figure 3). This “office samurai40” or

“ikumen samurai” motif more intimately ties ikumen to the nation. The symbolism is not at all subtle. Generic forms men can print and fill out to request paternity leave are emblazoned with the office samurai. In the background, the rising sun is positioned behind Mount Fuji. While this might appear as a move to shift ikumen away from a globalized vision of fatherhood, appealing instead to an understanding of fathers as an extension of Japanese history beyond the influence of Western colonial powers drawn from the period of national isolation (sakoku), the ikumen samurai is not a “pre-modern” figure. Instead, this the ikumen samurai sits among all the trappings of the salaryman. Posters created for display in workplaces feature the office samurai imploring companies to “aim at supporting Japan’s fathers”. In one striking poster example, the ikumen samurai holds a banner aloft that reads “Employees are family members of the

40 This is the name used for the character in internal documentation and is featured in the digital signature of these documents (ie. office_samurai.pdf). In the images themselves, the character is sometimes labeled “ikumen samurai”. 88 company. Your childcare will be backed up!”. Here, the audience is reminded of the foundations of Japan Inc.: the extension of pseudo-employee status to the salaryman’s family and their reciprocal fealty to the corporation. The samurai-to-salaryman geneaology (Okamoto and Sasano

2001) is reimagined, here leading from samurai-to-salaryman-to-ikumen.

Figure 3. The “office samurai” or “ikumen samurai” appears on a childcare leave request form

Moreover, while the Ikumen Project’s messaging has shifted to frame ikumen as distinctly

“Japanese”, they are nevertheless shaped and assessed through transnational comparison41. The

Ikumen Project leans heavily on quantitative analyses to support its activities. This data is presented comparatively, using the precedent set by European nations and the United States to problematize the behaviour of Japanese fathers. In so doing, it further shifts the discussion of fatherhood into a transnational arena, where men are invited to think about fatherhood as an index (or cause) of a nation’s prosperity and as a homogenized category of practice that exists at a global level. In this sense, Japanese fathers are rendered as an aberration among men where their Western counterparts represent natural ability and predilection towards care, somewhat ironically recalling the “dehumanization” problematized by Otoko no Kosodate o Kangaerukai.

In Figure 4, the number of minutes spent per day on chores and childcare is divided by nation and by gender. The bubble at the top reads: “For example, in Sweden papa’s do chores and childrearing more than 3 hours per day”. At 83 minutes per day, Japanese men lag far behind the nations positioned here as its peers.

41 Quantitative research comparing childcare habits between nations has long been an influence on policy in Japan. For example, between 1995 and 2006, the Ministry of Education conducted the International Comparative Survey on Familial Upbringing (Katei Kyōiku ni Kansuru Kokusai Hikaku Chōsa), which concluded that “Japanese fathers” participate far less in PTA meetings and disciplining children than “Western fathers” (See Keiko Funahashi 1999 for more on similar surveys conducted on the subject of the behaviour of fathers in Japan).

Figure 4. An international comparison of time spent on chores and childcare by gender prepared

by the Ikumen Project (The Ikumen Project 2019).

In sum, the Ikumen Project frames the ikumen as a citizen-subject working in service of the nation to improve its economic standing among its peers: an attempt to align Japanese fathers with their Western counterparts. It invites associations between ikumen and masculine archetypes strongly associated with the national imaginary and post-war economic miracle— salarymen and samurai, which help to fold the “Western” elements of ikumen into the deeper, invented Japanese

“tradition”. Rather than redefine the division of labour on a fundamental level by legitimating, for example, stay-at-home fathers and single earner mothers, it implores fathers to dedicate 91 themselves fully to their family in addition to their expected dedication to their employer and the nation. The novelty of ikumen is made possible by the occlusion of conflict between the state and fathering activist groups that predate the ikumen concept. The elimination of this history aids in the alignment of ikumen with notions of fatherhood abroad, making them appear as a pre- requisite to belonging in the modern global order. In the following section, I look to how ikumen are figured by industry as pleasure seeking consumers. While the national project advanced in the state’s rendering of ikumen is muted, ikumen consumers are similarly depicted as members in a global community of like-minded fathers.

2.6 Ikumen as Consumers

The Ikumen Boom was in many ways a commercial boom. The Ikumen Project’s sleek image was due in large part to its partnership with advertising giants Dentsu. In 2009, Dentsu had coined the term “papa danshi” to refer to a growing sub-section of male consumers of childcare related products. With an increase in the number of men participating in childcare came increased demand for clothing, diaper bags, and baby carriers. The sort of ikumen promoted by businesses and lifestyle magazines and blogs differed significantly from the sort of ikumen promoted by the state. In contrast to the notion of national service that animates the

Ikumen Project, the emphasis here is a kind of global citizenship, the pleasure derived from a family life, and a more authentic “self” (Ivy 1995) that can only be realized through consumption. The cultural capital ikumen possess assumes they also possess a certain kind of economic capital (see Inoue 2016). As such, the “my homeism” (Allison 2012) of post-war Japan resurfaces here in a fetishization of purchased domesticity. This time, however, it is the father and not the mother who is incited to fantasy: to see a life fulfilled in a well-furnished home and the realization and public signification of their ikumen identity through conspicuous consumption

(Inoue 2016). 92

Among the many magazines targeting fathers in circulation during my fieldwork, FQ

Japan (Father’s Quarterly) was arguably the most influential. Established in 2006, FQ Japan is the sister publication of its British predecessor, Father’s Quarterly. In digital and print forms, the magazine features interviews with celebrity fathers and government officials (including representatives of the Ikumen Project), parenting guides and relationship advice, and copious advertisements and lifestyle articles featuring luxury goods and the latest fashion with a familial spin. The stylish and handsome fathers featured within model clothing that would not be out of place in the trendy streets of Omotesando. Clothing marketed towards ikumen is praised for both its appearance and functionality, with articles designed to demonstrate their utility in childcare.

Many of the strollers and harnesses promoted in FQ Japan have the appearance of a luxury sedan or— in some cases— tactical military equipment; an aesthetic that is not typically found among goods of the same category marketed towards women. Divided into “directories”, men can browse catalogues that compare everything from car seats to children’s haircuts to help readers achieve their desired ikumen image.

Article length advertisements outline an “ikumen lifestyle” in which their products play a crucial role. The role of a father is described as challenging but pleasurable. The ultimate goal of an ikumen is to enjoy his family and the development of his child; enjoyment that is more readily achieved through the use of an array of parenting products that save time and reduce the strain of the more mundane elements of childcare. Take for example the following advertisement for the television recording and streaming device “SLINGBOX” (Figure 5):

“Of course, the ikumen lifestyle is overflowing with joy but the reality that stands in your

way is that it is not just going to be fun things and will by no means be the ideal. So, to

these ikumen friends we introduce the ‘saviour’, the convenient SLINGBOX” 93

The image features a father driving a car while his wife and child happily watch a video on a tablet in the backseat. The SLINGBOX provides the hypothetical ikumen consumer with relief during long journeys or any other activity in which children are prone to boredom and disruptive behaviour. Purchasing goods, the advertisement suggests, can bridge the gap between the expectation of joy filled fatherhood and the reality of parenting. The promise of ikumen-hood can only be fully realized through consumption. Indeed, the necessary but unglamorous elements of the labour of care do not feature heavily— if at all— in publications like FQ Japan. The extent to which chore work is represented at all is in articles promoting the latest space-age vacuum from

Dyson, whose sleek aesthetic and cutting-edge functionality are very much in line with the ikumen image. Rather, FQ Japan overwhelmingly emphasizes activities that are generally enjoyable and may be extended to include family, such as the latest video game systems, outdoor activities, food and drink, and travel. Fatherhood is framed as the extension and modification of existing recreational activities and not as reproductive labour. 94

Figure 5. An ad from the FQ Japan web magazine featuring the “SLINGBOX” (FQ Japan 2014).

Implicit in all of this material is the presence of a dedicated spouse whose household labour enables the ikumen to pursue the more pleasurable aspects of parenthood promoted therein. Moreover, the consumptive nature of the vision of fatherhood this publication offers assumes its readers have considerable disposable income. Based on these premises, FQ Japan’s target readership is men in relatively well-off single earner households; very much the sort associated with the salaryman archetype. Indeed, in its frequent calls to purchase a wide array of parenting goods, its messaging strays into territory associated with the post-war family model: namely encouraging the substitution of a father’s salary for his presence in the home. A particularly stark example of this dynamic is an article espousing the virtues of “beloved wife appliances” (aisai kaden) (Fathering Quarterly Japan 2018). A busy father, the article argues, cannot help but fail repeatedly to adequately perform chores, resulting in the ire of his wife. The solution is to purchase appliances for one’s wife that will compensate for the fathers short- 95 comings. If you fail to clean up after dinner, a cordless vacuum will fill the void; arguments over laundry can be solved with a new drum type washing machine. This article is evocative of the

“Three Sacred Treasures” (sanshu no jingi) that stood as markers of modernity and class status in post-war Japan: a television, a refrigerator and a washing machine. Readers of FQ Japan are similarly called to build desirable families through expenditure on items that aid in the upkeep of the home rather than contribute labour directly.

A striking element of FQ Japan, as in similar publications like Men’s Lee and OCEAN, is the ubiquity of imagery depicting Caucasian families and fathers. Articles targeting ikumen show scenes of domesticity enacted by non-Japanese models, inviting comparisons between fatherhood in Japan and elsewhere. Where the Ikumen Project employs a negative framing in order to figure ikumen as Japan’s response to practices of fatherhood in other nations, FQ Japan claims fathers outside of Japan under the banner of ikumen. It capitalizes on the cachet of foreign celebrities to sell a vision of ikumen as belonging to an enlightened class of fathers found around the world. A profile of Johnny Depp, for example, calls the actor a “pioneer ikumen and the world’s coolest dad”, collapsing the boundary between the ikumen and the unmarked category of global father that is enforced through the efforts of the Ikumen Project (Fathering Quarterly

Japan 2013).

Media depictions abroad, which draw heavily from the sort of imagery found in the pages of FQ Japan, complicate these attempts to align ikumen with a global community of fathers. In these instances, ikumen have been represented as a foreign oddity: “hunky” (BBC 2018) fathers who have reached an almost celebrity-like status. In the words of one Quartz (2019) report, ikumen are “a very Japanese way to tackle a global problem”, namely population decline and women’s workforce participation rates. As they are represented abroad, ikumen are positioned as 96 a point of contrast with men in North America and Europe. In so doing, childcare practices in those locations which remain contested (see Doucet 2006) are naturalized against the exaggerated figure of the ikumen, whose perceived extremity signals a deficiency in the capacity of Japanese fathers to perform what is assumed to be an intuitive, universal male role.

Beyond the images of European and American fathers circulated to market childcare goods and the states constant comparison between parenting practices in Japan and abroad, the global character of ikumen is attributable to the increasing level of exposure to life in different countries for many fathers. This is undoubtedly related to the classed nature of ikumen and their consumptive habits, of which travel is no small part. FQ Japan readers are provided with family travel guides for foreign locales like Singapore, Hawaii, and Las Vegas, positioning ikumen as globetrotting members of an international community. For many readers, this jet setting lifestyle is more aspirational than practical. Certainly, among my interlocutors the experience of living in a foreign country for an extended period of time was relatively rare. However, I was struck by recurring references to encounters with childcare practices abroad both in discussions with interlocutors, though my research falls short of being able to trace these global journeys or present some argument for diasporic fatherhood (see Kang 2012).

While the influence of short- and medium-term travel abroad on perceptions of fatherhood will recur in some of the stories of fathers in later chapters, I found the profile of a man with the surname Takaba, which was circulated through social media channels, to be particularly illustrative. A Fathering Japan member from the Osaka area who was profiled on the organization’s website, Takaba-san worked in Seattle as a high school teacher. Nicknamed “the thoughtless father” after once leaving his daughter behind at a venue following a Fathering Japan event, Takaba-san’s experience in the United States makes for an interesting read. Reflecting on 97 the cultural differences he experienced, he says “first, there are no fitting words for ‘fathering’ or

‘ikumen’ (in English); because fathers raising children is obvious/natural, a specific word is not attached”. He continues: “There is no general idea of ‘fathers childrearing’ or ‘mothers childrearing’. If it’s strongly attached it’s ‘parenting’… at town events etc. too, there is a standard system called “kid friendly”. The saying ‘everyone raises children together’ is well known”. While he was struck by the lack of distinction in English parenting lexicon and practice

(as he observed it), Takaba-san carefully notes that Japan has shown forward thinking in areas that the United States has not: “…for example maternity leave and the accompanying payment, there is not one system but many holidays joined together and everyone takes vacation days (as opposed to formal leave). Because of that, as a system Japan’s has progressed more (in comparison)”.

Take as a whole, the vision of ikumen promoted by industry— as represented in publications that take fathers as their primary audience— is one achievable only through conspicuous consumption. Men are called to reorient their purchasing in a way that helps them derive pleasure from engaging with their family. The form this family takes closely mirrors the post-war family model, doing little to upset the gendered division of labour. Through media representation, ikumen are closely linked to fathers outside of Japan, presenting them as part of a broader global community with implicitly shared values and practices. There is a concrete dimension to this line of thinking, as many fathers have experienced life abroad and think critically about expectations of fatherhood outside of Japan. Where the nuclear family of the post-war era containing the salaryman and sengyō shufu in a home furnished with appliances was a marker of modernity and belonging among Western European and North American nations in the twentieth century, ikumen similarly index a modern global citizenship, now characterized by 98 a commitment to gender equality, work-life balance, and consumption. Ikumen replicate the same kind of appropriation and aspiration towards modernity as their salaryman forebearers.

2.7 Conclusion

Historically, fatherhood has played an important role in the way modernity is conceptualized in Japan. The ikumen is a figure of modernity that is emblematic of Japan’s ongoing efforts to solidify its position in the global economic order. Animating the ikumen discourse is the global flow of data and images of fathers in North America and Europe against which fatherhood in Japan is measured. This should not be taken to mean that this sort of comparison is recent or exclusive to ikumen. To view salarymen as embodying tradition or essential cultural elements requires invention or a misremembering of the strong influence exerted by the “Western” nuclear family on Japan’s post-war development, a pattern carried forward from the formulation of ie during the Meiji Restoration.

In the next chapter, I follow the state and industry discourses of ikumen outlined above to their eventual collapse. In the years since the introduction of the concept, ikumen have become the target of public ire. Returning to the question posed at the beginning of this chapter, I ask why this is the case. I argue that ikumen is not a singular figure of modernity but is rather fractured and contested. Drawing from the examples provided by my interlocutors, I show how the recent emergence of critical ikumen figures— the ikumen modoki and yarisugi ikumen—mark a significant philosophical change for the fathering movement. Through these figures, mothers, unmarried women, corporate workers, and fathering movement members are contesting the heroic, hyper-productive ikumen promoted by the state and the pleasure seeking, consumptive ikumen promoted by industry. 99

Chapter 3 The Ikumen Backlash 3.1 Critiquing Ikumen

I return now to my point of entry in the preceding chapter: the case of LDP Lower House law maker Kensuke Miyazaki. Previously, I argued that ikumen are positioned as a path towards economic revival and productivity, a key player in a larger project of restoring Japan’s status in the order of global superpowers. For fathers, ikumen status promises renewed purpose and place in the national schema, as well as an international physical and class mobility realized through consumption: travel and the purchase of luxury goods. However, based solely on this understanding of ikumen it is difficult to make sense of the scandal surrounding Kensuke

Miyazaki. Why was it that Miyazaki, in many ways an exemplar of these ikumen qualities, suffered rejection at the hands of the very party that was invested in popularizing the concept?

Why, despite his status and open embrace of the fathering movement, was he viewed negatively by its members?

As speakers rotated in and out behind the podium over the course of the forum on fathering that evening in Ginza, Miyazaki’s eyes were downcast. The tone of these presentations struck me as fundamentally different from similar forums. While much of the material was boilerplate self-promotion for the various NPOs in attendance (this meeting representing unprecedented exposure to a national audience), towards the end of the two-hour session

Miyazaki became the focal point of discussion. In one breath he was praised for his bravery, in another gently lectured on the scope of the issue. He received a parade of well-wishers and supporters giving speeches in succession, with the final address coming from Ando. Miyazaki then took the mic to a warm round of applause. He gave a few words of thanks before beginning his statement: 100

Though I’m receiving positive and negative opinions from people, what is really

resonating with me is, unfortunately, those harsh comments that I feel so deeply.

Although, from a more positive perspective, this is the first time I’ve directly received

this kind of praise. I’m grateful—thank you! To avoid misunderstanding: support (for

paternity leave) in the LDP is gradually beginning to grow. It's all thanks to you!

Bringing this issue to the public has caused some problems. As was mentioned earlier

there is a silent majority of supporters, but I hope we can work it out (with the people

who disagree). Please bear with me. When I announced paternity leave before my child

was even born, there were a lot of things I wasn’t sure about. While many people are

criticizing me, I recognize all Diet members bear the burden of responsibility. I want to

start thinking about what my job is and what I have to do.

It was an awkward, non-committal statement and an anti-climactic end to the evening, but we applauded all the same. Notably absent in his statement was discussion of parenting per se. In fact, he did not use the word “father” once in this public appearance. The focus was squarely on the controversy and his role in it, not the broader issues members of the fathering movement had assumed Miyazaki had intended to bring to the fore through his actions. The men here had come for meaningful engagement and had reached out to Miyazaki— father to father— in solidarity. In exchange, they were treated to a display of delicate politicking.

Milling around the crowd outside the lecture hall, I maneuvered towards the Fathering

Japan members in attendance that I recognized. Ando was in the thick of the media scrum fielding questions. After answering the reporter’s questions to their satisfaction, he greeted me warmly and invited me to join his party of Fathering Japan members for a celebratory drink. We collected more fathers as we passed through the lobby, rounding off our group at 10. Stepping 101 out into the crisp night air, we paired off in conversation as the collective meandered towards our destination. Safely away from the crowds and cameras, Miyazaki could be discussed in earnest.

“I don’t think he understands what he has done” Tenno told me in stride. “He is just a kid. I think he was surprised by the reaction from other LDP members. Maybe he thought this wasn’t a strange request”. Murasaki nodded, adding “When I saw him up there, he seemed scared!”. The pair peppered me with questions about my work until we were finally seated at the izakaya. The conversation was lively as our group discussed that evening’s events.

As our drinks arrived, I abandoned all pretense of tact and asked the question that seems to be on everyone’s mind: could Miyazaki become a leader in the fathering movement? In the short weeks leading up to this meeting, there was a palpable sense of expectation among my interlocutors. It seemed that this may be a watershed moment. However, immediately following this highly public forum, these hopes were noticeably diminished. “He made a mistake. This is not his passion. He doesn’t know our issues”, one shaggy haired father exclaimed, waving his hands so as to emphasize his point. The table speculated that Miyazaki had likely been hushed by other lawmakers prior to the forum. He had come under intense scrutiny since his declaration; his job was on the line. He was trying his best to preserve his newfound popularity without angering his superiors any more than he already had. Taking paternity leave probably seemed like an easy

PR win, but he had grossly underestimated the backlash. Tenno curtly summarized the general sentiment of those seated at our table: “baka” (stupid).

In this chapter, I explore how the ikumen, as a figure of modernity (see Barker et al.

2009) promoted by the state and industry with deep historical precedents, has splintered. I look at this splintering as it is embodied by ikumen modoki (pseudo-ikumen) and yarisugi ikumen

(overkill ikumen), derivative figures that I show contest the ikumen fantasy of and desire for 102 modernity. I borrow them from a 2013 NHK special program entitled “Call Off the Boom:

Rethinking Ikumen”. Aired as the Ikumen Boom was just beginning to wane, “Call Off the

Boom” was a platform for the disillusioned wives of self-proclaimed ikumen to share their experiences. The promotional material featured an illustration of a frustrated mother watching her oblivious, smiling husband sitting in front of a television set playing video games. Slung across his back is their crying child. The father happily ignores her wails. The women who appear on the program characterize their husbands as falling into one of two camps. The first is the “ikumen modoki” or “pseudo-ikumen”: those men who aggrandize their relatively minor contribution to the labour of the home and use it to validate their misbehaviour (staying out late drinking, failing to keep promises made to their partner etc.) or to avoid being assigned more time-consuming tasks. These men co-opt the ikumen identity to deflect criticism. In contrast, the second ikumen camp— “yarisugi ikumen” (overkill ikumen) — relentlessly pursue domestic labour to the point of becoming a nuisance. These critical ikumen figures further sap the hegemonic masculinity/subordinate masculinity analytic, mapped on the distinction between salarymen and ikumen, of its explanatory power. The ikumen figure is shaped in dialogue not only with the imaginary West (see Chapter 1), but with itself.

I argue that critiques of ikumen, embodied by the figures of the ikumen modoki and yarisugi ikumen, upset “…the myths of modernity— the narratives that we all tell ourselves about how modern social life is different from, and differently structured than the past”

(McKinnon and Cannell 2013: 8). I use the discourses of ikumen promoted by the state and by industry, outlined in Chapter 1, as my baseline for establishing what these myths of modernity entail as they intersect with fatherhood and kinship. For the state, the contributions of fathers in

Western nations to the labour of the home accounts in part for their economic success. Ikumen are called as citizens of Japan to make a “heroic” change to rival their counterparts overseas, 103 rejuvenating Japan’s economy. This is at once a striving for modernity and the reiteration of a deeper invented masculine tradition reflected in imagery associated with salarymen and the samurai. For industry, ikumen are part of a global, pleasure seeking class of consumer. Their values, thought to align with those of men in Western nations, are formulated vaguely as gender equality, cultural exchange, and work-life balance. Ikumen are depicted as desirable and fashionable. However, for my interlocutors, the figures of the ikumen modoki and yarisugi ikumen highlight the damaging effects of corporate Japan’s push for competition in a global marketplace, the persistence of gender discrimination, and empty materialism. To call this a contestation of myths of modernity is somewhat counter-intuitive because, for many of their critics, ikumen are not nearly “modern enough42”. Their “uniquely Japanese character” is a marker of failure to comprehend, fully, what the imaginary of Western fatherhood entails. In the wake of these critiques, ikumen are being treated by the fathering movement as a distinctly

Japanese deviation from a universal, homogenous ideal of modern fatherhood located in the imaginary West. Buried in these critiques, then, is the persisting notion of modernity as a

“developmental teleology” (Sakai 2005:191).

In discussing yarisugi ikumen and ikumen modoki, my goal is not to sort “good” fathers from “bad” fathers or to add further levels of granular distinction in the description of contemporary fatherhood in Japan. The value of attending to the figures of the yarisugi ikumen and ikumen modoki lies in the way they capture deep lying fears and ambivalence that the

42 These critiques recall the one advanced around the turn of the century in Jogaku Zasshi by owner Iwamoto Yoshiharu (Butel 2012; see Chapter 2). The newly codified ie, which drew heavily from notions of family in Western Europe cloaked in “Japanese tradition”, was criticized by Iwamoto for its failure to emulate the values of Christian familial love. Curiously, fatherhood— unmarked, non-ikumen fatherhood— has become the site for the regeneration of an imagined global future. 104 growing popularity of the fathering movement has surfaced. My analysis draws inspiration from a similar undertaking by Barker et al., “Figures of Indonesian Modernity” (2009). Outlining a

“cast of characters” emblematic of contemporary Indonesia, the authors specify that “these are not particular individuals but rather figures whose significance can be understood against… changing social, political, and cultural life” (2009:35). Figures function much like Raymond

Williams (1976) “key words”, acting as sites for observing both ideological formation and contestation. Figures are “creatively constituted subject positions that embody, manifest, and, to some degree, comment upon a particular historical moment in the complex articulation of large- scale processes that are not always easy to grasp in concrete terms” (2009:37). My effort here, on a much smaller scale, looks to the way ikumen figures capture the uncertainty and skepticism that has accompanied Japan’s push for a revision to the gendered division of labour. They operate in rumor, anecdote, and the realm of the hypothetical, but it is precisely their slippery quality that makes them so useful for articulating objections that are “not always easy to grasp in concrete terms”. An untrustworthy suitor, a clumsy husband, a suspicious politician: the fact that such disparate examples could be used by my interlocutors to speak to the same concerns about fatherhood illustrates the utility of ikumen figures.

In the first section of this chapter, I address the figure of the ikumen modoki. I analyze social media content and statements from my interlocutors to determine the basis of the feelings of suspicion associated with it. There is a fear that conspicuous consumption or the strategic invocation of the ikumen label may be used to conceal the exploitation of both coworkers and partners. In the second section, I turn to the yarisugi ikumen. Drawing again on social media and interview data, I show how the yarisugi ikumen threatens not only the efficiency of household operations, but also the ongoing struggle of women for equality in the home and workplace. In the third and final section, I use texts produced by Fathering Japan to illustrate the increasingly 105 ambivalent— even hostile— position taken by the fathering movement towards the term

“ikumen”. Here, I show how ikumen are increasingly used as a point of contrast— not alignment— with fatherhood as it is imagined as existing in the West.

3.2 Ikumen Modoki

Two days before Miyazaki’s speech, he was making his way towards a hotel in a quiet neighborhood in Kyoto. For a month, he had been exchanging messages (numbering in the hundreds) with bikini model Mayu Miyazawa (The Strait Times 2016). The two had met before a parliamentary session in December 2015 where Miyazawa was working as a kimono dresser.

Miyazawa claimed that the two never intended to begin an affair, but their relationship was consummated that night under cover of darkness. According to both Miyazawa and Miyazaki, three further meetings occurred in the weeks following that night at the hotel. A photographer from the Shukan Bunshun was able to snap a shot of Miyazawa leaving Miyazaki’s home, the location of their final rendezvous. Confronted with the evidence, Miyazawa confessed and helped the tabloid piece together the details of the affair. More than political opportunism, it seemed now that his initial declaration may have been an act of misdirection. Miyazaki had concealed his motives behind his public persona— a caring, dedicated father-to-be— in service of his own interests. The suspicions expressed by my interlocutors regarding Miyazaki’s motives and authenticity were validated as far as they were concerned. They saw the ikumen label appropriated by the politician as a form of misdirection. He was not truly invested in the aims of the fathering movement, they surmised. Rather, the title allowed him to fashion himself publicly as a bold, progressive father. Yet, his true intentions, it seemed, were to indulge in pleasure seeking. As one woman I spoke to speculated, he may have pursued childcare leave in order to have time away from work to meet with his mistress. Sayaka Osakabe, the founder of Matahara 106

Net, a support group for pregnant working women who have experienced unfair treatment at work and a panelist at Miyazaki’s forum, later said that the scandal would energize critics and could lead to further harassment of men who elect to take paternity leave: “it’s possible that you file for paternity leave, only to end up being ridiculed by your boss who may joke you’re trying to use such leave as an excuse to commit adultery” (The Japan Times 2016).

I would later surmise from conversation on the topic that the nature of his indiscretions was not entirely surprising. This particular set of behaviours— deception, misappropriation, infidelity— was not unique to the politician himself. In fact, they reflected a more general critique manifest in the figure of the insincere and opportunistic ikumen modoki. The suffix

“modoki”, best translated as pseudo or mock, can be applied in a variety of contexts.

“Kīromodoki” refers to something yellow-ish in colour, Purada-modoki to a fake Prada bag. In

Japanese theatre, the “modoki” is a character who parodies the protagonist in an exaggerated, contradictory, and often comical fashion. The figure of the ikumen modoki riffs on the consumptive, pleasure driven model of ikumen promoted by fathering focused industry publications like FQ Japan (see Chapter 2). In his most extreme form, the ikumen modoki is a con artist. He contributes the bare minimum to the labour of the home in order to validate his claims to the ikumen label. He is smug and condescending to both his partner and his peers, admonishing them for their lack of effort. When confronted, he embellishes and gaslights.

Sometimes, the ikumen modoki is less a cad than a lay about. In complete ignorance of the sheer volume of labour managing a home and family demands, he makes minor contributions, naturally favouring enjoyable work like playing with the kids, and thinking this constitutes parity with the efforts of his partner. Described succinctly in a Fathering Japan lecture I attended, the ikumen modoki “may change a diaper filled with urine but will not change one filled with poop”. 107

This conflict between ikumen as style and ikumen as substantive parenting means that men who proactively claim the ikumen label are met with particular suspicion. The ikumen modoki represents the luxury of deciding when and how to act as a father in spite of the fact that caring for children is exigent and indifferent to the desires of the parent. In an anonymous blog post authored by the wife of a self-professed ikumen, the author wonders “who decides whether or not a person is an ikumen?”:

It seems that the number of self styled ikumen—men who say they are ikumen— is

increasing. It makes me angry when they only play with the child, do childcare, or take a

bath with the child when the baby is in a good mood. But it seems there are also people

who do this who think “but I am an ikumen!”. If there are times when the baby is in a

good mood, there are also times when he is in a bad mood. You can’t be absent because

you feel too tired. The baby needs to have its diaper changed, it needs to be fed, it needs

to have a bath. That is child rearing.

The legitimacy of claims to ikumen status is a common concern among mothers generally. In a post entitled “Moms are Fed Up with Dads Who are All Talk” (2017), “mommy blog” It Mama provides a helpful checklist to determine if one’s partner is an ikumen modoki. “There is a difference in couples in terms of awareness of cooperation when it comes to childcare and chores” the article explains. It continues with the somewhat sinister question, “are ikumen modoki lurking here?”. The reader is invited to answer 13 questions, with the final score determining whether their partner is, in fact, ikumen modoki. Readers are asked questions that focus on their partner’s consumptive habits and concern with their public image: Do they buy things they are inclined to, even if they are unnecessary?; Do they do a lot proactively, but only the easy or enjoyable things?; Do they think it is awesome that doing something (related to 108 fatherhood) makes them appealing to others?; Do they “act like an ikumen” outside the home? A score of 9 or more indicates a “true ikumen modoki” — in this case, the author notes that it may be necessary “not only to raise your child, but the father too”. Of central importance here is the way men represent their efforts in the home to others and it incongruency with the efficacy of their household labour. The ikumen modoki seeks praise and recognition while being derelict in their duties.

The ikumen modoki is said to carefully manage the time he commits to care labour in order to ensure that it remains enjoyable. However, this is a characteristic that is not exclusive to the labour of the home. I heard similar critiques from men staged with reference to the corporation. Ikumen co-workers present a risk of deception in the sense that they may avoid the demands of employment in favour of leisure. I join Shohei and Hiro, a banker and his colleague visiting from New York (where he was working on a short-term transfer), for dinner at a friend’s restaurant near Omotesando. Seated on the patio, the owner brings us a bottle of wine and some marrow. “He’s a graduate student” Shohei says, gesturing towards me in a casual introduction,

“studying ikumen”. “Ikumen?” Hiro says “I didn’t know that. Interesting. I thought you were a banker?”. “It’s a good thing isn’t it?” says the owner, popping out the cork. “You know, I think all men should help with child rearing” Shohei says. “I think if a man is honest about this, he should do it. In Japanese companies, it can be difficult. But everyone should be trying to do it”.

Hiro nods in agreement. “That’s true, but if you say ‘honest’, I wonder about the people who say ikumen”. I ask him to elaborate. He lights a cigarette before continuing. “I agree all men should help (their wife), naturally. My company has a good parental leave policy. But to actually say

‘ikumen’ is odd”. “It makes me feel suspicious” Shohei interjects. Hiro carries on: “Yeah, maybe he wants to leave early or come late? We all have important responsibilities. It is best to not 109 inconvenience others I think”. “I want to leave work too!” Shohei groans, clutching his face. “I can’t trust that kind of person”.

For Shohei and Hiro, the self-indulgent ikumen is not a salve to the woes of the workplace. Where the state sees a hyper-productive father/employee who makes equal and meaningful contributions to his home and employer, Shohei and Hiro see themselves being called to fill a gap. The presence of ikumen in the workplace is subtractive, not additive. Indeed, they exacerbate the considerable pressure to perform to which Shohei and Hiro are already subjected. The invocation of the label “ikumen” is met with particular suspicion. It appears to these men as grounds for claim making, an effort to separate the ikumen in question from his peers (“we all have important responsibilities”). There is no “trust” to be had, no shared solidarity in corporate commitment as a kind of masculine performance that group Shohei and

Hiro together in contrast to the ikumen. This is in spite of Shohei’s concession that he, too, would love to live a life free of the constraints of corporate employment.

Crucially, while the formulation of their argument may appear to support it, these men are not launching a defense of the salaryman lifestyle. Their concerns are rooted in their experience of increasing precarity and exhaustion in contemporary corporate employment. As they would convey to me in exasperated complaint over the many evenings we spent together, work was demanding, stressful, and volatile. Time away was an impossibility. If ikumen were meant to mark a shift in the conditions of employment in Japan to match the comparatively lax work environments found in North America and Western Europe, Shohei and Hiro did not recognize them as such. The exceptionalism surrounding “heroic” ikumen elicits grumbling from the pair, though both are quick to claim that “natural” parenting by the father should be embraced. Yet, I was left wondering if this was mealy mouthed lip service to gender equality or 110 actual conviction. The ikumen is caught in a bind if we follow Shohei and Hiro’s reasoning. A man should be supported if he pursues chores and childcare as an ikumen “honestly” but cannot be trusted— his “honesty” brought into question— should he actively claim ikumen status.

Perhaps there was a subtle envy of fathers who could use their kinship obligations to free themselves from their corporate ones.

In addition to self-centered pleasure-seeking, the ikumen modoki represents the desire to embody the stylish image of ikumen and reap the social benefits of this association. As a result, men who were preoccupied with publicly aligning themselves with ikumen signaled to my interlocutors that they may be an ikumen modoki. While Shohei and Hiro saw this claiming of the ikumen label as problematic in the context of the workplace, I found this issue was even more pronounced in discussion with women. “I don’t know if I would like to marry someone who is ikumen” Nanako tells me, sipping her coffee. “Yeah. Of course, helping with chores and childcare is important. But… if you call yourself ‘ikumen’, I feel suspicious” her friend, Chiaki, interjects. “Yeah! I really feel suspicious! Like, if you say, ‘I am ikumen’, I feel like you want praise or something like that. Maybe they don’t actually help at all, but they want credit”. “Yeah, right? Maybe it’s something they just say to girls for attention”. They both laugh. Nanako and

Chiaki are women in their early twenties navigating a dating scene populated by self-described ikumen. We are seated outside a university convenience store at a satellite campus of a larger school located just outside Tokyo where the two are students. Both express an interest in finding a partner who is keen to marry and start a family quickly but are troubled by uncertainty regarding the intent of their suitors.

I ask them to elaborate on this feeling of suspicion. They pause to consider their reasoning. We share a mutual acquaintance, one of their classmates, who once mentioned in 111 passing his desire to be ikumen. The Chiaki and Nanako remember it vividly. “Ruka, for example, he’s no good right?” says Chiaki, suddenly breaking the silence. “Yeah, so lazy! I have that kind of image (of Ruka) when you say ikumen”. Ruka, I am told, is a troublemaker. He is constantly cutting corners in the workplace and at school, and the women admonish him for his lack of “yaruki” (willingness or ‘can-do’ spirit). Throughout our exchange, there was a sense that the pair were not opposed in principle to a partner who would share the burden of household labour— quite the opposite in fact. As Nanako explained: “I think that, if a man can clean and cook and do childcare things, it’s important. It would be good if more men did that. If my husband didn’t do that, I would be mad! Naturally they should help me!”. Rather, they were wary of being fooled by the use of the title ikumen by unscrupulous men; fooled into consenting to sex, into giving praise, or into entering into a relationship where the division of labour was lopsided. Public declarations of “ikumen status”, then, were a clear red flag. Nanako’s choice to emphasize Ruka’s perceived laziness— as opposed to his other faults— as being the hallmark of ikumen is also noteworthy. Here Ruka’s capacity for labour is questioned. Whether this is in the context of the home or outside of it is left unspecified, but given their interactions were limited to a classroom context, she is likely drawing conclusions based on his efforts there. In so doing, she posits that his poor performance and lack of interest and motivation in school reflect the questionable nature of his ikumen claim.

112

Figure 6. A comic strip from Tottori Prefecture’s “The Real Life of the Ikumen who Tries his

Best” (Tottori Prefecture Child and Human Resources Bureau 2014).

The use of the ikumen label as a means of ingratiating oneself to women— a concern expressed by Chiaki and Nanako— is even reflected in some state issued instructional material.

A 4-panel comic strip (Figure 6), found in a volume on the subject of ikumen-hood developed as part of the Tottori Prefecture’s Ikumen Project related educational efforts, is entitled “the Stylish

Ikumen’s Song”. The father sings about his own identification as a handsome “ikemen” who claims the ikumen label. while fantasizing about the love he will undoubtedly receive from both his family and female admirers for his efforts before he is brought back to reality by a punishing blow from his wife. The lyrics are as follows: “I am ikemen, the trick is ikumen. If the family goes smoothly, work will go smoothly. I’ll be able to make many beautiful mama friends. After all, I am i-ke-me-”. At this point, the singer is interrupted by a slap delivered by his enraged wife.

For women like Chie and Nanako, the stylish image of ikumen does not translate into practice. In later conversations with the pair, the Miyazaki scandal stood as a self-evident example of the power of the ikumen label to conceal ulterior motives. The promise of “gender equality” that ikumen entail, widely conceived, was seen as suspect. Instead, women were wary of a greater susceptibility to exploitation. This exploitation could be sexual or, as in the example of Ruka, economic (as it was insinuated that the labour of the home would still fall to women to complete in spite of his stated desire to be an ikumen). 113

For members of the fathering movement, ikumen modoki were seen as interlopers in the home that undermined the validity of their own efforts. As was the case among mothers, women, and male colleagues, members of the fathering movement saw pleasure-seeking fathers as being at odds with the actual labour of the home. However, where men typically framed their objections with reference to corporate employment and women with reference to the division of labour in the home, members of the father movement collapsed this distinction between home and corporation in their critique. I encountered the clearest example of this collapsing during an impromptu calligraphy lesson one sweltering summer day. That afternoon, exiting the station into the stifling heat, I saw Bar Almeda for the first time in daylight. At night, warm light streams from its narrow windows, interrupted intermittently by the dark silhouettes of its patrons.

As I traversed Tokyo attending meetings or conducting interviews in an array of community centres, homes, parks, and schools, only for an afternoon or evening and never again returning,

Almeda was perhaps the closest I came to a stable sense of place. It was a bit unsettling to enter

Almeda, then, and see it empty, save its proprietor. The lights were off, the chairs were empty, and the only sound was the hum of a single fan and the clink of glasses as Koji served chilled barley tea. Koji is a staple of Tokyo’s fathering community, his influence reaching far beyond

Fathering Japan alone. Such is his ubiquity that some fathers told me it was “inevitable” that the two of us would cross paths. In the early days of my research project I was especially thankful for this, not just because Koji was a thoughtful and insightful interviewee, but because he was a veteran member and lecturer in several fathering organizations, chief among them Fathering

Japan and Himitsu Kessha Shufu no Tomo. I witnessed many fathers turn to him for the sort of calm and assured counsel that comes only with experience.

Koji and I hunch over opposite sides of the bar top. He wipes away the pool of condensation forming under my glass so as not to damage my notebook. Then, picking up my 114

pen, he hastily sketches out two characters in the margins: 主夫, pronounced “shufu”. The first character, shu, means main or primary; the latter, fu, means husband. Together, the characters are generally taken to mean “stay-at-home dad” or “househusband”. “This” he tells me, tapping the characters with his pen “is not considered a job”. Koji jots down another two characters on the line below: 主婦, also pronounced “shufu”. Here, the last character, fu, means wife. As such, the meaning of the compound shifts to “housewife”. “However, this” he says, circling the word, “is considered a job”. Koji continues: “The same thing can be said of working mother (kengyō shufu, 兼業主婦). It is a separate word. To say working father (kengyō shufu, 兼業主夫— again, a homophone) is redundant. Naturally, we think that a father is a father who works”.

Though not stated quite so elegantly, I was familiar with similar arguments expressed in

Fathering Japan literature. I had expected him to push back against these narrowly defined and heavily gendered roles. Anticipating a similar response, I ask him where “ikumen” fits in this hierarchy. Koji cringes slightly and replies, with a bit of feigned incredulity “What do you mean ikumen? That’s a word for someone who does nothing!”. I’m taken back by this turn of events. I hadn’t anticipated such a strong rejection of the label, especially considering Koji’s history of parenting activism. He was, in fact, an early member of the “sister” organization to Fathering

Japan, the Ikumen Club, which was credited with sparking the “ikumen boom” back in 2006.

Koji returns to the characters he drew earlier. “Shufu”, he says, pointing to the character for

“stay-at-home dad”, “is like a fulltime employee (seishain). Ikumen are like part-timers (hi seishain)”.

This analogy, dense with historical significance, requires careful unpacking. The invocation of “seishain” and “hi seishain” draws on the deep, gendered divide between these 115 two employment models and recent seismic shifts in the composition of Japan’s labour market to make an argument for belonging in the context of the home. Seishain are directly employed by the company. They are expected to work full time (40 plus hours a week) and to provide a great deal of unpaid overtime. While their jobs are secure, their duties are vague and essentially at the discretion of management. It is not uncommon for seishain to change positions within a company or be transferred (shukko) to a distant branch on a whim by their superiors. Hi seishain, in contrast, are often subcontracted from staffing companies for fixed terms. They have clearly defined duties and are not expected to work overtime or agree to transfer within or between company branches. However, as Osawa et al. (2013) note, fully one third of all hi seishain match their seishain counterparts for hours worked per week (see also Gaston and Kishi 2006). So, while their responsibilities may differ, hi seishain are primarily defined by the absence of benefits, limited job security, and low wages43.

The conditions of hi seishain workers align them with the “precariat” who, lacking the stability afforded by secure employment, live in a state of uncertainty (Allison 2013; Standing

2011). Unsurprisingly, this division has a material effect on the lives of workers. As Osawa et al.

43 As Broadbent (2003) illustrates, the divide between hi seishain and seishain has fostered a more pronounced gendered hierarchy in Japan’s already heavily stratified corporations. Japan’s anti-discrimination laws draw from Article 14 of the Japanese Constitution, which states: “All of the people are equal under the law and there shall be no discrimination in political, economic, or social relations because of race, creed, sex, social status or family origin”. However, it wasn’t until the Equal Employment Opportunity Act (EEOA) of 1985 that legislation specifically addressing inequality in hiring, firing, promotion, and training was passed. Unfortunately, the original EEOA was relatively toothless. In the absence of legitimate legal repercussions for failing to adhere to it, Japanese companies offered a form of symbolic compliance with the institution of an ostensibly gender neutral two-track system (kōsubetsu kanri seidō). Employees were hired as either sōgōshoku, a managerial career track with room for promotion, or ippanshoku, clerical and administrative positions with little to no upward mobility. Hiring requirements for sōgōshoku were established in a way that valued qualifications that were overwhelmingly monopolized by men prior to the 1990s, including a university degree from a top tier school (whose students were, often by mandate, entirely male) or foreign language fluency and experience studying or working abroad. As a result, men were predominantly hired as sōgōshoku and women as ippanshoku. Though unequal in standing, both were seishain. Hi seishain positions were the limited purview of students and mothers or those in semi-retirement looking to earn a little money on the side. 116 explain, “…Japanese social policy is designed based upon the assumption that nonregular workers are mostly students and married women and that heads of households are holding regular jobs. Thus, social programs are geared towards this ‘typical’ breadwinner model…”

(2013:316). As of 2013, only 60% of hi seishain were enrolled in the unemployment insurance program, compared to nearly 100% of seishain. Similarly, 48.6% of hi seishain were enrolled in health insurance; 46.6% in the public pension. These numbers continue to drop every year44.

While the hi seishain is, in this sense, a tragic figure, the disdain expressed by Koji suggests that

I was not meant to sympathize with them.

This is because the proliferation of hi seishain in companies following the asset price bubble collapse in 1991 has created tensions in the workplace, with fears of obsolescence fueling resent. As Yu explains: “Not only are those who are not seishain— that is, nonstandard employees— entitled to few rights in their workplaces, but their employment status also tends to stigmatize them as uncommitted workers, making it extremely difficult for them to shift to standard jobs and attain higher occupational status in the long run” (2013:29). Employment status, then, is a “socially meaningful category in the workplace” (Yu 2013:29). As companies restructure to eliminate costly fulltime positions, seishain view hi seishain with suspicion.

Seishain responsibilities are more demanding, with long overtime requirements and a workplace culture that accepts nothing less than total commitment. They imagine themselves to embody the

44 The difficulties faced by hi seishain are exacerbated by Japan’s heavily regimented hiring process. Japanese corporations hire directly from universities (a system known as shinsotsu-ikkatsu-saiyō). Outside of this annual recruitment period, it is incredibly difficult to secure full time employment, and failing to find a job with the rest of one’s cohort carries a stigma which precludes the possibility of entry through this channel in the future. By entering the workforce through part-time positions, those working as hi seishain have very limited opportunities to transition into seishain positions. Less than 12% of these employees are able to make the switch to full time positions within 3 years of their first assignment; past this point, the number continues to drop year over year (Osawa et al. 2013:320). Hi seishain are forever typecast in this subordinate role. 117 ethos of the white-collar corporate warrior that defined Japan’s boom years, willing to make tremendous personal sacrifices for the company-as-family. Hi seishain are not subject to the same expectations. As they have little professional or economic investment in the corporation, their development of relationships with full time employees or their part time peers is often stunted. The gap in qualifications between seishain and hi seishain can also be a source of tension. With seishain having cultivated a specialized skill set through workplace training or advanced study, the loose requirements for hi seishain positions— and the lack of investment in their professional development— deepens the divide. With the threat of downsizing, seishain look to this gap as evidence of their unique importance to the company.

It is precisely these notions of non-commitment and inadequacy as the defining characteristics of hi seishain that Koji draws on to illustrate his point to me. He continues:

For example, in a shop like a restaurant, employees (seishain) think about how they can

increase the number of customers. But because they are doing part-time work (arubaito),

they work from one hour to another hour, they think about how much (money) they can

make for themselves. Ikumen think only about themselves. Shufu think about all.

Through his analogy, Koji implies that ikumen are part-time workers in the home and, as such, their loyalty is not “to home”. Rather, the ikumen, like the part-time worker, is loyal only to himself. Here, Koji echoes criticism that emerged alongside the freeter (furītā), a portmanteau combining the English word “free” and the German “arbeit” (labour), in the 1980s. While today the term freeter is associated with precarious, hi seishain employment agreements, its 118 connotations were originally quite different45. Satsuka (2015: 41) traces the origins of freeter to its use in 1987 by the editor in chief of From A magazine, Hiroshi Michishita. Michishita had originally envisioned the term reflecting the sort of casual work done while one pursues their dreams and passions, rejecting the heavy obligations of corporate employment while remaining self-sufficient. The notion of freeter as pleasure seeking idealists in search of self-realization is reflected in Koji’s commentary, here set in a negative frame. Their lack of commitment to the corporation/home indicates a particular sort of self-centeredness. Labour— whether performed in the service of the company or the home— is simply a means to whatever fanciful ends the ikumen might envision: leisure, attention from the opposite sex, a stylish image, or praise.

Since its inception, those in the fathering movement have strived to sort themselves from other men and reify their own fathering identity: at first, by “declaring themselves ikumen” and now, increasingly, by isolating the ikumen modoki within the ikumen cohort. Koji’s explanation served to stake out the legitimacy of his presence in the home. Those in the fathering movement currently occupy a precarious position, lacking social (and to a lesser extent legal) acceptance. If

Fathering Japan members, or at least the members they seek to court, are indeed the “seishain” of the domestic sphere and ikumen the transient and selfish part-timers, then the criticisms that emerge from this changing division of labour can be compartmentalized— in this case, as reflecting the poor behaviour of ikumen modoki.

Yet, Koji’s analogy is not just about emphasizing the emancipatory and, to his mind, selfish dimension of irregular or part-time work that he sees reflected in the ikumen modoki. It is

45 I return to the topic of freeters in the 1980s and 1990s in Chapter 7. 119 also an expression of concern over the parallels between the trajectory of ikumen and freeters.

Both freeters and ikumen were originally conceptualized as a form of resistance against domineering corporations. As I discussed previously, being a freeter or hi seishain is no longer an act of rebellion. For many, it is the only means of eking out a precarious existence (Allison

2013; Driscoll 2007; Cook 2013, 2014, 2016). Chief among the costs of this precarious position is the absence of a work-based identity (Standing 2011) and the dignity and recognition legally valid and protected labour affords (see also Castel 1999). Young male hi seishain and freeters have poor marriage prospects because they do not earn enough to establish a family. Co- habitation outside of marriage continues to be relatively rare in Japan (Piotrowski et al. 2015), and so these men extend their stay in their natal home, often at the expense of a healthy relationship with their increasingly concerned parents (Cook 2016).

The comparison of ikumen with precarious labourers invokes anxieties around the cost of corporate Japan’s pursuit of a competitive business model in a global business environment. This can be traced through the two movements that animate Koji’s explanation. First, when Koji makes his comparison in the language of the corporation, he implies that the realm of domestic labour is being encroached upon by a precarious workforce that displaces full time employees: ikumen as figurative hi seishain. Next, by arguing that househusbands are equivalent to seishain,

Koji is simultaneously working to establish equivalency between househusbands and housewives

(the distinction between the two having initially sparked this digression). What emerges is an idealized model of family where the labour of dedicated fathers and mothers is equal, stable, and socially legitimated. This stands in contrast to the inequality of the ikumen model of family. For

Koji, men work casually and in a subordinate capacity in this family model as though they were hi seishain or freeters. His framing recalls the organization of the household model of the post- war era. As Allison (2012) explains, “…the home became a breeding ground for hyper- 120 productivity in workaholic husbands, competitive students, and sacrificial mothers. Those who couldn't live up to the task often felt socially rejected and rejected in the eyes of their family as well” (99). If fathers cannot secure a similar kind of qualified belonging in the home through participation in chores and childcare, then they too face rejection by their partners and by peer fathers like Koji.

In sum, ikumen modoki represent the concern that ikumen, contrary to the model of hyper-productivity and economic revitalization advanced through the Ikumen Project, are a drain on the resources of the home or company. Similarly, the discourse of exceptionalism surrounding ikumen (the heroic, elite ikumen envisioned by the state and the stylish, successful ikumen envisioned by industry) is suspect, especially when individuals actively make claims to ikumen status seeking preferential treatment. Specifically, the industry vision of ikumen as pleasure seeking consumers opens space for their motivations to be questioned. Ikumen who appear to be concerned with their image, desirability, and freedom to choose leisure over labour raise questions concerning their sincerity and commitment—whether to a partner, family, or company.

In each case, my interlocutors believed that ikumen modoki prioritize their own happiness, valuing appearance over substance. My interlocutors used the questionable and transient nature of ikumen labour to demarcate the boundaries of their own responsibilities (as mothers, as employees, or as fathers), and to express concerns about the proliferation of precarious labour and the facile promises of gender equality that characterize contemporary state and workplace efforts to align with policy in North America and Western Europe.

121

3.3 Yarisugi Ikumen

Tragically, Miyazawa’s interview-expose ran the same week Miyazaki’s wife, Megumi

Kaneko, was due to give birth. When word reached Miyazaki, he went to break the news to his recuperating wife in the hospital before scheduling a press conference to tender his resignation.

During his highly publicized mea culpa, run at noon across the country, Miyazaki insinuated that this was not his first indiscretion over the course of the couple’s short marriage (at the time, only

9 months had passed since the two exchanged vows). Following a prolonged bow expressing his contrition, Miyazaki stated: “I know my careless acts are inconsistent with the ideals I was advocating for. For that, I am deeply, deeply, deeply sorry and resign as a member of parliament as a result”. Taking a breath, he continued: “regardless if they were for or against men taking paternity leave, I am also deeply, deeply sorry and would like to apologize to all those who have given serious consideration to this issue”. Finally, he reiterated the importance of the debate, saying “Times have changed … We should no longer make women alone juggle the burden of working, giving birth and then raising the children. As a lawmaker, I wanted to set an example and change the atmosphere in society”. Even in a country where the news cycle was dominated by recent political scandals, the hypocrisy of Miyazaki’s secret playboy lifestyle was met with particular ire. Indeed, the public response to the scandal was so toxic that the LDP did not bother to put forward a candidate for Miyazaki’s seat in the ensuing by-election.

Several months after the Miyazaki scandal broke, I met Bun in Inokashira Park. We sat by the pond surrounded by the picnicking families scattered beneath the shady canopy. A young volunteer beloved by the men of Fathering Japan, Bun had been in attendance at the izakaya following the Miyazaki forum. “Do you think Miyazaki really just wanted the parental leave?

Did he really just want to spend time with his kid? Did he want time off work?”, I ask. “I don’t know” she replies, “Maybe he just wanted time off. Or maybe… I don’t know… What I was 122 wondering was—maybe he just wanted to say that it is not fair, that if the father is a member of parliament, when the baby is born, he can’t be at the hospital or stay at home. So maybe he just wanted to raise the problem. But, maybe how he did it was not so clever”. Miyazaki had struggled to manage the expectations of fathering activists and other Diet members. The depth and scale of the problem of paternity leave, the deft social maneuvering required to maintain strong ties with one’s employer and one’s partner, the strength of emotion these issues evoke: this complicated political terrain that fathering movement members work tirelessly to navigate was beyond both his ability. As Bun suggested, the fathers I spoke to about Miyazaki were generally of the opinion that he was “not so clever”.

The yarisugi ikumen represents similarly tactless fathers. In contrast to the Ikumen

Project’s vision of the heroic father deftly managing his roles in the home and in the corporation

(see Chapter 2), the yarisugi ikumen represents a farcical lack of ability. He jumps headfirst into the home, but his limited skill set and poor understanding of the scope of the labour of the home leaves him overwhelmed and in the way. He doesn’t separate the laundry. Plates emerge from the sink speckled with grease. His meals are spartan and unappetizing. Ignoring or failing to address complaints from his partner, he persists in his efforts to assert himself into the home.

Always underfoot, his need for supervision and his interference in established routines for the completion of daily chores adds to the labour of the home. A Fathering Japan lecturer once described yarisugi ikumen as “men who have fallen into childrearing neurosis” (ikuji noirōze): an obsessive and pathological need to parent. While the ikumen modoki purposefully cuts corners, the yarisugi ikumen is often seen as failing earnestly.

“Well, fail is not a good word” Aki says. “I’m happy that he tries his best” (ganbateiru).

We are seated in her kitchen of her apartment in Ikebukuro talking about chores. Her husband, 123

Makoto, is an active Fathering Japan member and proud cook. Aki, it seems, is content with that:

“I still make bento boxes for lunch, but he makes dinner and breakfast”. Aki is a stay-at-home mother of two. She experienced difficulties with their eldest in part because she missed her previous job in office administration, and in part because Makoto was fairly disengaged as a parent. When she learned she was pregnant with their second, the couple renegotiated their arrangement: Makoto would have to pick up the slack. To Aki’s regret, he did. “I can’t stand the way he does the laundry. He did it when he was a student, when he lived alone, but he isn’t attentive. I like it to be done a certain way. So, he doesn’t do that anymore”. The same applies to scrubbing the kitchen and bathroom. Makoto could never remember where cleaning supplies were kept, so he would go out and buy more. Now, their cabinets overflow with tile cleaner and bleach. It was easier to just do it herself.

I heard many stories similar to Aki’s which illustrate the practical difficulties couples encounter transitioning fathers into the home. For women, this carries frustrating ramifications for their daily activities, as their partners may actively undermine the labour of reproduction by elongating working hours and disrupting existing systems46. As women in Japan continue to struggle for even footing in the job market47 (especially stay-at-home moms or part-time workers), many are reluctant to relinquish household duties when they have served as relatively stable grounds for claims to belonging since the Second World War. The “salaryman doxa”

(Robertson and Suzuki 2003) was accompanied by the “professionalization” of housewives in a rigorously gendered division of labour (Takeda 2005). As Holloway explains:

46 A subject I return to in Chapter 5.

47 Cite some studies of workplace discrimination. 124

The emerging postwar economy demanded a reliable workforce of full-time employees

who could be counted on to devote considerable time and energy to their jobs. By

defining women as ‘professional housewives’, business and government officials hoped

to ensure that men would not be distracted by household responsibilities, expecting

women to form a pool of part-time workers who could be hired and laid off as business

conditions demanded” (2010: 33).

The integration of women in the new economy extended far beyond this “pool of part-time workers”. During the 1960s and 1970s, household labour was increasingly technical. Its success was tied to women’s cultivation of exclusive skill sets that supported corporate growth and expansion from the home, “a lifetime career requiring special training, special skills, and endless devotion” (Vogel 1978: 16; see also Kondo 1990: 280). Housewives came to occupy a place of distinction in the post-war order as the backbone of the domestic workforce that enabled the grueling work hours demanded of salarymen. It was precisely the legitimacy of housewife status that Koji sought to align himself with in his critique of ikumen. Yet this sort of claim to a shared identity is rejected by many women. As Nakatani explains, “…insofar as the mothers themselves continue to internalize a conventional view of motherhood, childcare remains a contested arena where little space is left for the fathers to assume more active roles” (in Rebick and Takenaka

2006:101). Jolivet, making a similar observation to my own nearly 15 years earlier, wryly concludes “it is difficult to tell whether it is the men who have excluded themselves from the family or whether it is the wives who have alienated them” (1997:113).

The state’s endorsement of men’s contribution to the home threatened this symbolic order as much as inept fathers threatened pre-existing systems for the efficient performance of household labour. This manifested both as excessive praise for ikumen fathers— a replication of 125 the hero narrative promoted by the Ikumen Project— and intensified scrutiny towards mothers.

An opinion piece on the topic of yarisugi ikumen appearing on parenting blog Todoke Kokoro no

Kakehashi (2017) states that “there is no mother’s standpoint from which a father is too perfect”.

However, the author continues:

There is also the worry that a wife will appear like a daughter-in-law that does nothing

whenever her husband does something… When it comes to your relationship with your

in-laws and they come to visit— it is good if they are nearby and they can often visit, but

if they live far away and they cannot visit often they would think that your husband does

all of the childcare.

To an observer, the yarisugi ikumen might index a pathological breakdown in the labour of the home for which the mother is thought to ultimately be responsible. The social ignorance of the yarsugi ikumen is as disruptive for women as his technical ignorance. Embracing the heroic image of ikumen, the yarisugi ikumen does not consider the way his actions reflect on his partner and the different sort of scrutiny to which they are subjected. Koji touched on this issue in an article he penned for a parenting website in which he reflected on his path to “house husband- hood”. He concedes his own ignorance, veering dangerously into behaviour associated with the yarisugi ikumen, before being enlightened by his wife:

When I started to call myself a “full-time house husband”, I was told by my wife that I

should stop calling myself that publicly. This was done with good intentions. I say that I

was saved by my wife. Why? It appears that there was a sarcastic response from a friend

who heard that I was a house husband. She said to my wife “it’s nice that you don’t have

to do anything, isn’t it?”. 126

The constant implicit and explicit moral evaluations to which mothers are subjected are exacerbated as men encroach upon the labour of the home. While he had intended by adopting the title to indicate that he was a father who worked in the home on equal footing with

“housewives” (as opposed to the ikumen “who do nothing”), his had intensified the public scrutiny of his wife’s own contributions.

Indeed, much of the furor surrounding yarisugi ikumen involves the discrepancy in the way their contributions to the home are assessed by the public when compared to women. Mai, a mother on the verge of retirement with two grown boys, expressed her resent to me in a seedy curry shop near her office. “It’s not ‘ikumen modoki’ like you suggested, but, doing things like that (childcare, chores) is natural isn’t it? It isn’t special”. Her husband is not an ikumen in any sense of the word. His career saw Mai and their sons paraded around the world for 15 years. She eventually set her foot down, choosing to settle in Tokyo to let her kids see out high school with their friends. She watched the ikumen boom develop from afar with a tinge of jealousy. “I thought ‘I really wish I could have had this help when my sons were younger’” she tells me wistfully. As the popularity of ikumen increased, she began to develop reservations. Her experience abroad, in particular, had a profound effect on the way she viewed the responsibility of fathers. “I think that things like ‘ikumen’ are good because, you know, the old generation is very strict. This sort of father, in my father’s generation, is very rare. So, it’s good that it has become more common. But I think this sort of ‘ikumen’ thing really should be normal. And should have been normal in the past, but Japan is very behind countries like Canada in this way”.

Mai had managed to maintain her career through two births and several relocations without complaint. She resented the latent sexism of Japan’s business world, but she endured and succeeded in spite of it. When ikumen encounter a fraction of the problems she did, it seems their world comes grinding to a halt. When they invest a modicum of time and energy into the family, 127 they are praised regardless of the results of their efforts48. Mai’s argument also draws heavily from her impression of fathers living outside Japan. In the quote I provide above, her specific reference is to Canada, but in other instances during our conversations this was a more general reference to fathers “in the West”.

Aki shared a similar experience. “When I go to pick up my youngest from pre-school, there is one father who always comes to get his son. All the mothers fawn over him. They say things like ‘oh, what a good husband he must be’, ‘his wife is so lucky’. But we (the women) are all there too, every day”. While we laugh at the absurdity of the situation, Aki has the self- awareness to detect those same patterns of thought as they emerge in her own life: “I was on the train the other day and I saw a father sitting with his son across the aisle. I thought ‘wow, that’s quite rare. He must be a good husband’. I don’t know why I had this reaction myself. I thought it was quite strange”. Even cognizant of the imbalance in the assessment of the work of fathers and mothers, Aki cannot help making the same evaluations as a reflex. But these are tempered by immediate feelings of resent, even jealousy. She describes a day, recently, when both of her children were sick, and she had an appointment she couldn’t miss. She hired a sitter, just for half

48 The furor surrounding Miyazaki’s paternity leave request, for example, eclipsed the ongoing struggle of female lawmakers at the local and national levels with the issue of maternity leave. Precedence for maternity leave was first set in 2000 by Liberal Democratic Party House of Councilors lawmaker (and former Olympian) Seiko Hashimoto, who was absent from Diet sessions for 3 days immediately following the birth of her child. This was only the second time since 1950 that a female lawmaker had given birth while parliament was in session; less an endorsement of careful family planning than an indictment of the gross gender imbalance across the lower and upper houses. Since then, allowances of up to 3 months leave have been made, but the institution of such policies across Japan’s lawmaking bodies is inconsistent. Of 1,741 local legislative bodies, 416 do not have any maternity leave system in place. Some that offer maternity leave do so under the same rules that allow time off in the case of traffic accidents or other misfortunes. Nearly two decades after the initial Hashimoto-led reform, only 11 other women had applied for maternity leave. All of them have been subject to various forms of harassment from the public and from their colleagues. In 2017, independent House of Representatives lawmaker Takako Suzuki’s blog was inundated with comments questioning her commitment after announcing her pregnancy. A year earlier, Hiromi Suzuki of Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward Assembly was confronted by a male colleague who questioned her ability to “engage in election activities” while on leave. 128 a day. When her friends — all of them mothers—heard about it at the park the following week, they were very critical of her decision. They said they would have definitely canceled if it were their child. “It made me feel like a failure” Aki says, pained. The uncritical lauding of fathers stands in sharp contrast to the intense surveillance and judgement mothers are subjected to on a regular basis.

The yarisugi ikumen represents the disruptive effect fathers, emboldened by the image of ikumen as capable, competent, and valued citizen-subjects, can have on the way women are perceived by extended family and community members. This can also extend to disrupting the intimate relationships of the home: a difficult dynamic to trace. The clearest example of this I encountered was a subtle discomfort in the relationship of Kenichi and Eri. Kenichi works as a sushi chef, a job he acquired relatively recently. He has always found himself in sporadic employment. His wife, Eri, is a producer at a massive television network. In her early 30s, her success in the industry is quite remarkable, but it comes at a cost. Eri often works past midnight or on weekends and can rarely be counted on to pick up their daughter, Yuka, from pre-school

(hoikuen). Given the relative flexibility of his hours and the lack of pressure associated with positions in large companies, Kenichi became the primary caregiver by default. Recently, his employer has been leaning on him more and more in the hopes of one day having Kenichi manage an independent branch. This has put them in a tight spot in terms of childcare time and has led them to depend more on the support and stop-gap childcare provided by friends made through their daughter Yuka’s school. This is how we come to know each other; meeting at a play date arranged with our mutual friend, an ex-pat American parent at their school named Lisa.

When Yuka is with her father, her eyes sparkle. Yuka brings every scraped knee, broken toy, and ethical dispute with her playmates, every bruise and cut, and every delightful find dug 129 from the muck outside straight to Kenichi, and he is happy to oblige her. He dotes on her, chasing away welling tears with a joke. “She always does that” Lisa tells me, “even when you’d expect her to go for mommy, it’s always Kenichi”. Eri smiles, but it tapers off. After a few bottles of wine, Kenichi is hopping around to “Bulls on Parade” (not exactly Raffi, but certainly better for the mental health of the adults in the room) with Yuka gleefully perched on his back.

I’m surprised to hear that both Kenichi and Eri are Rage Against the Machine fans; in fact, Eri was a concert going enthusiast in her youth. I’m struck by Kenichi’s enthusiasm: he seems to me the embodiment of the sort of “smiling father” Fathering Japan aims to cultivate. Scribbling furiously, I make note of his boundless energy, only to look up and find him double over in an armchair, dead to the world. It’s 7:30 on a Saturday. Eri gives him an affectionate pat before taking a seat on his lap. Our evening continues without Kenichi.

We have a bit of laugh at our fallen comrade’s expense, delving into the more peculiar aspects of their childcare arrangement. Eri describes to me her unforgiving employer— the overtime, the overnight trips, the weekends spent working from home. She tells me that she wants a second child but laments the fact that the decision mostly rests on Kenichi’s shoulders.

She is grateful for all the effort he puts into the home. In truth, she says, things would have fallen apart quite quickly had he found himself employed in a position similar to her own. Still, Eri values these openings to spend time with Yuka alone. She tells me to take a seat (officially relieving me of my childcare duties), then hops off her unconscious husband and scurries after her daughter, arms outstretched. Lisa, whose child attends the same school as Yuka often takes her home and watches her until Kenichi or Eri is available to collect her. Kenichi often returns the favour. Sitting on the couch watching Eri and the children from afar, Lisa confides in me that

Eri is not nearly as enthusiastic as her husband when it comes to swapping babysitting shifts.

“She always seems inconvenienced or bothered when I ask her to take my child too” she says, “I 130 think she gets very little time with Yuka, so she doesn’t want to divide her attention when she does have a day off”. While the yarisugi ikumen is often evoked to capture the overenthusiasm and incompetence of men in the home, but gifted and dedicated fathers can instill strong feelings of uncertainty and insecurity in their partners.

Yarisugi ikumen are primarily used to voice critiques of the influence of fathers on the labour of the home. In contrast with the state’s vision of ikumen as men who relieve mothers of some of their household responsibilities, women frequently expressed concern that the ignorance of fathers would actually increase the amount of labour they would need to invest into the home.

While ikumen are hailed as heroes, they are saved from the sort of meticulous assessment women are constantly subjected to for performing the same tasks. They infringe on the role played by mothers in the home. While the legacy of sengyō shufu is the product of deeply engrained sexism and the systematic exclusion of women from stable employment in the corporate world, it continues to provide social recognition, stability, and intimacy that fathers can threaten (through exposing their partners to increased scrutiny from friends and family). In this sense, many women felt that ikumen did not represent a shift towards gender equality. On the contrary: they served to highlight the persistence of gender inequality.

3.4 An Organization for the Elimination of Ikumen

As the figures of the ikumen modoki and yarisugi ikumen came to dominate discussions of ikumen generally when the Ikumen Boom cooled, the fathering movement strategically distanced itself from the term. Flipping through Fathering Japan’s texts or perusing its website, the word ikumen is used sparingly. Given Fathering Japan’s very public partnership with the

Ikumen Project, their efforts to avoid association with ikumen were a source of curiosity for me. 131

In an attempt to parse the distinction between “ikumen” and Fathering Japan’s use of the term

“fathering”, I asked Toshi, one of the organization’s directors and a veteran lecturer, to compare the two. “I guess, if ‘fathering’ as a word makes a person feel the subjectivity of a father, then it is probably a good word” Toshi mused. “Ikumen though— ikumen exists as a word because of the rarity of fathers who parent. As fathers do more parenting, naturally, this word will gradually disappear”. By way of example, he tells me that when he first started going to parks and doing pick up and drop off at nursery school for his eldest 10 years ago, he was the only dad. But today, he sees more and more fathers in these spaces, contributing to the labour of care publicly.

Fathering Japan’s aim, its members would tell me, was to eliminate the need for the term

“ikumen” altogether by ensuring that their message of the necessity of fatherhood thoroughly saturated the nation. As reflected in the striking opening chapter of The Book to Change Papa from Tough to Interesting! (2017), the fathering movement has entered what Fathering Japan calls the “post-ikumen” period. The problem the organization highlights is the gap between the image of the exceptional ikumen popularized by the state and media outlets during the Ikumen

Boom and reality:

Originally, the word “ikumen” was born because it was also a call that “fathers should

participate more in childcare!”. Nevertheless, presently you can catch sight of those

walking towards this perfect ideal family. However, this doesn’t mean that anyone can be

this sort of superman (supāman) (2017: 25)

The use of the word “superman” here seems to be a knowing wink towards the recurring motif first found in early Ikumen Project promotional materials (see Chapter 2). While the text acknowledges the relationship between Fathering Japan and the Ikumen Project, we can see a strategic distancing of the organization from the Ikumen Boom in the following passage: 132

Together with the Ministry of Health, Labour, Welfare we inaugurated the “Ikumen

Project” with the acceleration of men taking part in childcare as its goal. The “Ikumen

Boom” spread out through society…In this way, one method (we attempted) was to try to

raise ikumen as an ideally imagined father. Now fathers are unfortunately worrying about

the gap between this “ideal” and their own reality. This is the beginning of inviting the

“ikumen blues” (2017: 24)

The “ikumen blues” (ikumen burū) is described as a kind of male corollary of post-partum depression, which is sometimes referred to as “maternity blues”. While I return to these concepts in the following chapter, it is important to note here that the expectations surrounding ikumen- hood—feelings of joy, “peak happiness” (shiawase seichō) (2017: 18), and a more intimate and loving bond with one’s spouse— are often a far cry from reality. Postpartum depression for men, in this framing, is driven in part by state and commercial messaging surrounding ikumen that emphasizes their exceptionalism. While the stakes are framed differently, Fathering Japan adopts a similar stance to the critics of the yarisugi ikumen.

The fathering movement has begun to chart a path beyond the morass left behind by the

Ikumen Boom. In a recent interview, Tetsuya Ando suggested the ultimate goal of Fathering

Japan may be the elimination of Fathering Japan itself, an objective he frames through transnational comparison:

Actually, in preparation for the launch of “Fathering Japan”, I checked if there was an

organization in Japan that was doing similar activities. I found there was one in

Canada. But now there is no Canadian organization. In Toronto, it's true that male

childcare leave has become quite popular now, and the group has dissolved. In other 133

words, the organization's activities are no longer necessary in Canada. In other words, the

mission of “Fathering Japan” is to disband (Murahashi 2019).

Much like the state does through the Ikumen Project, Ando poses the problem of fatherhood as something with a distinctly national character. Moreover, he envisions a universal, evolutionary progression of fatherhood from something marked and supported through specialized institutions towards an unmarked, naturalized category as it is thought to exist in the West. This category is derived from research into fatherhood in Western Europe and North America, which glosses much of the political reality of parenting in these locales. The complex negotiations individual fathers in engage in regarding paternity leave in Canada, to use Ando’s example, are overlooked because of the absence of an activist bloc comparable to that in Japan. “Ikumen” is made legible not just through contrasting Japanese fathers and with fathers in other nations, but through the absence of the concept elsewhere. As an organization that seeks to eliminate the term ikumen,

Fathering Japan is pursuing parity with other nations. The post-ikumen period is a time of transition away from this “distinctly Japanese” phenomenon to membership in an unmarked modern fatherhood imagined as existing elsewhere.

For members of the fathering movement, the furor surrounding the Miyazaki scandal and ikumen more generally served as an important demonstration of their growing influence. As the heated discussions began to subside in the months following Miyazaki’s resignation, Bun clearly articulated the significance of the event to the fathering movement:

Even though Miyazaki-san’s incident didn’t go well… ikumen—or people taking parental

leave— is becoming more and more popular. The idea. Everybody knows about it. More

people know about it. Now they have opinions, at least. Like, before, we had to explain

that fathers can take parental leave as well. But now, more people know that fathers can 134

take parental leave. And they’re discussing it, which is good. So, even though progress is

very slow, but the idea of taking parental leave is expanding. Now the question is if it’s

good or bad, not can you or can’t you.

In the eyes of activists like Bun, the nature of the conversation surrounding fatherhood in Japan is slowly shifting towards the unmarked category of fatherhood Ando gestured towards in his interview. Far from being a blow to the movement’s hopes, the spectacular collapse of the ikumen concept was taken up as a sign of progress. Now, the way men conduct themselves within the home was the primary subject of negotiation; not whether or not they belong there at all.

3.5 Conclusion

In this chapter, I deconstructed the growing anti-ikumen sentiment I encountered during fieldwork. I show that the emergence of two distinct figures— the ikumen modoki and yarisugi ikumen—has served to sort and contain more general feelings of apathy and frustration that the fathering movement has surfaced. These feelings reflect ambivalence and anxiety responding to the discourses of ikumen promoted by state and industry. The former’s conception of ikumen as heroic figures in a national project of economic revitalization was offset by concerns that ikumen undermine the productivity of the corporation and the home. They were seen as non-committed literal and figurative employees. Like part-time or contract labourers displacing salaried workers, ikumen were a threat to the established order in the home/corporation. The industry vision of ikumen as image conscious, pleasure seeking consumers was grounds for some to question their motivations in taking on an active role in the home. Self-styled ikumen were thought to hide behind the label in order to avoid corporate and domestic responsibility or to make themselves appear more desirable to women. 135

The fathering movement has attempted to distance itself from ikumen, marking the beginning of what Fathering Japan refers to as the “post-ikumen” era. In the following chapter, I ask how men are interpolated by the fathering movement in this post-ikumen era. Rather than rely on the stylish imagery or nationalistic calls to action that propelled the Ikumen Boom, instructional materials encourage men to establish a sense of place and belonging in the home through acts of care and strategies that deepen their connection to their partner and child. Here, a consciousness of fatherhood is derived through alignment with the mind and body of the mother.

Though these texts sort fathers and mothers into the domains of culture and nature respectively, my interlocutors’ narratives reveal an awareness of the contrived and performative nature of both roles. It is in the violation of the domains of culture and nature— fatherhood and motherhood— that a fathering consciousness arises.

Chapter 4 The Papa Switch 4.1 What Ought a Father Do?

Shoes off, bottoms up. The izakaya is packed with salarymen indulging their superiors with well rehearsed exclamations of agreement and shows of polite, if slightly inebriated, deference. My companion and I let out a collective yawn before raising our glasses in a toast to the end of the work week. Beside me is Yuta, the software engineer featured in the introduction of this dissertation. Though his features are boyish, he is always dressed in the uniform of the 136 salaryman— navy suit, white shirt, and muted tie. When I first met Yuta, he was a chipper college student studying in Yokohama. Seeing him that evening, it is clear that a few years of stressful corporate employment had already begun to take its toll. His diet is poor, and he smokes heavily. One evening a few months prior, he lifted his shirt in front of our table in jest to reveal a girdle meant to conceal the considerable weight he had gained. The habitually tardy Eijiro, another software engineer in the same university cohort as Yuta, joins just as our conversation begins.

Our food arrives. Yuta declares, with little preamble, that his girlfriend of 6 months, Ai, is pregnant, and that they filed the necessary paperwork for marriage— a change to their household register (koseki) — at the ward office the previous month. Jaw agape, I turn and stare at Eijiro, who lets out a knowing laugh. I collect myself and we toast Yuta’s good fortune. I had known something was afoot but was nevertheless floored by the news. Ai had been a staple of our previous gatherings, but I had not seen or heard from her in weeks. Soft spoken and elegantly dressed, the evidence of her privileged upbringing was always on display. Even in our informal gathering of friends, she would act the perfect hostess: pouring drinks in accordance with seniority, lighting cigarettes, refusing compliments and avoiding eye contact when the subject of conversation turns to her. The daughter of an executive at a leading electronics manufacturer, Ai was afforded luxuries that few are: an international education, financial support, and a position in a corporation with plenty of opportunity for upward mobility.

As a researcher, I was excited by this turn of events. Speaking with Yuta throughout the pregnancy and in his early days as a father seemed a remarkable opportunity. We would find out several months later that the couple were expecting not one but two babies: fraternal twins. I maintained contact with Yuta via social media, anticipating that our meetings would become less frequent after the birth. I was surprised to find that he was able to keep up with our regular bar 137 trips only a few weeks removed from becoming a father. Over beer and karāge at a shop facing

Yokohama station’s bus terminal, I broached the subject of fatherhood: how was his experience as a father so far? “No, I’m not that sort of man” Yuta said, violently shaking his head. I quickly explained that I wasn’t interested in ikumen per se, which he assumed from previous conversations was my sole research interest. I was curious to hear about the experience of fathers of any sort. Again, Yuta hurriedly distanced himself from the topic: “You know, I’m a salaryman. I don’t know about those things. My wife does it. You should ask someone else”.

Worried that I may have overstepped, I apologized and asked if I had put him in a difficult position by making the request. He laughed and assured me that I hadn’t. I decided to press a little more, just to see if I could trigger some sort of understanding between us. “What about diapers, feeding? Do you play together?”. He furrowed his brow and shrugged. “Yeah, a bit, but most of the time it’s my wife. I’m a salaryman” he stated again, as though those words alone could resolve this misunderstanding— that, as a category, salaryman stood in such sharp contrast to the notion of fatherhood that it required no further explication.

Yuta understood “fatherhood” as a description of his relationship to his wife and child that implied the responsibility to provide for them through his identification as a salaryman.

However, he had no consciousness of himself as a fathering subject in the way it is understood within the fathering movement— one that nurtures the child and takes responsibility for some share of the labour of the home. In this chapter, I examine the way in which the fathering movement manages the impasse represented by Yuta. Readers will recall from the vignette in the introduction that Yuta would eventually— in a limited capacity— take up this call to fatherhood.

Yet, in our exchange here, Yuta invokes a naturalized and unquestioned conception of what a man ought to do. His just-so reasoning—his assertion that his role as a man and its attendant responsibilities and obligations (here represented by his identification as a salaryman) are simply 138

“known” — is the primary challenge facing the fathering movement. Fathering Japan’s answer, somewhat counter intuitively, had been to accept the veracity of this position. Indeed, the movement’s pedagogy is captured by a punchy and oft repeated slogan found throughout its texts: “men cannot ‘naturally’ (shizen ni49) become fathers”. In this chapter, then, I ask: how does the fathering movement “make” fathers?

To answer this question, I delve into instructional material and lecture content that speaks to the contingency of fatherhood through the concept of the “papa switch,” a metaphor for the moment of the creation of a “fathering consciousness”, which, in Fathering Japan’s rendering, is simply “the feeling that ‘I’m a father!’” (Fathering Japan 2015: 16). I engage closely with instructional materials prepared and freely distributed by local Gender Equality

Offices and those sold by Fathering Japan. In my analysis, I employ material developed in different prefectures— not simply those in the Kanto region where I worked. However, these texts are digital and are available via the Ikumen Project to fathers across Japan. While there are variations in style that may reflect regional peculiarities, they content of their arguments and instruction are replicated with a fair amount of consistency. This consistency is attributable in part to the fact that Fathering Japan members are often consulted by prefectural Gender Equality

Offices in the creation of instructional materials for fathers, blurring but not eliminating the boundaries between these texts. I value this particular genre of literature— parenting guides for fathers— because they call gender to account for itself. They make explicit what is so often

49 As Satsuka (2015), working through Yanabu (1982), explains, shizen is used to capture both the imported English concept of nature— a materiality separated from humanity— and the Taoist concept of ziran— an event that occurs without human intent/intervention. In the former case, shizen operates as a noun. Nature is rendered as an object separate from humanity. In the latter case, shizen is a description (adjective or adverb) that does not rely on such a distinction. In evoking the term here, we can see both understandings reflected: it indicates at once the notion of processes rooted in nature (pregnancy, birth, growth) and occurrence in the absence of human intervention. Hybridized through the process of translation, the term contains this contradiction— the tension between self/other and elimination of the distinction between self/other. 139 implicit: the gendered division of labour, the nature of the relationship between father, mother, and child, differences between the male and female body, and the minutiae of the intimate labour of care. In attempting to voice and in some cases to amend these “self-evident truths”, these texts reveal the tenuous logic and convenient occlusions and omissions required to make them appear whole.

The concept of the papa switch takes the form of its own narrative genre; or, if not quite a fully-fledged genre, a set of tropes. “Papa switch stories” are a regular feature of many parenting blogs and magazines. They share a distinct arc. An ignorant father, to his wife’s frustration, is negligent and disinterested in childcare until a moment of epiphany changes his ways: a bath with his child, feeling the kick of an unborn fetus, or a sonogram image. Without questioning the legitimacy of these narratives, I read the papa switch stories popularized in social media channels as a carefully curated and emotionally resonant argument for the sort of proactive and assertive fatherhood promoted by the fathering movement. It is useful to take the narrative of Ando, the founder of Fathering Japan himself, as an exemplar. As a child, Ando’s father was rarely present as a result of the demands of his employer. On those occasions when he was at a home, he was domineering, directing his wife in the performance of household chores. Ando has been quoted in various interviews as saying that these bitter memories of his own childhood drove him to set a better example for his own children50, but the full story is a bit more complicated. In fact, Ando variously cites two additional events as precipitating the emergence of his “fathering consciousness.” The first was a famous arson case in Nara in 2006 (nara jitaku hōka boshi sannin satsujin jiken). The 16-year-old son of a doctor, who had long been subject to abuse from his father and intense pressure to enter medical school himself, set fire to his home, accidentally

50 See interview with Hisatake Yamashita in Okamura’s (2014) Wave+. 140 killing his step-mother, step-brother, and step-sister. Profoundly influenced by the tragedy, Ando saw this as evidence of the necessity to reform father-child relationships nationwide. The second is more personal. Upon graduating from Meiji University, Ando eventually settled in the publishing industry. After shuffling through a series of different employers, he took up a managerial position at Rakuten Books. He would work long hours with the Roppongi Hills crowd, proud of his reputable employer and the elite class of workers he saw as his peers. While

Ando enjoyed his success, his wife toiled at home with their two children. One day, in an act of frustration, she simply walked out. Although this protest lasted only three days before she returned, it was a shock to Ando, not least of all because he was left as the sole childcare provider. During that period of uncertainty before her return, he reflected on his behaviour and realized that he had been a poor partner and an absentee father— not unlike his own.

For its audience of uncertain, confused, or unconvinced fathers, papa switch stories promise a revelatory moment— that they, too, might suddenly be “made” into fathers. Such stories render the absence of a fathering subject as a technical problem that can be solved through education and skills training, which serves as a foundation in the fathering movement’s instructional materials. O’Neil (2010: 112), tracing similar texts and courses inculcating neo-

Pentecostal fatherhood, offers a wonderfully vague formulation of fatherhood as a technology,

“as something taught and learned, as something mapped and outlined— (fatherhood as a technology) means doing certain things at certain times and in certain ways (as opposed to doing other things at other times and in different ways)”. Fatherhood is at once a type of “doing” that emerges through training (Goodfellow 2015; O’Neil 2010) and a technical language that produces a “fathering” subject. Therefore, fatherhood can be imagined as techne (see Dreyfus

1984); how “doing” fatherhood and speaking about fatherhood is a process of self-making

(Faubion 2001). Ando has stated as much, rather succinctly, in media interviews: “…we don't 141 have the answer to becoming a father, but we think there is a method, and Fathering Japan is writing it, programming it, and putting it into practice” (Yamashita 2014).

In instructional materials, the papa switch metaphor is often paired with a call to

“upgrade your OS” (operating system), which involves changing habits, mastering childcare skills, and becoming more attuned to the needs of one’s partner. Men, like a computer, are understood to require regular updates in the form of instruction and training to change their behaviour. The word “upgrade” is value laden: men who do not have an up to date “fathering

OS” risk obsoletion. While insisting that he did not want to “condemn” fathers, Ando has argued that “old OS Papa” (旧 OS パパ) may be the appropriate antonym to ikumen (Tokyo Shimbun

2019). Here, Ando takes OS as a metaphor for “social consciousness” (shakai no ishiki); the unquestioned values and beliefs concerning the gendered division of labour that drive everyday practices in the home and workplace. During interviews with Fathering Japan members, the concept of the “old OS papa” was interchangeable with the kind of hyper-masculinity associated with men of the Showa era51. Upgrading the OS involves critically interrogating the discourse on gender in Japan in addition to developing new skills and childcare knowledge. This knowledge is sometimes described as “software” (sofuto) or “applications” (apuri) — for example, “picture book reading application” (Fathering Japan 2015: 21) — that can be “installed”.

I connect the concept of the “papa switch” to my interlocutors’ descriptions of their experiences of developing a consciousness of fatherhood. Instructional texts guide fathers to mimic the body, mind, and actions of mothers. This mimicry at once blurs the boundaries

51 The Showa Era (1926—1989) is typically conceptualized as being divided in half by the American Occupation beginning in 1945. The pre-1945 Showa Era is the period of the Empire of Japan. The post- 1945 Showa Era is the period of the State of Japan. It is associated with Japan’s miraculous economic recovery and the emergence of corporate Japan, the nuclear family, mass media, and consumerism. In this instance, the “Showa Era man/masculinity” refers to the archetypical salaryman, who is emblematic of the post-1945 Showa Era. 142 between mother and father while reifying the biological and psychological distinctions between men and women. To the extent that they aligned with the instructional materials in the concept of the papa switch, the stories my interlocutors recounted as key to the development of their consciousness of fathering are united in their emphasis on moments in which gendered distinction between mothers and fathers were brought into focus. Importantly, the literal and symbolic absence of the mother was a recurring catalyst in these narratives of the birth of a fathering consciousness. Ando’s narrative itself identified the absence of the mother as a key element of the development of his “fathering consciousness.” This absence creates a space in which men could stitch together their identity as fathers.

These experiences undermined the fixity of “motherhood” and “fatherhood,” which allowed fathers to imagine new ways of existing within the family. Deepening attention to their partner’s behaviour revealed mothers’ ambivalence, frustration, and refusal, which fly in the face of their unquestioned ideal of motherhood: patient, loving, dedicated care takers willing to sacrifice endlessly for their children. Playing with these gaps in these expectations of gendered conduct revealed to men a kind of malleability within the family that was previously concealed.

For many of the fathers with whom I spoke, these were ultimately discussions about developing a consciousness of “choice”: the ability to choose how they relate to their family and to society at large, and how individual men and women could— and should— choose what fatherhood and motherhood entail. The notion of “choice” represents an acknowledgement that motherhood and fatherhood, like femininity and masculinity, are “…identit(ies) tenuously constituted in time— an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” in which there is a capacity for change

“…in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style” (Butler 1988: 519—520, emphasis theirs). In this way, motherhood and fatherhood are taken up by my interlocutors as gendered performances 143 that, in the Butlerian sense (1990), index an ideal that can never be obtained. It is precisely the realization of the impossibility of attaining the ideal of “motherhood” that my interlocutors flagged as stimulating the emergence of their “consciousness” of fatherhood.

4.2 Natural Mothers, Mechanical Fathers

The concept of the papa switch is based on the principle that the conception or birth of a child does not necessarily result in the similar birth of a consciousness of fatherhood. In order to achieve this consciousness, an intervention is required: someone must “flip the switch”. The activation of a fathering consciousness may be a single, intense event— an argument, a lecture, an epiphany— or a gradual change through routine participation in childcare. In the absence of this sort of activation event (or events), men’s consciousness of fatherhood is described as “thin”

(Fathering Japan 2015: 16) when compared to a woman, or “slow” (The Ishikawa Child Care

Support Foundation 2008) to develop. As such, in contrast to mothers, who are thought to have a natural, unavoidable bond with the child they carry that is experienced both affectively and somatically, men do not simply become fathers but are produced by intervention.

Therefore, Fathering Japan’s contemporary instructional materials are based on a fundamental distinction between the sexes. In a slide from a lecture I attended, this was stated succinctly as follows: “When a woman gets pregnant, she has morning sickness and feels the fetus moving, she goes through the drama of childbirth and becomes a mother who feels through breastfeeding. However, men do not have a program to become a father in a natural way. In order to be active as a father, you need to turn the ‘papa switch’ on”. In this example, the trope of bodily pain as generative of (or as indexing) maternal relations mixes here with the symbolism of blood and milk, an appeal to the givenness, veracity, and corporeality of kinship relations (see

Borneman 1996; Carsten 2004, 1997). In the contrasting metaphor of the papa switch, the fathering subject is envisioned as being activated— “switched on” — either through experience 144 or instruction. The fathering subject might come before birth, it may come sometime after, or it may never arrive at all. As the frequent appearance of developmental timelines in fathering texts suggest, this question of chronology— the assuredness and predictability of fetal development and, by extension, motherhood and the contingency of fatherhood— is a focal point for instruction and practice. “Pre-papas”, in the fathering movement’s nomenclature, are called to actively “become” a father in step with the woman and child’s own processes of biological

“becoming”.

For anthropologists studying gender and kinship, the proposition that men are made is familiar, surprisingly durable, and problematic. Through the lens of gender, asking how fathers are made recalls Sherry Ortner’s seminal question: is female to male as nature is to culture?

Given the symbolic subordination of nature to culture in the Euro-American52 context, this association for Ortner (1974) explained the universal subordination of women to men. The basis of women’s alignment with nature is rooted in the body, and as such “woman’s traditional social roles, imposed because of her body and its functions, in turn give her a different psychic structure, which, like her physiological nature and her social roles, is seen as being closer to nature” (1974: 74). Ortner’s assumption of the universality of the categories of nature and culture and their dialectic relationship has been critiqued extensively (see Yanagisako and Collier 1987), but the gendered associations it highlights can be located in much of the early work done by anthropologists, sociologists, and gender theorists on the subject of masculinity. Here I include work such as Herzfeld’s (1985: 16) study in Crete through which he distinguished "being a good man" from "being good at being a man”, and Gilmore’s (1990) comparative study of manhood as

52 In Ortner’s work, this specification is concealed behind appeals to universality, though it is clear that the symbolic framework she relies on is distinctly Euro-American. 145 made through ritual acts that carry with them the risk of failure. Attention has consistently been drawn to the elements of masculinity that are understood as being achieved through action

(aligning them with culture) and not passively received through bodily development (which would align them with nature). This has had the effect, in turn, of occluding both the ways in which masculinity is embodied and femininity is produced socially. When I ask how the fathering movement “makes” fathers, then, I am not aiming to uncritically trace, as predecessor studies have, the ritual practices that are thought to produce men. Rather, I emphasize how my interlocutors came to understand fatherhood as both made and embodied, and motherhood as not solely as an element of the natural order but also as the product of history, economy, social expectation, and individual difference.

Through the lens of kinship, the question of how fathers are made dovetails with the question of paternity as a putative claim versus the knowable, observable, and thus “natural” and claimless status of maternity. In the greater history of the discipline of anthropology, we can trace this problem back to Malinowski’s description of the Trobriand Islander’s “ignorance of physical fatherhood” (1927: 23), or even further to Bachofen’s mutterrecht (mother right)

(1861). It continues to be relevant in contemporary work, particularly on the subject of new reproductive technologies. Strathern, following Cannell (1990), discusses the social construction of fatherhood and its asymmetries with motherhood (2011:255):

In conventional Euro-American thinking, the mother is regarded as created by her

offspring in the act of her (visibly) giving birth. But the father is at a further remove. He

is created through the mother-child connection, that is, the mother’s demonstrated

connection to the child is necessarily prior to his claims with respect to the child.

My interest here is not the social determination of paternity (the legitimacy of their offspring was not a concern for my interlocutors), but the dynamic isolated by Strathern. This is not only “the 146 representation of maternity as a natural and paternity as a social fact” (2011:256), mirroring prior discussions regarding femininity and masculinity, but the contingency of fatherhood on the non- contingency of motherhood. Within the fathering movement’s instructional material, the embodiment of motherhood is a pre-requisite for the embodiment of fatherhood. Yet, for my interlocutors, it is the realization of the contingent elements of motherhood— its capacity to fail as a gender performance (Butler 1990) — that makes possible the emergence of a fathering consciousness.

In instructional materials, the papa switch may be turned on through the study of the body of the mother, an object of biomedical knowledge. Papa’s Childrearing Manual (2008), an online resource commissioned by the Ishikawa Child Care Support Foundation, states that “self- consciousness is born” in women “from the time when they wonder ‘am I pregnant?’”. Men do not have this advantage. The onus is on the father to actively develop a similar self- consciousness: “for 9 months until birth, if you don’t proactively engage with your wife and child, when the child is born there will be a difference between you and mama”. In this guide and others like it, men are taught about the physical development of the child and the changes that occur in a woman’s body over the course of the pregnancy. This is typically organized by trimester. Descriptions of the child focus on weight, size, and the appearance of limbs and sensory organs. For mothers, hormone changes, weight gain, and morning sickness are explored in detail alongside anatomical drawings. The developmental trajectories of the mother and child are always plotted together, often physically adjacent on the page and positioned parallel to instructions for the father. Written with the kind of detached authority of a biology textbook, these descriptions can sometimes feel clinical. Indeed, the clinic itself is depicted regularly in images of the couple listening attentively to a nurse or physician. Fathers are instructed to 147 accompany their wife to her regular health exams and to heed the advice of medical professionals. They are also tasked with monitoring the health of their spouse and unborn child.

The division between the body of the father and the body of the mother is at times undone in striking fashion where mimicry is emphasized in fathering pedagogy53. For example, an image in “Becoming a Father in Saitama” depicts a father wearing a pregnancy vest accompanied by his wife and the course instructor54. With a thick, round paunch and gently padded bosoms, the weighted article of clothing is meant to mimic the physical challenges women experience during pregnancy. In parenting classes organized by the Ministry of Health,

Labour, and Welfare, this activity is called “ninpu taiken” (pregnant woman personal experience)

(Figure 8). Frequently paired with related exercises in which the father attempts to change and swaddle a plastic baby doll, ninpu taiken is often an occasion for boisterous laughter as men waddle around the classroom clutching their bellies. The instructor, typically a representative from the Ministry, walks the fathers through proper care for a pregnant woman. Lying down on mats placed on the floor, men are shown how to maneuver themselves into a comfortable, semi-

53 An odd bedfellow of my analysis here may be the couvade, a source of fascination in early anthropological work. The couvade is the ceremonial substitution of father for mother after the birth of a child structured by a series of prohibitions on the sort of food they might consume or labour they may perform. Echoing the conclusions reached about the couvade by scholars like Bachofen and Tylor invested in evolutionary understandings of culture, Malinowski claimed that “the function of couvade is the establishment of social paternity by the symbolic assimilation of the father to the mother” (1930:631). This unidirectional movement, however, is misleading. Doja (2005) rightly directs our attention to the way that mothers, too, are subject to similar taboos and restrictions after birth. Heron (2019), writing about Caribbean men’s determination of kinship through the mystical quality of consanguinity, shows how his male interlocutors believe paternity can be felt on a bodily level and thus known with the same sort of certainty that seems to spring from the body of the mother. My interlocutors do not experience something that could be likened to Heron’s fathers, nor to the couvade at is traditionally understood, but the material presented in this chapter sits at a similar juncture. 54 The pregnancy vest briefly entered the public eye as part of a television ad campaign for the Kyushu Yamaguchi Work-Life Promotion Campaign. Governors Yoshinori Yamaguchi of Saga Prefecture, Shunji Kono of Miyazaki Prefecture, and Tsugumasa Muraoka of Yamaguchi Prefecture donned the vests and performed routine tasks to experience the difficulty women face during pregnancy. In the television spot, the men groan and shuffle their way through the supermarket, the office, and household chores to comedic effect. Towards the end of the footage, Governor Muraoka states: "I really did not understand (the difficulty). Now that I understand what my wife has put up with for so many months, I am filled with gratitude". 148 fetal position. Between the jokes and smiles, my impression in conversation with fathers was that ninpu taiken was more of a novelty than a profoundly moving experience. Nevertheless, one instructor explained to me the importance of men experiencing the difficulty of going about everyday activities: to feel unbalanced, obstructed, and tired after limited activity. Men certainly made remarks reflecting this realization, but beyond this the instructor emphasized that the vest conveyed to men the constant presence of the child, here experienced as a literal weight as opposed to a sort of mental weight.

Figure 8. An illustrated example of ninpu taiken from “Becoming a Father in Saitama” (2019).

In this example, the fathering subject is produced through a figurative surrogacy; an attempt to mimic the embodied experience of motherhood by replicating, if only briefly, what instructors frame as the omnipresent connection between mother and child. This unsettles the 149 exclusivity of the corporeality of motherhood. Fatherhood appears as a form of mimesis, enacting not only the idealized imagery of good or proper fatherhood (Goodfellow 2015) presented in these texts, but also aligning the body of the father with the body of the mother. In these efforts to align these supposedly oppositional bodies, the distinction between them blurs.

Yet, the father is not rendered as a replacement for the mother, and men are warned against the danger of becoming a “double mama” (Ando 2017: 50—51). Fathering consciousness is framed as a kind of derivative consciousness that is generated through the medium of the mother’s body.

The omission of mothers as targets of instruction renders their position and relationship to the child and family as the extension of the natural order (Yanagisako and Delaney 1995).

Most texts include a checklist or diary-like insert55 in which the father is meant to record pertinent information from visits to the clinic, contact information for health specialists, and instances that may be cause for concern (irregular bleeding, for example). “Papa Switch On! The

Road to Gifu Ikumen” (2019), a parenting guide produced by the Gifu Prefecture Department of

Health and Welfare, states that accomplishing these various tasks before the birth of the child are a means of “increase(ing) your ikumen level” (2019) a video game analogy that gestures to how the papa switch metaphor more broadly draws on the metaphor of man-as-machine. Time plays a crucial role in mediating this biomedical knowledge and the actual practice of fatherhood. The

Gifu textbook mentioned above (Figure 7) plots the chronological development of the child and changes in the mother’s body in tandem. Below the timeline, instructions for activities for the father to perform accompany each month. In month 6, for example, the baby develops finger nails and reaches a length of 30cm and a weight of 600g. During this period, the mother’s stomach will protrude even further. The father, meanwhile, should attempt to arrive home from

55 Recalling the guidebooks described by Hendry (in Hunter 1993) 150 work early (“even 5 minutes earlier” will put your wife at ease, the book claims). Other recommendations for synchronized behavioural change common in these texts include shopping trips for baby goods, submission of request for paternity leave paperwork, and the aforementioned visits to the doctor’s office.

Figure 7. A pregnancy and child development timeline from “Papa Switch On! The Road to Gifu

Ikumen” (2019).

The strict scheduling, regimentation of behaviour, and language of “reform” (kaikaku) and efficiency recalls a familiar corporate logic promoting professional development (in this case, parenting skills acquisition) and managerial oversight. The clearest example of this is a timeline found in the Cabinet Secretariat’s Ikumen Passport (2014), which is separated into two halves. The bottom half depicts preparations to be made at home through each stage of the pregnancy— smoking cessation, morning sickness aftercare, mobility issues for pregnant women— while the top half shows the father making preparations at work— sharing news of the 151 pregnancy with superiors, increasing work output, planning for cover for paternity leave. While men are taught to strategically assert themselves in the parallel spaces of the home and workplace, mothers are primarily depicted as being calm and content throughout the pregnancy, though in need of assistance to the extent that their body becomes unruly (morning sickness etc.).

They are passengers in their transition into motherhood as their body— and the body of the child— replicate a known and immutable developmental trajectory.

In this section, I showed the way instructional texts in the fathering movement use the body of the mother to produce fathering consciousness. Though this argument places mothers in the realm of the biological and men in the realm of culture (in the sense that they are addressed as a kind of corporate or machine-like subject), this division is prone to slippage in instances like the ninpu taiken where the boundaries between the body of the mother and father blur. Next, I turn to the story of an interlocutor, Kazuyuki, and his (mis) alignment with the argument presented in these texts concerning the biological foundations of motherhood. He was “switched on” not through becoming attuned to the body of his partner, but by a series of realizations that divorced motherhood from the body and highlighted its capacity to “fail”.

4.3 Kazuyuki: An “Independent” Father

Kazuyuki is a 33-year-old father of two— a three-year-old daughter and a newborn son.

While not a fee-paying member of Fathering Japan, Kazuyuki has been an active participant in his neighborhood fathering circle for just over a year. Thanks to a supportive supervisor, he was able to take childcare leave when his youngest was born without much fuss. At the time of our interview, he described himself as the primary care provider for his children, but he was not a stay-at-home dad. Rather, he continues to work as a government employee (a low-level administrator). He tells me that, much to his frustration, his work schedule is somewhat erratic.

He finishes for the day any time between 4:00PM and 9:00PM. Fortunately, his wife— who 152 works at a daycare centre— has a fixed schedule. While duel income homes are relatively common in Tokyo, the irregularity of his work and the relative stability of his wife’s is not. She can be counted on to return home by 5:30PM. Typically, couples struggle to coordinate abnormal working hours like these with daycare hours. In describing his path to fathering, Kazuyuki reflects on the deeper, emotional investments these banal scheduling conflicts can inadvertently reveal. Over tea in his kitchen, Kazuyuki recounts the story of his first “solo flight” (tandoku hikō) as a father. Shortly after the birth of his first child, he became accustomed to short stays at home as the sole parent while his wife would run errands. She had become tired of household chores and childcare early in her maternity leave and had become increasingly disinterested and irritable. Noticing this shift in her mood, Kazuyuki felt that this time away from the home was good for her. His decision was supported by a local parenting guide, which flagged “taking care of the baby while your wife goes out” as a recommended (osusume) practice.

One afternoon, a significant subway delay kept his wife out for hours past her expected time of arrival back home. Kazuyuki would later learn that her cellphone was dead, so she had no way of alerting him about the trouble she had encountered. As the hours ticked away,

Kazuyuki grew increasingly ill at ease. He had never spent this length of time alone with their daughter. A host of hypothetical situations he was ill equipped to address rushed through his mind: illness, accident, an inconsolable baby in need of her mother. The anxiety he developed while waiting turned into rage when his wife returned in the evening. Tears were shed. “When I think about it now” he tells me, “at that time I thought you only have to work a few hours of childcare while your wife is out. I thought I should be concerned with childcare, but I also thought that childcare is mainly my wife’s responsibility and that I was in a support role”.

This event stands out to Kazuyuki as one that changed his trajectory as a father fundamentally. Forced into a (relatively short) period of solo childcare, he confronted his 153 assumptions about responsibility in the home. While he imagined he was being “helpful” by offering to watch the child while his wife ran errands, he did not feel compelled to share the burden by latent feelings of obligation. As the hours passed, his anxiety transformed into resent.

He explains that he felt pushed to contribute above and beyond what should be expected of him as a father. Tempering this resent, Kazuyuki instead emphasized the sense of joy he derived from spending time, alone, with his child:

“After that I changed my perspective. I began to enjoy my time with my child. My wife

had a tough time with childcare. But when I was alone with my child, we would always

really enjoy ourselves and be smiling. When I noticed my wife’s difficulties, I felt a kind

of inspiration. I had a strong feeling that I wanted to enjoy child-rearing independently. I

began to feel this change in myself. It was a feeling of ‘I can do this’”.

Kazuyuki positions his own feelings of joy as a childcare provider against his wife’s struggles, and states that he wants to “independently” enjoy child-rearing. I find it somewhat curious that his wife—a daycare worker— would not take to childcare. When I inquire as to the nature of his wife’s difficulties with childrearing, Kazuyuki tellingly highlights early issues with nursing:

Breastfeeding was so difficult. Our child would fuss and cry. Sometimes, the milk simply

would not come out. My wife eventually took to using a breast pump and bottle feeding

and of course because we used bottles I was able to participate in feeding as well. But, if I

had to provide a reason, I think that this frustration (with breast feeding) is one reason for

my wife’s emotional difficulties. The connection was not as natural as she would like.

Having previously taken for granted the gendered division of labour, Kazuyuki expresses awareness that his wife was not naturally endowed with an inclination towards childcare. More than this, he highlights the unruliness of the body of the mother; the potential for failure in the supposedly natural process of becoming. This reveals, in turn, the precarity of the relationship 154 the body is thought to produce between mother and child. Kazuyuki does not mirror or mimic the conduct of his wife. Indeed, her absence— the catalyst for the argument he describes previously— is the space in which he articulates the emergence of his fathering consciousness.

Kazuyuki stands in contrast to what the instructional materials presume about how fathers should learn to attune to women’s natural, biological functions. His “attunement” to his partner is, instead, the realization that “motherhood” is performed in reference to an ideal that can never be achieved. The labour of care Kazuyuki performs is not complementary or substitutive: it is

“independent”. It is important to recall that Kazuyuki was contributing to the labour of the home before our narrative point of entry. He had looked after his child while his wife left the home prior to the day of the train delay. What makes this particular experience significant— the reason why Kazuyuki associates it with his “fathering consciousness” — is this notion of independence.

His previous ventures, in his mind, had fallen under the umbrella of supplemental care. Yet, this independence arose only to the extent that it responded to his wife’s shortcomings. The instability and inconsistency of motherhood and the dizzying prospect of sole responsibility for the child is met first with anger, but then with a realization of what this absence revealed: fatherhood.

Kazuyuki’s journey to embracing chores is also noteworthy. He begins with a short— and telling— genealogy of Japanese men in the domestic sphere:

“In the past, you know, it was uncommon for a man to even enter the kitchen. I would

think about this image of the family when I began to do more child rearing and chores. I

had a feeling of discomfort. It was said that the kitchen is the wife’s sanctuary”.

Kazuyuki uses this traditional vision of family to demarcate space in the modern home (kitchen as the wife’s sanctuary). Implicit here again is the unexpected absence of the mother from the kitchen, which opens this gendered space to resignification. Kazuyuki persisted in spite of his 155 own reservations. He began shopping for groceries and planning his menu with the assistance of daddy blogs that provide meal inspiration and cooking tips. Sorting through odds and ends in the kitchen where we sit, he describes in detail his approach to the preparation of playful meals for his children. His family was happy with his initial efforts, and gradually he increased the number of days a week that he would take over the cooking (in addition to serving as the primary care giver for the children). He tells me that feeding his family gave him a sense of calm. “I realized that my life was happy” he says. “Even if it’s just trivial things, I fulfill my role independently in the home”.

Instructional materials produced by the fathering movement position motherhood as the by-product of the biological connection between mother and child, while fatherhood arises only through concerted effort. They instruct men to attune themselves with the body of the mother to reproduce or leverage this connection by performing complimentary tasks. In contrast,

Kazuyuki’s experience highlights the realization of the potential for the mother/child connection to fail (emotionally and corporeally) as precipitating the emergence of a fathering consciousness.

This failure undermined the fixity of motherhood and fatherhood, opening space for Kazuyuki to participate in the labour of care. In the next section, I return to the fathering movement’s instructional materials, shifting away from their rendering of the bodily dichotomy of mothers and fathers towards their psychological dichotomy.

4.4 Hormonal Mothers, Rational Fathers

Instructional materials are consistent in differentiating the role of the mother and father in childrearing and their efficacy in directing child development through appeals to their contrasting yet complementary psychology. Here, we can see the nature/culture dichotomy in earlier examples manifest again with force and clarity. The New Papa’s Textbook (2015) separates child-rearing (unmarked, presumably the sort performed by the mother) from “papa-rashii” 156

(papa-like) child-rearing. The book states: “Fathers think about society: what one should and must do. They nourish socialization and morality. Mothers nourish self esteem and the kindness of the child”. This balance between the father representing society and the mother representing the intimate bonds of kin should not be upset by papa’s becoming “the second mama” or “double mama” (Ando 2017: 50—51) in the process of developing consciousness of chores and childcare, the text warns. If the mother indulges56 a child, they will become spoiled and dependent. If the father too closely mirrors the labour and affective ties of the mother and becomes indulgent as a result, the risk of raising a spoiled and dependent child increases.

Childrearing texts of this sort have a long history in Japan. Hendry (in Hunter 1993: 232) describes similar “pocket-books” distributed by the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare in the 70s and 80s. Women, upon registering their pregnancy with their local health centres, were given texts providing guidance in matters of gestation, childbirth, and childcare. These doubled as diaries or journals for recording their health over the course of their pregnancy. Around the same period, popular childcare guidebooks provided prescription and proscription for mothers and fathers. As Nakatani (2006) elucidates, these texts argued that men should not interfere in matters of the home, both because the father “has more important things to do” (Hayashi 1998:

65—66) and because this would represent an infringement on a mother’s ikigai. While guides produced during this period supported a division of labour that mirrored the assumed archetypical home of the salaryman/professional housewife, reaching back even further in history helps to compartmentalize these texts. Uno’s (1999) enlightening analysis of similar manuals from the Tokugawa period reveals the way they framed mothers as incompetent in

56 The pathologization of maternal indulgence, or amae, by psychoanalyst Takeo Doi in his 1971 book “The Anatomy of Dependence” strongly influenced popular and academic discussions of the gendered division of labour. 157 matters of childrearing. In these guidebooks, mothers were described as too indulgent to socialize competent and independent male citizens. Rather, they were told to engage in “womb education”, a form of corporeal management including dietary and behavioral regulation that ensured the productions of healthy babies. The guidebooks I employ in my analysis mark a significant departure: they are designed for a target audience of fathers, not mothers. The Book to Change Fatherhood from Tough to Interesting (Ando 2017) argues for a papa that serves as an

“at home ikuboss” (see Chapter 7) who can act as a buffer between emotional children and mothers and “overlook the home from a top-down perspective”, as though he were a manager in a corporation (52). A father with motherly qualities and a mother with fatherly qualities is also considered acceptable, as are surrogate mother and father figures found in the community or extended family (Fathering Japan 2015), so long as this balance is maintained. Despite the change in audience, then, contemporary texts share much in common with the forebearers

(stretching back decades to centuries). The mother is responsible for the body of the child but is not equipped to shape them as citizens without the intervention of the father.

The differences in descriptions of post-partum depression in mothers and fathers reflect the way their roles as parents are distinguished. The Book to Change Fatherhood from Tough to

Interesting (Ando 2017) describes post-partum depression as originating “mainly from women’s hormones slightly decreasing physiologically after birth” (Ando 2017:16). It is flagged as the cause of widespread conflict between couples described as the “after-birth crisis” (Ando

2017:18). Citing Eastern Management Research Institute Chief Researcher Naoki Atsumi’s

“Women’s Anxiety Curve”, the text goes on to claim that a mother’s affection towards the father decreases from its peak immediately following marriage to a trough with the birth of a child.

“Fathers often lament ‘women who give birth to children change’, but for mothers it is natural that affection reverses to the child she gave birth to through great pain” (Ando 2017:19) the book 158 claims, again directing attention to the way motherhood as a set of affective ties is thought to emerge through the body. Post-partum depression in the spouse is positioned as a biological reality that must be managed by the father. In contrast, his own depression reflects his ties to society. The so-called “Ikumen Blues” (ikumen burū) (Ando 2017:14), a depressive period after birth experienced by fathers, is described as rooted in changing responsibilities to spouses and employers, and the unrealistic expectations established through the state’s grand narrative of the social responsibility of fathers.

A common argument made in paternity texts is that the after-birth crisis, or post-partum depression generally, can be overcome through an awareness of and adaptation to gendered communication strategies (Nara City Civic Activities Office 2016:15). In a subsection called

“gender differences” in the New Papa’s Textbook (2015), there is a small chart with columns for

“men” and “women”. Under the “men” heading, the following qualities are listed: problem solving, direct expression, speak towards a conclusion, concentrates on one point. Under the

“women” heading, there are contrasting qualities: sympathy, euphemistic expression, doesn’t necessarily want a conclusion, move through (multiple points) simultaneously57. The father’s objective is to negotiate these differences by considering his behavior through the eyes of his partner, and ultimately to realize that “mama’s wish is for the couple to be able to feel together”.

The father must stage an active intervention to align the couple’s naturally (read: biologically) misaligned emotional frameworks.

57 Ehrenreich (in Pascoe and Bridges 2016) speaks to the tendency to plant and “find” normative behaviors through psychological research into gendered behaviour. Examining the work of Therese Bendek in 1970, Ehrenreich shows how the male provider role was framed as having “instinctual roots” while “mother behaviour is regulated by pituitary hormone” (100). But Ehrenreich points out that Bendek could not account for “failures” of insufficient natural instinct, highlighting Bendek’s dismissal of men who did not provide as being afraid of responsibility (and thus undoing the primacy of instinct in her argument). 159

Miscommunication between men and women is framed as the product of differences in the brain. I came across the clearest articulation of this strategic approach in a class for fathers and mothers to be hosted by the ward Gender Equality Office. One of the lecturers was a representative of Fathering Japan. In the small community centre multi-purpose room, the projector throws up an x-ray image of the brain within a skull. The text beside the image notes that the hippocampus— a small, curved component of the brain associated with transforming short-term memories into long-term memories— activates when one feels excited (dokidoki, an onomatopoeia for heartbeat). This excitement can be fear, frustration, and anxiety, which are processed differently in the brains of men and women. In the male case, the lecturer explains, differences in activation in the amygdala (the super-structure in which the hippocampus resides) mean emotional events tend to trigger a physical response. In the female case, emotional events trigger the recollection of details, which means women tend to form and retain memories of these events with greater consistency and clarity. The lecturer’s argument was that men should leverage the biology of the brain to their advantage. Being present for intensely emotional events will deepen the bond between spouses. In contrast, mothers will remember (and resent) fathers who are absent when they experience the highs and lows of pregnancy and motherhood. The

Ishikawa Child Care Support Foundation’s Papa’s Childrearing Manual (2008) speaks to this idea directly: “When your wife was being examined by the doctor during her pregnancy, were you nearby? In unease or anticipation— times when your heart beats (dokidoki toki) — you want somebody to be with you. Please ‘dokidoki’ together”.

Once again, fathering consciousness is framed as derived from the corporeality of motherhood. While post-partum depression might stand as evidence that the mother’s bond with the child is not natural— that it may take many forms or precipitate a range of emotions— a great deal of effort goes into naturalizing depression itself. Fathering texts provide a gloss of 160 post-partum depression, assuring readers that it is typically temporary and has a purely hormonal basis while advising them to seek professional help if it persists in excess of the 6 to 8 weeks after birth earmarked for general recovery. A close reading, however, reveals subtle yet telling concessions that resist this bracketing and pathologizing of post-partum depression. “Becoming a

Father in Saitama” argues that there are certain impossibilities that arise in homes structured around rigid gender roles. Mothers may say that “childcare is a painful (tsurai) experience” or that they “don’t think children are cute” (Saitama City Children’s Future Bureau 2019: 26). Papa

Life in Mie (Mie Prefecture Children’s Welfare Office 2019) voices similar concerns from mothers. Nestled in a section entitled “Things that are difficult to say to papa… mama’s after birth body mechanisms” between a discussion of incontinence and data suggesting that calling a mother by her first name might trigger a reduction in the “stress hormone” cortisol (and an improvement in her mood) is a blurb on after birth depression (utsu): “Not thinking kids are cute, the unease of child rearing and the child’s future— (with thoughts like these) mood declines severely. (The mother) easily becomes irritable and cries often” (Mie Prefecture Children’s

Welfare Office 2019: 25).

There are multiple tensions that animate this discussion within fathering texts. The father is framed as both a representative of the social and as determined by the social. He is described in corporate qualifiers: the boss at home, a problem solver driven by reason. The mother, meanwhile, is governed by her body and reflects the intimate and affective bonds of the home.

Yet, within this overdetermination of motherhood, we find concessions that suggest uncertainty or the possibility of kinship’s failure (Sahlins 2013: 24; Stasch 2009: 136). These exceptions are corralled in the realm of biology and rendered as pathology. Moreover, the father is instructed to

“feel together” with the mother and develop a consciousness of fatherhood through a shared embodiment— to let their hearts beat together. Next, I turn to the story of Koji, whose struggle 161 with his wife’s ambivalence towards their children led him to disrupt this discourse within the fathering movement of the dual psychology of men and women and resists the reduction of difference to biology.

4.5 Koji: Diverse Histories

Like Kazuyuki, other fathers recalled the realization that mothers struggled with their prescribed role in childrearing as formative moments in the development of their fathering consciousness. Early one afternoon, I meet Koji (see Chapter 3) at Bar Almeda to learn about his own path to fatherhood. Koji first joined Fathering Japan in 2010, although he now plays a prominent role in the “unofficial” Fathering Japan organization Himitsu Kessha Shufu no Tomo.

He has two children, now 12 and 4 years old. He married his wife, a clothing designer, in 2001.

While he studied art in university, Koji has made a career as a script writer for radio and television. As creatives, their work schedule is quite flexible, but it is also prone to occasional spikes in required hours to close out projects. Koji typically handles cooking dinner, tidying up around the house, helping with homework, and managing extra-curricular activities for the kids.

Right now, it’s ballet for the eldest and teaching the youngest to ride a bicycle. His wife is very particular about laundry, Koji explains, so he is more than happy to leave it to her. She also takes care of breakfast and bento preparation, as well as putting the kids to sleep at night. Depending on work assignments, this division of labour is subject to change— with the exception of laundry. Koji took a leave of absence from work in 2009, the year before his eldest started school, in order to spend more time with her. Both he and his wife work independently on a contractual basis. While this allows them to “take breaks” as needed, he tells me that avoiding subsequent contracts can make it difficult to land new contracts. Koji’s work as a fathering lecturer has opened new revenue streams as well. 162

I ask Koji if anything beyond these practical exigencies had led him to fathering. He tells me that he has “always helped” around the house. As if to prove his point, he begins polishing pint glasses with a rag while I scribble notes perched on a barstool on the other side of the counter. It was not only this predisposition towards sharing household chores that led him to fathering. Rather, fathering was something he pursued in response to what he then perceived as his wife’s inability to fulfill a motherly role in the home. After the birth of their first child, Koji noticed that his wife’s behaviour was “odd”. I wonder aloud if it was post-partum depression; not so, he replies. She was distant, physically, from their child: she often avoided hugs and was reluctant to pick her up. “My image of a good mother was always someone with a lot of love and intimacy. Lots of hugs and things like that, like my own mother” he says thoughtfully. Koji could not help but evaluate the connection between the body of the mother and the body of the child measured through touch and acts of affection.

Koji’s observation is curious because in the fathering movement’s instructional materials men are assumed to have no prior experience interacting physically with children. Mothers, in contrast, are thought to already hold this knowledge. This was thrown into relief during a class I attended at a Gender Equality Office on the subject of “play”. While the lecturer spoke at great length about safety precautions and injury prevention on playground equipment, he also provided the class with a handout illustrating different forms of physical play. One image depicted a father crouching so that a child could clamour on for a piggyback ride. Another specified that it was best to lift a child with hands placed firmly beneath the arms. As the attendees scanned the document, one mother seated nearby expressed some confusion. “Isn’t this all quite obvious?” she said, with a small chuckle, as she flipped over the handout. Some of the fathers present laughed in agreement. The lecturer clarified that, while many people are very comfortable interacting with the small and delicate bodies, others feel very nervous, especially as children 163 begin to play recklessly and receive minor injuries. Another mother remarked that “women get used to the body of their child when they breast feed, but others don’t have this physical experience (taiken)”. “Others”, here, is implicitly gendered, as her emphasis was on breast feeding— an activity in which men do not typically take part. In this example, the father’s physical connection to his child is depicted as “unnatural” — requiring specific, technical instruction to achieve— in contrast with a mother’s physical connection to her child.

However, the exclusivity of the corporeal connection between mother and child is subtly disrupted in other sets of instructions for fathers. Papa’s Childrearing Manual (Ishikawa Child

Care Support Foundation 2008) includes a section on early stage pregnancy subtitled “I can hear papa’s voice”, suggesting that a communicative relationship between father and child is possible through the medium of the mother’s body58. The brief introduction is written from the perspective of the baby, who says: “hey papa! When mama’s tummy puffs out a bit, try talking.

Papa’s voice can get through (to me). I can also hear mama and papa fighting”. These parting words unsettle, calling attention to the responsibility of the father to model proper conduct long before the child enters the world. The mother and child are not passive: they act on the father sensuously. In the text, the unborn child is even ascribed agency, speaking in the first person and calling the father to action. The development of “fatherhood” does not run parallel here: it is enmeshed in the corporeality of motherhood. While the mother’s body serves as a

58 Parenting guides of all stripes make a similar recommendation. O’Neil (2009) provides a particularly striking example in the context of neo-Pentecostal fathering instruction. According to one of his interlocutors, “The father has the ability to speak positive words when the baby is inside the wife. It starts a change in the nation, in the human being, in the family, et cetera, et cetera, and et cetera. It’s because of this [potential] that it is necessary to minister to the baby inside the woman for all nine months. It is possible to begin this development at a very early age. It’s possible to make a change in the culture, to make a new generation.” (2009: 116). While I did not come across any examples of national futurity embedded in speaking to unborn babies among my interlocutors or the texts I consulted, the nation building project explicit in this example maps closely to state rhetoric in the Japanese case.

164 communicative medium between father and child, it is not a substitute for the body of the father, which actively touches, listens, and feels.

There is also practical impetus behind this very deliberate approach to teaching touch. A father in the aforementioned Gender Equality Office class hesitantly asked the instructor for clarification later in the lecture on the subject of tossing one’s child in the air. He asked first if it was safe (his wife had scolded him in the past for being careless), and then if there was a particular way to position himself to catch his son. Beyond these technical aspects of physical contact, instructional materials also emphasize that papa switch activation can involve physical bonding through touch. This is characterized by an emphasis on “skinship59” (sukinshipu) and the importance of close physical contact with one’s child to the development of a consciousness of fathering. “Skinship” refers to the generation of affect through touch. In this sense, the term has fairly broad applications. While it is often evoked to describe the bond between parents and children created through bodily contact, it is also used in conversation regarding touch in relationships between friends (a pat on the back, for example) or in flirtation (proper “skinship” techniques to establish attraction feature in lifestyle magazines for young men and women). Most of my interlocutors agreed that both mothers and fathers participate in skinship with their children, but that the nature of this participation differed. Tahhan’s ethnographic work on skinship in Japan provides insight into how it is gendered. She writes (2010: 219; see also

Gregory 2011):

While mother-child relationships were largely explained within the context of bodily

experiences such as co-bathing, hugging, co-sleeping, massage, holding hands, climbing

59 Though skinship is composed of English language morphemes, it is not an import word as it does not exist outside of Japan (much to the surprise of many Japanese, who assume it is an English word) 165

on the mother’s back, and breastfeeding, father-child experiences of skinship were mostly

explained via more subtle forms of interaction such as playing, spending time together

and sight.

Within the fathering movement, instruction in skinship moves beyond play to the sort of actions

Tahhan associates with mother-child skinship— hugging, co-bathing, and massage, among many others. By replicating these acts of care, fathers might develop a similar level of intimacy with their children. Instructional texts are dedicated to both technique and developing comfort and familiarity, gently encouraging men to engage in displays of affection.

The Tochigi Future Making Foundation’s “Father and Child Handbook” (2013) instructs fathers to “respond to irritability through skinship” (24). A fussy child can be calmed through skin on skin contact with the father. Men are encouraged to develop a level of comfort that allows them to hold their child in public spaces like parks or malls60. Mothers are assumed to have this degree of comfort, whereas it must be consciously developed by fathers. The Chiba

City “Ikumen Handbook” (2012) provides careful instruction in the proper technique for cuddling one’s child: neck support, proper posture, and eye contact. It states that babies love to be cuddled by mothers and fathers, a crucial specification for its male audience. The handbook also notes that some nervousness on the part of the father is natural when he begins to cuddle his child, but that it will dissipate if he persists.

Co-bathing also features prominently in instructional materials as “the most important form of communication with your baby” (Nara City Civic Activities Office 2016). Bathing is described as an opportunity to understand the baby’s body, emphasizing its small size and

60 See Chapter 6. 166 fragility. On the importance of bathing one’s child, a guest columnist in the New Papa’s

Textbook writes the following (Fathering Japan 2015: 94):

The papa switch is not turned on even during childbirth, when (the father) feels like ‘this

is like a horror movie’. Self-confidence as a father is also absent. During every day you

spend with your baby, gradually the self-consciousness (jikaku) of fatherhood wells up.

While bathing (mokuyoku) when you look at your daughter’s happy expression when

floating in the water, you’ll think ‘my time as a papa has come!’ (papa no shuban ga

kita).

Bathing with the child is a noteworthy form of skinship because the mother is conspicuously absent from the act. This is one of the few areas of the literature touching on the topic of the papa switch that focuses on the body of the child and not the body of the mother. But beyond the symbolic absence of the mother’s body, there is also a physical absence of the mother. Where instruction in, for example, cuddling often features images or instruction in which the mother is present, either as a co-snuggler or snuggle instructor supervising the father’s actions61, bathing is framed as an intimate act performed in isolation (Figure 9). However, the association of mothers with the act of bathing the child means that the father’s presence here appears substitutive. Men, who are not furnished with the intuition mothers presumably have when it comes to bathing their child, are figured as requiring detailed information about the act— appropriate temperature for bath water, techniques for holding the child, and guidance for cleaning the child.

61 See Chapter 5. 167

Figure 9. An anecdote featured in “Papa Switch On! The Road to Gifu Ikumen” (2019). The

narrator recounts attempting to playfully breastfeed his child while co-bathing.

For many fathers, then, these displays of affection and casual play do in fact require fairly detailed instruction. However, a common refrain among lecturers and within texts for fathers is

“don’t worry” (shinpai shinai) about technique. In the face of this preponderance of direction in the minutiae of interactions with children, this seems counter-intuitive. The intent, however, is to draw men’s attention to the feelings produced by these acts of care. Images show fathers smiling with their children as they play, but they also show men exasperated, sweating, worried. Stylized illustrations of fathers in a panic, juggling appliances and babies, are common, as are those of men openly weeping tears of joy and frustration. Through the performance of acts of care, men are subtly shown to display emotions that are explicitly described as belonging to mothers in the very same texts. In contrast with other masculinist groups in North America and Western Europe that speak specifically to the importance of outward expressions of emotion as part of their project of reform (Messner 1993), these texts associate the performance of the labour of care with the production of particular affects in the labouring subject. They show frustration, joy, exhaustion, contentedness, anger, and relief coming from experiencing intimate acts associated 168 with mothers. In this sense, fatherhood, like motherhood, is depicted as being experienced somatically through the performance of acts of care.

For Koji, seeing his own wife struggle with mothering on a practical and emotional level left him confused. He did not know what, exactly, he could contribute to rectify the situation, but felt at the time that it required intervention. In step with the instructional materials that implore men to be managers within the home, his initial impulse was to help his wife alter her behaviour to suit his normative vision of motherhood. “But, then, I began to think about my wife’s father”

Koji tells me. In the past, his wife had spoken matter of fact-ly about their lack of intimacy. He was a germaphobe who would avoid her arms, outstretched for a hug, to inspect her palms for dirt. This was a habit she had replicated with her own children. His wife and her father never went to the park together, enjoying those close but messy moments of intimacy mucking about in the earth or catching insects (mushitori). Physical contact between them was minimal. Her understanding of the relationship between parent and child came from a very different place when compared to his own, Koji explains. His concern with her actions, which to him stood as an expression of disinterest in motherhood, had obscured the other ways in which she expressed affection. He notes her careful arrangement of clothing and elegant bento boxes by way of example. She was grappling with the legacy of her relationship with her father, and it took time for her to become comfortable with the physical— and often dirty— elements of parenting. “She wasn’t a bad mother, I realized. We were just different (kinds of parents)” he explains, “I may not have become a ‘good papa’ if she hadn’t struggled”. Inverting the arc of Ando’s narrative from the introduction of this chapter, Koji is not a father wanting to do better than his own father.

Rather, he acts to “make up” for the strained relationship between his wife and her father. Her struggles are the catalyst for becoming a “good papa”, opening space for him to take on a more active role in the home. Yet, Koji’s claim also suggests that he is contrasting himself with his 169 wife’s father— the “good” to his “bad”. Indeed, in distancing himself from his initial critical stance towards her behavior, being a good papa is as much about Koji’s relationship with his wife as the labour of care he performs for his children.

Koji’s narrative undermines much of the gendered logic behind the concept of the papa switch. He rejects the notion of generalized male ignorance of domestic labour, suggesting that he had contributed to the labour of the home regardless of his status as a father. While Koji reifies the distinction between the sexes by demarcating his wife’s behaviour as “odd” (and thus positioning and evaluating her in relation to an ideal mother-figure), Koji’s attempt to empathize with his wife reveals how contrived his preconception of motherhood actually was. In spite of his apparent fondness for her, Koji did not align his role in the home with that of his own mother, who figured into his narrative as an archetypical figure that served as a point of contrast with his wife. Instead, his attentiveness to his wife’s behaviour showed Koji that motherhood was not uniform in character, nor did its affects necessarily develop organically. Koji’s story recalls

Kazuyuki’s as it takes as its focus a mother who feels disinterested in or otherwise alienated from their child. His rejection of post-partum depression as an explanation is also telling. For Koji, there was no biological explanation: no reduction of motherhood to hormonal imbalances. Yet, the problem of motherhood was still an embodied one. Koji struggled to divorce touch and physical affection from his understanding of motherhood, which occluded the other labour of care his wife performed. In the end, Koji finds space here to compose his fathering subjectivity by performing the labour of care that his wife cannot: touching, who hugging, and getting dirty.

Koji originally entered the home to support his wife’s career, but he made this decision long before learning of her difficulties connecting with their child. That her strength of character became a problem does not come as a total shock to him. She had never been the type to relent in her pursuits and would never stop to coddle those who feel behind her. This drove her rapid 170 progression through her career in the fashion industry, which Koji deeply admires. She is simply

“not suited to childcare or chores”, in his view. Koji reflected on this aspect of their relationship in a personal essay he wrote for a parenting site some months after that afternoon we spent in Bar

Almeda. For an audience of readers composed primarily of fathers, he articulated the moral of his story thusly:

“For several years I have been lecturing in a parenting class. In this lecture there are

things that must be said: my own misunderstanding in relation to marriage. That is, I

thought when you are married, and your child is born women will become able to do

chores and childcare. But even if you are married and even if you have children there are

also women who won’t prosper in childcare and chores. In the lecture hall there are

women who are waiting to give birth and their husbands. Generally, for men this doesn’t

strike home, but a large percentage of the women nod in agreement”

Koji’s lecture recalls Butler’s (1990) performativity. Women are interpellated by a gendered ideal that is inherently unobtainable. Gender appears whole through its repeated “doing” and not through a fixed “being”. By opening (or attempting to open) his audience to gender-as- performance, Koji attempts to strip motherhood of the trappings of naturalization. In his example, the dual psychology of men and women is complicated. The failure of motherhood is not the result of pathology or a natural imbalance (as it is described in texts that address post- partum depression in women). Koji sees contrivance and contingency in both fatherhood and motherhood, and thus space for the free and flexible division of labour. Refilling my glass, he says “In Japan, not following the path from good school to good company is bad. Everyone is raised to believe this… but even when I was little, I thought sameness was boring”. Through

Fathering Japan, he has been able to meet people from all walks of life, not only those related by work. He rattles off a few of the “different” kinds of people he has met: translators, car 171 mechanics, artists. To read “difference” here solely as indexing class would be to miss Koji’s larger point: his alignment with those who fall outside the narrow path to white collar employment. He tells me that, much like he did with his wife, he has learned not to judge others and instead tries to understand difference in approach and experience. “The most important thing is recognizing choice. People are not obligated to do something. We need to recognize that choice, the power to choose”.

Koji and Kazuyuki’s stories share many elements, chief among them the importance of denaturalizing motherhood in revealing the possibility of fathering. For Koji, this denaturalization was revealed through his deconstruction of the supposed dual psychology of fathers and mothers. One element I have yet to touch upon is the relatively unique conditions of their families prior to their uptake of fathering. Both are semi-contingent workers, and both have spouses that have enjoyed as much— if not more— professional success. They were, in Koji’s sense of the term, “different” prior to the reorganization of the division of household labour, straying from the “path from good school to good company” and set in financial conditions that allowed for somewhat flexible earning (Koji could, for example, take on more work should there be time and a need for it; his wife could likewise decrease the volume of work she took on). In the next section, I pick up this thread. I contrast the narratives of two interlocutors to reveal how

“difference” may serve as a precondition for the emergence of a fathering subject.

4.6 Switched On, Switched Off

I met Atsuro the evening of the Miyazaki fathering forum. A warm hearted and inquisitive father of two (a 14-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son), Atsuro joined Fathering

Japan in 2010. He had studied systems engineering in university, although the work failed to capture his attention. He went on to study business administration, which has since splintered 172 into an array of consulting jobs related to parenting. Atsuro serves as the representative of his local fathering circle62, a management consultant, and a consulting lecturer in pre-natal classes.

His fascination with horticulture has also led to niche paid and volunteer roles assisting in the planning of community gardens. Before becoming self-employed, he had a stint at a large software company. This is where he met his wife, Aiko.

One afternoon, we shared coffee at a small café in Chiyoda Ward. Barely audible through the chatter of the crowded tables around us, he laughs as he tells me that Aiko was 5 years his senior— his senpai in the office. This is a far cry from the sort of office romance popularized by television dramas, where an earnest and often clumsy young office lady (OL) is wooed by a handsome and confident salaryman. Already, Atsuro suggests, his story is a unique one. He was ready to tackle chores and child rearing from the moment his daughter was born, Atsuro says.

However, he credits Aiko for instilling this awareness in him. For her, his participation in the labour of the home was atarimae (natural, obvious). She was greatly influenced by William

Sear’s Baby Book, which impressed upon her the importance of a father’s participation in childrearing. Instructional materials similarly emphasize the role women can take in activating the papa switch. Popular lifestyle blogs like “Woman.Excite” (2014) and Tokyo Kosodate

Switch circulate articles claiming to provide a method to make men into ikumen by “turning on the papa switch”, imploring women to involve their husbands in their pregnancy and to communicate openly about the changes in their bodies. Echoing the advice found in instructional material analyzed earlier in this chapter, Aiko communicated the developmental stage of the fetus to Atsuro throughout the pregnancy as a means of inculcating an awareness of fatherhood prior to the child’s birth. She also booked a private room in the hospital for her delivery to ensure

62 See Chapter 6. 173 that Atsuro could be present for the delivery and travel back and forth from work to ensure he was on hand to help with changing and feeding during her recovery.

Now, more than a decade after his tentative steps into fatherhood, Atsuro is deeply invested in the hobbies and passions of his children. While they find time to spend together outdoors on the weekends— fishing, camping, hiking— he laments the fact that, as middle and junior high school students, his kids spend most of their time studying. Even in their increasingly isolated lives, Atsuro finds ways to engage. He tutors his children in math and social studies and tries to share in their interests as much as he can. He eagerly discusses his daughter’s love for the pop group EXILE— extremely popular at the time. Her interest seems to have rubbed off onto him as well as he speaks animatedly to me about the members of the group. These new hobbies have come at the expense of his own. Atsuro is an avid soccer fan and used to coach the local men’s team. He has since given that up as he found it limited the time he had to spend with his family, he states with a deep sigh.

Our conversation takes an interesting turn when we speak about his work for Fathering

Japan. Atsuro teaches a monthly parenting class that emphasizes relationship advice. Drawing on his own experience with his wife, he prepares couples for the changes they are likely to experience when their child is born. “The dynamic of the relationship changes around the time of childbirth” he explains. “My most frequent advice is to go on dates, go to quiet places as a couple. Find time during pregnancy, because afterwards there will be no time!”. His lectures have garnered enough attention that he is invited to speak at pre-natal classes organized by the

Gender Equality division of his prefectural office. I ask if he sees his work in these government classes as intersecting with the fathering movement’s notion of the papa switch. Atsuro’s own predisposition towards care labour and his wife’s intervention have shaped the form his family takes today. Does he actively guide men to recognize themselves as fathers and to follow a 174 similar path? Atsuro pauses, and then responds: “It is hard to say what is the responsibility of the government. What is the responsibility of the people? Should the government provide enlightenment (keihatsu)? Will people accept that?”

Atsuro frames his position with reference to the sort of general policy reform driven by the Ikumen Project, which seeks to upend antiquated HR practices and standardize the process for obtaining paternity leave. “Globalization (gurōbarizēshon) is uneven” he explains. Small companies may be international firms; big companies may operate only domestically. Strict rules for paternity leave, for example, would affect these companies in very different ways. Work patterns in seasonal industries, too, are a source of complication. “One plan won’t fit all” he concludes. Here, Atsuro represents a position similar to Koji’s: one that embraces difference at a scale that includes, but also transcends, the family. At the same time, his critique of the state end of the fathering movement and its interventions into the home and corporation presents a kind of resistance to the concept of “activating” fathers itself. For Atsuro, turning on the “papa switch” is not a technical problem, but an ethical one.

His response had drifted afield of my original question, but he returns to the matter at hand: “choice is most important”. An individual’s life— all aspects of their life—must be balanced on their own. Here, Atsuro chose to illustrate his point using the example of work patterns determined by the state versus those determined by the individual, but he extends this to include the work of Fathering Japan. Perhaps, he offers by way of example, a panel of fathers consulting on policy is a sound idea in theory, but this does not mean the government should accept their input uncritically. Fathering Japan, he continues, can and does offer guidance to the government, largely via the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, but whether or not individuals should heed their advice as it is conveyed to them in texts issued by the Ministry or by Fathering Japan is a decision that is their own: they should not bend to yet another set of 175 expectations. Ultimately, individual fathers should be empowered to choose the way of living that best suits the needs of their family. Their ability to choose their lifestyle (seikatsu) must be revealed and activated. “I think this sort of ‘local lifestyle’ might be best” Atsuro concludes. This commitment to a “local lifestyle” is reflected not only by Atsuro’s support for individual choice for fathers and families, but also his tremendous community service (see Chapter 6).

Atsuro’s case is intriguing because of the extent to which choice, which he argues is at the heart of the work of the fathering movement, might be read as constraint. Turning back to

Koji’s example, we might understand choice in Atsuro’s life as specifically reflecting the ability to depart from certain expectations and obligations surrounding his career and to pursue self- employment. Drawing on other elements of his narrative, however, we can see his wife consciously pushed him towards active participation in chores and childcare. Indeed, in striking contrast to instructional material within the fathering movement that emphasizes men’s active leveraging of women’s passive transition into motherhood, Atsuro’s wife is engaged in a rather technical pursuit of her own. She is the one who reads and who learns; she is the one that translates this instruction into alterations to her partners behaviour. Atsuro is a willing partner, but he is not the only agent in the cultivation of his fathering consciousness. In fact, there is a hint of ambiguity surrounding his own investment in fatherhood. For the sake of connecting with his children, he abandoned his passions and hobbies. On this topic, he would later tell me that the demands of his volunteer work, including Fathering Japan, were also a significant factor. At the same time, fathering has come to serve as a new passion: a new hobby of sorts. His expertise on the subject of parenting is highly sought after. While he enjoys connecting with his community, he finds himself constantly short of time. Such is the strain that his wife believes he has simply swapped the time he spent in corporate employment for community obligations, a point of conflict for the couple. His schedule would exhaust even the most hardened career men. 176

What of men unlike Kazuyuki, Koji, and Atsuro—men who are unwilling or unable to achieve a similar sense of place and purpose as father? I want to return to Yuta’s story, providing a brief glimpse into his place in the family prior to the birth of his children. Here, we see how

Yuta’s constant invocation of the salaryman archetype— which might simply be interpreted as indexing corporate commitments that prevent him from contributing to the labour of the home— serves to offset the expectation that weighs on him as a newly married man. In striving to embody the ideal of the salaryman, Yuta represents a departure from my previous interlocutors.

For Kazuyuki, Koji, and Atsuro, this ideal was out of reach, unattractive, or not expected of them by their partners. The emergence of fatherhood needed only the denaturalization of motherhood.

My intent is not to argue that the dynamics in the scene I describe are causal— that these exchanges are the sole reason for his somewhat antagonistic relationship with fathering. Rather, I offer this to contextualize his claims to “salaryman” status and rejection of care labour to undermine the “just-so” reasoning so prominent in this chapter’s opening vignette. It also speaks to the kind of social constraints and subtle anxieties my interlocutors within the fathering movement articulated in the preceding section, but without the benefit of distance, time, and control over the way these memories are narrativized.

Over drinks with some of his colleagues in finance, Yuta invited Eijiro and I to visit his apartment “for lunch”. Perhaps it was the alcohol, or perhaps it was a subtler nuance of the invitation that I had failed to pick up on, but on my arrival in Yokohama I was surprised to find that I had in fact “volunteered” to help Yuta move out of his bachelor pad and into his new, shared residence with Ai. The three of us sifted through his apartment, still cramped even after being stripped of all but the bare essentials: cigarette packages, shōnen manga63 with well

63 Weekly or monthly anthologies of comics targeting young men. 177 endowed women plastered on the cover, a suit rack on wheels draped in dry cleaning bags, and some trinkets glorifying his university days. Eijiro and I haul boxes to and from the elevator while Yuta paces nervously, phone held to his ear. “Who is he talking to?” I asked. “I don’t know” Eijiro said, wiping his brow and briefly cursing the heat. “Maybe Ai? Maybe her father?”.

I knew little of Ai’s father— Yuta’s father-in-law— save his wealth and decorated career as a

VP at a large electronics manufacturer. Murmurs within our circle of friends suggested that he was upset with Ai’s decision to marry, having hoped she would find a partner of greater means.

With the truck loaded we make our way to Yuta’s new apartment, a short 20-minute drive from his previous abode, chatting along the way. Eijiro and I begin to move boxes from the car to the building foyer where Yuta loads them into the elevator. While we work, I notice a sleek, black sedan pull up alongside the building. In the driver’s seat, a dour, greying man of about 60, well groomed and dressed sharply. From the back of the car Ai emerges, gingerly setting her feet on the pavement before heaving herself out of the low seat. Her chaperone— who I quickly determine is her father— exits the vehicle and solemnly watches over us as we silently go about our business. He doesn’t move to assist Ai, who shuffles with great care towards the apartment entrance. I notice Yuta briefly acknowledge Ai’s father before hurriedly turning away. He takes

Ai by the arm and leads her in. Her father departs wordlessly. Left on our own in the foyer, Eijiro speaks to the tense scene we just witnessed. Ai’s father was far from pleased when word of the pregnancy reached him. Their quick decision to marry made sense given their circumstances, but

Yuta’s father-in-law remained unconvinced. The modest apartment complex where they had chosen to settle was inadequate in his eyes. Unlike my previous interlocutors for whom the perceived inadequacy of the mother opened space for fathering, Yuta is the partner who appears unable to embody the role of breadwinner and successful company man expected of him. Yet, for his spouse and extended family, his inability does not lead to a realization of the contrived 178 and contingent nature of gender performance as the difficulties encountered by the partners of

Koji and Kazuyuki did for them.

In Yuta and Ai’s new apartment, I sweat bullets. I perch precariously atop a kitchen chair, at full extension, supporting a chandelier in one hand and fastening it to the ceiling with a screwdriver in the other. As the tallest person available, the task falls on my shoulders. The supervision and advice offered by the onlooking men falls somewhere between irrelevant and condescending, but I am somewhat relieved to find that this male ritual, at least, seems mostly congruent with my experiences back home. Ai is awkwardly perched on a futon in the other room, resting her swollen feet and fanning herself in a vain attempt to stave off the summer heat.

Finally, my task is complete. I step down to admire my work, which is met with a round of applause. “Ugh, you’re lazy. How can it take so long to do something so simple, I wonder” Ai complains while staring at Yuta. Having done the majority of the work myself, I too feel slightly wounded. Yuta serves cold tea from plastic cups, an ignominy for which he apologizes profusely

(“our good cups are still packed”, he explains sheepishly). Again, Ai scolds him, this time for failing to adequately provide for their guests. Yuta is silent as Ai moves to the bedroom to sit in front of the gently humming fan. After a moment, Yuta smiles and turns to me. “Since you are studying men, maybe this is a good experience” he jokes, flexing his biceps. “Yeah! This is the real salaryman lifestyle” Eijiro assures me, half in jest. “The lamp is crooked” Ai moans, moving slowly across the hallway.

In one sense, Yuta’s naturalization of Ai’s role as mother was about a seemingly fundamental belief in a naturalized gendered division of labour. On this point, I take his words at face value and as an honest expression of his understanding of the order of things. However, I suggest that it may also serve as a way of concealing the weight of gendered expectation on his own life. Unlike Kazuyuki, Koji, and Atsuro, there is no space or events through which to reflect 179 on the division of labour in the home: no paternity leave, “solo flights”, atypical career paths, or intervening partners. It seemed as though at every turn Yuta was called— by his wife, father-in- law, and friends (including myself) — to reiterate the salaryman trope. In the example above, this served as a way of holding together an identity as a competent male provider that was constantly under threat. His father-in-law’s disapproval of his marriage, his wife’s continuous derision of his efforts, and the need to perform a kind of shared masculinity for his male friends privy to this tension provide some insight into why invoking a salaryman identity was important to Yuta. Salaryman status indexes a particular class identity that, at this point in his career, seems incongruous with Yuta’s actual means. Regardless of Yuta’s personal feelings on the subject of fatherhood (which may very well be exactly the sort of distance and disinterest he expressed them to me in this chapter’s opening vignette), these examples also illustrate the weight of expectation that likely precludes subjectification as the sort of active father promoted by the fathering movement. Even when performing a modest act of domesticity— serving tea to his guests— Yuta is chastised. I do not want to suggest that there is an “ikumen” dwelling repressed within Yuta, eager to burst out under the correct conditions. My point here is only that his rejection of this label and the failure to interpelate (Butler 1990) himself in the fathering movement’s discourse are not solely the result of adherence to a hegemonic standard of masculinity. Yuta is subject to subtle and intensely personal social and economic forces that conceal the sort of gendered revelations experienced viscerally by my other interlocutors.

4.7 Conclusion

In this chapter, I examined the way the fathering movement conceptualizes and promotes a fathering subjectivity using the narrative of the papa switch. Flipping on the papa switch involves a mirroring of the mother in an attempt to replicate what is framed as the natural and organic emergence of the mothering subject through the connection between the mother’s body 180 and the child’s body. Rather than parrot this essentialization of sexual difference (which here is the root of gendered subjectification), the fathers with whom I spoke described moments that undermined their preconceptions about women’s predilection for childcare and the inviolability of their bond with the child as being pivotal in their adoption of an active fathering role.

Recognizing gender roles as an artifice revealed to them an ability to choose. This was reflected not just in increased flexibility in the division of household labour, but in a critical awareness of motherhood and fatherhood as gendered performance. Furthermore, this “choice” was never completely open and individualized. Rather, it was always constrained by the kin and non-kin relationships in which the fathers were enmeshed.

In the following chapter, I turn to the way father’s who have been “switched on” negotiate the division of labour in the home. Here, the mother yet again plays a vital role.

Positioned at once as the recipient, manager, and instructor of the labour of care, the fathering movement uses the figure of the mother as the rhetorical locus of the work of chores and childcare for men. While my interlocutors struggled with the mechanics of these tasks, their primary concern was with their meaning: how they were read by their partners and by society at large.

181

Chapter 5 More Than Chores 5.1 Doing Chores, Doing Gender

“Few men would admit to marrying for reasons other than love or domestic incompetence” —

Barbara Ehrenreich (1983)

In the early weeks of spring, just before the cherry blossoms fill out the treetops, Tokyo begins to come alive. Families pack the gates of Shinjuku-gyoen, strollers, bento boxes, and children in tow. Despite being one of the largest parks in the city, it feels hidden in the maze of commercial buildings one must traverse to reach it. I came to know the park well through

Fathering Japan, which had hosted an educational event introducing children to its flora with the help of a government botanist affiliated with the Ministry of the Environment. Today, however, I am here to meet Noriko and her husband. It is a statutory holiday (Labour Day, November 23rd), and as such this is a rare opportunity to speak with them at the same time. I catch them exiting the park gates, their boys— a precocious 3-year-old and wide eyed 1 year old— following excitedly. I greet Noriko and introduce myself to her husband, Hiro, while their children, suddenly silent, hide themselves behind her skirt. Hiro is an affable man of 30, though his manner of dress, round glasses, and unkempt hair make him seem younger. As we make our way to a nearby café, I give him a quick outline of my research project. He nods cautiously, affirming with a nervous “is that so” (sō ka) as I try to validate my presence. When I mention my interest in “ikumen”, specifically, Noriko guffaws: “Ikumen, you say! We just fought about this last night”. She pushes ahead of us with the stroller and children in tow, her body rigid and steps staccato. Hiro doesn’t acknowledge her statement. He turns his attention to my academic affiliations instead. 182

Noriko and I first met a few weeks earlier at a public lecture I was invited to give in conjunction with the feminist NPO “WAN” (Women’s Action Network). That night, I was presenting preliminary insights from my research project at a community centre in Musashino, providing a few ethnographic vignettes of Fathering Japan members I had interviewed to the mostly female audience. While I was milling around the meeting room after the talk, Noriko approached me and introduced herself. She extended her meishi (business card) towards me with a slight bow. I immediately recognized her employer: a massive publishing company headquartered in Tokyo. We exchanged pleasantries. Pausing briefly, Noriko composed herself and, looking straight into my eyes, tentatively asked: “I wonder… how do you think we can make more ikumen?”. To hear her describe it, Noriko’s husband was not an ikumen per se, but very “ikumen-like”. He read parenting magazines and blogs, expressed interest in participating in childcare, and followed social media channels where Fathering Japan and its members were active. He was a constant presence around the home when Noriko returned to work after her second round of maternity leave in the spring, taking care of both children on his own for long stretches of time (it was “awesome”, Noriko would later tell me). However, her husband’s involvement in the home has steadily decreased over the past few months. I asked Noriko to accompany the event staff and some of the attendees to a small reception dinner at a nearby café so that we could continue our conversation. Later that evening, during the customary round of self-introductions, Noriko stood up and, after providing some basic information about herself, proceeded to describe to the group the dilemma that had led her to our session. Having recently given birth to her second child, she was at her wits end. Her husband was absent for most of the day and took no initiative when at home to contribute to chores or childcare. Voice cracking and tears welling in her eyes, she spoke about her feelings of hopelessness and frustration with both her husband and with a general lack of understanding and support from her friends and her 183 employer. She took a seat after a generous round of applause and some comforting words from others.

Seated at our table some weeks later, it was clear that Noriko’s resent had grown deeper in the time we had spent scheduling this meeting. Children affixed to their iPad screens, our discussion stretches on for hours. Noriko and Hiro’s early responses to my questions first appeared to me as general social commentary: “companies”, “men”, and “women” all figure as abstract archetypes, placeholders encompassing social conditions in Japan spoken about at arm’s length. Slowly I came to realize the couple’s responses are directed at each other as much as they were at me. Late in our discussion, Noriko, seizing my role as interviewer for her own, turned to her husband and asked:

Noriko: Hiro, what do you think about househusbands (otoko no shufu)?

Hiro: Men who only…

Noriko: Men who do chores like that, men who do things like a housewife, what do you

think…

Hiro: Men who work and do things in the house or men who do everything in the

house…?

Noriko: What about ikumen?

Hiro: Ikumen? …. Hmmm…. What should I say? Ikumen… I am often told that I am

ikumen, but I don’t think of myself as ikumen. 184

There is a long, weighty silence. Hiro busies himself with the children, I pretend to write something meaningful in my notebook, and Noriko sits, composed but exasperated. I ask about the specifics of their chore arrangement:

Hiro: Men who have married, do they start wanting to do chores?

Noriko: In our house, when there is time, he’ll do it for me.

The silence returns. This time Hiro breaks it:

Hiro: That is, probably now the number one among all the various ways of thinking is …

regarding women who are married, they (their husbands) would like them (their wives) to

do all of it, and they themselves totally don’t want to do it at all. That’s one (way of

thinking), probably the most common. It’s just my opinion, but there’s a lot of this

perspective.

Noriko: It is the same for women. When women have time, when they are living at home,

they want things to be done for them by their parents. When you start living alone, you

have to do it yourself. Why is this the way men feel?

Hiro: If they are at home it’s done for them (by their parents), or men will do anything

themselves (if they live alone). But there are many who think when you get married, it is

best if women do this, women can do that for me…

Noriko: That is harassment to me (laughs). I don’t like that.

Given the recent backlash against the term as discussed in Chapter 3 of this dissertation, Hiro’s rejection of the ikumen label is not surprising. He positions himself between this extreme and what he frames as the most common opinion among men: that they are not responsible for any 185 housework. In so doing, he reminds Noriko of the relative value of his contributions amidst other homes (see Hochschild 1989) where the average arrangement would be even less agreeable with her. Noriko rejects this argument through an appeal to the unstable ground upon which these gendered expectations rest. Women and men have similar feelings and motivations concerning domestic labour but are compelled by society to act differently on them, she argues. Crucially,

Hiro is not able to recognize these similarities in feeling and does not interpolate himself within the overarching discourse of “gender equality”. Switching to a conciliatory tone, Noriko clarifies her position. She is not in favour of househusbands— of men only working inside the home— and prefers living in a duel income home. “It’s best if you can both work… Usually— if you say

‘usually’, working from 9 in the morning until 6 or 7 in the evening— then usually both can do it” she concludes.

In this chapter, I unpack the negotiation of chores and childcare. As Noriko and Hiro’s story suggests, this negotiation is a fraught one. Bianchi et al. (2000) suggests that household labour is ‘‘contested terrain’’ among couples as much as it is ‘‘contested intellectual terrain among scholars’’ (192). The discourse emerging around household labour, as embodied in the texts produced by both the state and organizations within the fathering movement, is one that directs men’s attention beyond what chores “do” to what chores “say”. This discourse transforms chores from a set of technical skills that contribute in a quantifiable way to the operations of the home to a medium through which the father manages their relationship with their wife. The fathering movement is concerned with the bond between labouring spouses more than the labour of (re)production. This is embodied by ideals of equal partnership, a departure from a rigid, implicit, role-based division of household labour to one based on open communication and adaptability. Chores are envisaged as the concrete manifestation of internal states: a display of affection, investment in the family, and support for the loftier political project of gender equality. 186

In this sense, the fathering movement departs from the gendered, post-war division of household labour and the economic idioms of management and exchange through which it was understood.

This is far from a perfect departure. Men who do chores and childcare stumble over the economic exigencies that shape household labour. They also grapple with the same feelings of resent and underappreciation expressed by their partners.

This chapter proceeds in three parts. I begin with the way the fathering movement and my interlocutors narrativize their departure from the gendered division of labour associated with the post-war era. The contribution made by men to the labour and upkeep of the home was captured in the figure of the daikokubashira— the pillar of the home. The fathering movement’s critique of daikokubashira focuses on its monetary contributions to the home through wages and gifts, which are thought to act as an insufficient substitute for the relationship between father, mother, and child. In the second part, I introduce the fathering movement’s alternative framework for male domestic labour: “mama care”. Here, chores and childcare a reconceptualized as a kind of care labour performed for the sake of the mother. In this way, these tasks are read as an expression of respect and affections towards one’s spouse. The father’s labour is figured as supplemental or subordinate to the mothers. It is less a contribution to the economy of the household than a performance of affection. For my interlocutors, this becomes a point of tension.

In part three, I turn to debates over the technical performance of chores and childcare. In instructional materials, the mother is positioned as an authority figure within the home. She guides fathers and critiques their form. In practice, fathers performed chores strategically to validate their place in the home, a course of action which did not always mesh with the expectations of their spouses. Rather, mothers often view household labour as governed by efficiency and efficacy, much like remunerated labour performed for an employer. I speak to the work of one entrepreneurially minded father who has capitalized on the conflict between chores 187 as an affective performance and chores as exigent and subject to assessment, providing instruction in an approach to cooking that keeps the management of the relationship between the father and his family as its primary objective.

5.2 Departing from Daikokubashira

“What do you think of the ideal ‘men work, women do chores and childcare’?” the lecturer, an affiliate of Fathering Japan via a local fathering circle, asks those assembled in the community centre meeting room. Roughly 20 men and women are grouped in clusters of four around non-descript tables. “Non-descript” is a term that suits this space well in a more general sense: grey carpeting, grey trim, cream walls. Energy levels among the participants in today’s information session for expectant parents has dropped considerably since they first filtered into the room, and I suspect the design may be the reason for it. The question, displayed on a slide thrown up on the screen at the back of the room, was one I had seen posed in public parenting talks many times before. Lecturers from Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare or representatives of family-focused NPOs would often open with some variation of it as a means of sparking conversation. The slides that follow might display data from national opinion polls illustrating the decline in the popularity of this perspective since the 1970s; some may simply refute the statement outright. A bespectacled man with a wiry frame and soft voice was the first to respond. Without lifting his eyes from the table in front of him, he said “My father and my mother have no relationship. He was totally of the era of daikokubashira. He did not help to raise me, did not help with chores: it was entirely my mother. He fulfilled his duty (gimu), but I don’t want that kind of life. I have no relationship with him now”. A slight woman with a toothy smile replied, in a charming Kansai accent, “My mother did all the chores too, and that’s how I was raised. I am not at all like my father… Well, he drank a lot of beer, so I guess in this sense we’re the same”. The room erupted with laughter. 188

The solemn, candid sentiment expressed by the bespectacled father-to-be was one I heard repeated many times and in many ways over the course of fieldwork. Members of the fathering movement position themselves in contrast to the daikokubashira (“pillar of the household”) archetype, emphasizing the lasting emotional impact of the physical and symbolic absence of their own fathers. Rather than take for granted this understanding of daikokubashira as reflecting a homogenous historical reality64, my goal in this section is to show how the fathering movement outlines this particular masculine figure and the importance of its use as a point of departure for its members. By emphasizing daikokubashira as being enmeshed in relationships of exchange rather than relationships of fellow feeling, the fathering movement argues that men must consider the affective dimension of their contributions to the home or risk exclusion. The force of this argument draws on the strength of the figure of the daikokubashira in the narrative of post-war Japan’s economic development and family system, which many fathers see reflected in memories of their own families. This is part of a larger effort to periodize daikokubashira, relegating it to the past in spite of the influence it continues to exert on both men and women.

The enduring discourse of salarymen as daikokubashira gestures towards the way that labour outside the home is imagined as directly connecting men to stability and success in the home (see Hidaka 2010; Gill 2003: 144; Roberson and Suzuki 2002: 129). As Yamada (1993) explains in his exploration of the etymology of the term, daikokubashira reflects the language of metaphor that blurs the division between home as a physical structure and home as a social unit in Japanese (see also Kondo 1990). Historical records suggest that the term was used in certain regions to refer to housewives, though the patriarchal nature of the relationship between the

64 See Chapter 2 for more on diversity in the division of household labour in the post-war era, and for information on fathering activism in the late 1970s and early 1980s. 189

Emperor and his subjects infused the term with masculine character after the Meiji Restoration

(Yamada 1993). Daikokubashira figures into a larger familial schema characterized by fixed, gendered roles with attendant responsibilities. Despite the expectation that salarymen would marry and start a family as part of their metamorphosis into shakaijin (social person) (Dasgupta

2013) or as a rite of passage into ichininmae (full-fledged adulthood) (McLelland and Dasgupta

2005:172; Edwards 1989:124; Lunsing 2001:74), participating in the upkeep of the home was frowned upon as it indicated a wavering in their commitment to corporate work (Vogel 1963).

This relationship between man and home mediated by the corporation was made possible by the

“living wage” and the associated benefits afforded to those in heterosexual households (including health insurance, tax relief for dependents etc.). A man’s contribution to his family was his salary, an indirect form of childcare that worked in tandem with the actual labour of care performed by mothers. The father, then, existed squarely outside of the home, but was recognized as being essential to its internal operations (Allison 1994). The non-monetary contribution of fathers to family life is encapsulated in the moral discourse surrounding them.

Fathers were figured as the avatars of society within the home, transmitting expectations of conduct to their children (Vogel 1963: 242—243; Morris-Suzuki 1998) who, inspired by their dedication, would in turn commit themselves to their studies with the same zeal. Zoya Street

(2013) argues that the distance between largely absentee fathers and their children leant their rare interactions greater significance, thus increasing the efficacy of this moral instruction. In practical terms, the separation of the father from household labour meant few of them had the technical skills needed to perform simple chores. Men typically lived in their parent’s home or a company dormitory until marriage, and thus had no real reason to learn to care for themselves, let alone others. 190

Wage, patriarchal authority, and ignorance were not enough to secure a father’s status as daikokubashira, however. There was also a certain expectation that men would invest some of their labour back into the home, though this investment was tellingly consumptive in nature and inflected with a familiar corporate character. “Kazoku sābisu” (“family service”) was a term popularized during the mid-1980s, although there is evidence to suggest it was used in corporate circles as early as the 1970s. Kazoku sābisu began to gain traction as Japan’s workplace culture was undergoing a radical transformation. While the Labour Standards Law of 1947 states that employers may not discriminate in wages “by reason of the worker being a woman”, it wasn’t until the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1985 that legislation specifically addressing inequality in hiring, firing, promotion, and training was passed. Women were able to establish a foothold in the corporate world for the first time, typically at the expense of hours that were previously dedicated to household labour. This era also saw the introduction of a 5-day work week. While by no means strictly enforced, this change provided men with the option of taking regular holidays. Kazoku sābisu arose in tandem with this need for supplementary household labour and this small allowance of non-work hours. The governmental campaign to increase the number of “Sunday papas” (nichiyōbi no papa), demarcating Sunday as a day that men reserved for their family, was aligned with this concept (Ishii-Kuntz 1996).

Kazoku sābisu refers to the largely involuntary use of a salaryman’s scant free time to meet familial obligations. Kazoku sābisu forced men, already exhausted from work, to offer what little time and energy remained in the “service” of their family. While the word “sābisu” is derived from the English “service”, in Japanese it is often used to refer to something offered for free— during a store promotion, for example— in addition to its meaning of help or assistance.

The service in kazoku sābisu, then, can be read as referring to either a kind of aid offered to the family or to unremunerated labour of the sort offered to customers or clients. These economic 191 undertones are accentuated by the fact that kazoku sābisu was typically envisioned as consumptive. It was often described as involving travel, whether day trips or full-blown vacations. Take, for example, the following excerpt from the Nihon Keizai Shinbun, circa 1983:

Compared to Europe which enjoys holidays lasting from three weeks to one month, the

summer vacations in our country's companies are quite short. Still, currently many

salaryman-fathers reluctantly engage in kazoku sābisu and take their family to the sea, the

mountains or to visit grandparents, making the summer a season of volkerwanderung

(minzokudaīdō). (in Mizukoshi et al. 2016: 219)

The image of kazoku sabisu as paternal family involvement that mirrored corporate client care practices held some cachet until the new millennium when alternative visions of fatherhood began to flourish. The contributions of ikumen, specifically, have been positioned by advocates in direct opposition to kazoku sābisu and daikokubashira more generally. The New Papa’s

Textbook describes daikokubashira as the “old version of the OS” (Fathering Japan 2015: 21). If one detects traces of its characteristics in oneself, it is evidence that it is time to upgrade to the

“new papa OS”. The divide here is philosophical and generational. Kazoku sābisu and daikokubashira are strongly associated with the post-war generation. They reflect the corporate focus of employed family men at the peak of Japan’s boom years. For Fathering Japan, this father’s connection to his wife and children is based on the notion of reluctant service. Kazoku sābisu embodies many of the qualities of men’s household labour that the fathering movement is actively campaigning against: it is infrequent, exceptional, and transactional65. The Aichi

65 As an example of the distinction made here, SturtzSreetharan’s (2017) analysis of the 2013 film Soshite Chichi ni Naru is useful. It draws attention to how the two male leads— one a working-class father who spends time with his 192

Shinbun (in Mizukoshi et al. 2016: 217) has run several articles authored by Fathering Japan’s

Ando that decry kazoku sābisu consciousness (ishiki) as ‘antiquated’ (furui). The central tension for Ando is the question of pleasure: reluctant parenting through kazoku sābisu is void of joy. In a similar vein of critique, the New Papa’s Textbook bids “Farewell to Kazoku sābisu”:

Fathers of the past often used the phrase “kazoku sābisu”. Fathers were praised for taking

their wife and children out despite being tired from trying their best at work. However,

now kazoku sābisu is a no good (NG) word. The reason is that it is offered as service, but

they (the family) are not customers. For fathers who say kazoku sābisu, perhaps family

becomes like ‘weekend customers’. Papas are not satisfying the family by playing the

role of chauffer or photographer. They want to enjoy being together with family (2015:

30)

The division between corporation and family— of corporate modes of sociality and familial modes of sociality— is emphasized in this explanation. Kazoku sābisu lets these categories bleed into one another, a quality which Fathering Japan problematizes in the passage above. The sense of obligation one has to clients is distinguished from the sense of obligation one has to their own family, though the “correct” performance of both are central to reifying the salaryman/fathering subject. The family is not just another organization to which a man is expected to contribute his labour. Rather, the family is “satisfied” by the father when he is able to “enjoy” their company.

The absence of feeling in fathering, then, is posed by members of the fathering community as a reason to problematize the pre-existing division of labour. Fathering Japan

children, the other a salaryman who spends money on his children— are distinguished through the use of Osaka dialect. 193 lecturer Toshi employs a powerful image to illustrate this point in his lectures: the “ATM

Zombie”. Toshi describes the ATM Zombie in terms that echo the discourse surrounding daikokubashira— as a man who contributes only his salary to the home. His wife and children extract cash from him like a machine, but he persists without “life” in a social sense, serving only the company. This image of the father as a monstrous conduit to the outside world incapable of experiencing familial love is one expression of a pervasive sense of alienation from the actual labour of social reproduction felt by men. In a section entitled “Have You Been Away from Home?”, the New Papa’s Textbook states:

The old OS (operating system) of papas was that it was likely you were away from home.

The feeling was that family wasn’t a place for a child-centered lifestyle and, because it

was thought to be good that the workplace was more comfortable (for men), papas did

more overtime than was necessary. Despite being excited to speak about customers and

superiors, as a couple there was no conversation. However, even that sort of papa is

detaching from the company. If you are away from the family and local community,

fathers have no place (ibasho)… for fathers who commit to childcare, they don’t lose the

ability to converse with mama and the home can become a comfortable place even into

retirement (2015: 31).

As Allison (in Baldwin and Allison 2015) explains, the inability to find ibasho is part and parcel of a more generalized existential precarity in contemporary Japan, a feeling of not belonging anywhere that reflects the “alienation of the soul” (seishintekina ikizurasa). In the case of fathers without an ibasho, the “relationless society” (muen shakai) at the heart of Allison’s argument emerges less from a state of generalized precarity than from the inability to translate intensely siloed forms of sociality between different social worlds. In this case, the familiar mode of 194 corporate sociality— wherein relationships are forged based on a performative, self-sacrificing work ethic and contributions to shared goals assessed for their efficacy at arm’s length— chafes in the context of the home.

As the bespectacled man from the opening scene of this section illustrates, the position of salarymen fathers was recognized as one that was fixed and immutable: a role that, despite its flaws, must be played. Time, money, and labour were understood as being commensurable and therefore subject to exchange within the home as they are outside the home. Men could compensate for their absence through spending on kazoku sābisu, understood as a kind of gift or investment similar in character and intent to spending on entertaining clients through settai (see

Allison 1994). However, by transacting with the family as they would a business partner, men stripped household labour of the affect that produces meaningful relationships, personhood, and sociality. This is illustrated in metaphors like Toshi’s that describe fathers in terms that are both financial and “less than human”. The bespectacled man expresses this as the absence of a

“relationship” with his father, and between his mother and father. Moreover, though its ramifications are strongly felt by him today, he situates the ideal of the daikokubashira in the past. There is a sense of periodization that helps to figure his own emerging fathering subjectivity through contrast with the preceding generation. Though lighthearted, the slight woman’s reply is similarly revealing. She also demarcates a significant generational schism.

Though raised to follow her mother’s example, she draws a comparison between herself and her father and, with comedic effect, identifies one way in which she did indeed embody his salaryman persona. Both utterances display a shift in the contemporary understanding of the home away from the fixity of the past— of ‘men work, women do chores and childcare’— to a fluid gendering of labour in the home. 195

Among the men I spoke with, those who operated as full-time “househusbands” best exemplify this turn towards fluidity. I was introduced to one such father, Taizo, through a mutual friend. After a long day spent planning an event for working mothers in the Shinjuku area with members of WAN, I retired to an Italian restaurant for dinner with other members of the volunteer team. One of the women present that evening mentioned an “awesome” (sugoi) father— Taizo— within her circle of friends. She explained that he was in a leadership position at Himitsu Kessha Shufu no Tomo. As it would turn out, I came to know Taizo quite well over the ensuing months, not only because of his activism, but because of his media presence. Taizo’s blog is popular among fathers in Tokyo and he has been profiled by an array of parenting websites and magazines, making him something of a minor celebrity in the fathering community.

For 4 years prior to our introduction, Taizo was a full-time househusband. He spent several years in a lucrative position as an engineer at a major automobile manufacturer after graduating from the prestigious Tokyo University. Over dinner that evening, I was told that Taizo raises his two sons on his own, earning money on the side as a freelance translator for a few American magazines. I was curious: what conditions had led him to his current position?

I was keenly aware that Taizo’s impressive professional qualifications were increasingly unique. Beyond concerns about belonging and the role the father ought to play in the home, in a practical sense serving as daikokubashira is simply unrealistic for many men in contemporary

Japan from an economic standpoint. The image of powerful, wealthy husbands and Japan’s period as the world’s pre-eminent (non-American) economic superpower are interwoven.

Toshiro once sought to illustrate this point in a Fathering Japan lecture by citing a 2010 survey regarding marriage and personal finance. Female respondents in the study wanted an average salary of 6,825,000 yen from a marriage partner (roughly 80,000 CAD at the time). In that year, only 3.5% of men in Japan earned more than 6,000,000 yen. Toshi turned to data provided from 196 a study conducted by Mitsubishi. The contents of that report reveal that, after adjusting for inflation, men’s average annual earnings between 1997 and 2007 decreased by 2,000,000 yen: a staggering sum. Prior to the 1990s, it was said that women selected partners on the basis of the

“sankō’s” (literally “three highs”): highly educated, high income, high stature (tall). Sankou also holds a cheeky double meaning as it can be used to refer to high-valued yen, high stock prices, and high land prices— the hallmarks of Japan’s Bubble Era. However, the sort of lifestyle afforded by salaryman employment in the 1980s and 1990s is no longer sustainable and so the sankō’s have been replaced, Toshiro explains. Now, women in Japan value the “sanpei’s”

(literally “three averages”): average income, average looks, and a mellow personality.

Standing over 6 feet tall (by my estimate) with a degree in engineering from the nation’s leading institution and an enviable job66, Taizo exemplified the fading ideals of the Bubble Era’s sankō’s. His decision to become a househusband was a deliberate and conscious one, though it was also spurred on by practical exigencies. Taizo’s wife, Minoru, is an accomplished academic.

As a doctoral researcher, she moved abroad to work at Stanford University. Taizo, recognizing this incredible opportunity for Minoru to advance her career, applied for childcare leave in order to accompany her and their son. While his manager was initially bewildered by his request, he eventually received a 2-year leave of absence after a few panicked discussions in which he was begged to stay. Though he had been abroad in his youth— 3 months in Edmonton for study and

6 in Vancouver for snowboarding, he tells me with a laugh— spending a prolonged period of time in California had a profound effect on Taizo’s perspective on family and childcare. His son’s pre-school, home to families of all structures and backgrounds, exposed him to the value of

66 Prior to his transition to housework and freelance translation. 197

“diversity” (daibāshitei). Families in America adopt a range of forms suiting the needs of the couple, he explains. This stood in sharp contrast to the rigid expectations of Japanese society.

“People in Japan are afraid to be different. If they enjoy parenting and chores, maybe it will change. But as it is, the image of family life here is very strict” he says. Taizo felt encouraged to embrace his atypical decision to put his career on hold in favour of his wife’s and the well-being of his son.

At the end of her two-year appointment, Minoru’s stay at Stanford was extended beyond

Taizo’s period of childcare leave. He returned to Japan, downtrodden. The loneliness was difficult for him to bare. He resolved to quit his job for good, return to America, and become a fulltime househusband. Minoru was hesitant to accept Taizo’s decision initially. She was not keen on the idea of her husband completely abandoning his career in favour of househusband- hood. It was clear, though, that they would need to choose between Taizo following this path or living apart. With Minoru’s consent, Taizo left his company and returned to California. That was several years — and one new baby— ago. Taizo and his two sons have since resettled in Tokyo.

Over the course of my fieldwork project, his wife was still working abroad, leaving him to manage the home on his own.

While I will return to Taizo’s story later in this chapter, I want to emphasize here the importance of Minoru’s hesitation. Her concern had less to do with the financial stability of the home than the ramifications of such a decision on their relationship and the public optics of such an arrangement. Minoru’s salary covers most household expenses, though Taizo’s freelance translation is an important supplement. Both Taizo and Minoru had the earning potential necessary to support their family on a single income. Minoru’s career was prioritized in no small part because of the prestige of her employer and her growing list of accolades. Yet, the idea of a 198 complete reversal of gendered roles within the home sat uneasily with her. As illustrated by

Koji’s warning about the weight of the baggage of yarisugi ikumen on the term househusband in

Chapter 3, men performing domestic work can sometimes subject their wives to harassment from friends and colleagues who take the arrangement as evidence that she is derelict in her duties as a mother. Moreover, with the enduring association between man and corporation embodied in the discourse of daikokubashira, there is a persistent unease that men who spend all of their time in the home fall short of social personhood. Domestic work alone is seen as insufficient in isolation; the corporation, or at least remunerated employment, remains a critical site for producing masculine subjects.

Where an array of unique circumstances, including relatively secure income from a single parent and experience abroad, drew Taizo and Minoru to invert the archetypical gendered division of labour, other couples struggled to distance themselves from the daikokubashira paradigm. The periodization of daikokubashira often resists clean narrativization, complicated by slippages between categories and by strategic occlusions or mis-remembering’s. The afternoon I passed with Noriko and Hiro in Shinjuku helps to illustrate this point. “I have a lot of things to say!” on the subject of fathering, Noriko declared as soon as we were settled at our table. A long pause followed as we sipped our waters. The hangover from their argument the evening prior was palpable. Having placed our orders and ensuring the waitress would not interrupt us until our meals were prepared, Noriko began:

Noriko: If you say father, the first thing I think of is my own father. My own father

worked for {a major electronics manufacturer}. He was hardworking and successful in

his career. So, when I think about the image of how a father works, their way of working

with utmost effort and to have success in their own work but, beyond that, in the way 199

they conduct themselves—this is the first image. My father… my mother wanted to, so

she worked… I don’t know what to say—

Hiro: My father only worked.

Noriko: My mother worked too. She worked very hard for 15 years. As a part-timer.

Hiro: But not when you were young, right?

Noriko: Yeah, when we were little, she was a full-time housewife.

Noriko begins by connecting the current conditions of her home to her childhood, setting up parallels between her family life as a child and her current image of what the family should be.

Hiro does not state, directly, that he expects Noriko to put her career on hold until the children have greater independence. Indeed, throughout our afternoon in the café and in subsequent exchanges, Hiro expressed admiration for Noriko as a career woman and, while often overwhelmed with his own professional concerns, clearly took pride in her work. Tellingly,

Hiro’s interjections steer Noriko’s description of her mother back towards a normative truth she occludes: despite working outside the home, she spent time as a housewife when Noriko (and her brother) were children.

Noriko, unphased by her husband’s commentary, pushes forward. The image of her father—very much the archetypical daikokubashira— recurs as she reminisces on the couple’s path to marriage:

Noriko: I really didn’t know who to marry, I really didn’t know what kind of marriage

would be best… Because I was a student in university, working at a company with a high

salary, a life more like my father’s than my mother’s – that suited me. Even though I 200

married at 29, in the same way as my father I thought work was the important thing… In

Japanese society— Japanese society is an academic background society, with a good

academic background, you get into a good company, that kind of thing. So, my model

was my dad. When I was thinking of who to marry, isn’t it so that it can’t be helped that

it is my father’s type? But what about doing things in the house? I really didn’t know at

all who to marry.

Noriko pauses before continuing:

Noriko: He (the man I would marry) didn’t have to have an academic background like

mine but someone who likes children, a strong cook, basically his character— his

favorite things, his favorite food for example (is important).

Noriko’s talk of her father’s success and her own ambitions raise questions as to her choice of partner. A furītā in his late teens and early 20s, Hiro chose an atypical path to his current corporate position. He didn’t have an aversion to studying, but he did not have the willpower or commitment to study diligently in his youth. He floated between part-time positions for half a decade before he was eventually resigned to the fact that a university degree was his ticket into a salaried position. Emphasizing the way in which Hiro departs from the image of fatherhood provided by her own father without uttering his name, Noriko gestures towards the importance of her “prospective” partner’s contribution to household labour in her marriage decision. Noriko wants to position herself as her father’s corollary in their own home and, with a hint of conflict about her feelings, sought to create a household where her partner’s domestic contributions would make this possible. 201

When Noriko first asked me how we might “increase” the number of ikumen, I had assumed she was asking, in a roundabout way, how she might make her husband an ikumen.

Hiro, however, struck me as the sort of man many in Japan would confidently describe as ikumen. He is abreast of different organizations in the fathering movement, mentioning Fathering

Japan by name. He put special consideration into the location of his company while job hunting so he would be able to return home at a reasonable hour and eat dinner as a family. That is not to say that his company is family-friendly. Hiro paints a picture of a corporate culture without room for proactive fathers:

Noriko: His boss is a father. The bosses’ wife works at a consulting firm. Very busy.

Hiro: Generally, everyone (in my company) has children, but their wives don’t work. Or

there are few that are working. It seems my company is not a good one for childcare. And

the salary is low (laughs). That’s terrible.

Noriko: It’s not a company that students searching for work would want, I think. Because

it’s not big; it’s a small company. The only good thing is he can come home quickly.

Hiro: University students, when they’re choosing work, probably they don’t think about

childrearing things. Recently something saying that came out in the newspaper but— for

myself, I got married and when I had kids diligently coming home was something that

suited me. But when I chose a company, I didn’t do this (consider childcare).

Hiro tends to one of his fussing sons briefly before continuing:

Hiro: In my company, all the senpai are fathers. There are 3 fathers below me, below 30

years old— everyone else is above me. Everyone has middle schoolers and elementary

schoolers. No one has infants. It’s that kind of workplace. 202

Noriko: Before I got married, I thought either (the father or mother) could work, and

either could do household things. But really, when the children were born, I realized…

it’s not a society where one can work easily.

Hiro attempts to illustrate the lack of understanding and support he receives from his employer to validate his absence from the home. His co-workers have stay-at-home wives; their children are grown and in school; he is separated from them by seniority. Left unsaid here is the relative precarity of his position. Hiro had taken an abnormal path into the corporate world and landed at a small firm at an advanced age. It would be a challenge to secure his position and advance his career in a workplace that valued seniority above all else. Hiro feels he is bound by the persisting influence of daikokubashira as it is embodied by the aged managerial class. Meanwhile, Noriko reflects on the way that these conditions restrict fluidity in household roles, questioning her own idealism.

5.3 Mama Care

If fathers are indeed loosening— or attempting to loosen— themselves from the strictures of expectation that characterized the homes they grew up in, what logic(s) beyond the obligations attendant to fixed household roles are animating the current division of labour? The alternative that emerges from texts produced by the fathering movement and the state is oriented around the question of “care” (written in fathering movement texts as an import word, kēa). The object of this care is less the child than the spouse. Household labour is figured as the primary avenue through which the relationship between father and mother is mediated. The New Papa’s

Textbook (2015) states that “the vital point of father’s care-work is ‘mama care’” (28). “Isn’t it thought that ‘if you do childcare and chores, mama should be happy’?” the book asks, 203 rhetorically, “But perhaps mama’s true feeling is ‘when papa does childcare for me it’s helpful, but more than that I’d like him to express his gratitude to me’” (2015:28).

The model of household labour posed in the New Papa’s Textbook (2015) is one that directs father’s attention beyond mechanical performance. Instead, they are instructed to consider the meaning invested in their actions and the way this meaning is read by their partner. This

“papa childcare”, as the textbook has coined it, is envisioned as a triple tiered pyramid. The first level, the foundation, is consideration shown to the mother. The second is the enthusiastic pursuit of childcare and chores. The final tier, the tip of the pyramid, is empathy towards child rearing.

By progressing through the experience of parenting at each stage, the husband is eventually able to attain insight into their partner’s emotions. The line between the mother as an individual and the mother as someone who performs childcare is blurred: an empathetic understanding of one is rendered as being synonymous with an empathetic understanding of the other. At each level, the father’s primary consideration is not the child nor the completion of a specific task but rather to communicate to the mother their affection and recognition of the difficulty of the household labour women are tasked with performing.

The focus of the text more broadly is communication between mother and father, which is figured as a kind of affective labour that fathers must perform attentively. The New Papa’s

Textbook (2015) describes mothers as needing empathy (kyōkan) and receptivity (juyō). These needs can be fulfilled by consistent communication throughout the day via email or messaging apps. Time for these activities should be budgeted. The typical Japanese response to those who are struggling— “ganbatte” (do your best) — should be replaced by words of thanks delivered without reservation. It was remarked to me on more than one occasion by both fathers and mothers that “thank you” was a more meaningful thing to say to a partner than “I love you” (ai 204 shiteru), which sees infrequent usage. But, as will become clear, gratitude here is not understood as existing in strictly economic terms (see Hochschild 1989): as deficits, surpluses, and relative values on a public market of household affect. Rather, it is one element of a complex of labour directed towards the spouse that produces inalienable affect: empathy as a state, not a commodity. At issue is the way that household labour— and the way the couple communicates about it— is read. In a section entitled “‘Would you help me?’ is a no-good (NG) word!”

(2015:30), the textbook states:

Have you had the experience of asking mom to give you a hand and she gets angry? As a

father it is said with good will, but in reality “lend a hand” displays a consciousness that

“childcare is mama’s role, not my work”. That attitude will annoy mama. For example,

even if the no-good phrase “lend a hand” comes out of papa’s mouth, if papa changes the

diaper or puts the child to bed, mama will remain calm. But, if while saying “lend a

hand” you only say things like “they’re pooping!”, “the baby is crying!” without moving

yourself, as can be expected mama will become angry. Childcare is not about lending a

hand; it is about sharing. “Childcare participation” or “chore cooperation” hit the ear

better, but these expressions are also not desirable. Fathers who say “participate” or

“cooperate” do not convey that they are conscious of being the concerned party. Mom

likes a dad that commits to childcare and housework with independence rather than

participating when in the mood.

The tension between the couple revealed in this passage is not only over the performance of chores, but the way in which the mother and father understand the motivations behind their partner’s contributions. Mothers grow resentful when they perceive chores done by fathers as a form of assistance offered to them— a favour, rather than something born from an innate desire 205 to be part of family life. It suggests that the idealized home is not composed of static roles with responsibilities determined by societal expectation but is rather a flexible and equal partnership.

Conceptualizing men’s labour in the home as a form of gift giving — contributing labour in excess of the perceived average in other homes in order to curry favour— implies that “childcare is mama’s role” and that a father’s efforts are voluntary and supplementary. In contrast, the independent pursuit of chores and childcare is an expression of gendered solidarity and familial belonging.

Many fathers with whom I spoke told me that the key to clearly conveying these values to their spouse is to pursue chores and childcare “proactively” (seikyoukuteki ni). Proactivity displays the desire of the father to be a father; to derive joy from the totality of fatherhood rather than isolated pleasurable interactions like playing with the children. “Core” chores (Bianchi et al.

2000) tend to be sex-typed (Blair and Lichter 1991; Twiggs et al. 1999). Of these core chores,

“low control” chores (Estes et al. 2007) —those that are absolutely necessary to the upkeep of the home (like cooking and laundry) — are performed primarily by women. “High control” chores—those where time constraints are weak, and demand is infrequent (like mowing the lawn) — are typically the domain of men. For fathers, high control chores include the “fun” elements of childcare, like trips to the park and reading picture books, which they participate in only when time permits. The New Papa’s Textbook (2015: 30—31) explains:

Childcare is not just fun parts. Being the dull opponent of a child is hard. Especially when

they are sick etc., childcare is a hardship and a worry. You must take joint ownership not

just of the fun of childcare but the hardship and dullness, cultivating in the couple a

relationship of mutual trust (with mama) 206

There is an awareness throughout the fathering community of the “family myth” (see Hochschild

1989) that participating in only the enjoyable elements of childcare creates parity with the efforts of a partner who must endure its hardships alone. Childcare is something that must be experienced by fathers as a range of feelings— frustration, fear, and exhaustion in addition to joy, wonder, and love. Returning to the pyramid of papa childcare, the empathy borne of shared experience enables couples to connect in a way that is impossible if labour is treated as a discrete element of the economy of the home independent of the ties between mother, father, and child.

The affect of familial relationships is framed as being produced by the labouring subject and not through the occupation of fixed positions within the family.

For my interlocutors, this empathetic turn was predicated on both the lived experience of performing the labour of the home— coming to grips with its scope, scale, and intricacies— and on the optics of this labour in society at large. Shortly after our introduction, Taizo and I met for lunch at a café within the courtyard walls of his alma mater. I had recently read an article detailing an omiai (a match making event for single men and women) organized by HKST and was eager to ask if there had been any successful matches. However, in discussing the selection of a marriage partner, our conversation quickly turned to the importance of household labour.

Before they became parents, Taizo and Minoru had an established system for chores. Taizo took charge of cooking— an area his wife never had much interest in— while Minoru was responsible for cleaning the home and doing the laundry. This system was established “without much discussion”. However, as a single parent in Tokyo, Taizo is responsible for all childcare matters.

“I can’t say that the burden of chores and childcare is divided in half (between my wife and I), but this is true of homes where both parents are regularly present too”, he explains. He describes his daily schedule as a “lifestyle rhythm” (seikatsu rizumu), noting that it is “similar to the schedule of a mother from a dual income home”. In the morning he wakes up, prepares 207 breakfast, wakes and feeds the children, and then dresses them (the eldest first, the youngest second). He drops both off at school and daycare before returning home to put on a load of laundry and clean up from the morning activities. This leaves him 4 to 6 hours for translation work from home. He wraps up in the late afternoon, collects the kids, feeds and bathes them, and gets them to bed.

Seated on a small patio, we watch students pass by on their way to class. We nurse our tea and watch the trees in silence while we gather our thoughts. I confirm my mental math with

Taizo: “about 13 hours of work a day, then?”. That’s an underestimate by his assessment. There are a range of responsibilities related to the home that often go overlooked, making it difficult to quantify the work done by either partner. Taizo stresses the significance of these subtleties; details overlooked in negotiating the division of labour that wear away at mothers and fathers over time. He provides several examples, counting them off on his fingers. There are occasions, such the school sports festival, that require the special preparation of bento boxes or additional transportation time for the kids. Trips to see the doctor when one of his sons has a fever, pick-up and drop off from school: these are additional times sinks that compound the hours of work already required to maintain a functional home.

Taizo is particularly attuned to the impact of this “unnamed housekeeping” (namonaki kaji), and flags this as an area of tension. He uses the term casually, though I had not yet encountered it in conversation with other fathers67. Befuddled, I sheepishly ask him to repeat himself. He responds with an example: “it’s like restocking seasoning in the kitchen. It is a small

67 This became a viral term in 2017 under the hashtag namonaki kaji following a survey conducted by Daiwa House. 208 thing that must be done, but who should do it?”. The ubiquity and intensity of unnamed housekeeping, these necessary but forgettable tasks, surprises men who assert themselves in the home, he explains. Describing them as “small details”, Taizo tells me that women are particularly attenuated to them precisely because they go unnoticed. Their commitment to the minutiae of housework— making sure beer is stocked in the fridge and chilled for their husband returning from a long day at the office— can be a source of “resent” (urami). Fathers who give thanks for the visible work of mothers in situations where the demand for their labour is acute— cleaning after the baby spits up, for example— convey a lack of understanding of the grand scale of their efforts and, by extension, a kind of ignorance of or detachment from the home. Taizo invokes these “subtle and mundane acts of care” (Buch 2013) that constitute the labour of care as a whole as evidence of a kind of consciousness that arises in fathers who are proactive participants in chores and childcare.

Taizo’s awareness of the difficulties mothers face was born in part from grappling with the demands of household labour and in part from the social circles he developed as a househusband. One afternoon, while discussing the presidential race in the United States, Taizo reminisced about his time in California. I knew that the experience was a formative one, exposing him to the array of family structures represented in his community. His focus in this exchange was different, however. He built lasting friendships with other Japanese families in the area who had relocated for work. This meant spending his time almost exclusively with stay-at- home mothers who had accompanied their husbands. Many of them were unhappy to be away from friends, family, and the familiarity of home. Taizo recounts example after example of the complaints these women would voice to him: the husband who refused to change the baby while his wife was sick in bed, the husband who spent the day “playing” with his son by propping him up in his play pen while he played video games. As a househusband coming to grips with the 209 weight of his responsibilities, Taizo “felt their frustrations deeply”. There is one story that Taizo frequently tells, be it in interviews or presentations, that illustrates his own experience of these frustrations. One day, Taizo met a senpai from his university whom he had not spoken with for years. This senpai had pursued a lucrative career in engineering while his wife had taken on the bulk of the responsibility for raising their family. While the two men caught up, the senpai asked, in a mix of disbelief and wonder, how Taizo “lives” without his partner in the house.

“Would a woman who does childcare and chores be asked the same question?” Taizo asks, rhetorically. There are many “contradictions” (mujun) of this sort that men begin to realize and feel on a personal level only after they become invested in domestic labour, he explains.

Instances of empathetic experience for fathers like those described by Taizo are always imperfect, the gap between them and their partner never quite commensurable. Goro, a salesman in the textile industry, once told me that “balance in chores will create balance in your relationship”. He and his wife, a daycare worker, had created what he framed as a stable, harmonious home life before the birth of their daughter. “The workload increases exponentially” he explains “it is completely different than (the number of chores) before”. Sales, in a sense, is seasonal. There are periods that require extended, overnight travel to different prefectures to meet with clients and deliver presentations and samples, and others where Goro is able to consistently return home before 6PM. He had hoped that a system for the division of labour would arise organically given enough time, but as his wife approached the end of her maternity leave there was still a great deal of discontent. Even with a full day to dedicate to childcare she felt overwhelmed. Goro saw that their relationship was becoming strained. Moreover, he was eager to bond with his daughter and found the scant time he had at home with her to be insufficient. Goro resolved to be “proactive” in carving out time for household labour. 210

I encountered a peculiar scene of empathetic incommensurability during a playdate with a mother Goro had befriended through preschool, who I will refer to as Marie. When I arrived at

Marie’s apartment, nestled away in the suburbs of Setagaya, I found both parents irate. Their preschool had recently issued a letter to families outlining expectations regarding the lunches provided for students. Marie had her copy on hand, which she turned over to me as I took a seat on her couch. The letter outlined to recipients the importance of providing healthy lunches that children would be happy to eat, all in the typically polite terms used in this sort of correspondence. It seemed like a common-sense reminder. I failed to see the issue. Marie, however, was distraught. She felt the letter was targeting her (and perhaps a few of the other parents) specifically. As a single mother, Marie struggled to balance work and childcare.

Sometimes, she explains, she’ll send food from the convenience store or leftovers from the night before along with her son in lieu of an elegantly prepared obento, for which she has neither the time nor patience. As Allison (1991) explains, the preparation of obento is both a chore and a ritual ridden with ideological meaning: “the child must eat the obento; the mother must make an obento the child will eat. Both mother and child are being judged; the subjectivities of both are being guided by the nursery school as an institution” (195). Though the language used in the letter was cordial, Marie read it as an attack. Rather than disguise her as the intended recipient, its circulation to the entire school had only heightened her embarrassment. As the only single parent, she was already subject to intense scrutiny; the other mothers would easily be able to determine the culprit. I had assumed Goro was troubled by the harsh treatment to which his friend was being subjected. However, his concern lay elsewhere. “Look at this” he says, pointing to the top of the letter. I re-read the preamble of the text, noticing now that it had been addressed to the mothers of the school. Goro felt that his work as a father in preparing obento for his child was being delegitimated and that, perhaps, the letter was also intended as a criticism of his own 211 burgeoning technique as someone who had only recently begun learning to cook. The two parents sat in front of me frustrated by the weight of gendered expectation that follows household labour, but for very different reasons.

A crucial element of “mama care” that does not fit quite so neatly into the notion of empathetic partnership is intergenerational transmission. “How would mama explain your absence to your child when you are at work?” the New Papa’s Textbook (2015: 30) asks:

In the era of the mōretsu (go-getter) salaryman, when papa wasn’t in the home because he

was at work or playing golf, mama would tell the children “because papa is out trying his

best for us, our family can be happy”. But today’s mothers are different. When papa is

always late returning from work, after muttering “papa is late today too”, mama will tell

your son “if you become like your father, it will be bad” and your daughter “if you marry

a man like your father, it will be bad”.

The contrast here with daikokubashira as an absent moral exemplar is stark. The careful inclusion of “playing golf” alongside “work” is a knowing dismissal of the venerability of salaryman fathers. This example yet again emphasizes the relationship between mother and father, this time as the limiting reagent in the relationship between father and child. A subsequent example is offered wherein the hypothetical father’s absenteeism makes the mother cry in front of the children. As a result, “…even if papa is fired up to spend his free time on the weekend—

‘yes, let’s play with the kids on Saturday!’ — the child will say ‘this guy (koitsu) bullied mom, he’s a bad guy’” (Fathering Japan 2015: 30). The use of “koitsu”, a derogatory term used to dismissively refer to an individual (instead of “papa” or “otō-san”) in this instance illustrates the distance between father and child and is intended to shock the reader. Failure to compassionately manage the division of labour in the home in a manner distinct from the salaryman of the past 212 first compromises the relationship between husband and wife and then, in turn, between father and child.

The previous excerpt from my meeting with Noriko and Hiro highlighted the intergenerational fractures and continuities from their parent’s homes to their own, a dynamic they recognize will be replicated by their children when they establish independent households.

Noriko identifies strongly with her father’s way of life and draws inspiration from her mother’s own commitment to working and parenting but reaches an impasse at the point where these qualities cannot be replicated due to Hiro’s relatively precarious corporate position and his desire for her to behave in a manner that is comparable to his co-worker’s wives. The couple relate their struggles over household labour to the development of their children, speculating about how these debates might shape their domestic life in adulthood:

Noriko: When they get married, probably women are more— men are different, but

women think about their own work. One’s own work… from their childhood, they get

messages— from the television, magazines, manga— things they learn from. They learn

that they are a human being (ningen) that does chores. Chores are women’s work when

they get married. They also study it, in magazines, see recipes, see it on TV. They study it

in schools too.

Hiro: Children’s toys— girls get baby dolls, they act like a mother, boys don’t do that.

Nicholas: But instead cars—

Hiro: They get cars, for example. Women get all these things that are related to childcare.

Noriko: That’s the message. Gender message. 213

Hiro: But moreover, it would be good if boys could play with baby dolls too wouldn’t it?

Then they could act like mama.

Noriko: At home, when I’m in the kitchen—

Hiro: The kids have so many cooking toys. She thought it would be good because they

will think that men can go in the kitchen too. Her way of thinking about going to work is

probably the same too. The husband doesn’t just work…

Hiro trails off as we pause and focus on our plates.

5.4 Mama Care as Technique

I wouldn’t see Noriko again for months after that afternoon in Shinjuku. Our attempts to reconvene were thwarted by illness. Her children battled colds in December, flus in January, and strep in February. In Facebook exchanges, she apologetically canceled our meetings. She had no choice but to stay home and care for the kids herself. Hiro, as usual, was unavailable. We finally cordon off a block of time during her lunch break in April. Conscious of our time constraints, we catch up as we hustle through foot traffic. Hiro has been assigned more overtime than when we last met— two days a week or so. He is always late to come home, but Noriko is never sure if it is because of these overtime assignments or settai (business entertaining— typically drinking with potential clients). Noriko has been averaging 9-hour days herself. She can tolerate some overtime, but settai, which blurs the lines between business and pleasure, frustrates her. “Things still haven’t changed, but I’m getting used to it” she tells me as we finally sit surrounded by suit- clad salarymen in a café. Noriko continues:

We fight occasionally. What should I say… what sort of things do we fight about. It’s

really trivial. Really small things but…for example, it didn’t become a fight this time but, 214

yesterday I had work, right? When I was at work, it seemed that my oldest child was

feeling bad. I asked dad to take him to the hospital. But he was tired, and evidently he

thought it was OK to take him later in the day— after noon. But, when I’m ill,

immediately I would take medicine— I’d want to go as fast as possible. But if I say it

directly (chokusetsuni) to him, it always becomes a fight. So, I asked my mother. She left

quickly. When I want something and, regrettably, I use strong words, there are many

times that he looks offended (kachin to kuru).

The weekend, when the couple would typically take time to enjoy each other’s company, has become Noriko’s only respite. Exhausted from her long work hours and a week of chores, she goes to bed early and barely says a word to Hiro. Their anniversary was earlier this month, so they took a Saturday for themselves to go out and celebrate: a proper restaurant with plenty of wine. “It’s been a long time since we’ve had a dinner together like that” she says, “about a year”.

There was a short period of time after our emotional first meeting when Hiro seemed reinvigorated. He would rush to her office via transit during his lunch break so they could share a meal or a coffee together. It wasn’t chores or childcare, but Noriko read his actions as an attempt at care. Without mooring this care in household labour, however, these gestures served only to frustrate. What Noriko wanted was for Hiro to have shown the foresight and planning ability to take his child to the doctor. The proper performance of the (limited) chores and childcare Hiro tackles were more significant to Noriko than direct expressions of affection because they conveyed an appreciation and respect for her experience as the primary caregiver.

Noriko’s comments remind us that the focus on the emotional significance of household labour does not mean that the skill gap between men and women in the home can be ignored. On the contrary, instruction in the mechanics of chores and childcare was the primary focus of early 215 state involvement in the Ikumen Boom and spawned numerous texts and online resources developed by a range of related NPOs, including Fathering Japan. There is a clear generational divide within the fathering movement that influences the extent to which men make use of these instructional materials. The senior members of Fathering Japan I spoke with, most of whom were born in the 1970s and made a rapid transition from university to corporation, had little exposure to chores prior to marriage. Sharing techniques learned through research and trial and error was an important part of their early efforts as activists. For fathers born in the 1980s and 90s who entered the workforce in post-Bubble Japan, delaying marriage and making oneself mobile for employment purposes typically meant spending long periods of time living alone or working and studying abroad. As a result, many fathers had experience with chores before marriage. Some fathers gave an exact date for this generational divide: 1993. It was at this time that home economics was made accessible to both boys and girls in middle schools across Japan. Men who were enrolled around this time or after are thought to be more competent in the home and were tied directly to newer subcultures developing around male domesticity, like “bentō danshi”

(Yuen 2014). In the textual and ethnographic examples I provide below, the efficacy of a father’s household labour is emphasized to the extent that attention to detail and form are read by mothers as expressions of dedication, commitment, and respect; or, broadly, as the sort of mama care described in the previous section. Furthermore, systemization and strategy involve increased attention to the perspective and needs of the mother, a naturalized figure of authority on childcare.

The Ikumen Passport (Cabinet Secretariat 2014) offers specific instruction in the proper techniques for holding, feeding, changing, and washing a baby, and tips for helping to avoid injury and detect illness. In one illustrated section dedicated to the subject of holding a baby, the mother observes and instructs the father throughout the process. His initial attempts, bouncing 216 the baby high in the air, are met with a punishing slap and a lecture on the importance of supporting the child’s weak neck. He asks if his second attempt is acceptable while his wife watches on, brow furrowed. Finally, the father’s perseverance is rewarded. While passing the baby to his wife, it bursts into tears, ceasing when it is returned to the father’s arms. His wife notes how content the child is with his father and offers words of encouragement: “papa fight!”.

The other instructional sections follow the same format: a watchful mother imparts knowledge to the struggling father, whose success is rewarded with adoration from both his child and his spouse. Here, the mother is figured as the authority in matters of childcare. The father appeals to her for help, is punished by her for his errors, endeavours to win her approval, and is rewarded with displays of deepening affection from his child. In each case, the father handles these tasks on his own. The mother watches from afar. The responsibility, ultimately, is his.

The New Papa’s Textbook (2015) dedicates a chapter to “Papa Techniques” with instructions in the preparation of simple dishes and changing diapers, among many other items of interest. The key concept reinforced through each of these lessons is the importance of “rhythm”

(rizumu), derived from the concept of circadian rhythm. “When adults wake up and go to bed at different times and eat meals scattered throughout the day, it means their physical condition is not clear/refined (sukkiri)” the book explains (2015: 86). As part of the developmental process, children need to be fed and put to sleep at regular intervals during the day, while parents need to accommodate the demands of work, chores, and maintaining their own health. The challenge of household labour lies in synchronizing the rhythm of each family member at a biological and social level. These instructional segments seek to rationalize the systemization of household labour through the hybridization of pop-biology and pop-psychology. Fathers must learn these underlying, immutable principles; a separate, physiological reality that shapes their interactions with family. 217

As in the Ikumen Passport (Cabinet Secretariat 2014), the figure of the mother is omnipresent in explanations of the technical elements of the performance of chores and childcare. The salient point the text attempts to make is that the contributions of the mother are often concealed in the father’s understanding of their own responsibilities. In one example, a simple chore— taking out the trash— is used to reveal this hidden labour. The text states that many fathers believe this is a task they complete on their own. However, they fail to conceptualize the act of “taking out the trash” in its entirety. Their spouse will typically collect the garbage from around the home, seal it in the garbage bag, and then hand it to the father to take to the garbage pickup site. Understanding—and taking responsibility for— a chore through from beginning to end is the essence of “Papa Techniques”. The fathering subject is one that carries this awareness of the scope and scale of the labour of the home; one that “sees” the entirety of the work performed by his partner and is proactive in taking on these responsibilities himself.

For my interlocutors, empathetic partnership often emerged through strategy and technique in household labour. Sogen is a 45-year-old father who works as a claims adjustor at a life insurance company. A member of a fathering circle in a neighborhood bordering my own,

Sogen and I would chat during the monthly papakai held in a narrow izakaya near the train station. His two teenage daughters, though deeply invested in their studies, contribute to household chores. Still, he and his wife continue with their division of labour that has carried over since they were infants, wary of upsetting the “balance” (baransu) they have established through years of negotiation. Unlike many other fathers in his age range, Sogen was no stranger to household chores prior to marriage. “Since before I got married, I have been able to iron shirts and cook because I lived alone when I began at my company” he explains. Today, he depends on his wife to complete these tasks while he focuses on washing the dishes and tidying around the 218 home. He had never particularly liked cooking and would “rather not do it, if at all possible”. He flags his feelings on cooking, in particular, as a point often overlooked by men proactively

(seikyokutekini) pursuing childcare and chores. A man’s wife “probably doesn’t enjoy doing chores herself, but she will still try her best every day and do them”. In contrast, new fathers exclusively pursue tasks that they enjoy, free of this broader sense of responsibility for the home.

On more than one occasion, I overheard him gently chastise a papakai attendee for their laissez- faire approach to childcare. The burden of chores, he would say to the offending party (perhaps for my benefit as well), must be acknowledged and shared. One cannot create an a-la-carte menu of tasks they are willing to do.

During one particularly lively evening, Sogen and I found ourselves seated at the bar while papakai members and regular bar patrons milled around the room. Leaning over, Sogen posed a curious solution to me: “wouldn’t it be good if men started doing chores that their wife hates? Moreover, wives could take special care of the chores that their husbands hate”. Many couples don’t speak truthfully, Sogen explains. If there is something that upsets you, you must make it clear to your spouse. This is how the division of labour is negotiated. If there are tasks you simply hate to do, tell your partner. Of course, communication must be reciprocal. “Papa’s must absolutely listen to their wives about chores” he says. If your wife is struggling, take over the task— not just for the day, but permanently. His concern, ultimately, is the impact of chores on the “happiness” of the individual. For Sogen, purposeful, compassionate systemization is important because there are an “infinite” number of chores. A single person is unable to realistically handle everything on their own, but sharing responsibilities creates a kind of reciprocity: partners have varied skill sets that can be complimentary. 219

In contrast with Sogen, Goro was far less intentional in his approach to chores. Given his initial difficulties in passively establishing a balance between his contribution’s and his wife’s, it came as a slight surprise to hear Goro advocate for a “system” for the division of labour based on initiative and intuition rather than routine and structure. I am invited to join Goro on a trip to the supermarket. Typically, fathers prefer to meet me at a bar or café when they have a reprieve from their responsibilities. Goro has been pressed for time recently, as he explained over LINE. It would be best to catch up while he was accomplishing some of his daily tasks. As he pushes his cart down the aisle, Goro tells me that housework can be “easily” negotiated by a couple if they approach each chore with the right intention. “Chores are best done if the person who first notices (that work needs to be done) does it. In terms of dividing roles, it is enough to say ‘I did it last time, so you do it this time’” he says. “I think that dividing housework completely evenly is impossible” he continues, “The couple must be adaptable (rinkiōhen)”. Goro views the labour of the home as existing in a kind of moral economy where work is invested then repaid in kind by their partner at a later date. The scales are never balanced in this scenario, because true equality here is figured as an impossibility. Adaptability, then, refers to both the ability to change the tasks one regularly performs to meet the needs of the home and the ability to endure or rationalize any inequalities in workload that arise.

I instinctively felt that Goro’s approach to household labour would create conditions in which his wife was prone to taking on the larger share. With Goro having established some distance between his family and his fathering circle, I did not have an opportunity to confirm these suspicions with his wife. The presence of his wife and her role in this ongoing negotiation over the division of labour was keenly felt nevertheless. One evening, I found a huffy Goro venting to attendees at a papakai. I had joined the conversation mid-way. Goro was describing, in detail, the proper technique for folding sheets, which I gathered had been sternly 220 communicated to him by his wife. At issue for Goro, he insisted, was not that his technique was insufficient, but that his wife had treated him dismissively and condescendingly in her efforts to correct him. “Pride should be considered in this kind of situation” he insisted. Though most fathers may lack technical skills in the home, he explained to his audience, communication between mothers and fathers must be respectful if they are to maintain balance in their relationship. The other fathers nodded in agreement.

Some weeks later, I encountered a peculiar scene in which the once indignant Goro displayed renewed attentiveness to the perception of his chore work. I once again joined Goro at

Marie’s first story Tokyo apartment, which features sliding glass doors leading out to a small backyard area. Steady rain over the course of the week had softened the ground and filled the buckets strewn around the garden. Goro’s daughter and Marie’s son were eager to get out in the muck. Marie and I slipped on shoes and joined the kids outside. We perched on the small patio space while they frolicked barefoot in the mud, ineffectively waving about a bubble wand. Goro, meanwhile, busied himself inside, putting away a train set that had been scattered across the living room floor earlier that day. “It’s OK, leave it alone!” Marie hollered. I was surprised to see

Goro tidying up in someone else’s home. This was a mess that existed before he had even arrived. I was slightly concerned that his behaviour might be read by Marie as an implicit critique of her own ability to manage her home, but quickly found Goro was locked into a force of habit. Later in the day, after indulging in a few chū hai’s (flavoured alcoholic beverages),

Goro quickly gathered our cans, deposited them in the recycling, and began handwashing our cups. “Stop it!” Marie scolded him playfully. Goro apologized sheepishly, explaining that this is how he has conditioned himself to behave in his own home. He wants to leave no trace of his activities for his wife to come home to at the end of a long day, and so is diligent about cleaning 221 up after playtime, doing the dishes as soon as a meal is over, and generally ensuring that there is no spillover from his housework.

Within the fathering movement, conflict between spouses such as the one experienced by

Goro often served as a catalyst for the strategic implementation of new chore and childcare techniques. The Super Daddy Association held a symposium on the topic of couple’s quarrels

(fūfu genka) in Shibuya68, inviting couples to join a frank discussion about sources of tension within their relationships. The commentary provided by one participant, a working mother of three called by the family name Sato, was noteworthy. Sato-san began by explaining the untenable conditions she found herself in shortly after marriage:

“When we became a couple, I was weaker than my husband so there was a time when I

couldn't fight. I was always frustrated, thinking about work while doing housework. I

kept giving out an "Irritation Aura" and sending telepathic signals to my husband.

However, my husband was more concerned with his smartphone while watching the TV

(laughs) and told me that he didn't want to go home to a frustrated wife. Finally, my

anger exploded".

In an effort to change her husband’s approach to housework, Sato-san began to record and track the completion of tasks using an Excel form. Each task had a point value attached to it. This way,

Sato-san could quantify the amount of work that was completed by herself, her husband, and outsourced to paid services. She provided her husband with glossy charts and graphs illustrating the gap in his contributions to the home numerically. “I thought that it would be easier to speak

68 This session was held after I had left the field. I was provided with a recording of the symposium via social media. 222 in the common language of work because both the family and the company are run in the same way” Sato-san explained to the audience. “The family is an organization, we have a budget, it runs like a company. It seems that it is easier for my husband to imagine if I talked from that perspective”. The approach outlined by Sato-san, which emphasizes regimentation and responsibility in a way the mirrors accountability to the corporation, clashes with the affective focus of much of the fathering movements texts on chore work.

Training fathers in techniques and strategies for improving accountability in the same vein as Sato-san’s argument has proven lucrative for the entrepreneurially minded. I was made aware of this during a particularly raucous evening at Bar Cero. Attendees were being treated to an informal cooking demonstration organized by Koji and the founder of the wildly popular father’s cooking organization “Bistro Papa”, Takimura-san. Koji’s young waitress tends to the drinks of the men crowded around the counter while he rolls up his sleeves and dons his apron.

Space is at a premium in CERO, and so the bulk of the actual cooking happens off to the corner of the far end of the bar, where a small kitchenette is embedded in the wall. As a result, the focus is less on the process of preparing the dishes planned for the night than the ingredients and, of course, the tasting that would follow. Takimura-san shows us some of the staples of the pasta dish he plans to prepare today— cream, octopus, and caviar, the latter of which sparks particular interest among attendees. “It is delicious, but it is not necessary if you don’t have any”

Takimura-san explains. Our appetizer is standard bar fare: ika no shiokara, an incredibly salty and pungent mix of squid and their fermented viscera, served cold. I’m politely warned about the polarizing nature of this dish, but I had long before developed a fondness for its powerful flavour. Koji, tonight’s sous-chef, ladles out a thin stew of root vegetables and fish into bowls at the far end of the counter before sliding them (carefully) to his eager patrons. While some men hold Takimura-san’s attention for a few minutes, asking questions about various techniques and 223 dishes, there is a lot of chatter and almost no formal instruction. Bistro Papa’s Cooking Cram

School, the primary offering of Takimura-san’s successful business venture, is a serious affair.

Takimura-san is emblematic of the explosion of entrepreneurial activity that has occurred within the fathering movement since its inception. The Ikumen Boom created significant demand for goods targeting fathers taken up by manufacturers of clothing, toys, and childcare accessories. However, it also created a market for fathers to monetize their carefully cultivated skill sets and fathering experience as trainers and consultants. Their services appeal to fathers struggling to cope with their responsibilities and to corporations implementing family-focused

HR systems. The emergence of what I call “papa entrepreneurs” represents a curious twist in this discussion of household labour: some fathers have begun to “sell” their expertise in household labour on the open market. Takimura-san’s business is based on the principle that men cannot simply “cook”. Rather, cooking becomes as an activity oriented around one’s partner situated within the broader context of household labour. As in the materials produced by the state and the fathering movement discussed earlier in this section, the mother serves as the primary point of surveillance and assessment in Takimura-san’s method.

Takimura-san, the “cooking papa”, is among the most successful in this sphere. While

Bistro Papa’s Cooking School is its most famous project, the organization offers an array of corporate services. Classes can be commissioned by companies on a variety of topics related to cooking and more broadly to questions of work life balance. Lectures like “More papas at home

– the family smiles with papa’s cooking”, which provides cooking instruction and inspiration to employees while espousing the benefits of spending time on chores, cleave closely to Bistro

Papa’s stated aims. Other offerings venture further afield: “To eat is to live ~ Body friendly food is also friendly to children ~” focuses on meal planning and nutrition, while “A way of life to 224 create “profession” – a challenge of a papa culinary researcher – “is a platform for Takimura-san to speak about his experience as an entrepreneur. From the online store, visitors can purchase cookbooks, tote bags, and a variety of brightly coloured aprons for both children and adults.

The strength of Takimura-san’s personal narrative, in which he progresses from absentee father to chore hobbyist to committed partner in the labour of the home, renders the common experiences of fathers in a way that has helped him gain traction in mainstream media. “When I was single,” he tells me, “I ate out all the time. I would never cook at home”. As a newlywed, his wife would prepare meals, but for Takimura-san— who worked long hours as a corporate PR strategist— household chores were off the table. Takimura-san’s eldest daughter was born in

2003, and it was her entrance into his life that precipitated tremendous change in his habits. He couldn’t justify being away from the home so often (not to mention the additional expenditure on meals), and he had a new mouth to feed. Cooking began as a casual interest for him that he pursued because he enjoyed it— a curiosity he could explore at his leisure. It was, in his words,

“a sort of inconvenience” to his wife, who scolded him for approaching this household responsibility so selfishly and without respect for the additional work it was creating (dishes, garbage generation, grocery shopping etc.). This encouraged Takimura-san to consider a family- oriented approach to cooking, especially following the birth of their second child. “I became a father who remembered his family” he says.

While this is a story that many patrons of Bistro Papa identify with intimately, Takimura- san’s efforts are inspiring in the broader context of the hardships he has endured as a father. Papa

Cooking Cram School attendees receive the following letter upon registration, penned by

Takimura-san, which I present here translated in full: 225

14 years ago, I started cooking as a result of my eldest daughter Yurika being born. When

I noticed the fun of cooking, I cooked dishes I wanted to make on the weekend and arranged it on the table. Even though I did not wash up after, I thought I was doing something good. I realized that cooking in the kitchen was my hobby as my family became less than delighted (with my actions). Then, I resolved that “I will make father’s home cooking for my family and spread it to others”. My second daughter was born, and almost every day I made a daddy dish and uploaded it to my blog. I retired from the company where I served 14 years, and in April 2009 launched my independent start-up

Bistro Papa Co., Ltd. I formed this company in order to create a world where the father cooks for the family. As my children grew bigger, I enjoyed their help in the kitchen.

I always thought that this family would be able to enjoy and eat meals together. Then, there was a day I could never have imagined. In February 2011, my eldest daughter suddenly stopped walking, and received an examination at a university hospital. A tumor was found in her brain. It was an incurable, serious, serious, serious disease. All my family supported Yurika. When the disease was found and she was undergoing radiotherapy, the Great East Japan Great Earthquake occurred. In those days I did not know if it was a dream or reality.

My daughter’s disease progressed so quickly: she could not walk, she could not speak, she was impaired, she could not swallow. We would go to the hospital, everyone in my family would desperately care for her with the belief that the illness is sure to heal, as miracles happen. I desperately made food to help her become healthy and so that the disease can be cured as well, so that her immune system would be improved even a little.

In December, after the symptoms worsened and she was carried by an ambulance, Yurika 226

lost consciousness and was put on an intravenous drip. Despite being able to cook so

much, my daughter could not eat my food. Yurika left for heaven on January 12, 2012, 8

years and 8 months of age.

The number of times the family eats meal together is limited. We can’t know when

someone will be transferred (to a new job), when they will enter nursing care, or when

they will become ill. To eat is to live. To cook someone’s food, to make someone take

advantage of this. To be able to cook is to be able to be free. I, my partner, and my family

can be free. Because you are living healthily, please give someone their freedom by

cooking with compassion. I wanted to start a cooking school for people who love family

and friends, to make friends, to challenge yourself, and to develop culinary skills to help

you live 100 years. With this idea, I set up “Dad’s Cooking School”. Even once, I want to

increase the number of people who sit around the table with a smile.

In the centre of Takimura-san’s red apron, which he wears proudly in all of his Bistro Papa appearances, there is a spiral drawn in white. Following its tail clockwise and you reach two dots and a small circle in the centre: a smile Yurika drew years ago.

The Papa Cooking Cram School is, as the name implies, a cooking class targeting men who want to learn to navigate the kitchen. Eight participant fathers and Takimura-san meet one evening a week after work for the 6-week duration of the course, which runs around 30,000 yen

($350 CAD) per person. The classes begin with the basics: knife work, measurements, and

Japanese staples like miso soup and yaki udon. By the end of the course, participants are deep frying tempura, serving Italian classics, and handcrafting sweets to give to their wives on White

Day. In addition to specifying that applicants should be “beginners” who “want to be able to make every-day home cooked meals”, Papa Cooking Cram School materials suggest that 227 applicants should resolve that “from now on, my work style— persisting in independence, entrepreneurialism, side jobs, two jobs, and regional or NPO activities— is ‘I want to live my way’”. The decision to participate actively in household chores and childcare is positioned in this passage as an expression of the entrepreneurial spirit. In this sense, the father-as-entrepreneur exists as an implicit critique of the father-as-salaryman. The former provides for the family with and through passion. He is an active parenting agent as much as he is an independent economic agent: both realms are shaped by his choices as an individual, entrepreneurial subject. They

“rejuvenate” the national polity as drivers of business and social reform through their influence over father/clients. The father-as-salaryman provides with and through a sense of obligation. His is a web of dependencies that persist regardless of his feelings. He maintains the national polity by ensuring that the family/corporation replicate themselves and that the core set of values is consistently transmitted between these institutions and down through generations.

During the demonstration at Bar CERO, Takimura-san emphasized the fact that his program was about creating habits and ingraining practices, hence the juku format. There are two systems instituted in service of these goals that deserve closer attention. The first is the “Papa

Cooking Cram School Review Check Sheet”. This online form, which is tailored to each course and shared with participants, tracks the progress made by fathers translating the skills acquired in class to the home. In the centre of the form is a chart. In the left-hand column, the names of the dishes students were taught are listed. Following the dishes, a list of cooking related chores: shopping, tidying up, taking out the garbage etc. Below chores, a single row is set aside for the family comprehensive evaluation. Along the top of the chart, running out towards the right, are the surnames of all the participants in the session. Using the guidelines provided, students are meant to track their progress in these three areas with the results visible to all other members of the group. Participants are instructed to prepare a “review dish” for their family within two 228 weeks of class. Beside each dish, students enter symbols corresponding to “failure (no attempt)”,

“attempted (though not necessarily successfully)”, “first success”, and “second success (the top grade)”. Similarly, there is a four-point system for the chore section: “failure (no attempt)”,

“pointed out by wife”, “implemented”, and “habitualized”. The family comprehensive evaluation progresses from “no good” to “personally satisfied” to “father and mother or child satisfied” and finally “the whole family is very happy”. This section is considered “comprehensive” because the family is encouraged to factor chore performance into their score. Fathers who score in the third or fourth level for all meals and related assessments “pass” the first grade of Papa Cooking

Cram School.

The second system for accountability comes in the form of “Papa Stay-At-Home

Tickets”. These tickets are given to the wives of men who attend the Papa Cooking Cram School.

By entering a timeframe in the space provided, women can redeem these vouchers for a day free of childcare responsibilities, which their husbands are obligated to dutifully perform in their stead. Similar systems have made for popular Mother’s Day gifts inside and outside of Japan, but here they have been implemented by Takimura-san to provide women with some measure of leverage over their husbands. Taken together with the Review Check Sheet, these mechanisms for accountability emphasize surveillance and supervision by other family members— especially mothers. In so doing, Takimura-san tries to bridge the gap between the father’s proactive and self-focused attempts to initiate change and the disciplinary structures that help mould behaviour.

5.5 Conclusion

In this chapter, I examined the way chores and childcare are conceptualized as a form of care for one’s spouse within the fathering movement. Household labour becomes a medium through which the father can express solidarity, commitment, and understanding. On one level, 229 this approach signals a departure from the daikokubashira, a model of male household contributions contested by the fathering movement as being antiquated and driven by a purely economic logic. On another level, it encourages men to consider how their performance of household labour is perceived— what their actions “say” to their partner— rather than strictly consider its efficacy. However, chore work “says” different things to different groups of people.

For some of my male interlocutors, their domestic efforts make them targets for critique among friends, co-workers, and spouses. For women, who are figured as managers or teachers in instructional materials, the fathering movement’s focus on the meaning behind household labour distracts from the exigency of care work. To the extent that women do serve as reluctant

“managers” of the home, women are ultimately held responsible for the effective completion of these tasks as they are read by the general public and, as a result, place a higher value on competent and self-directed efforts from men. Following this line of reasoning, the strategic systematization of household chores employed in some families (and professionalized by one entrepreneurially minded father) utilizes a logic of efficiency and accountability smuggled in from corporate environments.

In the following chapter, I shift perspectives from the home and family life of my interlocutors to their involvement in their communities. I introduce the concept of “ikimen”, an ikumen derivative popularized by the fathering movement. Ikimen represent the transition of concern with the health and well-being of one’s family to the health and well-being of the community in which they are embedded. Indeed, much of the work of the fathering movement is concerned with integrating men into what might be broadly described as civil society. I argue that casual gatherings of fathers, joined by men in their capacity as fathers, marks an emerging form of male sociality. This is a process of overcoming certain gendered boundaries in the use of 230 space (schools, parks, and nurseries) and encouraging men to engage with one another outside of the confines of corporate drinking rituals and their attendant obligations.

Chapter 6 Rearing the Community 6.1 Men Out of Place

The basement of the Asagaya Community Centre is not quite “dingy”, but it certainly lacks polish. The poor lighting and off-cream paint job make it feel like an eerie, abandoned hospital. The room I’m seated in is large enough to comfortably fit 50 people or more, but today the chairs have been folded up and stacked in the foyer by the reception desk. In their place, large mats have been scattered on the floor. Mothers sit, legs crossed, fussing with their children and chatting. I sit in one of the few chairs remaining at the back, watching Ando and company set up their instruments and unpack their books. Behind them, brightly coloured balloons knotted in the shape of quarter notes line staff pasted on the wall. In tune with the décor, the room comes well stocked with equipment for musical performances—drums, keyboards, speakers, 231 switchboards, and microphones. Most are in varying states of disrepair. Fortunately, the men have brought their own tools of the trade: a guitar, slap drum, ukulele, and a few smaller instruments tucked away in a bag. Held as part of the Asagaya Mama Expo, I arrived expecting this edition of Papa’s Picture Book Sing Along to have more women in attendance than men.

Still, the imbalance is striking. I count 6 men in the room: The performers Ando, Tanaka, and

Nishimura, myself, a photographer working as part of the event crew, and, sat on the mats among the mothers and children, a solitary father. The solitary father was a heavyset man with small, round glasses and a mask covering his mouth. His business attire made it seem as though he had somehow gotten lost on his way to the office.

The session begins with a few short words of thanks to the organizers from Ando, who introduces Fathering Japan’s mission to increase the number of “smiling fathers”. He delivers a well-rehearsed line to close his remarks: “From Okinawa to Hokkaido, we are all Papas”. At this point the performers take their positions: Nishimura in the lead, Tanaka perched on the slap drum, and Ando, clad in a denim apron with his acoustic guitar in hand. Ando’s garb reminds me of the children’s musicians of my own childhood. Like Fred Penner or Raffi, Ando’s love of the music of his youth— Queen and David Bowie, versus Raffi’s Simon and Garfunkel— comes through in his gentle swagger and casual ponytail. The children, timid at first, inch closer to the trio of performers as the session progresses. They whip through their set at breakneck speed, their enthusiasm infectious. Nishimura has the audience rolling with laughter with his rendition of “Bōshi Tottara” (“When You Take Off a Hat”). Each page of the book by the same name features a character with a hat printed on a flap. When the flap is raised it reveals a hidden item resting upon their head. Nishimura teaches the children to mime along with the song: they cup their hands over their head to mimic a helmet or hop around on the mats when the ears on a rabbit’s head pop out from beneath its cap. 232

As they approach the end of the hour, Ando and Tanaka gesture towards the solitary father, asking him to join them at the front. He bashfully demurs, his voice barely audible. They persist, coaxing him forward without stretched hands, wide smiles, and reassuring nods. He eventually relents, perching himself precariously atop a small stool before the crowd of toddlers and mothers. He is given a picture book, which he cautiously holds aloft and at a distance, as though it were some fragile, priceless artefact. Ando and company burst back into song, a merry band trotting around one clearly uncomfortable father. Watching the musicians for his cue, he flips through the pages of the book as the song progresses: a retelling of the story of the Three

Billy Goats Gruff (which, judging from some audience commentary, the children excitedly and mistakenly believe is the classic Hayao Miyazaki character “Totoro”). The children who are old enough to follow the lyrics and plot roar with laughter; the others lie on the floor or stare at their mothers as they gently attempt to direct their attention to the performance. Everyone applauds the now beet-faced father at the performance’s conclusion. He gives a few curt, nervous bows before shuffling away.

With today’s session completed, I join Nishimura at the front of the room to ask about the music— all of which he composed himself— as the crowd filters out. In my peripheries, I see

Ando pull aside the sole father. His wife and child have already departed. Ando speaks to the father in a low voice, inaudible at this distance. His face is kind and imploring. He eventually hands him a pamphlet before they separate with a series of grateful bows. “Do you think he is a potential Fathering Japan member?” I later ask Ando as he packs up his things. Whether or not he establishes any formal affiliation is beside the point, he replies. “I hope he can find support so he can enjoy time with his child to the utmost. Seeing other fathers, speaking with other fathers: these are the most important things” Ando concludes. 233

In this chapter, I look at fathering as a means of generating new social spaces, or legitimating men’s presence in spaces from which they have been excluded. The image of the sole father before a room of women and children, a man out of place, was one that lingered in my mind long after that event. The men behind him— fathers with such dedication to childcare that it has become their career— are a sharp point of contrast. Beyond the passion and ease of interaction displayed by men like Ando, Nishimura, and Tanaka, their camaraderie represents the promise of the fathering movement: a coalition of men anchored around this shared identity. The man perched on the stool is emblematic not only of fathers who feel adrift in a world of diapers and bottles, but of those “without a place” (ibasho ga nai). Many of my interlocutors would identify with him, having at one point or another experienced this sort of discomfit. As a response, members of the fathering movement have created localized, informal, and relatively egalitarian masculine spaces either through participation in existing community organizations or through their own “Fathering Circles”: a kind of support group for fathers.

The feelings of placelessness and the recurring question of ibasho to which the Fathering

Circle responds unsettles common-sense assumptions regarding the relationship between ibasho and economic and social precarity. Citing the work of activist and writer Karin Amamiya,

Allison (2012: 357) highlights “…the psychic turmoil of being a Japanese worker who lacks affiliation (shozoku). This is what companies once provided and still do for their seishain69

(regular workers): a steady salary, protection in crisis, and an identity. Irregular workers, by contrast, are on their own, struggling to make a living, and, in what has become a pervasive complaint, bereft of an ibasho”. As this passage suggests, this phenomenon is often interpreted as an effect of a bifurcated labour market and the social atomization brought on by austerity

69 See Chapter 2. 234 measures and a receding social safety net. Yet, among my interlocutors this lack of affiliation and ibasho were keenly felt. These are the supposed “winners” of the new economic order; those who live the kind of life of relative economic security and class identity denied to a growing number of citizens. Many were drawn to fathering after feeling isolated, exploited, and stifled by work-a-day life. Yet, as I have illustrated in the preceding chapters, men also struggle to carve out a place for themselves in the private sphere. This difficulty is nothing new. Keiko Higuchi argues that the father, long removed from the family, “…no longer has a space to call his own, which means that he has become a veritable intruder in his own home” (in Jolivet 1997). Pushing beyond the notion that Japan is a fatherless society, famous psychoanalyst Hayao Kawai claimed that Japan was the country of the “great mother” (in Jolivet 1997). This sense of alienation extends to and is acutely felt in those spaces aligned with the public outside the realm of work: cafes, park space, and community centres, among many others. The frequency with which I encountered these sentiments brought to my attention an important question: what salience do conceptions of the “public” and “private” spheres have for fathers when it would seem they belong in neither?

My intent here is not to provide a concrete answer but to think through what this problematization of the public/private divide makes possible for fathers. Though the distinction between public and private was one regularly invoked by my informants, it carries some baggage from an anthropological perspective. It is useful to begin from Collier and Yanagisako’s (1987) premise that these categories are “a feature of anthropological discourse rather than of the social or symbolic systems of the societies studied by anthropologists” (Moore in del Valle 1993: 193).

The public/private distinction is itself the product of a Western folk model of social organization in which it exists as one transformation of its sister dyads: nature/culture and production/reproduction. 235

As such, I do not take for granted the oppositional nature of public and private in the

Japanese case. While Chapter 2 of this dissertation provides a more thorough overview of the historical constitution of the public and private in Japan, I’ll remind readers here that during the

Meiji Restoration the division of gendered duties into public and private spaces was enforced in law and discursively validated through texts produced by public intellectuals intending to shape an ideal national polity. This is reflected in the writings of prominent thinkers like Yukichi

Fukuzawa, who wrote “that men pursue their duties without while women govern within is the principle of division of labour (bungyō no mune)” in Minkan Keizairoku (Popular Political

Economy), 1877 (Sekiguchi 2010:98). Philosopher Inoue Tetsujiro echoed these sentiments, stating that ‘once a family is formed, a necessity for husband and wife to divide their labours arises. That is, the husband goes outside to pursue his business, while the wife stays inside to perform the housework’ (Sekiguchi 2010:102). Some hundred years later, Kondo provided an ethnographic account of the gendering of space in the context of small family firms in Tokyo which illustrates the continued importance afforded of the public/private distinction. She leans on a parallel dyad: the distinction between inside (uchi) and outside (soto)70. Expanding on her framing of ie, Kondo explains: “The term uchi describes a located perspective: the in-group, the

“us” facing outward to the world… uchi focuses on the household in close-up, as a center of belonging and attachment” (1990:141). Where uchi is informal, intimate, and private, soto is public and disciplined. It is in the process of making these distinctions that relationships are constituted (Kondo 1990:152). Kondo’s analysis is reflected in the work of domestic thinkers as well (beyond Chie Nakane, whose work on the history of ie greatly influenced Kondo’s). For

70 It is important to emphasize that uchi and soto connote actual, spatial distinctions between the home and the world at large. The elegance of Kondo’s argument comes from the interplay between the materiality of the ie and the way its physical structure is mirrored through sign. 236 example, Murakami Yasusuke described Japan as an “ie shakai” (household society) built on the organizing principle of “ba71” (place) (in Brinton 2011).

For my interlocutors, the male dominated corporate world was not synonymous with this notion of public as that which lies outside the home. Following Nancy Fraser (1990), the broad conceptualization of the public sphere “…conflates at least three analytically distinct things: the state, the official economy of paid employment, and arenas of public discourse” (57). This

“official economy of paid employment” existed for fathers as a sliver of the social that bleeds into bars and restaurants in afterwork meetings with clients and co-workers. The “true” public sphere exists elsewhere: in neighborhoods, schools, and parks and public space. The reduction of the public to production conceals the way the public is understood by the fathering movement as primarily being composed of sites of reproduction: for the rejuvenation of the body, social ties and, crucially, for the development of children. There was a prevailing sense that these sites of reproduction— and not just the home— were feminine space in which fathers were unwelcome and potentially dangerous pollutants or trespassers72 (Douglas 1966). This discomfit was framed as a product of custom but also of practice. In other words, men might learn to access this space.

I begin by introducing the concept of ikimen: fathers who embrace their community as key stakeholders in the childrearing project. I draw on textbooks, blog posts, lectures, and insights shared by interlocutors in order to outline this figure. I then present stories of community making members of the fathering movement I came to know during my time in Tokyo in two sections. The first focuses on the reflections of the leader of a fathering circle. My primary

71 For Yasusuke, ba flourished as a principle of social organization under conditions of isolation and enclosure— specifically, sakoku (national isolation) during the Tokugawa period (see Brinton 2011).

72 While it is beyond the scope of my discussion in this chapter, it is important to note that this belief requires some ignorance of the profound isolation experienced by many primary caregivers. This was a sentiment commonly expressed by mothers and by fathers who took extended leaves of absence from work for childcare. 237 interlocutor in this scene plans his departure from the group as his family life evolves. The second is a unique PTA-adjacent unit composed entirely of fathers that served at a school where

I worked as an instructor. My attention here is divided between their participation in the school culture festival and their annual general meeting.

6.2 Ikimen

Reviewing lecture notes I had collected from Fathering Japan seminars, I was struck by a claim made in one lecture slide from the now defunct Papa School: “children are your passport to the region’s society”. The statement brings to mind the work of Enloe (1989:21), who claimed

“in many societies being feminine has been defined as sticking close to home. Masculinity, by contrast, has been the passport for travel”. Writing about men in Japan, Gill (in Roberson and

Suzuki 2003) extends the scope of Enloe’s argument “… to include more mundane forms of mobility, such as the simple journeying between home and workplace” (144). Where the scope of access for masculine subjects is implied here to be expansive— an unmatched freedom of association on a scale both large and small— for my interlocutors the “simple journey between home and workplace” is not just an addendum: it is the totality of their social and physical mobility. With the recession in the 1990s and the wave of closures and downsizing that followed came the term “industrial waste” (sangyō haikibutsu). As a description of corporate warriors without a “war” left to fight, this moniker captured men’s loss of value in both a social and economic sense; a troublesome by-product of capitalism’s endless march forward. Rejected by their employers, they faced hostility from wives who had no interest in surrendering their authority in the home and from children who had no place in their regimented lives of study and extra-curricular activity for a father that had until now abandoned parental responsibility in favour of workplace obligations. In the analogy of the passport, children are figured as an exit 238 from the shrinking kingdom of corporate masculinity that is, in a sense, formalized and socially accepted. The father, like the passport holder, possesses this standardized marker of citizenship.

I found the children-as-passport analogy recurring though an array of presentations and texts. In a seminar for the Mie Gender Equality Centre, Fathering Japan’s Shingo Fujimori

(2014) describes children as a father’s “strong ally”. “It is a hurdle to face local events and festivals on your own,” Fujimori says, “but it should be easier if you take your child and attend as a companion. If you show your face not once but two or three times, beginning with the fathers and mothers of your children’s friends, you’ll find other opportunities to get to know other people in the area. Children are ‘passports’ for community involvement”. Using the child as “a passport to local society”, the New Papa’s Textbook (2015: 154—155) calls for a “Park

Debut” (koen debyū): fathers bringing their infants and toddlers to parks or similar social spaces as a means of introducing themselves. The child is a kind of social conduit, serving as common grounds for concern and legitimating the presence of the father. In contrast, a male citizen who is not a father wouldn’t have the same sort of social or physical mobility through non-corporate space.

If children are indeed a father’s “passport to society”, they do little to guarantee safe passage. My interlocutors felt this insecurity acutely in spaces that have been coded as female.

Kenichi, the sushi chef and primary childcare provider introduced in Chapter 3, provides a compelling example. I became acquainted with Kenichi through an ex-pat friend who lives in the same neighborhood, Lisa (also introduced in Chapter 3). The story of Kenichi’s “park debut” — the moment when the two became good friends— was presented to me as a quirky comedy of errors. The scene was described as follows: Lisa sits in the park while her son plays on the jungle gym. She recognizes one or two mothers who frequent the spot, but she sees a man standing conspicuously distant from the other adults. While not alarming, this is an odd sight: a man, 239 seemingly alone, in a park. He approaches Lisa cautiously. Lisa, too, is cautious. Is he a chikan

(pervert)? Is he here to cruise for single moms? He sits a respectful distance from her on the bench. They exchange a few words of greeting. He looks at her, imploringly, on the edge of words. Lisa suddenly bolts upright: Kenichi! Eri’s husband! She had barely recognized him. Or, perhaps it’s better to say that she was not expecting to find him in a park. Still, Lisa worried that if she were seen with Kenichi, other women may get the wrong impression and gossip could spread. She was often the centre of attention (she stands out as a blonde, white woman in a suburban part of Tokyo), but the optics were not good. Now, she assures me, all the women at the park know Kenichi.

Many of my interlocutors relayed stories similar to Kenichi. Their examples bring to mind early anthropological work on the subject of taboo (Leach 1967, Schieffelin 2005) and safeguarding gendered space against “sexual danger” or “pollution” (Douglas 1966:4). Almost all would note that it was exceedingly rare to see other fathers in the park, and often used this line of questioning to reveal feelings of isolation and discomfort when entering spaces typically reserved for women and children. When Fathering Japan lecturer Toshiro first took to fathering, for example, he recalls there being very few fathers at his local park (although he adds that they are becoming more common). Pivoting from the prompt, he tells me that when he began attending parenting classes at the local community centre the nursing mothers thought he was a chikan. It took them quite a while to warm up to him. He also described feelings of apprehension bringing his daughter into the men’s washroom to change her, transgressing the norms of this space in a way that may signal sexual deviancy. Perhaps the most striking example I came across was the story of a father who was interrogated by police while riding the shinkansen (bullet train) with his daughter on his way to visit his parents under suspicion of kidnapping. The father, a manga-ka (manga artist/author) and avid daddy blogger, documented his experience in an 240 account that was widely circulated on social media. The father was adamant in declining to comment on the incident to media outlets, at least in part to conceal the traumatic incident from his elderly parents. They eventually caught wind and sent him a simple text: “We saw the news.

Come again without doing it the hard way”.

These feelings of discomfit —and even criminality— among fathers moving through

“estrogen filled worlds” (Doucet 2006) are not unique to the Japanese case. However, in its formulation of the problem and potential solutions, the fathering movement has positioned itself at the forefront of a sweeping critique of male sociality writ large. The term “ikimen” has recently emerged as a graduated form of the ikumen that promises not only the integration of fathers into existing social spaces, but the generation of entirely novel ones. Ikimen is yet another neologism situated in a complicated web of interrelated masculine archetypes whose nomenclature plays off the peculiarities of the Japanese language. While typically written in phonetic katakana, the “iki” of “ikimen” is drawn from the word “chīki” (地域), which can be translated literally as “area” or “region”. I was also told that the “iki” of “ikimen” might refer to the adverb “ikiiki” — to be lively and active. In either case, an ikimen is a father who is involved in his community through various forms of volunteerism. In addition to contributing to the revitalization of the Japanese economy73, it is through this movement into and contribution to civil society that ikimen are imagined as the driving force behind a project of national renewal. A flyer I came across advertising an ikimen lecture hosted by Fathering Japan offered the most explicit rendering of this objective: “If papa shines, the child will smile, the family will be bright, and society will be healthy. A lifestyle where papas enjoy raising their children is the start of a rejuvenated Japan!”. More than a project of social “reform” or “change”, as the Ikumen Project

73 See Chapter 2. 241 first positioned itself in 2011, ikimen are associated with “rejuvenation”. The term harkens back to Japan’s boom years, promising a return to order, power, and potential. Japan’s implicit figuration here is withered and aged, a reflection both of its demographics and economy: stagnant and futureless. The potential for renewal lies not in the isolated figure of the child

(Edelman 2004), but in the relationship between father and child and the passage into the social this relationship supposedly secures.

Ikimen, then, are men “that raise their region” (Fathering Japan 2015: 156) hailed by a moral call (Muehlebach 2012) that reaches them as fathers, as men, and as citizens. As fathers, ikimen are framed as recognizing that childcare necessitates close connections with schools, doctors, supportive parents, and government personnel, among a host of other invested parties.

This network of relations brings to mind the English adage “it takes village to raise a child”. It is the father’s responsibility to “make” the village: to ensure that these relationships are cultivated and form a community unified in intent and purpose. As men, ikimen are implored to forge bonds of masculine solidarity that extend beyond the workplace. An extensive “papa network” provides both practical and moral support. As citizens, ikimen are tasked with taking on organizational roles in local schools and community programs. Ikimen must work in solidarity with the primarily female members of organizations where their presence is still considered unorthodox.

Moving beyond the boundaries of the household and the corporation, the ikimen is informed and aware of the issues his community faces. His service to the family, the neighborhood, and to Japan is structured by a recursive set of motivations. However, there is another force that drives the ikimen. Parenting blog “Lv. Papa” describes ikimen-hood as “a project of making your own ibasho” (Hanada 2017). “Not just finishing with a roundtrip between work and home, it (the term ikimen) indicates a Papa that has a place in his local area where he assertively pursues his own activities” the article proclaims (Hanada 2017). The creation of 242 ibasho— a space of belonging— where one can “pursue (their) own activities” suggests that the ikimen is not necessarily a selfless actor driven by obligation to his family. Rather, the ikimen discourse attends to the problem of individuation and placelessness by making fatherhood a community building project motivated by desires beyond establishing favourable conditions for the growth and development of one’s own child. Fatherhood promises men the opportunity to slip the bindings of corporate sociality: to find a space of belonging among likeminded men who associate voluntarily rather than because they are obligated to do so. Offering a vision of a life of potential, opportunity, and choice (via freedom of association) rather than inevitability and expectation, Lv. Papa concludes: “If we can make friends not in the workplace but in the area where we live, we can definitely live a fulfilling life” (Hanada 2017).

6.3 The Fathering Circle

Over the course of fieldwork, I heard and read a vast array of suggestions offered to fathers searching for friendship and community. Attending events held by Fathering Japan or similar organizations, lectures at community centres, PTA meetings, or a simple trip to the park were among the most common. Of course, even these preliminary steps are a bridge too far for some men. Fathers with infants, for example, are particularly prone to social isolation as their child is not yet old enough to participate in school functions. As a result, there is a demand for informal, localized meeting groups that target men directly and require that they meet no greater criteria than simply being fathers. Fathering Japan has worked to legitimate and spread awareness of these community groups for men by branding them. The “Fathering Circle”

(fāzāringu sakuru) is a space to connect with likeminded fathers in the community. Increasingly, the interaction between Fathering Circle members is digital, though semi-regular outings to the 243 parks or to bars (sans children) are typical. Those who are particularly motivated may organize larger events or volunteer at local festivals, but this is by no means a requirement. A Fathering

Circle meeting or digital forum is a space to air one’s worries or insecurities about childcare, to boast about your children knowing others will join in turn, and to ask for recommendations and assistance for topics ranging from school enrolment to medical concerns.

Hideyo, the nominal leader of one such Fathering Circle, had a well of patience that always seemed limitless. At 5 years old, his son, Makoto, was mischief and ill-intent clad in

Oshkosh. Though shy in my presence, he tore a swath through the streets of Tokyo once I slipped out of sight. Strolling through Omotesando, is mother, Reina, and I would practice our rusty French while, mere steps ahead, Makoto swung from his father’s shoulders, pulling hair, yanking buttons off coats, and shouting nonsense. Once, while a groggy Hideyo steered his exuberant son through a subway car, Bun (a personal friend of Hideyo) remarked to me that

Makoto “says terrible things in a sweet way”. He may be troublesome, but in brief moments of calm, he is incredibly affectionate. Seated on Hideyo’s lap at our table in a café, Makoto nuzzles his harried father before telling him that he is slow because he is “too old to play”. Makoto’s assessment is a bit harsh. Hideyo, while beleaguered, is sharp, incisive, and capable. These are qualities that have served him well in his fathering circle, a group of about 15 men with children below the age of 5 that meet sporadically for playdates or drinking parties and provide helpful advice and support via their LINE chat group and other social media channels.

Hideyo spent his 20s hopping between large American companies in management positions. “I’ve changed firms many times in my life, but not once have I worked for a Japanese owned company” he once mused to me. This was a distinction between himself and other fathers that Hideyo was careful to assert. Had he found himself employed by a Japanese firm, his path through life and through fatherhood would have likely been very different. He had developed in 244 corporations with a stronger sense of separation between work and life. Team building was done in workshops and retreats as much as nomikai afterhours. He typically worked abroad or with visiting foreign clients who did not have the same strict expectations regarding business entertainment. Hideyo eventually quit work to pursue an MBA in Paris. It was during this time abroad that Reina, who had also decided to leave her corporation to accompany Hideyo and continue her studies, became pregnant with Makoto. They returned to Japan for his birth. Hideyo resettled in Tokyo a dramatically different man from the workaholic that departed two years prior. He was now an MBA, a father, and unemployed. In those early days— the first year and a half by his estimate—Hideyo was overwhelmed by his new responsibilities. Reina returned to her natal home of Kyoto for about 3 months after the birth. This period of separation during which the mother alone develops a deep bond with the child under the watchful eyes of her parents “is typical of Japan” he tells me. What was atypical of Hideyo’s situation, however, was the amount of time he spent with his newborn. Being unemployed, he was able to visit Kyoto frequently. Hideyo considered his ability to participate in the earliest stages of childcare a

“distinct advantage” he held as a father.

Through his attention to the “advantages” and “distinctions” he held, Hideyo was attempting to communicate both his opposition to the discourse of ikumen exceptionalism74 and his cognizance of his own good fortune. His candidness had a profound impact on the trajectory of my research. In the early months of fieldwork, Hideyo warned me that Fathering Japan represented “the top 1%” of fathers”: an elite group. Whether this was meant to reflect their skill level, dedication, or finances, he did not say, though from context I gathered he meant all three.

If my intent was to understand contemporary fatherhood in Japan in its entirety, it would be best

74 See Chapter 2 and Chapter 3. 245 if I cast a wider net. This suggestion was a timely one. In my conversations with other fathers, I had begun to recognize a pattern. These fathers— typically organizational members of Fathering

Japan or similar NPOs— were strong advocates of “diversity” (daibāshitei) in the fathering movement. It was a quality they both enjoyed and championed. When I first became acquainted with Koji’s fathering circle, located in a neighborhood about 30 minutes by train from Hideyo’s, he emphasized the presence of artists and small business owners75— those from walks of life that were decidedly not the typical salaryman route. There is some variety in the socio-economic background of the members of Hideyo’s fathering circle, but white-collar professionals are still overrepresented. Nevertheless, the opportunity to speak and share with men with whom they shared no corporate affiliation was significant. For Hideyo, the fathering circle revealed the joy of “other ways of living”. He runs through the members of his fathering circle: one is a semi- professional marathon runner; another is a photographer; this one is a chef. Each had a different path through life; each had a different way of living. Hideyo’s co-workers, in contrast, had taken the same route through rigorous high school examinations to competitive universities, then from the shukatsu76 gauntlet to a position in one of a handful of elite corporations.

It was clear that the relationship between the fathering circles I moved through and

Fathering Japan as an organization was loose— almost non-existent in some cases. For Hideyo,

Fathering Japan “provided brand name recognition” to fathering circles including his own.

Ando’s promotional work built the profile of the organization, which local fathering circles could draw on for legitimacy and to attract new members. This, however, was the extent of their involvement. There are no directives provided by Fathering Japan, no instructional material

75 See Chapter 3. 76 Regimented job hunting for 3rd and 4th year university students. 246 outside of what is already offered in public or commercial channels— just sporadic promotional messages about events occurring nearby. Within Hideyo’s group, communication is handled through social media and listservs, though the latter are much less relevant with each passing year. Inclusion in these groups, for some fathering circles, is predicated on a modest annual membership fee; for others, a father need only ask.

Reflecting these loose organizational ties, fathering circle members vary in their dedication to the fathering movement. This can open space for subtle critiques. Hideyo, who once shouldered a fair amount of organizational work for Fathering Japan including lectures and picture book reading appearances, has reduced his involvement significantly. Fathering Japan will occasionally petition his fathering circle for support if they need an additional speaker. With an impressive “fathering CV”, including penning some newspaper columns and appearing in profiles in textbooks and other publications, Hideyo is typically the one to fill this role. We touched on the topic of organizational participation sitting in his kitchen one afternoon. Careful with his words, Hideyo explains that Fathering Japan requires “independent participation”.

Simply paying your dues without actively asserting yourself will not yield community, support, or childcare knowledge. Today, Hideyo laments, older, established organization members have a monopoly on lectureships and event appearances. Unless one is willing to hustle to carve out a niche for themselves, it is easy to fall out of the network. Fathering Japan requires forethought, independence, and effort from fathers. Those who do put it in the time and energy can build wonderful friendships and even business arrangements. In contrast, Hideyo asserts his fathering circle is “for all” — not just those with drive and ambition.

6.4 Fathering for All?

Hideyo’s assertion calls to mind an encounter I had while joining Atsuro for his volunteer work. Like Hideyo, Atsuro’s affiliation with his local fathering circle led to active involvement 247 in his local community. As a senior organizer of the festival, Atsuro invited me to join him in the mikoshi77 procession over drinks with other Fathering Japan members several months ago. In preparation for the event, he had taken me on a whirlwind tour through Asakusa to purchase the necessary equipment: tabi (a traditional, split-toed sock), tenugui (a thin hand towel often fashioned into a bandana), a white t-shirt. With a loaned happi (a straight sleeve coat often worn during festivals), the transformation was complete. We had a chance to discuss Atsuro’s community involvement as we strolled through the lattice of streets that lie to the west of Senso- ji. Atsuro is the most active member of his local Fathering Circle, and as such is responsible for expanding the group’s “connections”. Before the birth of his children, Atsuro was an avid soccer fan— an interest we shared. He still attends Yokohama FC Marinos matches. However, he found that, as his children began to develop their own interests, he could no longer commit to coaching the local men’s club. Atsuro explains that there were no alternative opportunities for him so socialize outside of the Fathering Circle. Those that overlap with his specific interest in childcare are typically school based PTAs, so it is tough to divorce participation from the organization’s overarching goals. Moreover, these are “places with many mothers” Atsuro tells me without further elaboration, suggesting that participating men (including himself) would feel as though they were intruding.

Within Atsuro’s Fathering Circle, all members contribute as they are able: some volunteer at events, others donate money, but everyone pitches in. In our interview, Atsuro had

77 The mikoshi is a “divine palanquin”, a portable Shinto shrine both in form and concept. The local deity is thought to reside inside the mikoshi. Those who carry it act as faithful attendants ferrying the deity to visit neighboring shrines in this annual, intensely localized pilgrimage. While mikoshi vary widely in their design, it is perhaps easiest to envision them as a miniature temple supported by a platform of long wooden beams fixed in a lattice of cross-lap joints. The roof of lacquered wood, red or black, is replete with elegant gold accents and draped by thick, knotted braids of white, red, or purple rope dangling over its eaves. These ropes are often anchored to the long trusses that curl out past each of the roof’s 4 corners and may be fastened to the frame of the plank itself to anchor the mikoshi. 248 previously advocated for a “local lifestyle” (see Chapter 4). Wary of prescription, Atsuro felt that

Fathering Japan’s role was not to tell people how to best live their lives, but to inform them that they have the ability to choose how to live. Matters of corporate policy, he explained, are too complex and contextually specific for sweeping reform to be effective. Animating Atsuro’s concept of the local lifestyle is an implicit need for knowledge of and connection to the locality in question. Joining him today for the festival, the culmination of months of planning and committee meetings, was a chance to see him enact this ideal: to move through this space and connect with its inhabitants as an ikimen.

Earlier in the day, on our way to the meeting site, Atsuro and I paused to take in the morning’s “junior procession”. Mobs of children, some barely walking, towed tiny mikoshi with ropes; the shrines themselves far too heavy and cumbersome to carry on their shoulders. Guiding them along were their mothers, many holding infants in their arms while trying to herd the tiny revelers forward along the parade route. Attendees crowded the sidewalk, snapping photos of waving kids and shooting video to share with relatives living far away. Some children would break off from their party, wandering to a familiar face in the crowd only to be shooed and rushed back to their place on the line. A few tears were shed. I notice a handful of fathers helping— none of whom Atsuro recognized as Fathering Japan members. Atsuro tells me that, after seeing their children through this mini parade, these men were likely to reconvene with their teams and carry their own mikoshi that afternoon.

The mikoshi begins its journey elevated by large wooden supports called “uma” (literally

“horse”, continuing the allegory of the mikoshi as a divine carriage or litter). Attendants, typically the most senior members of the party, distinguished by their white happi, will transport the uma between rest sites, setting them down to support the mikoshi during breaks. These breaks are frequent because, as I learned very quickly, mikoshi are heavy. The shrine and plank can 249 weigh upwards of one metric ton. Life-long mikoshi bearers can develop massive, swollen callouses— like subcutaneous balloons— on their shoulders and necks. After a block, I understand why Atsuro told me to bring a towel. I wipe the sweat from my brow, then fold it and place it between the beam and my shoulder as a makeshift cushion. By the end of the day, my scrawny frame, lacking in any natural padding, was black and blue.

We pull into an alley just off our route and are briefly relieved of our burden. Tables stocked with cold tea and onigiri await us, with organizers and local business owners distributing the goods to our party with words of thanks. I take a seat on a ledge nearby to rest my feet, striking up a conversation with the three men seated beside me. Omura, a spritely and thoughtful man in his early 30s, greets me in English. The son of a diplomat, Omura is well travelled. We speak briefly about his time in Toronto before I’m introduced to his associates, Hamada and

Fukuzawa. Hamada is a squat, balding man in his 50s— a manager in an IT firm. Fukuzawa, his nervous attendant, is fresh out of university and recently assigned to Hamada’s department. He is trying desperately to keep up with Hamada, who out-drinks him at a pace of 2 to 1. Hamada laughs uproariously while Fukuzawa tries to quickly empty his plastic cup. Omura asks if I’m a member of the small contingent of French teachers who have joined today’s activities. I explain that I’m a researcher— a guest of Atsuro— interested in Fathering Japan. Omura gestures towards the crowd: “well, maybe you’ll find some normal fathers here”. What did he mean by

“normal fathers”? “Well, you must know that these ‘ikumen’ are a bit odd, right? The men here are a bit older, they are more like traditional salarymen. I think you’ll find a different perspective”. Hamada interjects: “you know, I’ve been working at my company for more than 20 years. I’m a father too. My son is older though. Anyway, look here”. He points to another mikoshi trundling into the narrow entrance to the alley. “I think you can see fathers here who want to share this with their kids. There is no shortage of dads to talk with”. Indeed, Hamada is 250 right. I had scarcely noticed the growing number of children watching our team from the sidewalk. Omura speculates that they have likely recuperated from their earlier exertions in the children’s procession and had returned to watch their fathers. They wave from behind their mothers, smiling and weaving in and out of the legs of the adults.

As Hamada’s commentary suggests, Atsuro’s presence at the festival was questioned less because of his status as a father than because of his status as an ikumen or a visible self- identified member of the fathering movement (via his affiliation with Fathering Japan). He served in this instance as a counterpoint for Hamada to reveal the omnipresence of “unmarked” fathers in the community. In the same movement, Atsuro is subtly displaced from the scene of the festival. In asserting his presence and attempting to access this social space as a father, he had presented Hamada with an opportunity to undo this belonging. Hamada occupied this space as a hard-drinking salaryman— subordinate in tow. He insists upon his belonging in the context of the festival, highlighting the presence of others like him: “normal fathers”. He is able to compartmentalize the role this expression of kin identity played in validating their presence in a way Atsuro did not.

Even members of the fathering movement itself express a kind of comfortable ambivalence to its overarching aims and the motivations of participating fathers. Bun and Hideyo once animatedly recalled the questionable behaviour of a member of the fathering circle. At each of the group’s regular meetings, the other fathers would ask him “how much time can you stand to spend with your kids now?”. When he had first entered the circle, this father was a reluctant participant in the home. Having missed much of his child’s infanthood, he struggled with the constant demands and unpredictable emotional swings of his toddler. Every day, it seemed, was a struggle. In early meetings, he would reply “15 minutes”; months later, “30 minutes”; some months more, “an hour”. The other fathers enjoyed a great laugh— partly at his expense, partly 251 out of sympathy. In either case, the fathering circle was meant to serve as a space where men could speak with this degree of candidness. This stands in contrast to the vulnerability of Atsuro outside the familiar terrain of his own fathering circle, where his presence alone became grounds for criticism.

The ability to speak freely in the fathering circle offers something beyond the catharsis of release. Koji articulated this to me with the greatest clarity. During our interview, I had asked him what “need” his association with his fathering circle fulfilled in his life. What was its primary benefit? “The feeling of acknowledgement”, he replied. At that time, I had assumed Koji meant “acknowledgement” (ryōshō) in the sense of praise or appreciation, but these were precisely the qualities of ikumen that he decried78. I returned to the word “acknowledgement”: what did he really mean by this? “Maybe the feeling is more being understood” he said, after considering the question briefly. “Before talking about this I didn’t really think about it, but the image of fathers is different from real fathers and that is confusing for men, I think” he said carefully. To hear Koji explain it, there are two types of men who are drawn to Fathering Japan: those who want to learn and those who want recognition. But recognition does not mean praise:

“it’s not an award or something like that”. It’s about sharing an experience and having others understand it intimately; a sense of belonging and acceptance. Among other fathers, it is possible to be “seen” as a father. In his analysis, Koji implies that this sense of being “seen” stands in contrast to corporate contexts where fatherhood is always occluded by one’s identity as an employee. It also recalls the tremendous “over visibility” of fathers in public settings, where attention is drawn past the father as an individual. In these instances, too, the viewer does not

78 See Chapter 2. 252

“see” the father, but rather “sees” a man out of place, a potential pervert, or simply someone that does not belong.

6.5 Growing as Ikimen

For Hideyo, it had come time to put the evenings of reciprocal acknowledgement and honest —if imperfect— fathers in the past. In the weeks following our introduction, he told me he would pass the torch to another father after years of leadership. His family was set to relocate to a new apartment, and this departure from the neighborhood would mark the end of his formal association with the fathering circle. Hideyo always insisted that his fathering circle is just a

“social club for men”. It is a casual, egalitarian assembly of dads. There are no greater demands on member’s time or finances than attendance (at their discretion) and a pint or two. There is little in the way of explicit political goals or activism. Sometimes the men will convene at a park to while away an afternoon with their children; other times they’ll grab a bite after work. Hideyo and other interested and able fathers meet on Sunday mornings for marathon training. Torn between demands from their employers and their families, low pressure and low commitment membership in the fathering circle is all many fathers can manage. For men feeling harried by their many responsibilities, a group that is consistent in its presence and support, welcoming without being demanding, and sympathetic to their troubles is a novel and inviting prospect.

Despite Hideyo’s arguments to the contrary, I could not help but feel his departure would be a blow to his fathering circle, which depended greatly on his organizational abilities and political savvy. His careful management of the group’s relationship with local government offices had blossomed into a fruitful, ongoing partnership. Hideyo asked for little while delivering much. His fathering circle’s community “Ikufesu” — a public festival offering family focused attractions— was funded entirely by local business owners. In 2015, Hideyo estimates nearly 2000 mothers, fathers, and children attended the event. Years of participation in local 253 business association meetings and patronizing independent businesses had ingratiated him to the community. None of the business owners who donated in support of his cause were Fathering

Japan members and were not compelled to contribute by the force of organizational expectation.

When Hideyo and the other fathers came to them with their request for donations, they happily assented. This ability to negotiate funding and support for the fathering circle’s activities without petitioning the government for assistance had made them more amenable to requests when

Hideyo did approach them. An occasional speaker fee or access to space in the community centre was provided without hesitation.

In one sense, fathering circles are the product of geography and demography. Hideyo attributed the growth of his group to the influx of young families with small children into his neighborhood. Nakamachi79, a special ward in the heart of Tokyo and the main commercial centre of the city, is the formal “home” of his fathering circle. Many families relocate to the area for work. The sheer volume of men of roughly the same age in the area has made recruitment for

Hideyo’s fathering circle relatively easy. Hideyo also notes a demographic divide in the neighborhood: an old guard composed of long-time residents, many of whom are retired or are approaching retirement, and newly arrived young families. Hideyo says that this division means that existing community organizations— like the neighborhood association— are more difficult to access because they have deeper roots. The fathering circle is full of relative new comers.

There are no cliques to navigate and no hostility to outsiders. The fathering circle plays an important role not only in providing fathering support, but in enriching the social lives of these men and building a sense of community in their new home.

79 A pseudonym. 254

This provides only a partial explanation for the group’s success. Hideyo was the charismatic catalyst of this fathering circle. Articulate and understanding, he was a well of social gravity: men were drawn to him. It was in this sense that Hideyo reminded me of Ando, another charismatic figure within Fathering Japan who seemed to have touched the lives of nearly all the men with whom I spoke. Hideyo, it would turn out, was no exception. A flier advertising a community centre lecture by Ando caught his eye while retrieving Makoto from daycare. In a brief but intense discussion after the session, Ando implored Hideyo to join Fathering Japan.

Shortly thereafter, he began consuming articles, blog posts, and videos produced by the organization. He saw himself reflected in these stories of men trying to carve out a niche in a social world where fathers where both an abnormality and an afterthought.

Over tea in his new home, I asked Hideyo candidly how he would select his successor.

What sort of qualities made for an effective head of a fathering circle? “Interest and dedication” he responded bluntly, “There are no special skills or other requirements. Just someone who wants to do it”. “Selection” was not the right term, he added. What he needed was a willing volunteer. Some weeks had passed since the move, yet Hideyo maintained his leadership position. My impression was that little had changed in terms of his workload and the group’s activities. His new living space in a gorgeous high rise was “technically” outside of the Suita area, but the commuting distance to his former neighborhood was relatively short. Though he had framed the transition as a necessity driven by logistical concerns, I had doubts as to whether this was his sole motivation for leaving.

I explain my thinking to Hideyo, who concedes that he was not planning on departing the circle simply because he had relocated. He realized that his family was also “aging out” of the group. If a fathering circle were a social unit dedicated strictly to childcare provision and support, this may be a logical conclusion. However, so many of Hideyo’s circle’s activities were 255 strictly social: jogging, drinking, and swapping stories. While their association had begun in the name of supporting their childcare efforts, surely the relationships that formed ran deeper.

Exiting the circle did not mean that these friendships would end, or that the “exit” itself would preclude future collaboration. Rather, Hideyo was anticipating a shift in communal responsibilities as his children aged. Gazing down from his apartment window into the narrow street below, the only visible structure is the elementary school Makoto would attend after graduating from the government run daycare in which he was currently enrolled. As we stood in his living room that foggy afternoon, we spoke about its somewhat intimidating concrete façade and gated courtyard. Hideyo sighed. Soon, he would be a member of the school PTA. With that position, he anticipated a range of new responsibilities and relationships. When Makoto was an infant, Hideyo had needed support and an escape from the isolation he felt as a father. He found it among men facing similar challenges. Ultimately, though, this was in service of Makoto’s growth, development, and happiness. Now, the PTA would become that locus of connection for

Hideyo to the community in which his child would be enmeshed. Leaving the Fathering Circle would free up time to invest in supporting the school, marking a shift in Hideyo’s position within the community.

6.6 Making Papa Friends

Before I turn to the subject of school participation foreshadowed in Hideyo’s narrative, I want to return briefly to Bar Almeda. Nestled in the nooks and crannies of Tokyo’s side streets are innumerable drinking establishments just like it. Most feature a single bar, housing only a handful of patrons— standing room only. As the workday comes to a close, parties of salarymen flow out of the subway, suitcases in hand, pushing through the noren (ornamental curtains hung outside of shops) with a slight bow to the proprietor. Bar Almeda would welcome similar patrons on any other night, but once a month the bar is packed shoulder to shoulder with fathers. On one 256 such evening, I managed to crack open the door and ease in. Koji notices me from behind the counter and nods before returning to his conversation. As a foreigner, I draw the requisite amount of polite attention. I squeeze up to Koji’s young waitress and place my drink order.

Feeling a little out of place, I fumble for my notebook and attempt to make myself seem somewhat busy. There is a tentative tap on my shoulder. A young man with slicked hair introduces himself and extends his meishi towards me. He is wearing a charcoal suit but not a tie, presumably having slipped it off at some point before joining the party. His associate, a slightly older fellow with black square glasses, stands just off behind him. His meishi indicates that he works for a company that wholesales sporting goods. We talk about horse racing and I begin to feel at ease. Our conversation is casual, and I pay less and less attention to my use of polite language. We speak with the familiarity of classmates.

Several hours into the evening, I am struck by a peculiar realization. Save Koji, every face in the room is new— not just to me, but to each other. Of the 6 men I spoke with that night, none had attended a Fathering Japan event before. Their connection to this particular meeting had come through social media. There were no industry connections; shared professions between men were simply a matter of chance rather than conscious networking. Their children, with one or two exceptions, attended schools in different cities. Some fathers had come from neighboring cities: Chiba and Kawasaki. These men were strangers without the moorings of a shared neighborhood space, professional identity, or organizational relationship— most notably to

Fathering Japan. Their association that evening was voluntary.

Fathering movement materials and members speak about the Fathering Circle as a space in which association is voluntary, but why is this quality significant? The banality of the scene I describe above, wherein relative strangers make small talk at a bar of their own freewill, is misleading. These casual encounters mark a significant departure from established modes of 257 male sociality. One way to elucidate this departure and to shed light on the stakes of voluntary association is to look through the primary ritual of the Fathering Circle: the papakai. The papakai, a causal meeting for drink and conversation among fathers, stands in contrast to corporate nomikai: rigidly structured and regimented occasions to share drinks with colleagues or business partners. In this section, I look at what it means for fathers to drink “as fathers”, both for themselves and for their community. The papakai is separate from the familiar world of workplace obligation, yet it maintains many of the trappings of corporate nomikai. Indeed, by leaning on the familiarity and unremarkable nature of men drinking with co-workers, the papakai is a very inconspicuous and comfortable way for fathers to congregate as fathers in public space.

However, this blurring of the boundaries between corporate sociality and public sociality was not always easily accepted. I focus on one instance in which the papakai became a political flashpoint in a small suburban neighborhood.

Why is it that friendship between fathers seems so laborious and so in need of intervention on the part of the fathering movement? The expectations of appropriate fraternization within the context of the company provides structure and familiarity to social interaction: a script to which all are privy which can be replicated without much critical thought

(see Dasgupta 2013; McDonald and Sylvester 2014). In the uncomfortable and sometimes hostile world of PTAs, pre-school pick-ups, and park parenting parties, making papa friends can prove to be a challenge. This lack of social nous and its corporate roots are figured in the New Papa’s

Textbook (Fathering Japan 2015: 153) as a point of gendered differentiation:

Mothers have a naturally strong desire for communication and are comparatively strong

at making mama friends. It is often the case that when mothers meet other mothers by

chance at childcare places or lectures they’ll ask in a friendly way “how long have you

been a mother?” and respond empathetically “me too!” and right away they have a good 258

relationship, exchange email addresses, and become mama friends. But papas are bad at

conversation without an objective. Even if they notice another papa picking up his kids,

they do not want to talk to them suddenly because they do not want to seem suspicious.

Concerning the reason why men can’t talk when they first meet, there are papa’s who

explain “I don’t know whether this partner is older or younger than me, I don’t know

whether or not to use keigo”.

This immediate concern with rank, expressed in terms of age and proper address, highlights an attentiveness to markers of social division and authority which are of importance in business contexts. Outside of the clarity of hierarchical and formalized corporate relationships, men feel ill at ease engaging with one another. It is notable here, too, that women are not bound by such considerations. This suggests both a naturalized distance between women and corporation, such that it does not figure in their friendships with other women, and a biological disposition towards connection with others80. The father, meanwhile, is a somewhat stoic figure who is not driven by a need to communicate with others. Rather, he expresses a constant awareness of his place in a larger social order.

Instructional material produced by the fathering movement offer the promise of tangible benefits for those men willing to invest in changing their behaviour (Fathering Japan 2015: 152):

Do you do drop off and pick up at kindergarten or pre-school? Fathers who do pick up

from preschool have been increasing recently. There are two types of these men: there are

papas who seem to enjoy doing pick up and papas who go through it mechanically and

with a blank expression. Why is it like that? When you observe, there is a difference

80 This echoes the line of reasoning found in fathering movement materials regarding the papa switch (see Chapter 4). 259

depending on whether or not there are friends at the preschool. Other parents and

children, teachers and close papa friends will say “XX chan’s papa, good morning” when

you go to drop off. Papa’s without friends in the pre-school, with an uncomfortable

looking face, will bring about an air that they want to quickly go about their business. In

everyday connections— with mama and papa friends that greet each other, with company

where you are able to have conversations about child related things— childrearing

becomes more fun.

In this passage, fathers that are enmeshed in relationships with members of the school community experience the space as a welcoming one. They are greeted and accepted. Men without these social moorings are “mechanical”. Divorced from the social space, they are rendered in terms that are not quite human— robotic, alien, unable to derive pleasure from the experience. Whether it is because of their intensely siloed corporate socialization or some deeper, immutable element of their sex, the problem is simply that “papas are bad at making papa friends” (Fathering Japan 2015: 152).

Publications and lectures that promote ikimen, then, must appeal to their target audience on two fronts. The first is to convince fathers of the benefits of community involvement; the second is to provide them with realistic strategies for entering the public sphere. In espousing the benefits of community involvement, the ikimen discourse hails men as fathers, employees, and citizens. In an article penned for the City of Osaka Lifelong Learning Promotion Group,

Representative Director of the Kansai branch of Fathering Japan Noriaki Wada argues that the self-centered ikumen archetype supports childrearing “in a narrow sense” (2019). “As children get bigger,” Wada argues, “the streets where they play, the area they pass through, and then their friends all come into view. When you really think about it, you can’t imagine a society in which only your child is happy” (2019). Here, the fathering subject is invariably a citizen subject. A 260 father’s understanding of the vast array of relationships in which he rests grows along with his child. The distinction between the child’s physical development and a generalized social development of which the father is a direct beneficiary is collapsed.

Wada also appeals to the father-as-salaryman. In the following passage, the ikimen’s time spent on public service is not a threat to productive working hours within the corporation.

Rather, the bonds of community might be leveraged to generate value. The work of the ikimen is almost entrepreneurial in nature, sitting in a broader scheme for the independently driven cultivation of human capital (Wada 2019):

It (regional activity) is an opportunity to give back to society the skills acquired in the

company and work. It is wasteful to use it only in the narrow society of work. In addition,

the know-how acquired at work is valued in the area more than you think. And, by giving

back to the region and society, new things will be gained (aratani urumono), and it is

possible to return to the company what has been newly obtained from the region and

society. As a result, you will become more and more productive

More striking, perhaps, is Wada’s vision of the ikimen as a communal subject that is held in tension with corporate sociality. Here, he contrasts social capital in the form of rank and title with “human power” which develops in their absence (Wada 2019):

You can make many friends in the local area without title. Because there is no extra filter

such as a position or a title as in the workplace, your own human power (ningenryoku)

will follow. Being able to rely on a variety of things can increase your sense of

accomplishment and build many relationships of trust. As a result, life will lead to

something richer. Again, activity in the area is not a duty (gimu), it is papa’s privilege

(tokken). 261

This final nod to the contrast between duty and privilege shift from obligation to opportunity; from socialization as expectation to socialization as exercising one’s freedom to associate.

Asserting it as a privilege held by papa’s suggests that the father exists as a defined and accepted subject position and not, as many fathers feel, an unrecognized and unwelcome intruder into civil society. That is to say, men are welcomed into their community on the basis of their identity as a father.

Fujimori, a Fathering Japan lecturer, presented ikimen as the solution to the isolation

(koritsu) experienced by parents. He emphasized the array of relationships community participation enables: horizontal, vertical, and diagonal. Corporate relationships tend to be vertical in nature. They are governed by seniority and rank. Horizontal relationships between those in the same age group and diagonal relationships in which there is an imbalance in rank but a separation in industry create a leveling effect. For Fujimori (2014), the local area is the “third foothold” (daisan no ashiba) alongside work and family. “Friends that cross paths outside the boundaries of the company, sharing the common goal of raising children, will be able to speak together sharing the same point of view” he concludes. Again, the ikimen as a communal subject stands in contrast to the narrow parameters of corporate sociality. Similarly, the New Papa’s

Textbook (Fathering Japan 2015: 153) describes the papa friends of the ikimen as “a network of different industries that do not have any shared interests”. That is to say, there are no immediately identifiable business opportunities to be had. In emphasizing this point, the text steers readers away from the assumption that this is an alternative form of settai (business entertaining): ideally this isn’t even an option, much less the intent, in this network-making endeavour. 262

6.7 Papakai and the Deconstruction of the Nomikai

The papakai draws on the broader significance of inebriation-as-ritual in Japan. Through the 1980s and early 1990s, Japanese drinking habits became an area of anthropological concern

(see Ben-Ari 1989; Hendry in McDonald 1994; Partanen 2006). The nomikai of the heyday of corporate Japan are relatively well documented, but there have been significant shifts in expectations of conduct surrounding these events since that time. Over the duration of my research project, I had the opportunity to join both friends and interlocutors for nomikai undertaken with business associates and co-workers in addition to the papakai I attended primarily for research purposes. While notably relaxed and relatively informal compared to the nomikai described by Partanen (2006) and Ben Ari (1989) at the peak of the Bubble Era, these experiences provided a useful frame of reference for determining where papakai’s cleave to and depart from corporate forms of what Nihei (2013) refers to as “nomi-nikeshōn” (drinking communication).

The ultimate goal of the nomikai is attaining “uninhibited sociability” (Partanen 2006). It is useful, then, to think of nomikai through Hendry’s (in Ben-Ari et al. 1990) notion of

“wrapping”. The author uses the metaphor of “layers of wrapping” to describe the logic underlying life in Japan. Her analysis begins materially, focusing on the elaborate packaging of gifts purchased from department stores and the complicated folding involved in dressing in kimono, before ascending to the level of speech. Polite speech (keigo) is employed strategically, allowing one to present a personal opinion while displaying deference to the listener. Here the focus is on maintaining “the wall of etiquette” between the two parties, revealing through performance the outermost layer of the self. Accordingly, there are also socially acceptable ways to “unwrap”, leading to deeper levels of personal intimacy through a gradual transition into informality. Alcohol underpins the most common form of acceptable “unwrapping”: the nomikai, 263 which exists as a sort of controlled chaos, ritual lubricated by liquor. With each passing stage of the nomikai, the rules governing social interactions are further relaxed. Attendees are able to “put aside rank” (bureikō) and express themselves openly. The deeper levels of intimacy attained through unwrapping reveal a sort of “social nudity (which) is exhibited in what are often deliberate violations of conventional manners and etiquette: bragging, infantility, stupidity, boisterousness, highly emotional expressions, lying on the floor, or in female-male impersonations” (Ben-Ari 1989: 54). These expressions of inner feeling or intention (honne) can be interpreted as an act of “giving”. Having transgressed social norms, the performer willfully places himself in a vulnerable state, eliciting reciprocal acts of indecency, along with the sympathy and understanding of his associates, as expressions of solidarity.

Such is the importance of ritual drinking in nomikai that young Japanese people learn to negotiate these meetings even before they enter the job market. McDonald and Sylvester (2014) examine the importance of regular nomikai in university bukatsu (sports clubs). Distinct from the other, more “informal” drunken exploits of young adults, bukatsu nomikai are the primary mode through which club members learn to communicate openly with their senpai and sensei, a skill that is of great significance in the world outside the university. Learning how to manage drunkenness—gauging their intake of alcohol while performing a level of toxicity that would excuse their transgression of certain social boundaries— is of such importance to the success of the organization that coaches will often willingly break the law by ignoring legal drinking age restrictions (Miller 2013). This dynamic was best summarized for me by a friend who, charmed by my naivety, provided an example from his own life: “I was in the tennis club, but like all bukatsu, it was actually a drinking club”.

The predominant academic, and indeed social, narrative of drinking in Japan, then, is one describing a variety of compulsions: to attend, to drink, to observe, and to perform. However, 264 these accounts are deeply rooted in the corporate heyday of the 80s and early 90s, when white collar positions and hyper-masculine, “big firm” culture permeated urban life. Exploring drinking practices beyond these archetypical workplace functions and considering the implications of broader changes in the nature of employment in the new millennium complicates our understanding of the nomikai, and it is at this juncture where the papakai intersects with these ritual practices. In addition to differences in drinking habits between older and younger

Japanese men, Christensen (2012) emphasizes the importance of the ability to decline alcohol.

Refusing an invitation to drink can act as a powerful display of traits typically associated with masculinity: dominance, willpower, and discipline. In Nihei’s (2013) exploration of

“herbivorous men”, the author recognizes the “refusal of the traditional means of communication in the workplace through drinking” as a form of resistance to the hegemony of the salaryman.

Increasingly, young employees— especially those who may fall into the many sub-genres of herbivorous men— choose non-alcoholic beverages or cocktails over the traditional beverage of choice for salarymen: beer. In so doing, they convey both an unwillingness to participate in in the hyper-masculine rituals of the nomikai and their commitment to frugality and health, values that stand in contrast to the conspicuous consumption of settai (business entertaining) and the baggy-eyed salarymen battle hardened by years of late nights spent drinking and chain smoking.

Papakai could be positioned within this growing resistance to salaryman drinking culture, though doing so risks concealing the many ways in which the event continues to cleave to certain elements of the corporate nomikai. Divorced from the obligations and expectations of participation, these events are organized and hosted by local fathering circles or, in those areas without an established fathering community, a particularly intrepid dad. They are held in bars, private homes, community centres, or even in offices after hours. Given the tremendous reach of

Fathering Japan and its diffuse organizational structure, it is difficult to say how many of these 265 meetings actually occur in any given month. Moreover, it is reasonable to expect that these meetings are diverse in practice, differing from neighborhood to neighborhood, city to city, and region to region. My experience was limited to those held in urban areas of the Kanto region

(namely Tokyo, Kawasaki, Chiba, and Yokohama). Of the papakai I attended, one was held at a personal residence and the rest in various bars and restaurants.

The significance of the papakai was made clear to me during my investigation of Papa

School curriculum materials provided to me by Toshi. I was struck by one slide, entitled “Let’s

Make Papa Friends”, which saw consistent use in one-off presentations created and delivered after the program was formally cancelled. The slide, which features a smiling Toshi and friends raising a pint in a toast, claims that “for papa friends, alcohol is indispensable”. The emphasis on inebriated sociality, repeated in lectures intended for an array of audiences, echoes corporate male drinking rituals. The connotation in its use here is the promise not just of the pleasure of drunkenness but the familiarity of the practice. In an exchange of Facebook messages on the topic of Fathering School, Toshi raised the topic of the papakai by direct reference to the drinking habits of fathers. When I asked him what he, as an instructor, had learned from the program, he explained:

“Over the course of Fathering School, I came to understand that the networks formed by

participants were more important than the content of the lecture. We decided to expand

the nomikai that followed each session. I think the difference between Papa School and

other lectures was that it contained this nomikai follow-up service (afuta forō)”

To hear my interlocutors describe it, the nomikai gradually eclipsed the lecture as more and more time was dedicated to this “follow-up service”. The post-Fathering School nomikai became a site for candid confessions and the creation of lasting friendships. Toshi recounted one memorable night spent counselling a father who was in the midst of a divorce crisis, a conversation that 266 stretched through the lecture and into the nomikai. The father later returned to the nomikai of the next edition of the program to report, happily, that the couple had resolved their issues and were expecting a second child.

6.8 Ikimen Papakai

Gathered in the lower level of Nantoka Gakuen, copious amounts of beer and food are laid out on the long cafeteria tables. I’m greeted by a few surprised teachers. Rarely does a foreign staff member attend a Father’s Association event. I detect a hint of worry in their otherwise friendly greetings. I am introduced to a few of the fathers, including Gakuto, one of the chief organizers of the day’s softball event. I’m shown to a seat and offered a drink just as the slide show begins. The principle, a few beers deep, is delighted to see me. Firmly grasping my shoulder, he insists that I accompany them to the izakaya. The other teachers, who I am beginning to realize are more chaperones than school representatives, impress upon me that I’m not obligated to attend. Of course, I’m very happy to have the opportunity and say as much, leaving them a little bewildered. We collect our party, some 50 strong, and head for the door. It wasn’t until we were halfway to the bar that I noticed the principal had slipped away, apparently happy to pass off responsibility for the rest of the evening to his staff.

Nantoka Gakuen’s Fathers Association is a rarity in Tokyo’s educational landscape.

Established in 2004, Nantoka’s Father’s Association is composed of approximately 20 executive members drawn from each of the school’s 6 grade levels. These individuals plan and execute a series of regular events— roughly 4 a year. While anthropological work from the 1970s and 80s provides an account of the typical contributions of mothers to the PTA (see Hendry 1981) — providing lunches, assisting with cleaning, organizing events among many, many other responsibilities— fathers barely feature. On the subject of men in PTAs in Japan, Jolivet writes

(1997: 114): 267

Though some do venture along to PTA meetings, they unfortunately run the risk of being

classed as failures of the system (can a man who takes time off work really be taken

seriously?). To continue taking this minor step requires great courage. Japanese society is

not one that views meetings where the sexes mix with a favourable eye and this

inevitably leads to the increased discomfort of those who are otherwise motivated to do

so.

Jolivet highlights an undercurrent in commentary on men’s PTA participation that proved influential in the case of Nantoka Gakuen: it is not simply the presence of father’s in the PTA, but rather their absence from work, that troubles. The papakai becomes a site of conflict precisely because, to the extent that it maintains the trappings of traditional nomikai, it draws attention to the inseparability of men from the corporation. Fatherhood or kin relations as the motivating force behind men’s presence in the school is occluded. Concerns abound about the blurring of boundaries between the reproductive space of the school and the productive space of the company the Father’s Association entails.

I first became aware of the group during the school culture festival. I arrived that day to find the students giddy with excitement. The classrooms are decorated, each according to a theme: Disney princesses, Star Wars, even prison. In each room, students eagerly introduce visitors to a variety of games and activities designed to reflect their chosen theme and highlight content from their studies. Nestled in a conference room attached to the teacher’s bullpen, the members of Nantoka Mother’s Association hurry to and fro. They have spent weeks assembling branded “Nantoka” goods; hand-made trinkets and baubles emblazoned with the school emblem that can be purchased at the school bazaar for a modest price. They are carefully wrapped and adorned with a bow, then organized like soldiers standing at attention in rows across long tables.

The women are clearly busy, but they work with a smile, conversing merrily and shooing away 268 intruding students. Across Japan, the school culture festival is typically held on Culture Day,

November the 3rd. A kind of “open house”, the culture festival is an opportunity for students to demonstrate their artistic achievements. Community members and students from other institutions in attendance get a sense of what life is like inside the school. The successful production of the culture festival often depends on the behind the scenes organizational support of the PTA and parent volunteers. In most schools these positions are predominantly filled by women. Nantoka, however, is somewhat unique. As the headmaster proudly explained to me,

Nantoka’s Fathers Association share in the division of labour. At this event, mothers are primarily concerned with their handicrafts and the preparation of bento lunch boxes for staff and volunteers. The Fathers Association has been charged with preparing food for students and guests.

I make my way into the courtyard. In the shade of the trees, there are half a dozen large, white tents with “Nantoka Gakuen Middle and High School” printed in black characters across their awnings. In spite of inclement weather, every bench, step, and low retaining wall is occupied by hungry students and visitors. Over hot griddle tops, fathers adorned in aprons and kerchief head coverings serve up Japanese festival staples. The popular items are brightly coloured kakigori (shaved ice topped with a fruit syrup), shiratama sweets (egg shaped rice dumplings served in a brown syrup), and bowls of curry with rice. The men are in high spirits.

They occasionally break out into chants of encouragement for one another (“song” might be a bit of a stretch— it seems these men are all tone deaf), jostle each other with good natured jocularity, and generally embarrass their bemused and mortified daughters. I note the logo on their aprons: a harried looking man, clad in an apron, cap, and chef’s whites, carrying a gleaming spatula and a platter of jostling pancakes. Beneath the man, it reads “Nantoka Gakuen Fathers, est. 2004”. The same image can be found on the trays on which the food is served. 269

The courtyard is packed. The line stretches back around the school. I watch as the students approach the fathers: some with familiarity, others with trepidation. The men joke with the kids, putting on airs as they mimic service sector workers with exaggerated calls of

“irrashaimase” (welcome) and “o-mataseta shimashita” (sorry for making you wait). The girls turn and walk away briskly, stifling laughs and rolling their eyes. There is a sort of discomfit to this scene of public male domesticity that the girls have, perhaps unwittingly, highlighted.

Keeping in mind the work of the men I spoke with to carve out public spaces amenable to fathers, I was struck by the banality of their presence here: the stream of customers, their embarrassed daughters, their chants. Yet, it was precisely the banality of the event that made it so curious to attendees. The presence of fathers in this organizational capacity at a culture festival was a rarity. Typically, food is supplied by the students themselves in makeshift cafes in the gymnasium or a classroom. The conspicuous presence of fathers animated the scene: every giggle, every raised eyebrow, every slightly delayed “please” or “thank you” suggested that, in spite of 12 years of continual service, the Father’s Association remained something out of the ordinary.

In order to better grasp the tension that seemed to surround this organization, I dug into regional online parenting communities. The public perception of Nantoka Gakuen’s Father’s

Association was difficult to parse on the ground. Mothers involved in the school community, administrators, and instructors were generally supportive of their efforts, though harried by their enthusiasm. The anonymity of the internet, however, gave voice to silent debates. A post on an education information forum regarding Nantoka Gakuen’s Father’s Associations role in the previous year’s culture festival had become home to a roaring argument over the validity of their work. The original poster, not unlike myself, highlighted both the oddity and organization of their cooking efforts. He glowingly describes the flow of the afternoon, including the nomikai 270 with the principal in the evening. He speculates that, as a group of professionals from large companies, these fathers possess exceptional organizational skills. Moreover, he notes the rarity of fatherly participation in school functions. “These fathers are proof that it is a school with little hierarchy and sectionalism, which tend to be found in private girls' schools” the poster concludes.

This description launched a flurry of responses. Those opposed to the Father’s

Association argued that drinking— especially with staff— was unbecoming and jeopardized the reputation of the school. This sort of active involvement was meddlesome and uncouth. One poster remarked “Principal and drinking = not involvement. It cannot be a traditional school.

There is no school where parents are involved in the culture festival too”. Other moralizing and implicitly gendered arguments were put forward by other posters, such as the following: “It seemed like the original poster made this thread braggingly, but in the end I was stunned that he was just trying to bring the bad habits of the company into the educational site”. In this instance, drinking is associated with the corporation. The poster worries about the collapsing of the distinction between the “bad habits” of masculine corporate spaces with schools, which are typically dominated by women.

Others, who generally viewed men’s participation in their daughter’s lives as a welcome change from the norm, were shocked by the vitriol in the thread. “My daughter has already graduated and my husband is a shy person so he did not join the fathers, but I have a remark to make from the outside. It’s good for a school to hear the opinions of people with different points of view. What is bad about having a father influence his daughter’s school?” one poster asked.

Others used the Father’s Association to index the broader trends illustrated in the early sections of this chapter: “In this school, fathers without a place outside the company (ibasho ga nai) can participate in their daughter’s school’s culture festival. They can also associate with teachers at 271 nomikai, and moreover at the nomikai they can bureikō and have a word with the school principle. With this candidness, it is surely a school of the people (shominteki na gakkō)”. Here, subtle class arguments begin to enter the discussion. The work of the father’s association is possible because this private school eschews the trappings of formality and rank in favour of sociability and frank communication. “No alcohol at a father's social gathering would be rather unnatural” remarked one poster, who was clearly dedicated to the custom.

Nevertheless, many struggled to accept the legitimacy of the father’s association as a form of regional activity (chīki katsudō). “This is not like a regional neighborhood association or volunteer fire fighter’s brigade” one mother wrote. “In a childcare circle, children are a pre-text for some people to hang out and play recklessly. Sometimes I feel doubt as to whether it really helps children”. “From a mother 's point of view, I would like the father to participate positively” began another poster, tentatively. “However, there are many fathers who cannot do it in reality and it will become problematic even at home. I think it is a good thing to have a father’s group, but you should be careful that it does not become regular merry making”. Some men, while supportive of the existence of such a group, saw it as yet another example of the elite— and thus inaccessible— status of the institution: “It’s too bad, it seems impossible to participate unless you are in a leading company”.

The teachers I consulted shared much of the skepticism found online. The Father’s

Association’s drinking habits were noted as a source of consternation, but beyond this I frequently heard their work ethic critiqued. As one instructor explained, it seemed that the mothers were still charged with performing the bulk of the tasks traditionally associated with the

PTA and thus coded as feminine. The Father’s Association’s presence was really only felt at the festival and at their annual nomikai. Of their festival participation, one instructor muttered “just 272 let the kids do the cooking for their damn selves81”. Most staff understood the Father’s

Association as a social group first and volunteers second.

I found some truth in each of these positions through my participation in the Fathers

Association’s annual nomikai. The popular event opens with a staff and fathers soft ball game in the morning. The match is followed by drinks and remarks from the principal in the school cafeteria— where I joined the festivities— before culminating in a trip to an izakaya near the train station. Departing from the school, I introduce myself to a few of the attendees as our party meanders towards its destination. Miya is a former student of Nantoka Gakuen. Now studying to become a teacher, she hopes to complete her training at her alma mater. Her attendance tonight is likely in service of that goal. Gakuto, a member of the Fathers Association, walks just in front of us. His rough beard and grey hair stand in sharp contrast to the youthful Miya, who he questions mercilessly. Ryu, a father I pegged to be in his mid-30s, eagerly introduces himself to me in broken English.

Replete with lacquered wood furnishings, ornamental sake bottles, and impeccably dressed waitstaff, the izakaya seems worlds away from the street side sea food grills that line the narrow roads outside. I worry that our rowdy crew may disrupt the quiet exchanges between other patrons. These fears are confirmed with surprising haste: no more than 20 minutes of bawdy jokes and uproarious laughter have passed and already a semi-conscious father is splayed out across the table. Our party is packed into the bar’s private room, but for the frustrated guests seated on the other side of the bar, this is “privacy” in name only. I’m surprised by the behaviour of these men given the fact that this is technically a school function. Teachers flit

81 Though my exposure to other school culture festivals is limited, I gather from conversations with friends that students typically take on food preparation themselves. 273 between tables, exchanging greetings and discussing school affairs and gossip. As they are so often the focal point of discussion, teachers are kept at a minimum of two to a table, even during rotation, so as to ensure that they are not overwhelmed. The female teachers in particular seem harried. Keeping with custom, they are charged with doing the majority of pouring for the guests.

They make sure each glass has been filled before excusing themselves.

I am seated alongside Miya at a table with roughly ten fathers. We snack on edamame and nurse our drinks while the fathers enjoy themselves. “Please give my daughter a good grade!” Ryu blurts at me, with a laugh and a little bow. A round of applause from the rest of the table follows. I respond that I don’t know or teach his daughter, but under his guidance she will likely do very well. Ryu, I am told, will be moving to England for work next year, and is eager to improve his language skills before then. I am surprised to learn that, of the ten men seated with me, six have worked abroad in English speaking countries for extended periods of time (Ryu would make that seven in a few months’ time). These men are clearly of the elite class of tech sector employees. Each is involved in some sort of engineering, that is if they haven’t already transitioned to management. With the cost of tuition at the school, this is not entirely surprising.

Money is very much on their minds tonight. Gakuto, upon hearing about my interest in Japanese fathers, broaches the subject: “We all have daughters you know, and the cost is high. University, private high school. It’s cheaper in Osaka but… studying abroad! Very expensive. In high school, quite a few girls go abroad, I think. But university especially. There are so many good schools in America, Europe. Very expensive”. I come to realize that Gakuto’s only child— his daughter— is currently a university student. I try to find a way to delicately ask him why he is here. After all, he has no direct connection to nor interest in the daily happenings of the school any longer. “He comes for baseball!” one of the other fathers’ jokes. The other men laugh, but it seems to me there is a kernel of truth here. From the discussion that follows, I gather that these 274 men enjoy softball, but don’t really have a men’s league to participate in: “the time commitment is too great”, “I don’t know if there is such a ‘men’s team’ in my neighborhood”, “my knees get too sore”. In truth, they prefer to meet and drink. Softball is a great pre-text for this. For men like

Gakuto, who participated for three of the years of his child’s tenure at the school, the years long male friendships through the Father’s Association are unique. He is here to maintain and enjoy them. Gakuto informs me that he is far from the only father without a currently enrolled daughter. In fact, “many” of tonight’s attendees are alumni members who remain active in the

Fathers Association simply because they enjoy the company of men who are not their co- workers. Moreover, they are— or were— anchored here by virtue of their children’s place at the school. The men expressed that their presence here was sanctioned in a way that it would not be were they to meet independently. This reflects a certain element of ibasho: not only the affects of attachment between the men, but a validation of their presence that extended in perpetuity once established. They were connected as “fathers” independent of the indexical role played by their children.

Ryu used to work as a computer engineer but moved to a different department in a lower level managerial capacity. “My company has paternity leave. I wanted to take it, but I didn’t. My wife did instead, and that was OK. Actually, in my department (human resources), I am the only man! The women always go on leave or get married and leave. Sometimes they come back”. “Is your boss a man with children?” I ask. “Yes”, he replies, “But he would never take leave! But he has so much money. He can get a nanny. I think he doesn’t appreciate the lives of the people that work there. We are not rich. Maybe he would think, if I took leave, that I am lazy or… he would expect my female co-workers to leave! It would be strange if I did. He wouldn’t understand”.

Without knowing Ryu’s salary, I still expect (given his ability to send his daughter to private high school, his international work experience, and the relative prestige of his position) that this 275 father is not as far removed in terms of socio-economic status from his boss as his comments suggest. Indeed, all of the fathers I met at this particular nomikai represent a rather privileged group: successful, well educated, and specializing in fields where the demand for talent is enormous. Many were members of the so-called managerial class— so often the boogeyman of an aspiring ikumen. Yet, in the context of this Fathers Association meeting they repeatedly positioned themselves in contrast with those “at the top”, as if there were ever higher positions of patriarchal influence that dictated the nature of their relationship with their families. The same movement helped to distance the meeting from the workplace. Here, management was a problem held at arm’s length. Men could gripe regardless of their actual professional status.

In the Nantoka Gakuen nomikai, the ritual trappings of corporate drinking and its masculine performance are maintained in the service of creating and supporting a social milieu that is unique within the existing social networks of attendees. There are exaggerated displays of drunkenness, physicality, deference to seniority, and even lightly sex segregated roles. The attendees are overwhelmingly elite employees who are no doubt familiar with the flow of corporate nomikai, which is replicated here. At the same time, these men are attuned to the unique qualities of this group. It coalesced around their shared identities as fathers, around the shared locality and community of the school and the surrounding area, around sharing in the labour of school organization. It persists through generations, creating a sense of attachment that remains even after formal ties to the school are severed. They reflect on corporate life and gendered expectation with a supportive audience.

6.9 Conclusion

In this chapter, I introduced an array of examples illustrating the way members of the fathering movement create ties to their community in their capacity as fathers. The ikimen, a man who cultivates strong ties with his community in service of both his family and his neighbors, 276 has emerged as a figure that represents a formalized effort to encourage men to make this transition. This is a crucial intervention as many fathers express feelings of discomfort as they transgress the gendered boundaries of parks, schools, and other non-corporate environs. Joining local fathering circles and sharing drinks in papakai allow men to connect outside of the context of the workplace. However, these men are sometimes met with hostility or suspicion, as in the case of the Nantoka Gakuen Father’s Association.

In the following chapter, I look to a similar transition of fatherhood, this time into the workplace. Discussing a new partnership between the state and fathering movement, I introduce the ikuboss: managers dedicated to shifting Japan’s workplace culture to accommodate an array of working styles. Like the ikimen discussed in this chapter, the ikuboss represents the movement of fatherhood beyond the family. These managers learn to read their corporation through the lens of fatherhood, translating their own experience with family members into compassionate decision making. The shape these decisions take and the multiple, competing logics that inform them reflect the malleability of the ikuboss concept in practice and the way it is leveraged strategically by managers.

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Chapter 7 Ikuboss 7.1 Rearing the Company: Work-Life Balance Reform and the Case of Matsuri Takahashi

“Child rearing is the same as rearing men. A subordinate grows up watching the boss's back as a

child grows looking at their parent's back” — Tetsuya Ando

Matsuri Takahashi, a graduate of the prestigious Tokyo University, joined advertising giant Dentsu in the spring of 2015 at the age of 24. On Christmas Day that same year, she took her own life, jumping off the roof of the company dormitory. In each of the months leading up to her suicide, Takahashi logged more than 100 hours of overtime, surviving on as little as 10 hours of sleep a week. The notoriously high demands of her workplace had become overwhelming.

Social media posts from Takahashi were circulated widely in the media following the incident; “I want to die”, read one, “I’m physically and mentally shattered” (Steinbuch 2017). A few weeks prior to Takahashi’s suicide, I was in contact with staff members from Dentsu’s head office in

Tokyo. An informant— a former employee of the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare— had stressed the importance of Dentsu’s collaboration with Fathering Japan and the government in concocting the original Ikumen Project campaign in 2011. “A brilliant piece of advertising” she explained, crediting Dentsu for its youthful energy and “cool” image. My contacts in the organization, receptive to my overtures prior to the winter break, went dark. Bracing for charges,

Dentsu was in lockdown. The company that had branded ikumen embodied the excesses of 278

Japanese corporate culture the fathering movement was created, in part, to fight against. This time from a very different position, Dentsu would again instigate widespread reform in Japan.

Death caused by overwork is so common in Japan that there is a separate word to describe the phenomenon: “karōshi”. The government’s first karōshi white paper, published in

October 2016, determined that some 2,159 suicides were directly attributable to overwork in

2015 (the year of Takahashi’s suicide)82. Under labor accident standards, the “karōshi line” — the point at which overwork directly correlates with death— sits at 80 hours of overtime per month. Ministry of Health Labour and Welfare estimates place 22.7% of full-time employees above the karōshi line. Due to the massive gender imbalance in full time employment and the entanglement of excessive work and masculinity (see Dasgupta 2013; Allison 1994; Ishii- Kuntz

1996, 2003; Taga 2016), statistically karōshi overwhelmingly effects men. While karōshi had long been a source of quiet unrest in Japan, Takahashi’s death sparked public outcry and a period of “national soul searching” (The Strait Times 2017). Takahashi’s case stood apart for a variety of reasons. Her gender, youth, academic pedigree, and the stature of her employer fueled much of the outrage, but the lack of ambiguity as to the cause of her death made this case particularly egregious. In her suicide note and in social media, Takahashi had isolated Dentsu and her managers as the sole cause of her death. The Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office brought a summary indictment against Dentsu on the charge of excessive overtime in violation of the

Labour Standards Law. Takahashi’s family had pushed for criminal charges against

82 These statistics must be treated with caution. Tracking the number of deaths caused by overwork— to determine causality irrefutably— is a difficult process. Japan has nearly 2000 suicides nationwide each month. While the deceased sometimes leave social media trails or notes directly implicating their work life, connections in other cases are largely speculation. Karōshi is also not limited to suicides. The coroner’s office often draws connections between employment conditions and deaths resulting from strokes or heart attacks, but these too are complicated by extenuating circumstances (a family history of heart disease, for example). 279 management, but there was no concrete evidence that she had been coerced into concealing her actual hours worked in company records. Dentsu was eventually fined 500,000 yen (about 5000

CAD) (The Japan Times 2017). Legally no individuals were found culpable in Takahashi’s death. The company administered its own penalties in a show of public contrition83. For activists and for the Takahashi family, the ruling was an insult. Following the verdict, Matsuri

Takahashi’s mother, Yukimi, said in a statement “The government must recognize this abnormal situation that creates so many victims. I want the labor laws to be amended so that death due to overwork can be eradicated" (Mainichi Shimbun 2018).

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ongoing efforts to develop meaningful workplace reform took on a new sense of urgency and significance following the Takahashi case. The public had become attuned to the issue, and the undercurrent of hypocrisy that had characterized the response of the government to the Karōshi issue had heightened public suspicion84. In March

2017, after its 10th and final meeting, the Prime Minister’s Council for the Realization of

Workstyle Reform (formed in 2016) released its “Action Plan”. The 70-page document opens with an outline of “The Current Economic Society” that formulates the problem at hand

(2017:1):

The structural issue regarding population, which is caused by the declining birthrate and

aging population as well as the decrease in productive-age population, is at the root of the

83 CEO Toshihiro Yamamoto took a 20 per cent pay cut for a period of six months. Tadashi Ishii, Dentsu president, later resigned from his post after apologizing for his inability to curb damaging work practices.

84 The government had plenty of its own labour violations to conceal from prying eyes. The 2013 death of state- owned national news broadcaster NHK’s employee Miwa Sado was frequently referenced during the Takahashi proceedings. Miki Watanabe, an Upper House lawmaker handpicked by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, owned a chain of bars embroiled in a legal battle over their own karōshi case. 280

bottleneck hindering our economic growth. There are also the issues of the stagnation of

the improvement in productivity, which is derived from a lack of innovation, as well as

insufficient investment in revolutionary technology. In order to realize the revitalization

of Japan’s economy, it is essential to improve the value-added productivity through

promotion of investment and innovation and the labor participation rate. To accomplish

these goals, we need to build a society where everyone can fulfil one’s potential and own

purpose in life.

The report gestures towards a growing perception of Japan’s work place culture as being deeply flawed and struggling to maintain its place in a competitive, globalized market. The tremendous hours put in by salaried employees have not translated to increased profits. In fact, Japan’s worker productivity rate is worryingly low. Among OECD countries in 2016, Japan ranked 20th out of 35 when assessed for GDP per hour worked. By that same metric, Japan was dead last among G7 nations (OECD 2019).

The panel later sketches out at path forward for the nation: one in which fathers play an important role. Throughout this passage, the influence of Fathering Japan’s work over the past decade to shift public discourse surrounding childcare leave is evident in the inclusion of a new, influential managerial concept popularized by the organization (2017: 30-31):

While women’s employment has been increasing in Japan, burdens of childcare or

nursing care are still biased toward women. Also, even when men hope to take childcare

leave, they cannot actually do so for various reasons… In order to change office

atmosphere, which make it harder for workers to take leave despite of the presence of a

system, we will introduce a scheme, which will encourage company owners to urge their

workers to take leave, as well as a system of leave dedicated to childcare to the Child 281

Care and Family Care Leave Act. In addition, in order to increase “ikuboss,” bosses who

are aware of the importance of childcare or nursing care of their subordinates or

colleagues, we will prepare a collection of role models and popularize the “ikuboss”

declarations. (Emphasis mine)

Like ikumen, the term ikuboss is a neologism combining the Japanese word iku, “to raise/rear”, and the English word “boss”. An “ikuboss” is a manager in a corporation dedicated to work-style reform in the name of “work-life balance”, implementing progressive policies that favour the health and well-being of their employees and their families. There was an explosion in interest surrounding the ikuboss concept around the time I arrived in Tokyo for fieldwork, though it had yet to reach the level of saturation that was capped by its inclusion in the Workstyle Reform

Action Plan. Industry publications, lifestyle magazines, and morning talk shows would regularly discuss different elements of this new breed of manager. Today, the business sections of Tokyo’s bookstores are lined with books targeting managers that promise happier employees and heightened productivity if they embrace the ikuboss concept. It has quickly outpaced Fathering

Japan itself. “Ikuboss” is now evoked by a range of authors and consultants without any formal ties to the organization. This spike in popularity has attracted a host of bandwagoners seeking to leverage its brand recognition. One prominent ikuboss lecturer griped on his blog about a management guide with “ikuboss” in its title that never once discussed the term in the body of the text: a hasty marketing ploy to attract buyers browsing the shelves of BOOKOFF (a popular chain of bookstores).

Launched in 2014, Fathering Japan’s “Ikuboss Project” marked a paradigm shift within the organization. In interviews and casual conversations, several senior Fathering Japan members had expressed to me the most salient lesson learned from the early years of the organization: the 282 desire to father is not the most efficient locus of intervention if one’s goal is to alter the workplace behaviour of men. Young fathers do not have the political clout within their workplaces needed to change their own responsibilities. They could not advocate for themselves

(nor for others) and were largely at the mercy of their superiors. If Fathering Japan were to effect meaningful change in parenting habits, they would need to target all levels of corporate hierarchy— not just the young fathers on the bottom rung. The Ikuboss Project is functionally a consultancy dedicated to management “solutions” to work-life balance issues. These solutions take the form of tailored training programs and materials designed to change workplace culture by altering the behaviour and attitude of middle and upper management.

The marriage of work-style reform, long brewing but accelerated by the Takahashi case, with the ikuboss concept is fascinating because these interventions into the workplace are filtered through the fathering subject. Indeed, as one father astutely noted, Japanese companies and

Japanese fathers are being made into “problems” to be solved at the same time because they are, in essence, “the same problem”. On the surface, the ikuboss concept may seem to be exclusively dedicated to improving the national rate of paternity leave acquisition. However, I argue that unpacking the ikuboss concept helps us to trace the way the fathering movement is influencing the way the company itself is being reconceptualized in Japan. This is not a revitalization of the idiomatic parity of family and corporation: the ikuboss is not “the father of the company”, a renewed patriarchal authority. Rather, I show that the ikuboss concept actually entails the reading of the corporation by management through the lens of family— a “father in the company”.

This distinction between “father of the company” and “father in the company” is a subtle but significant one. My thinking here is influenced by McKinnon and Cannell’s (2013) recent volume, in which the contributors collectively argue against the assumption that “modern 283 societies are marked by a separation between the domains of kinship, economics, politics and religion, and that these domains are distinguished by fundamentally different forms of social relations” (15). These domains are discursively (especially by academics) and legally separated in ways that make them appear distinct. McKinnon and Cannell astutely highlight the way a universalized conception of modernity serves to conceal the continued influence of kinship and commit its presence in the political and economic spheres to distant history or societies deemed

“pre-industrial” or “pre-modern” (see also Yanagisako 2002). The contributors instead show the continued impact of kinship on the economy, from textile manufacturing in Italy and China

(Yanagisako in McKinnon and Cannell 2013) to ship construction in India (Bear in McKinnon and Cannell 2013), and the “boundary-crossings and blurrings between domains” (Lazar 2018:

259). Kinship can create inequality and hierarchy in these contexts in addition to durable bonds of solidarity through sharing work, meals, and the use of kin terms (see Lazar 2018; Sahlins

2013).

As I will illustrate, in the Japanese case the collapsing of kinship and corporation has long been a matter of popular, political, and academic interest (see Kondo 1990). The “blurring” between these domains has been a matter of fact, not a matter of debate. What makes the ikuboss concept a compelling complication to this discussion is the way it mobilizes kinship— understood as loyalty, obligation, and pleasure unique to relations of consanguinity— to undo the “kin-like” bonds and practices of the workplace. Counterintuitively, this undoing results in kinship exerting an even greater force on the inner machinations of the corporation. It is not simply the “life” or work-life balance, a domain separate from but influenced by the corporation.

Nor is it a matter of aligning folk models of family with the administrative structure of the corporation through kin terms. Kinship— or, more specifically, fatherhood— is the guiding principle of management itself. The ikubosses I encountered poignantly contrast their previous 284 approach to work with their newfound attention to work-life balance. They begin to make business decisions as subjects they identify as being non-managerial—as fathers and as citizens.

Reform is intuited through fatherhood as managers draw on their own experience at home to improve the working conditions of subordinates. In this way, fatherhood opens space for the subversion of work-life balance as a state policy of (re)productive (see Frederici and Carlin

2014) intervention. This is evident in the implementation of workplace policies that undercut profits and in the expansion of reform beyond the reproductive interests of the heterosexual nuclear family unit.

The first section of this chapter grapples with the concept of “Japanese management” and its familial character, which looms large in the background of discussions with my ikuboss informants. Here, I historicize Japanese management as an object of knowledge and introduce theoretical work that troubles its culturalist roots. Section two delves into the Ikuboss Project itself. Here, I provide examples from the organization’s management training material in an effort to encapsulate its philosophy. In section three, I analyze the narratives of self-proclaimed ikubosses, exploring their personal understanding of the relationship between fatherhood and their managerial approach, and examining their unique applications and interpretations of the ikuboss philosophy.

7.2 Navigating Corporate Subjectivity

Scholars of Japanese work relations have argued that corporations in Japan following

World War II developed as community-like entities distinct from their profit driven counterparts in North America and Western Europe (Dore and Aoki 1994; Dore 2000). The Japanese corporation is thought to be animated by familial sentiments of duty, loyalty, and obligation

(Nakane 1967). This is embodied in the “Three Sacred Treasures” of Japanese management: 285 lifetime employment (shūshin koyō), seniority wages (nenkō joretsu chingin) and enterprise unions (kigyōbetsu kumiai), which offer relative stability and a degree of permanence to employment (Sakikawa 2012). In this system, as Allison (2012) explains, “…core (male) workers attached to the workplace, and one another, like familial kin: lifelong bonds, company trips, late-night work followed by outings to drink. Sararīman (salarymen) didn't work at Toyota, they belonged to Toyota” (96). Masayoshi Ohira, Prime Minister of Japan from 1978 to 1980, famously stated that the values of aidagara (human relations and respect) separated Japanese corporations from their inhumane, profit driven counterparts in the West (see Miyoshi and

Harootunian 1989; Allison 2013: 26). The influential work of sociologist Chie Nakane (1967) posited that the post-war workplace was structured as a family. Nakane argued that the familial sentiments that bound employees to each other were counter-balanced by tate no kankei (vertical relationships). Seniority was of central importance, with deference paid to those of higher corporate rank as though they were parents or older siblings.

While this formulation of the Japanese corporation and its attendant management paradigm were often taken for granted by my informants, and indeed is freely referenced in contemporary popular literature concerning Japanese management practices, this framing is at least in part the product of the Orientalist history of the social sciences. Japan’s phenomenal economic success in the 1960s was a source of fascination and concern for the United States. It sparked a period of intensive scholarly inquiry into the nature of “Japanese management” by native and foreign researchers alike. Synthesizing the work of anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and economists, this new body of literature demarcated a set of behaviours and policies in corporate contexts that were “distinctly Japanese”. These studies were largely, but not exclusively, comparative in nature, contrasting “Western” and Japanese modes of management in search of essential cultural differences. These often boiled down to the contrast between the 286 then hegemonic conceptions of the immutable individualism of the West and communalism of the East (see Said 1978). As Hamada (in Robertson 2005) explains, during the period of foreign interest and domestic prosperity from the 1970s through the 1980s, “the ie85, or household, became a collective symbol around which Japanese business elites rallied to identify and organize themselves in opposition to the so-called West” (131). The “Japanese way” of doing business, validated both by its success and by the large body of literature praising its unique cultural underpinnings, continued to grow in prominence into the 1990s. Increasingly, the relationships between employees of large Japanese corporations and their families served as a normative model for Japanese social relationship writ large. This conflation allowed the business community to continue to pursue practices that were increasingly untenable, especially with growing competition in the Pacific sphere from massive firms in South Korea and China.

Iwai (2003, 2005) offers a compelling alternative theorization that allows us to resist essentialist arguments for the variation observed between Japanese corporations and those in

North America and Europe. Rather than attribute these differences to immutable cultural elements, Iwai traces the ambiguous position of the corporation as both subject and object. In the

United States during the early nineteenth century, the corporation was rendered as a “legal

85 The revitalization of the nihonjinron during Japan’s boom years helped to tie Japan’s success to the continuity of traditions leading back to the feudal era. Through this lens, Japanese management was understood as the product of an ancient and inviolable cultural predilection for harmony (wa) and collectivism. Psychologist Takeo Doi’s (1973) conceptualization of amae, which leaned on a dichotomy between what he perceived as the psychology of forced independence in the West and the “presumption of indulgence” in Japan, helped to legitimate this explanation. In conjunction with Doi’s work, Chie Nakane’s profoundly influential book Tateshakai no Ningen Kankei (1970) (published in English as “Japanese Society”) shaped much of the popular and academic discourse surrounding Japanese management practices. Though reforms carried out under the American Occupation saw nuclear families exclusively recognized under civil law, Nakane argued that the psychological framework of the ie endured. The group loyalty and deference to seniority characteristic of the ie was replicated by managers and employees in post- war corporations.

287 person” able to represent itself in business transactions. This change was made in the service of simplifying legal agreements, which previously required the signature of each owner associated with the business. As a legal person, the corporation exists as both a subject capable of participation in business transactions and an object possessed by its (human) owners. Analyzing the debate that arose surrounding the dual nature of the corporation, Iwai stakes out two contrasting perspectives: “corporate nominalism” and “corporate realism86”.

The corporate nominalist perspective takes the personhood of the corporation as a legal fiction; its owners are the true subjects in any business interaction. The corporation is an object that they possess, and it may be traded freely like a commodity to another group of owners. In the service of profit generation, the corporation is stocked with skilled labourers and managers who, as non-owners, are incentivized to extract as much of this profit for their own use as they can. Iwai associates corporate nominalism with Anglo-American corporations. In contrast, the corporate realist perspective takes the personhood of the corporation— in so far as it exists as a legal subject— as something more than convention. Using the example of Japanese corporations following World War II, Iwai explains that many companies purchased stock in other companies.

In contrast to the American case, where ownership was often limited to a small group of individuals, these corporate stock holdings in Japan made it difficult to individuate ownership.

Often a company would be its own majority shareholder, further emphasizing the subject-like nature of the corporation as a legal entity and owner. More than an object for the generation of profit, the corporation has a vested interest in its own perpetuation.

86 The terms mirror those used in management studies literature in the 1970s and 1980s. Japan’s “groupism” model (shudan-shugi) was held in contrast with the “individualism” model (of American companies), where employee performance was the chief metric of assessment, specialized skill sets were favoured, and labour was mobile and motivated strictly by self-interest (see Futatsugi 1986; Dore 1973; Johnson and Ouchi 1974; Ouchi and Jaeger 1977). 288

This distinction changes the nature of the relationship between corporation and worker.

Corporate nominalism positions workers as subjects who consent to temporarily sell their labour— an object in a business transaction— to the corporation. The corporation is a legal fiction that exists to facilitate a contractual agreement between owners and employees. Each party is incentivized to cultivate either a more lucrative skillset (for workers) or a more efficient production system (for owners) in order to maximize the profits they generate through free exchange in the labour market. Corporate realism positions workers as a crucial element of the perpetuation of the corporation. It is beneficial for the corporation to invest in the development of workers with organization specific skills and knowledge, valuing retention and efficacy over the profit generated from the immediate exchange of labour for money. Cultivating labour power that is most efficiently applied to a single corporate context, the production of the worker-as- subject is more intimately connected to the corporation-as-subject.

Looking to lived examples, the boundaries of Iwai’s categories are not neatly set by national context. Following Satsuka (2015), I see a tension between the corporate nominalist and corporate realist positions manifested within actual corporations in Japan. Describing the

“escape” of the Japanese tour guides she worked with in Banff from what they saw as restrictive and oppressive corporate employment, Satsuka suggests that the peculiarities of Japan’s post-war development pit the cultivation of a relational subjectivity (in the corporate context) against the cultivation of an individuated subjectivity. Returning to Iwai, Satsuka explains that post-war

Japan’s need for rapid economic recovery favoured the relative stability and more equitable profit distribution of corporate realism. However, the backbone of the American Occupation’s reform policies was the promotion of a form of liberal humanism considered suitable for building a democratic order (see McLelland 2010, 2012). In the corporate context, the tension between corporate subjectification and its kin-like relations of dependence and subjectification as an 289 autonomous and independent citizen resulted in what Satsuka describes as a kind of anxiety among her interlocutors. For example, employees improve their skills in service of the corporation and to solidify their role within it, but also recognize that these skills are uniquely theirs and exist independent of the corporation.

Satsuka highlights this tension as a means of explicating her interlocutor’s simultaneous anxiety surrounding their search for self-hood and comfort in being enmeshed within the relations of corporate employment. The company provides security and a sense of belonging— what Brinton (2011) refers to as a site (ba) for the construction of social identity— but the expectation of tireless work and self-sacrifice can suffocate. Satsuka’s interlocutors were generally of the cohort that entered corporate employment in the 1980s just prior to the end of the Bubble Era. At that time, part-time work as furītā was posed as an enticing alternative to demanding corporate employment that enabled young people to pursue their dreams and passions— to constitute themselves as they saw fit without the weight of expectation in the company-cum-community. As belt-tightening in corporations in the 1990s and 2000s made these part-time positions less a choice than an inevitability, furītā has become synonymous with precarity (Standing 2011). Satsuka’s analysis develops out of the experience of interlocutors that reflect a very different period of time than my own; men and women who sought an escape from the strictures of Japanese corporations through irregular employment and travel abroad. Indeed, the frustrations expressed by the guides in Satsuka’s work would likely be met with envy by some of the men with whom I spoke, who look back on the stability of this form of corporate employment with nostalgic longing.

However, I saw this tension between relational and individuated subjectivation in the corporation reflected with remarkable clarity in the discussion surrounding the ikuboss concept. 290

My interlocutors in non-managerial positions often complained of a gap between their compensation and benefits and the expectation of dedication to their employer, the careful surveillance of their conduct, and the constant infringement of work obligations on their personal lives. That is to say, they were expected to behave “as family” within the corporation despite being treated as fluid and ultimately disposable labour power. The managerial perspective is a unique one because it takes the tension between corporate nominalism and realism as a problem to be solved through technical intervention. That management is invested in retaining skilled workers and improving their performance is not remarkable in and of itself. What is remarkable in this instance is that management is being driven through the fathering subject. The family is

“re-entering” Japanese corporations, not as a model for the corporation itself but as a means of reform. The overlap between corporation and family in understandings of Japanese management provides a pre-existing discursive space for the Ikuboss Project to connect fatherhood to the workplace.

One could view the changes associated with ikuboss as representing a push towards corporate nominalism, better reflecting the dominant paradigm of the multi-national (but

American led) corporation. In an interview with Wave+ Magazine (2014), Ando spoke rather poignantly in favour of the sort of relationship between employee and corporation associated with corporate nominalism:

Many people think that they are ‘employed by a company and get a salary’, but instead I

think we should work feeling that ‘I am temporarily lending my ability and time to the

company and getting compensation’.

Moreover, it was not uncommon for my interlocutors— self-proclaimed ikubosses and otherwise—to cite American juggernauts like Google and Facebook as models of work-life 291 balance they aspired to emulate. However, the legal foundations of corporate personhood are not being challenged directly in these work-life balance reforms— only what Iwai sees as their effect. What may be “new” here, then, is less the idea that the corporation is one element of a larger social whole than the way this relationship is being narrativized by state and industry. In the material I describe in the following sections, the qualities that previously appeared to index the communal character of the corporation— consideration of the impact of one’s personal life on the company, not inconveniencing others, a willingness among employees for self-sacrifice— are being reframed as flaws that must be remedied. The problem, the audience of managers and employees is told, is that Japanese corporations lack “teamwork” and empathy, and care only for profit. Lecturers affiliated with the ikuboss concept argue that what was previously seen as evidence of employee’s dedication to the success of their corporate family actually reflect a kind of selfish myopia on the part of management and co-workers: the expectation that employees commit to a certain, often unsustainable workstyle or face ostracization. Employees should be free to work in a way that best suits their needs; an approach to work-style that emphasizes the benefit for all and not just the corporate entity. The ikuboss concept operates in this ambiguous space between insisting upon the primacy of the autonomous individual and curtailing the deleterious effects of this individuation in the workplace.

7.3 Ikuboss Parameters

Fathering Japan’s initial formulation of ikuboss serves as a useful starting point for exploring the concept. The “10 Ikuboss Articles” is a document drafted in 2013 outlining the qualities of an “ikuboss”; a sort of charter that would go on to shape the content of future management training programs. These articles are frequently cited by ikubosses and corporations associated with the Ikuboss Project. They also feature prominently in the educational materials prepared by the organization: 292

1. Understanding: “To understand modern child rearing circumstances, to show

understanding to subordinates dedicating time to life (parenting)”.

2. Diversity: “For subordinates dedicating time to life, manage with diversity in mind and

without discrimination or hostility”.

3. Knowledge: “To know laws (labour laws etc.) and internal company systems (childcare

leave etc.) for the purpose of life”.

4. Organizational Permeation: “Throughout all jurisdictions under your control (for

example, if you are a manager, your department), actively convey your recommendations

for creating more time without neglecting life”.

5. Consideration: “For jobs transfers with or without family or for work that exerts a great

influence on your subordinate’s life, give it maximum consideration”.

6. Business: “When those taking childcare leave exit the company, make jointly owned

information sharing systems, foster teamwork, use mobile or cloud-based software etc.

and work out a plan using any possible measures for the purpose of advancing your

organization without delay”.

7. Time Solutions: “To make it easy for subordinates to take time for life, reduce meetings,

reduce documents/paperwork, make quick decisions, and promote a system of

discretion”.

8. Proposal: “To your boss or the Human Resources Department etc., propose management

solutions that place an emphasis on the life of your subordinates”.

9. Be as Good as Your Word: “In a business or organization with an ikuboss, demonstrate

that business performance will be improved and make efforts to disseminate this

(information) to society”. 293

10. Begin with You: “The boss himself must emphasize work life balance and enjoy his own

life”.

Anyone who adopts these principles and applies them to their own work is, technically, an

“ikuboss”. There are many who identify with the moniker and philosophy despite a lack of formal association or training. Some simply educated themselves, purchasing books or reading articles about being an ikuboss on the internet. Such self-declared members are important because they help to propagate the concept and change their own workplace culture: any barrier to entry or monopoly on the title (an inflexible need for certification, for example) would only serve to hinder its permeation. Furthermore, these individuals often lay the groundwork for formal entry into the Ikuboss Alliance: the Ikuboss Project’s official network of approved corporate affiliates.

Accession to any of the Ikuboss Alliances is predicated on the satisfaction of three criteria. The first is to commit to promoting “diversity87 management”. The second is to be seeking “management consciousness” and work-style reform policies. The third is to have commitment from the top levels of management. If the company in question wants to join as a small or medium enterprise, they must meet the requirements set out in Article 2 of the SME

87 Diversity is an import word— a transliteration of the term from English— used almost exclusively in the context of work-style reform. The Japanese language has several native words used to refer to the concept of diversity. Tayōsei, comprised of the characters for “many” “forms” and “nature”, is often translated as “diversity”. As David Rear (2016) explains, tayōsei is a loaded term in Japan’s business community, and has historically been evoked in the context of deregulation. Tayōsei is associated with the hiring of non-regular, often non-Japanese employees, especially at the expense of salaried jobs previously given to (male) Japanese workers. Complicating the matter, ikuboss materials or ikubosses themselves will often use tayōsei and diversity as synonyms. However, diversity sees limited use outside of management circles. The growing popularity of the “diversity management” approach, itself a bedfellow of the work-life balance movement in Japan, has done a great deal to shape the term and distinguish it from the more general applications of tayōsei.

294

Law. If these conditions are met, the company submits the required form. The form itself contains fields for basic company and contact information, as well as details concerning the current condition of diversity systems in the company and a stated reason for wanting to join the

Ikuboss Enterprise Alliance. The Ikuboss Project reserves the right to deny any applicant at their discretion. This theoretically allows them to weed out bad actors should any gross violations of the organization’s principles come to light, though I was not made aware of any instances where this occurred. After the documents are reviewed, the Ikuboss Project contacts the business in question to coordinate the Ikuboss Declaration event. During the event, the company’s personalized declaration is signed by participants. A copy is retained by the Ikuboss Project.

From this event onward, the company’s sole obligation is to send a representative to the bi- monthly Ikuboss Enterprise Alliance meeting (small and medium enterprises have separate, irregular events to which they are invited).

7.4 Making Ikubosses

In ikuboss lectures and texts, family generally, and fatherhood specifically, are invoked again and again as the means of reform. A prominent figure on the ikuboss lecture circuit,

Toshi’s thoughtful and well-organized lectures have been delivered to a vast array of corporations and municipal offices. Toshi provided me with example lectures and an explanation for their content88. After introductions and an ice breaking activity, Toshi will often begin his class with a detailed periodization of corporate masculine subjectivities in Japan. This performs

88 I was unable to attend an ikuboss course in person (public lectures promoting the concept in a general sense were uncommon at the time but accessible) as I was not a manager nor employee of a company that had commissioned such a lecture. It was difficult to find an organization that would consent to my presence. In addition to Toshi’s original materials, I was able to view some recordings of lectures (both partial and complete) that were shared with me by interlocutors or made publicly available via the internet. In the years since my fieldwork, there have been some larger ikuboss lectures with public registration as the concept has grown in popularity. 295 two important functions. The first is to position ikuboss in contrast with traditional Japanese management, asserting that the two are distinct and, to an extent, oppositional. The second is to normalize change. By charting the evolution of corporate masculine subjects, Toshi undoes discourses that seek to naturalize managerial behaviour or characterize it as a reflection of essential elements of Japanese culture. Beginning with the statement “the way a man ought to live has changed”, this timeline is meant to show that, far from being the first “deviation” in corporate masculinity, ikubosses are just the latest in a long line of shifting archetypes. Until

1950, just after World War II, Japan was dominated by what Toshi calls the “stubborn thunder and lightning father” (ganko kaminari oyaji). Described as having “feudalistic” tendencies and reflecting an unquestioned patriarchal authority, the thunder and lightning father is tied to the legacy of the samurai89 and described as reflecting a kind of unruly masculinity. Toshi marks the post-war era up to the 1990s as the period of the mōretsu (“go-getter”) Salaryman. This is the corporate warrior who fights on the frontlines while “his wife is on the homefront”. It was a time of rapid economic growth fueled by excessive hours of work. The philosophy that supported this division, Toshi explains, was one that glorified being away from home. Those who gave their lives to the company were moral exemplars. The social, economic, and demographic fallout of this period leads to the current ikumen/ikuboss era, wherein work and childrearing co-exist. The way of life “that ought to be” (arubeki) has changed. Men, including bosses, should have “full lives” (jyujitsu raifu).

A striking element of this periodization is the connection Toshi draws between corporation and society at large. Recognizing the way of life “that ought to be” is not simply

89 This association between hyper-masculinity and the figure of the samurai is a consistent one (see Introduction). 296 about encouraging and allowing employees to pursue their passions: it’s about rectifying the misdeeds of corporate Japan. He presents this as being an experience of revelation, the sharing of

“an impending sense of crisis” (kikikan). The broader goal is to institute societal change from within Japan’s business world, but first there is a need to convey the severity of the overarching issues of the low birth rate and karōshi. In one lecture, he ties this directly to the suicide of Mari

Takahashi described in the beginning of this chapter, writing “the impact of the Dentsu case: long hours of hard work are the root of evil”. In another, he speaks about the prevalence of maternity and paternity harassment (matahara and patahara).

Viewed through the lens of crisis, the stakes in implementing work-life balance reforms are high. The scope of an ikuboss’ concerns, in turn, are appropriately broad. On his Powerpoint slide, underneath the word “Ikuboss”, Toshi writes, in red lettering, “child rearing is not the limit”: an early attempt to shift attendee’s attention away from the ikuboss as solely a facilitator of childcare leave. Instead, as the lecture continues, fatherhood and child rearing are woven into the managerial logic of the ikuboss. Toshi argues that an ikuboss is “not a good boss, but a humorous boss”: someone who can appreciate and enjoy the totality of the lives of his employees. This echoes the sentiment of Fathering Japan’s original catch phrase: “not good fathers, but smiling fathers”. In both instances, the emphasis is on managing and fathering as something affective— not measured but felt. “Subordinates (children) who see the figure of a lively and shining superior (parents) will have bright wishes in the future” one slide concludes, explicitly collapsing the distinction between father and manager, family and company.

Parental responsibility is rendered in the corporate language of productivity and skills training, promising a monetary return on investment in work-life balance reform. Toshi argues that child rearing is itself a kind of professional development. Parents, his slides explain, have 297 excellent time management and planning abilities. They are cognizant of risk and take the appropriate measures to limit it. They are better able to cope with stress. They have a “sense of citizenship” (shimin kankaku) — a connection to the social world outside the company. Finally, and crucially, they have an “abundance of feeling” (kanjyō ga yutaka) or “EQ”: emotional intelligence. This makes them ideal managers because of their enhanced capacity for empathy.

The Ikumen Project’s management training texts echo this position. “Training Materials for

Managers” (Ikumen Project Secretariat 2017), a book accompanied by a series of training videos provided by the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare for corporate use, lists the benefits of allowing employees to take paternity leave: “increased risk management ability”, “improved multitasking ability”, and “improved patience and adaptability” are all derived from childrearing experience. The text also (somewhat spuriously) claims that men who are needed and want to be at home are motivated to be more efficient in the completion of their work. Rather than see parents as unreliable and bound to commitments outside the corporation, managers are invited to see them as more efficient and dedicated than their childless co-workers. Moreover, the affect that animates their familial commitments is framed as a business resource: a mode of relating that can translate from kin to co-workers.

Following this line of reasoning, Toshi argues that managers should actively seek to

“bring family into the workplace”. Sharing information about one’s personal life (assuming it is done while respecting the privacy of others) creates an atmosphere (funiki) where others can speak easily. Talking about life plan’s and ambitions can provide insight into where the objectives of the company meet the desires of its employees in opposition to sacrifice in service of the company. Of course, Toshi concedes that work-life balance typically falls far short of this ideal. The trouble starts with the concept of “balance” itself. A slide entitled “Thinking about

Work-Life Balance” features a scale with an “x” drawn through it. “Balance does not mean work 298 and private (life) should be 50/50”, it explains. Rather, it is important to consider the entirety of one’s life. There will be periods when childcare or nursing care takes priority, and others where work is one’s focus. Toshi describes work-life balance as “nabe90” (hot pot). His diagram includes the pot itself. In it there are different spheres representing elements of social life: childcare, PTA, being part of a couple, community activities etc. Each of the spheres varies in size, representing the proportion of his life that it occupies. Students are provided with their own blank nabe diagram and are asked to fill the pot with their own “ingredients”. The “balance” of each pot will be different, its contents a mixture of passions and responsibilities. Toshi tells participants to learn about diversity from participating in their community and learning from those outside the business world: “less MBA, more PTA” in his words. However, work-life balance is not simply the extraction of labour to serve the corporation, family, or community, but the creation of time for self-cultivation: “When you care for others, don’t forget to care for yourself”.

7.5 Representing Ikubosses

Roleplaying activities are an important component of ikuboss management training. From an analytic perspective, they are valuable because they present idealized visions of how managers “should” act and, importantly, how they are perceived to act currently (ie. should not act). These activities are often designed around training videos that provide scenarios for managers to reflect critically on. The first example I was referred to by ikuboss trainers was a

90 This analogy is a common one, illustrating the way in which these disparate materials draw on the same experts to craft their arguments. Nabe images can be found in the New Papa’s Textbook (Fathering Japan 2015: 142). 299 series of three videos produced for pharmaceutical giant I will refer to as PPK for internal use in consultation with Fathering Japan in 2014. While PPK maintains a copyright over the material, they agreed to let Fathering Japan host it on their website (so it is available to the public). The videos themselves make no reference to processes specific to PPK. Rather, they present an array of generic “office” problems and contrast the responses of two archetypes: the NG (“no good”) boss, who is meant to embody the poorest qualities of management, and the ikuboss, who is presented as a model to be emulated. They were distributed alongside a worksheet asking viewers to pencil in their own thoughts and responses for each scene.

One particularly illustrative short is entitled “consulting on paternity leave”. The title card “NG Boss Case” marks the beginning of the video. Two men, a manager and his subordinate, discuss the latter’s plans to take time off work for the birth of his child. “Childcare leave!? You’re a man, aren’t you? Even though we just released new goods. If you aren’t doing your best now, what am I to do? What do you think?” the manager retorts aggressively. His employee bows several times, nervously. There is an awkward pause before the employee responds: “In our leave system, men can take it too…because we work together”. “Look, I know about the system” his manager continues, “anyway, about you taking leave, your child has a mother. Do you understand? Stop it”. The video transitions to the “Ikuboss Case”. Again, the employee expresses his desire to take leave, this time to a much more receptive manager. “Oh, childcare leave! I see, we should do it soon… maybe schedule time off for the month after next?

That’s good, congratulations! So, you want to be present (for childcare and birth)?” he says, excitedly. “Yes, I want to be present for it” his employee smiles, sheepishly. “However, at the same time, there is a project…”. “Ah, I see” the manager interrupts. “Well, the birth of a child is something that doesn’t happen many times. And you want to be present for it, right? So, when should we schedule childcare leave until?”. “3 months?” the employee ventures. “3 months…” 300 the manager says, momentarily troubled. “Well, when my child was born, all I did was work.

Even now, my wife says, ‘at that time I was so busy, and you were never there!’. She always complains about it”. They share a laugh. The manager continues: “Anyway, so don’t worry about work. Let’s try and do some of the work earlier (in preparation for your leave)”. The employee thanks him profusely.

The contrast established through this video series— oscillating back and forth between the NG boss and the ikuboss— helps demarcate the boundaries of these management styles. The

NG boss is a corporate warrior; he is concerned with the performance of the team and aggressively belittles those who refuse to emulate the workstyle of their peers. His comments also reflect a kind of hyper-masculinity: questioning the manhood of his subordinates, responding tersely or angrily to requests sent his way. The ikuboss is comparatively longwinded.

While his responses are perhaps a little “on the nose”, the ikuboss makes reference to his own parenting experience in order to establish a frame of reference for his decision. He connects his life outside the workplace to his subordinate’s life outside the workplace on the grounds that the presence of “family” in both makes them commensurable. This interaction is framed as a discussion between fathers; the business end of the discussion is pushed to the background.

Notably, he is not cast as an ikumen role model for emulation. Instead, he alludes to his short comings as a parent in order to empathize with his subordinate. Viewers are invited to reflect on the way their own life experiences might intersect with similar workplace conundrums: to hold an empathetic attentiveness to the way their decisions intersect with broader Japanese society in a space that the NG boss manages rigidly as its own isolated microcosm. That is not to say that the ikuboss archetype ignores his responsibility to the corporation entirely. Rather, in contrast with the NG boss, the ikuboss takes active responsibility for the work of his subordinates, managing through intervention rather than expectation. In the short described here, the ikuboss 301 expresses a bit of uncertainty regarding his subordinate’s request for paternity leave, deciding that they should try and complete their assignments ahead of schedule as a kind of compromise.

The ikuboss is depicted not just as a more compassionate manager, but as a more competent manager.

The Ikumen Project has produced its own series of videos, some of which do not adopt the same instructional format. Rather, these videos are dramatic short films that chart the lives of male employees seeking paternity leave and the managers who entertain their requests. Though they explore scenarios that mirror the contrived exercises produced for PPK, they weave a more complex narrative and are intended to resonate emotionally with their audience. One of these films provided to me by an interlocutor revolves around Shota Aoki, who is told in the opening moments that his wife is pregnant with their second child. We learn that Aoki was absent for much of the childhood of his daughter Kaneko. When his wife wistfully describes how quickly she’s grown, Aoki resolves to take paternity leave for the birth of his second. Several scenes establish the distance between these almost saccharine scenes of idealized domesticity91 and

Aoki’s work-life. Receiving the news of the pregnancy by text in the office, Aoki dismisses his co-workers’ inquiries as to the cause of his excitement, saying “it’s just a family thing”. When he floats the idea of taking childcare leave past his junior associate Yamazaki, the latter protests in a harsh whisper: “Don’t say that! Are you stupid?”. Aoki eventually approaches the section head,

Hirata, in the privacy of the company tearoom to make his request. While Hirata concedes that

91 Aoki’s wife, apron clad, is an unflappably calm and accommodating part-time housewife, and cleaves rather closely to the sengyō shufu archetype. This story is not about the importance of paternity leave to the careers and lives of women. Rather, both Aoki and Hirata’s wives knowingly guide their husbands towards the “correct” solution to their dilemma without having a direct stake in the going’s on of the company. Actual female co-workers present in some scenes in the film are given no real lines of dialogue. 302 provisions for paternity leave do exist in corporate policy, concretely it would be impossible for him to approve the request given their current workload. The following scene gives us a glimpse of Hirata’s home life. He sits that evening with his wife, asking after the study habits of his own child. Sighing, he recounts Aoki’s request. “Aoki-san is an ikumen!” his wife exclaims, “I don’t know if you recall, but all you did was work when Satori (his daughter) was young and you didn’t spend much time together”. “I wouldn’t ask for childcare leave” Hirata scoffs. “But, as a father, wouldn’t you have wanted it?” his wife asks knowingly. Heart softened, Hirata meets again with Aoki, this time to approve his request and to offer his support. The audience is told via a voiceover from Aoki that Hirata’s epiphany led to an overall reduction in overtime.

Employees at their company leave early to be with family and junior associates like Yamazaki are less dependent on senior supervision, rising to meet the challenge of carrying more responsibility for day to day operations.

The mirroring of Aoki and Hirata’s families in this film is noteworthy. The kitchens in which the men speak with their wives are near mirror images of one another; the scenes set around a late-night drink seated across from one another at a table. Hirata and Aoki represent a generational schism but, through the intervention of Hirata’s wife, the enduring compulsive force of kinship in both of their lives is revealed. Indeed, though Hirata’s decision was shown to be a net positive for the company’s bottom line, it was ultimately a reflection of establishing parity between his family and Aoki’s; between Hirata as a father and Aoki as a father. Aoki and Hirata meet for the second time not as superior and subordinate or with Hirata adopting a fatherly or brotherly role in relation to his younger co-worker. They meet and plot a path forward as two fathers who share a corporate association: a relation that is subordinate to their respective kin relations. In this sense, there is a shift in emphasis from the hierarchical relation between Hirata 303 as a manager and Aoki as a subordinate to the horizontal, equalizing relation stemming from their shared identity as fathers.

7.6 Managing as a Father: Noritoshi

Noritoshi takes a final drag of his cigarette before we exit the designated smoking area outside Shibuya station. A blue folder is tucked under his arm. Gesturing towards it with his head, he says “I’ve brought something for you”. We hurry across the crossing to the Starbucks overlooking the intersection. Noritoshi is tall, his long, gangly legs keeping pace with my own strides. He is solidly built and well groomed, his manner confident without being imposing. Now the director of a mid-sized sporting goods supplier in Tokyo, Noritoshi has had a phenomenally successful career despite his youth— he only recently turned 30. Though his organization is not one that has made an ikuboss declaration, Noritoshi has pledged himself to the cause

“independently”. In our exchanges over LINE before our meeting, he told me he attends public ikuboss events as he is able and keeps abreast of the project on social media.

We are able to stake out space at a counter facing the station, Hachiko92 barely visible through the crowds and light shrubbery. Noritoshi produces a copy of The New Papa’s Textbook from his briefcase as further evidence of his credentials. “This was very helpful when I first started to change my management style” he says. In his early 20s, Noritoshi was a “workaholic”; a typical salaryman, he claims. Late nights spent working and drinking took a toll on his body and his health, but at the time it was something he relished. It was, in his mind, “natural”

(atarimae): “I used to think ‘staying up late is natural’, ‘drinking all night and coming into work

92 A statue memorializing Hachiko, an Akita dog who famously waited for his master to arrive at Shibuya station every day over 9 years after his death, is a landmark that serves as a popular meeting spot. 304 the next day early is natural’, ‘working through holidays is natural’”. It was a difficult lifestyle, but one of which he was proud. His background as a student athlete (a rugby player) and his competitive personality allowed him to frame habits he now characterizes as “unhealthy” as measures of his mental and physical strength. His ability to perform in business, like his ability to perform on the pitch, were deeply connected to his sense of worth. Pausing to sip his coffee, he searches for the words to describe his mindset. “The feeling was one of ‘I must continue, I must win’. I’m not sure I can say I was unhappy or I was happy with certainty. Rather, I didn’t think that there was a different way to work or a different way to live. I think many men in Japan think this way”.

Removing his cellphone from his breast pocket, he swipes to a picture of his wife and daughter. I recognize the background: Yokohama’s famous Ferris wheel. Noritoshi nods. “This was last year, I think”. I ask if his wife had been the driving force behind his reformed outlook on work. “Certainly, the relationship between us is good now. But that doesn’t mean I changed when we got married” he replies. In fact, as a newlywed, Noritoshi’s unhealthy work habits intensified. Hard drinking and late nights spent socializing with his subordinates gave him an excuse to avoid housework, exasperating his wife. “I think everyone knows the idea ‘men work and women do chores and childrearing’” he says, “This was certainly my belief at that time”. In their second year of marriage, Noritoshi learned he would become a father. He was excited, but even the birth of his daughter could not persuade him to change his ways. In fact, becoming a father spurred on his sense of commitment to his career. “Because I became a father, I had the feeling that work was my most important responsibility” he says, absent mindedly watching the crosswalk below us flood with men clad in suits as the signals change. 305

His daughter was a toddler before Noritoshi began to realize the effect his absence was having on his family. On the rare night or weekend when he was able to return home, his child treated him like a stranger. Sometimes she would cry when he went to hold her, asking for her mother instead. He had difficulty convincing her to eat, to sleep, to play. He coincidentally shared a brief conversation with a colleague in a different department— a Fathering Japan member. His gentle urging, though, was enough to tip Noritoshi over the edge. He put in for a two week leave of absence later that month. The company president, he explains, is an intense workaholic, not unlike himself. His rapid ascent through the ranks of the company— rare in a business that still privileges seniority over performance for career advancement— was partially attributable to the mutual understanding and respect they shared. When Noritoshi decided to take a leave of absence, he approached the president with trepidation. However, he was unequivocally supportive of his decision. The company had a childcare leave system in place for both men and women, but not a single man before him had taken advantage of it. Why, then, had no men applied for paternity leave, if the conditions here were generally favourable? “Well, perhaps I can say the important thing is role models” he suggests. The elderly president has children, but they are adults. Since Noritoshi took his inaugural leave (he recently took a second, month long break for the birth of his second child), three other male employees have followed in his footsteps. It’s a small but meaningful change. Noritoshi knows each of the three men personally, speaking with them before and after their breaks.

This sort of open communication between subordinates and managers, he tells me, is an area of serious concern for Japanese corporations: “Japanese people don’t speak to each other directly. They worry about inconveniencing others”. If an employee wants to take a leave of absence, they need to feel comfortable raising the issue respectfully with management.

Fatherhood or a shared status as parents can facilitate these conversations if a manager makes a 306 point of using these shared identities to foreground negotiations. Establishing open communication has added benefits. Within the rigid hierarchy of the corporation, opinionated employees have the potential to introduce “original” ideas. They can change the course of the business in unexpected ways. Noritoshi opines that lack of this sort of innovation in Japan. “If you say ‘diversity’, I think that the meaning is a team that is flexible and where people feel free to speak about their thoughts” he says. If a company is dedicated to realizing “diversity”, they need to cultivate an environment where communication is clear and unhampered by outdated customs that no longer serve to strengthen Japan’s corporations. In instituting his reforms,

Noritoshi has been deliberate in choosing policies he thought would allow for a “diverse team”

— a group of employees that were adaptable, open minded, and full of fresh ideas.

Noritoshi’s theorization of the issue is clear, but I’m curious as to how he’s gone about translating this into concrete changes in the workplace. He produces the blue folder he had revealed to me earlier that day. He opens it, revealing a glossy document on company letterhead.

The bolded title reads “Childcare Allowance Reform Plan 2014”. Skimming the text, I see that

Noritoshi’s company now provides an allowance of 1 million yen (roughly 11,000 CAD at the time of our interview) to employees who have a child. It’s a policy he spearheaded and his pride in it is clear. For a firm of this size, it is a fairly generous bonus. “This is something more concrete. You could say it’s a kind of ikuboss reform” he explains. There have been less formalized changes that have exerted an even greater influence on workflow, though. Noritoshi specifically refers to “respect for employee’s time”. The nomikai that dominated Noritoshi’s evenings early on in his career have decreased year over year. End of quarter gatherings and the traditional bōnenkai are the only remnants. Meetings, too, are now scheduled sparingly.

Noritoshi tells me that organizational and planning meetings had typically been scheduled after

5PM to avoid cutting into the regular workflow of the day. As his employees feel able to speak 307 openly and directly with each other and to himself, Noritoshi is comfortable making decisions

“on the spot”. If information is circulating through the organization with speed and clarity, extended consultation is only necessary in unique circumstances. He encourages similar independence among his team members, who often know better than he how to make the most efficient use of their time. It is not uncommon now for his employees to be out the door by

6PM— a rarity in Japan. “Now, we are able to make time for life” he concludes.

Momentarily sliding away my notebook, I recount my own experience with afterhours meetings to Noritoshi. Staff meetings at my previous employer in Canada— a Japanese corporation— were always held during scheduled working hours. To do otherwise would invite backlash from employees. In Japan, I was regularly expected to join planning meetings (to which

I had next to nothing to contribute) after 5PM. Noritoshi reiterates that this is the norm; that in

Japan, people leave work exhausted regardless of whether the day has been slow or busy. This is what he means by “making time for life”: returning his employees to society at large while they are still in a state to contribute meaningfully to their families and communities. Using himself as an example, Noritoshi tells me that he is involved in his school PTA and his neighborhood association and encourages his employees to do the same. “Today, there are so many changes in society. If all you do is work, how can you understand our society?” he asks rhetorically. There is a sense, then, of social responsibility— to use time away from work to engage in the world around oneself— but Noritoshi stresses that this is not born of a sense of “obligation”. “I want to do things that I enjoy. Something that I choose to do on my own” he says. An employee shouldn’t feel pressured to join the PTA— to follow the example set by Noritoshi as an extension of his workplace loyalty. 308

Noritoshi’s identification with the ikuboss archetype emerged from a confluence of events surrounding his transition into fatherhood: marriage difficulties and an existential crisis related to his children. “I was able to look at my role as a superior because of my new role as a father” he states conclusively. Noritoshi learned what non-corporate life was like, and how to participate in it productively by communicating openly with his partner. He attempted to translate this realization back into the workplace, affording his peers the chance to share in a similar experience by promoting childcare leave and emphasizing efficiency in their work in order to strike a healthier balance between time spent in the office and in society. Though vague in his formulation of “society”, he demarcates a shift in his worldview: from hyper focused salaryman to father/citizen. Noritoshi ably narrativized his change in a format similar to that used in papa switch narratives (see Chapter 4). The difference, however, lies in Noritoshi’s efforts to empathetically translate this experience into policy. He pushes back against the excesses of a workplace culture that damaged his private life.

There are two elements of Noritoshi’s story that subsequent narratives will complicate.

First, for Noritoshi, the form that self-fashioning outside the corporation takes is still organized around, or grows outward from, the reproduction of the heterosexual family. His policies are crafted in the service of an abstracted mother/father/child unit. The following interlocutors, two business owners I call Tomohiro and Keiichi, often had a much broader conceptualization of what, exactly, “life” entails. Moreover, left unsaid in my conversation with Noritoshi was the influence of this work-style shift on the company’s bottom line and its permeation through the ranks. As we will see, Tomohiro takes a more utilitarian approach to work-life balance reform, valuing its quantifiable effects on productivity and operating costs 309

7.7 Efficiency and History: Tomohiro

Once again, I ambled to Shinjuku-gyoen from the station in the oppressive summer heat.

I find Tomohiro, a manager approaching retirement who is “done” with parenting, on a bench outside a kiosk where visitors can purchase cold drinks and sweets. Mothers rock strollers and warily eyeing their rambunctious children as they sprint about this makeshift meeting space.

Tomohiro’s casual weekend attire is still very much “office ready”: a white, collared shirt with short sleeves tucked into black slacks. His thinning hair has wilted a bit in the sun, liver spots peeking out from between the arching wisps of his comb over. He stares intently as his ice cream cone through his thick glasses, working diligently to control the rapidly deteriorating mound of soft serve. Tomohiro cut his teeth as a junior employee in the Tokyo-based trading company, founded by his father, where he now serves as president. “The entire country was booming. Our lifestyle was to work every day until 9PM. We would have time off for Oban and New Year”. He stops briefly to clear his throat before continuing: “However, even then I wondered ‘is human life just about work?’”.

On his father’s retirement some 20 years prior to our meeting, Tomohiro assumed control of the organization. Digging through the company books, he quickly realized that the company would struggle to hit half of its projected income for the year. Operating costs were growing, and an overemphasis on sales numbers had occluded this fact. They were selling more than ever before, but their profits were marginal. The company had a long history, and with it the baggage of an outdated corporate culture and work style. Tomohiro wanted to change course, abandoning many of the practices that defined Japanese corporations in his youth. It took a few years to steady the ship, but he was soon ready to begin work-style reform in earnest. The first target was management. “We had too many employees” he says. “We had a mix of full time and part time 310 employees. Labour management, from an HR perspective, is simpler if there is only one sort of employee. So, we changed to have only full-time employees”.

Tomohiro’s shift away from contract and part time work flies in the face of labour trends across Japan. He says that his industry peers were shocked when they caught wind of this reform.

Naturally, his costs went up— he was paying larger salaries and benefits after all. However, the size of his team had shrunk; some of the part timers had been hired full time, others were laid off. This had lessened the burden on managers in turn. So too were HR hours reduced by streamlining the company employment model. Savings abounded. The largest financial benefit

(and perhaps the most difficult to measure directly), Tomohiro explains, was the “happiness” of employees. Employee turnover dropped significantly and the number of job seekers approaching his company— many industry veterans— swelled.

“There is a relationship between happiness and equality” Tomohiro tells me, wagging his finger instructively. “But to say ‘equality’ is easy. The new way of business is equality and diversity. This is how companies in Japan are changing. But how do you make ‘equality’ reality I wonder?” he posits rhetorically. Increasing the number of female employees was an obvious first step. His industry is male dominated, and the company’s ranks skewed in that direction as a result. After the implementation of their new employment model, hiring practices were adjusted to target gender parity. He is satisfied with the results, noting that today just over 40% of his staff are women. In management, representation is not quite proportionate (Tomohiro wagers that between 25 and 30% of his managers are women but admits he may be wrong) but progress is steady. With an eye to simplifying the administrative end of the corporation in addition to furthering his project of leveling status, he also standardized travel expense accounts and per diums. Scheduled raises, too, were made equal among all employees. 311

My curiosity was piqued. It seems “equality”, as a set of policies, could just as easily be called “belt tightening”. Tomohiro digresses quickly, pointing upward: “looks like rain”. It seemed the city would enjoy a brief reprieve from this heat wave. We agreed it was best to beat a hasty retreat. Umbrellas are a poor defense against torrential summer downpours. We make our way to the park entrance, keeping to shady trails under the thick forest canopy as best we can.

Tomohiro returns to his narrative. Predictably, there was resistance from senior staff members— who had benefitted from the previous systems— to these changes. Tomohiro says they eventually assented after having the importance of equality to workplace happiness explained to them “many times over”. Without dwelling, exactly, on what this ominous phrase entails,

Tomohiro pivots to extolling the profound influence of these policies on the behaviour of employees. Limiting per diums resulted in employees splitting meal costs between them. There was no longer a sense of class division between employees, where some could stay in 5-star hotels while others could only afford motel stays without going out of pocket. They were more collegial, open to sharing work during an absence due to illness or childcare responsibilities.

We find a small curry shop located just around the corner from the park’s entrance.

Tomohiro and I place our orders at the self-service machine in front of the shop before handing off our meal tickets and finding our seats. Still somewhat troubled by his use of the term

“equality”, I steer our discussion towards working conditions. Fulltime employees have borne the brunt of Japan’s overtime hours and are at the highest risk for Karōshi. With the standardization of his company’s employment model, has there been an increase in hours worked? “To the contrary” Tomohiro replies, pausing to thank the owner for delivering his curry rice, “we have experienced a reduction in hours worked”. Working hours became far more predictable. Holidays could be scheduled far in advance and time could be allocated with greater efficiency. As a result, the average annual hours worked for employees stand at about 1800 — 312 very reasonable as far as Japanese corporations are concerned. Tomohiro notes that there is even wiggle room for childcare arrangements— it’s not a problem to take off 30 minutes early to collect your children from preschool, or to come in a little late because you had to drop them off.

Overtime is virtually non-existent. In discussions with other ikubosses, I found the elimination of overtime had proved a major obstacle to instituting reforms because of its influence on annual pay. However, Tomohiro’s shift to salaried staff meant that pay was standardized— there were no hourly workers to raise a fuss.

However, keeping work hours to a minimum means that the company can’t afford to lose manpower throughout the year. As a result, Tomohiro confides that the number of individuals taking childcare leave is “not good”. I find it curious that Tomohiro thought to mention this unprompted, given his careful framing of his corporation in our discussion thus far. I knew he was a father himself, but there is an obvious generational gap. His children must be grown adults by now. “I was born in the Showa era. My friends, too, are Showa era men” he explains, “My father experienced the war. His generation had a very strong influence during Japan’s economic development. In this work style, it was impossible to take childcare leave. I never considered it. I think that this work style continues today. We are all trying to change this”. Tomohiro begins to paint a picture of his corporation when his father was in charge as a means of illustrating his point about the wider influence of his generation. They had a continual desire to move into new territory and expand their market share. With the changes Tomohiro has instituted in the name of work-life balance, his company has seen wage bills increase and man hours reduced. These costs have been offset to some degree by increased productivity and finding efficiencies in their process, but their business has retracted from its size in the 1990s. A policy of fixed growth over aggressive expansion might cause concern for some, but Tomohiro places a greater emphasis on sustainability. This measured approach to business allowed for a shift in thinking: employees, 313 not customers, are the foundation of the company. “We are able to choose clients” Tomohiro says. “In Japan, that way of thinking that the customer is always number one has deep roots. But really there is also a choice on the side of those providing the service, but I think there are a lot of people who work without noticing that”. If a particular client requires too much effort to serve, the company simply won’t take them on. He concludes that this, too, has improved company moral, sparing sales staff from frustrating settai (corporate entertainment for clients) with rude and demanding customers. “Isn’t it strange to think that customers should be happy, but it is not important if employees are miserable?” he asks.

Tomohiro sees ikubosses as part of a larger process of social reform. A boss who knows only how to manage a company, how to manage employees, is useless once he exits the company, he tells me. This is why his reforms have carried with them a certain expectation of increased community involvement. For Tomohiro, some of these hours, no longer tied up in overtime, should be invested back into Japanese society at large. A lifelong patron of the arts,

Tomohiro enthuses about the symphony orchestra. There is so much to enjoy in the city and, while noting his wealth, age, and success afford him the time and money to indulge, he expresses a strong desire for his employees to enrich their lives through the arts. He is aware, though, of the challenges facing young families, and this has informed his efforts at the company. Children are becoming a rarity, and the thought that he may not become a grandfather is “worrying”. Few of his friends have grandchildren, and they often talk about this fact with growing concern. This, he explains, was another of his motivations for instituting work-life balance reforms.

Standing on the platform waiting for the train back to Shibuya that afternoon, I wondered if Tomohiro would have made the same business decisions regardless of the influence of the

Ikuboss Project. It is difficult to pinpoint where “Tomohiro the ikuboss” deviates from 314

“Tomohiro the savvy businessman”. Rather, in our discussion he continually folded the two into one another. His motivations sit between a desire to lead Japan forward in social reform and to safeguard his business in a changing economy. The way he presented his business was as an organization that was no longer driven purely by profit and expansion; rather, the “happiness” of his employees became the primary locus for intervention. However, there was enough evidence to suggest that this was less a rejection of the fundaments of capitalist production than a reorientation in the way corporations evaluate their assets; focusing on “human resources” — labour— as opposed to market share or company holdings. In the long run, it stands to reason such a company could thrive even in an uncertain future. Pre-emptive renovations both in policy and philosophy may be worth the cost of immediately surrendering ground to competitors.

My cynicism, though, was curtailed by Tomohiro’s efforts to position his decision making in reference to his own life experiences: his careful reflection on the influence of his father’s generation on his own life, for example, or his desire to become a grandparent.

Tomohiro found much to enjoy in life outside of work and managed accordingly. His business is not aggressively expanding. On the contrary, it is shrinking. Yet it remains sustainable as both a financial entity and as part of his employee’s lives. Tomohiro’s pick-and-choose approach to clients is noteworthy. When forced to choose between profit and the amorphous quality of

“happiness”, he chooses the latter. Throughout our conversation, Tomohiro repeatedly reinforced the division between past and present management practice, contrasting the “Showa era man” with the ikuboss; the company his father built with the company he shapes now.

7.8 Redefining Reproduction: Keiichi

Among the ikubosses I spoke with, Keiichi’s interpretation of the role of the manager was among the most unique. We met one evening when I joined Ando, Bun, and several fathers for a 315 drink in Ginza after a particularly stressful week. We secured two large tables on the second story of the izakaya well insulated from the brisk February air. Pitcher in hand, I turned to fill the cup of the man on my right: Keiichi. In their collared shirts and slacks, baggy eyed and thin haired, the other members of our party (save Bun) could be mistaken for reveling salarymen. Not

Keiichi. Dressed in jeans and a t-shirt emblazoned with the emblem of a rock band, he tested the limits of our unspoken business-casual dress code. His dyed brown hair is long enough to be tied back and his skin is the deep, earthy tone of the college students who bake themselves in front of the surf shacks in Chiba. Anticipating the question forming in my mind, he quickly confirmed that he is, in fact, a member of Fathering Japan. Ando leaned towards me conspiratorially. He gestured towards Keiichi: “he is the ‘boss’, you know. Though he doesn’t look like it, he’s the president of an IT company”. A flurry of light-hearted jests and remarks from the other fathers followed, all of which centre on Keiichi’s decidedly unpresidential appearance.

As founder and president of a mid-sized IT support service provider, Keiichi occupies the highest rung of his own corporate ladder. While he may claim the title of ikuboss now, this was not always the case. Rather, his was a slow, painful evolution from workaholic father to ikumen and, finally, to ikuboss. Prior to joining Fathering Japan, Keiichi had not once interrupted his career for family. Business had boomed over the past few years but this, he says, is not an adequate excuse for his behaviour. He was, in his own words, a “terrible husband”. Keiichi was rarely home, choosing to socialize with his employees into the late hours of the evening instead of coming home to relieve his wife who (not unlike Keiichi) is something of a workaholic.

Consecutive pregnancies kept her sidelined from the job market for an extended period of time.

With each leave of absence, Keiichi’s wife grew more anxious about her ability to reintegrate into the work force. She struggled at home alone, physically and mentally exhausted. When their three children were finally eligible to enroll in preschool, she threw herself into her career. Three 316 short years later, however, Keiichi’s wife became pregnant with their fourth child. Dreading her pending return to maternity leave, she would enter the office early in the morning and toil well into the night, leaving only when her concerned co-workers would (gently) force her out of the office. The thought of a pregnant mother of three working these hours was unconscionable to the others at the table; Keiichi’s narrative elicited a wave of concerned grunts and downcast eyes from the other men in attendance. Keiichi remembers this period of life with “shame and regret”.

A bespectacled father, a long-time friend of Keiichi, leaned in from my left, saying “his

(Keiichi’s) work today is his punishment for his past sins”. He speaks only half in jest.

Keiichi began to read Fathering Japan materials available online, and soon became an active member of the organization. His contributions to the home grew— chores, childcare, and spending on gifts for his wife (especially those that might assist with self-care; onsen trips, for example). The realization of his failures was profound enough to make him reassess the value of his work entirely. He had pushed through in his own pursuits unabated while his wife jeopardized her health to care for their family. He began to think about the working conditions in his company, considering the possibility that he may be contributing to similar problems in the homes of his employees. He explains that, while his business is growing quickly, it remains small enough that he is able to make unilateral decisions when it comes to policy. He rolled out a progressive leave system, eliminating caps on time off and offering additional incentives for parents in the form of a child bonus.

“Do you have any fathers who have asked you to take childcare leave?” I ask. “No, they are all still young. I think some of them don’t even have girlfriends” Keiichi replies dryly. Ando laughs knowingly. Keiichi tells me that his work-life balance policies have had a meaningful impact on their lives, though. “For example, last week— or was it two weeks ago— there was a 317 big video game launch. Dragon Quest— do you know Dragon Quest? So, I had a few employees request the day off so they could go play it”. I respond incredulously: “really, you allow them to take a leave of absence for video games?”. Keiichi laughs. “In the past, they would’ve just called in sick anyway! We all have personal lives. For them, games are more important than work, so why not take the time off? Enjoy it”. Leave transparency, whether for birthday parties, illness, or other pursuits, was born from Keiichi’s larger desire to communicate plainly with employees. It eliminates the little lies— the fabrications people use to game archaic leave policies— in favour of a stronger bond between management and personnel. Furthermore, by rolling out a leave policy that offers meaningful benefits for both parents and non-parents,

Keiichi’s approach helps to curb paternity and maternity leave harassment. Interpolating all members of the company in his philosophy advances the cause of work-life balance further than a platform focused solely on parents ever could.

For Keiichi, implementing work-style reform is not about children and childcare per se.

He speaks to the labour of reproduction in a broader sense, opening space in which employees can produce themselves as subjects independent of employment. Keiichi’s approach drops the pretense of the grand project of social revitalization through the family in favour of embracing the mundane. He is not looking for hyper-efficient employees forged in the twin crucibles of home and corporation. For Keiichi, being an ikuboss is as much about gamers as fathers. It was clear that his wife’s health struggles had a lasting effect on Keiichi. His relaxed approach to how his employee’s take leave reflects, in part, a desire to avoid forcing others into a similar position: compromising their health for the corporation. At the same time, when Keiichi says “games are more important than work”, it feels sincere. He embraces the idea that his employee’s association with his company is supplementary. His role as a manager is not to “force” the company to be the primary site in which they are constituted as individuals or to decide the parameters of 318

“reproduction”. Hobbies can rejuvenate employees like time spent with family. At the same time,

Keiichi appears to be a canny manager noting both the unnecessary deception a rigid leave policy entails and the important of expanding the terms of the work-life balance discussion. In this way, family still figures prominently into his decision-making process.

7.9 Individualism and Diversity: Makoto

Compared to the many fathers— not just managers— I came to know, Makoto was something of an oddity. Where I typically heard stories of childhoods characterized by a mixture of idolization and resent for workaholic male role models, Makoto spoke fondly of his atypical home life. His father would leave work a little early every day. His mother would serve dinner at a later hour (between 7 and 8) so the family could eat together. While his classmates would rarely see their fathers from Monday to Friday (and, for those on tanshinfunin, weekends too),

Makoto regaled his father with stories from the schoolyard over a shared meal. Despite his father’s behaviour marking him as an exception in the salaryman sphere, Makoto tells me that he had always assumed that he would be able to recreate this dynamic in his own home as an adult.

We opted to meet in a shady park near his child’s preschool to chat before he was due to pick her up. It’s a quiet, suburban neighborhood east of Shibuya, not far from my own residence.

Makoto is a gregarious man in his early 30s. Youthful and stylish, I am surprised to hear that he came to our meeting straight from his office given his rather casual attire. Working without a suit and tie would not have been a possibility before switching jobs, he replies. Previously, Makoto was an executive officer in HR for a construction supply company. From his description, I gather this organization was an extreme example of the broader gender imbalance in employment in

Japan. A mere 10% of its employees were women: none of them held management positions.

Makoto was tasked with developing a plan to shift their demographics towards gender parity. 319

In absolute terms, the goal of these reforms was modest. In 10 years’ time, Makoto aimed to have 10 female managers at the company. Perhaps anticipating my surprise at this unimpressive target, he explains that forcing shifts at the highest level of the corporation is difficult because of the dependence on internal labour markets for senior hires— a classic

Japanese management feature and one of the “Three Treasures”. If the strata below management level has few women, the pool of talent is limited. The number of women at the bottom rungs of the company needs to steadily increase through new hiring practices. They must be given early and mid-career opportunities to advance, acquiring team leadership and project management experience and knowledge about the breadth of the company’s operations. Building a strong internal pool of talented women provides a greater number of appropriate candidates for management positions, allowing for exponential growth in the number of female managers once amenable conditions are established.

Besides the gender imbalance, work habits in the corporation were “generally unhealthy”,

Makoto continues. Efficiency is the key, so much so that “reducing redundancies should be one of the 10 Ikuboss Articles” he tells me. His reasoning is simple: eliminating busy work and administrative hurdles frees up more time during the day to accomplish tasks that contribute to the company’s bottom line. This, in turn, reduces the company’s wage bill by shifting overtime work in regular hours. An efficiency focused approach “also enriches work-life balance”: more can be done in less time, with the time savings passed on to employees. By liberally expelling some of the more archaic elements of office life, over 3 years Makoto helped reduce the average annual hours worked by employees by about 100.

Makoto made impressive progress during his tenure as an HR officer. However, furrowing his brow, he recalls being continually frustrated by recalcitrant senior managers who 320 seemed to undermine his efforts at every turn. When he learned his wife was pregnant, Makoto knew he could no longer wait for workplace culture to catch up to him. Fortunately, Makoto now works at a large, international tech company: an Ikuboss Alliance member with progressive childcare policies. He mentions being “shocked” by their office space when he visited during the interview process: casual, open, and modern. It was a far cry from his very traditional employer.

He made the switch in the spring of 2014, a few months before the birth of his daughter.

We pause briefly to visit a vending machine both of us had been eyeing across the streets.

Cool drink in hand, I ask what surprised Makoto the most in his workplace transition.

“Everything” he replies. Makoto launches into a detailed analysis of the managerial benefits of the spatial arrangement of his new workplace by way of example. Communal desks smooth channels of communication: literally seeing “eye to eye” allows for on the spot clarification, the reading of facial expressions cluing in management to doubt or uncertainty when giving instructions. Formal meetings can be drastically reduced as a result. Makoto and the other managers can speak freely with their team members about their lives outside of work. He also notices absences or imbalances in the composition of his team. Working in close proximity led to a natural overlap in responsibilities and knowledge of ongoing projects, which Makoto says has made managing unexpected absences much easier. “Through these behaviours, their awareness of their responsibility (to the company) increases”, he concludes. It is a far cry from the siloed and cloistered workstyle of his previous employer.

The difference between these two corporations in terms of work-life balance initiatives is night and day. Now, Makoto can leave early to pick up his child from pre-school, for example, or work from home when he is sick. Through his own use of these allowances, Makoto wants to stress to the team he manages that time with family is precious: “Time at work is valued 321 monetarily, but it is more difficult to quantify the value of time spent at home”. Makoto describes his own motivation to be with his family in terms of desire: to be there for momentous occasions in his daughter’s life, or to simply be there— like his father— for dinner. “Even right now, we are here to pick up my daughter from school. This is something I want to be able to do” he says, gesturing towards the school.

This individualized approach to fatherhood informs his decisions as a manager and policy maker. Makoto leads the personnel department, which means he is able to have a material effect on matters of work-life balance in a way few other managers can. From the outset of his employment, he explains, he has pushed for work-life balance reforms. I express my surprise that his employer, renowned for its generous benefits, would be in need of further reform— surely theirs would be the model others sought to emulate. While childcare leave policy was well established, Makoto explains, there were no similar allotments of time for tending to ailing or infirm family members. With relatively little resistance, he was able to push through a new set of regulations allowing for flexible sick days: time off that could be used for any personal situation that might arise. This is exemplary of his broader management philosophy: policy cannot be designed around assumed archetypes. Corporations in Japan tend to assume that all salaried employees live similar lifestyles, he tells me. Family friendly policies may lead to assumption concerning the availability of single people for overtime assignments. As a result, they shoulder a disproportionate share of the work, which can breed resent towards parents taking time off.

Work-life balance policies are not about protecting mothers, fathers, and children exclusively.

As someone who studied abroad in the United States and currently works in a Japanese branch of an American-owned company, I assume that Makoto’s understanding of diversity might cleave closer to the North American use of the term. I mention that, in conversations with 322 other ikubosses, I had seen “diversity” used to describe a variety of workplace dynamics: what was his intent in using the term here? Makoto stresses that, while nationality and sexuality are indeed important to consider, the critical point for him as a manager is “understanding diversity in work experience”. He describes his ongoing efforts to structure a program that reintegrates women into the workplace after maternity leave. Losing 2 to 5 years (or more) of work experience places these women at a major disadvantage when they begin to look for work again.

Those who do return to their previous employers are often rusty and have not kept up with recent advances in their field. This is a waste of human resources: to abandon competent workers because the company is unwilling to invest in getting them back up to speed quickly. Makoto tells me that he believes the period between preschool and elementary school is crucial. This is when women seem to struggle most to balance returning to work with an imperfect system of external childcare. “My own wife struggled with this” he explains. One option, then, might be to offer returning mothers the option to work part-time in the office in conjunction with a flexible telecommuting system that can be shaped around their child. Once their child enters elementary school, they could transition back into the standard work method.

We part ways as the school attendants begin to usher the children towards the sliding glass doors at the front of the building. Makoto’s narrative dichotomy is noteworthy. His description of his work-style reform efforts stands in stark contrast to his previous, “traditional” employer, whose faults would have been considered virtues in Japan’s boom years. When describing his reform efforts, he anchors his explanations to his family. He manages from his vantage point as a father and is aware of the specificity of his conditions. He avoids foreclosing options for his employees by shirking “archetypes” and favouring programs that can accommodate workers with diverse backgrounds. 323

7.10 Conclusion

In this chapter, I explored the impact the fathering movement has had on the workplace environment in Japan as managers learn to manage as a father “in” (and not “of”) the company.

In conjunction with the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, Fathering Japan and other non- profits within the fathering movement are campaigning to reconceptualize work-life balance.

They are seeking to accomplish this goal through the promotion of ikubosses: managers dedicated to shifting Japan’s workplace culture to accommodate an array of working styles.

Through training materials and seminars, these managers are taught to connect with their employees in their capacity as fathers. In conversation with ikuboss interlocutors, I saw this connection manifest in different ways: as a desire to lead subordinates through example and to share a personal experience of fatherhood; as a responsibility to both ensure the success and survival of both the company and its employees (and the ambivalence that comes from balancing these goals); and as a perspective that revealed the importance not just accommodating active fathers in corporate employment, but an array of disparate perspectives and life styles.

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Chapter 8 Conclusion 8.1 Conclusion

Throughout this dissertation, I examined fatherhood as both a description of kin relations and a subject position from which relations— kin and otherwise— are produced. I follow my interlocutors in calling the practices that produce these relations “fathering”. While fathering is rooted in an originary blood relation (that is, the one doing the fathering is recognized as the

“father” to one or more children), its scope extends far beyond kinship. In the fathering movement’s formulation, fathering is the practice of “rearing” not only children but interpersonal relationships, communities, companies, and the nation of Japan itself. Fathering, then, extends the logic behind acts of care performed for one’s child to produce relationality inside and outside the home. For my interlocutors, these included caring relations between fathers and their spouses; relations of camaraderie with other fathers; (sometimes fraught) relations of support with schools and community organizations; and horizontal relations of mutual understanding and respect in typically hierarchical corporations. Fathering is a “kinship making practice”, but one that in its mobility blurs the domain boundaries between public and private, male and female, nature and culture, and home and corporation (or reproduction and production).

In Chapter 2, I traced the entanglement of kinship with the concept of modernity through three key periods in Japan’s history: the Meiji Restoration (1868) and its subsequent legal reforms, the Allied occupation of Japan (1945-1952) and the post-war boom, and the contemporary economic revitalization project(s) undertaken in the wake of the Lost Two

Decades. During the Meiji Restoration, Japan sought to position itself as a peer among existing imperial powers. This involved a series of legal, economic, and social transformations that sought to at once emulate systems observed in the “West” and promote Japanese exceptionalism. 325

The family was a key site of intervention. Through the codification of the ie, the state imposed strict legal parameters on the family vesting authority in the father over his household that replicated the authority of the Emperor over Japan. Mirroring moralizing discourses surrounding women’s chastity and responsibility as mothers in Western Europe, prominent thinkers in Japan carefully combined Western and Confucian educational texts with the existing practices of samurai caste families to create a new model of domesticity while concealing it hybrid nature in appeals to history and cultural inviolability. This model clashed with the relatively egalitarian homes of many in Japan, where gender roles and the division of labour were primarily shaped by economic exigency. Following World War II, the family once again became the primary site of intervention in Japan’s economic recovery. The American nuclear family and the notions of romantic love and individual choice that undergird it were promoted by the Occupation while the legal foundations of the ie were scrapped. This precipitated the emergence of the salaryman and sengyō shufu, the conjugal couple that served as the backbone of the Japanese economy. The zealous dedication of the salaryman to the corporation, itself a sort of familial microcosm, and the sengyō shufu to the home and childcare helped propel Japan to a position of strength in the international order. Yet, this model of family too was illusory: an ideal that was difficult to locate in lived experience.

In the context of my own fieldwork, fathers are once again being called by the state to kick start the economy. The Ikumen Project compares Japanese fathers unfavourably to those in

North America and Western Europe, while hailing those men who do contribute to chores and childcare (while continuing to meet workplace commitments) as heroes. Ikumen are also renewed domestic consumers. Just as the salaryman and sengyō shufu were typified by a particular kind of domestic consumption, driving the nation forward through the purchase of household appliances fabricated in Japan after the war, ikumen are called to spend on travel, 326 fashionable clothing, and new childcare gadgets. This, too, leads to an association of ikumen with fathers abroad: an imagined global class of mobile, cosmopolitan men dedicated to the principles of gender equality and work-life balance (read here as the pursuit of leisure). Through each of these periods, the father was positioned as a key figure in the nation building project: a heroic character whose dedication to home and employer would help to create a powerful Japan. While the precise qualities of the father shift over time to align themselves with those observed in the

West, the “newness” of the father is repeatedly buried through the rhetorical association of men with preceding masculine figures. In this way, the ikumen is associated through creative imagery and analogy with salarymen and samurai despite the fact that the ikumen is meant to signal a marked departure from the past.

This vision of ikumen has been subject to intense debate. Over the course of fieldwork, I found that it was precisely the heroism of ikumen promoted by the state and the pleasure-seeking nature of ikumen promoted by industry that drew the sharpest criticism. In both instances, my interlocutor’s critiques of ikumen were implicit critiques of the “myths of modernity”— the promise of wealth and success in the regime of global capitalism and the universal principle of gender equality— they embody. In Chapter 3, I organize this criticism by dividing it between two figures: the ikumen modoki and the yarisugi ikumen. My interlocutors were concerned that the ikumen modoki, a father who claims to be an ikumen and receives praise for it but avoids actual parenting responsibilities, might deceive them. Men saw this deception playing out in the workplace, where claims to ikumen status might be used as an excuse to escape from the workplace and saddle co-workers with their assignments. Women were wary of men who might claim to be ikumen to make themselves appear to be more attractive partners without actually contributing to the labour of the home. Men within the fathering movement saw the ikumen modoki as interlopers that could jeopardize their efforts. The ikumen modoki was compared to a 327 part-time labourer threatening to displace the “salaried employees” of the home— the truly dedicated father and/or mother. This analogy reflected ongoing shifts in Japan towards precarious labour as companies adapt to the increased competitive pressures of the global marketplace. In contrast, women took issue with yarisugi ikumen, men who overexert themselves in the performance of chores and childcare, because they were a disruptive presence both in the home and in the wider pursuit of gender equality. In the home, men can interfere with established and efficient systems of domestic labour, extending the hours required to complete these tasks.

Outside of the home, the praise and attention such fathers receive in the popular media as well as from casual observers did not seem to reflect a fair accounting of the quality of their work.

Women’s domestic labour, meanwhile, continues to be subject to intense scrutiny. The different evaluation of the contributions of men and women to the home stood as a reminder of the persistent gender gap in Japan. The “exceptional” quality of ikumen was seen as indicating a unique failure to embody the kind of “unmarked”, common sense fathering imagined as existing in the West. The fathering movement itself has adopted this critique, seeking to distance itself from the term “ikumen” in the pursuit of this imagined, universal fatherhood.

In Chapter 4, I asked how the fathering movement “makes” fathers. The “making” of men has long been a subject of anthropological debate, reflecting the contested binary between

“nature” and “culture”. Instructional materials and courses produced by the state through the

Ikumen Project and by Fathering Japan position motherhood as the by-product of the biology of a woman’s body. Men, in contrast, are figured as machines that must be “switched on” through instruction. In this framework, fatherhood, a contingent subject position that must be actively achieved, is derived from motherhood, an immutable subject position that emerges naturally.

Men are taught to mirror or mimic the psychic and somatic connection between mother and child, blurring the boundaries between father and mother— man and woman— these texts 328 simultaneously enforce. For my interlocutors, a consciousness of fatherhood emerged in instances where preconceptions a natural or inviolable motherhood were disrupted. Mothers who struggle to connect with their child or tire of childcare opened space for men to both reflect on the contrived nature of the gendered division of labour (in the sense that biological sex did not unfailingly result in a particular orientation towards care giving) and to engage closely with their children and the labour of the home. However, each of the fathers I introduce in this section come from families where the gendered division of labour was already somewhat fluid. In dual income homes or for men who are self-employed, this reorientation towards chores and childcare is a possibility. In the example of Yuta, I showed how other men are constrained by the weight of expectation— from their wives or extended family— to provide. “Switching on” a father proves difficult in instances where fatherhood disrupts the entangled performance(s) of masculinity and class.

In Chapter 5, I showed how fathering is a performative approach to chores and childcare— one that pays special attention to what these tasks “say”. This is a subversive performance of gender and a strategy aimed at producing a desired affective response from mothers. The performance is set against the notion of daikokubashira, a figure through which a father’s contribution to the home is conceptualized as being primarily financial and transactional.

In attempting to strip chores and childcare of this corporate logic, the fathering movement promotes a compassionate approach to household labour. For some fathers, taking on household labour led to a deepened appreciation for the structural inequality between men and women.

Understanding the scope and scale of chores and childcare revealed challenges that were previously invisible to them and, in this way, they were able to enrich their relationships with their partners. Yet, for some women, this emphasis on the “meaning” of men’s contribution to household labour occludes its economic basis: that these tasks, though unremunerated, are equal 329 to labour in the corporation and that they are evaluated for proficiency and efficiency. Fathers, in contrast, can become preoccupied with how others interpret their household contributions. My interlocutors described instances where they felt their efforts in the home went unappreciated by their partners or unacknowledged by schools. For others, like Noriko’s husband Hiro, participation in chores and childcare could signal a lack of commitment to his employer (if, for example, he was to ask to leave the office early).

The practice of fathering expands far beyond household labour (and the debates the performance of this labour entails). In Chapter 6, I charted the blurring of boundaries between

“private” and “public” as fathering was applied in the building of community. My point of entry into this topic was a common concern expressed by my interlocutors: that men lack a place to belong (ibasho). Outside of the shrinking world of corporate employment, men were often treated as suspicious— even criminal— as they encroached on social spaces that have typically been the domain of women (and children). In an effort to help men find relations of support and solidarity in their own community, as well as to furnish community organizations and schools with additional voluntary labour, the fathering movement has promoted ikimen: fathers who rear their local community as they would their own children/family. In the analogy of the child-as- passport, men are invited to conceive of the kin relation of “father” as providing access to and legitimacy in social worlds beyond the corporation. The ikimen concept is closely associated with fathering circles: local groups of fathers who meet regularly to share parenting tips, stories, and drinks. My interlocutors who participated in these fathering circles were able to forge friendships with other men outside the strictures of corporate fraternization. While fatherhood was the shared grounds for their association, matters of childcare were often a secondary concern for these men. In the example of the Nantoka Gakuen Father’s Association, the ambiguous aims of fathers who seek to contribute to their community were called into question by suspicious 330 observers. The fathers were seen as meddlesome, and their drinking habits marked a kind of contamination of feminine coded space by male corporate sociality. Indeed, these hard-drinking fathers found a community in the Father’s Association that extended far beyond their own daughter’s tenure at the school. Fathers, then, are engaged in a project of cultivating masculine spaces and communities— delivering themselves from the isolation and loneliness of strenuous corporate employment— which are not necessarily “for” children but are nevertheless legitimated by their status as a “father”.

Fathering has also begun to shape Japan’s corporate world. In Chapter 7, I explored the ikuboss concept and the impact it is having on managerial strategy. The ikuboss, a manager who is concerned with improving the “work-life balance” of his employees, was first conceived by

Fathering Japan but has since been taken up by the Abe administration as a policy measure to address the national crises of overwork, poor productivity, and low birth rate. Historically, domestic and foreign scholars and policy makers have emphasized the “kin-like” nature of the

Japanese corporation, a characteristic that was celebrated during the nation’s post-war economic boom and subsequently critiqued in the recessionary period that began in the early 1990s. In the figure of the ikuboss, the manager is not a father “of” the company, as the company-kin analogy might have positioned him in prior decades, but a father “in” the company. Ikuboss instructional materials and lectures encourage men to manage their subordinates by drawing on their own experience as fathers. A managerial logic concerned with hierarchy, productivity, and strengthening the sense of obligation between co-workers is displaced by one that emphasizes

“life”: time away from work spent with family, pursuing passions and hobbies beyond one’s career, and the fair and equal division of labour between spouses. However, in appealing to managers as “fathers” rather than professionals bound to a uniform set of expectations, the approaches taken by individual ikubosses vary dramatically. In drawing on their own experience 331 and understanding of family, the managers I spoke with crafted and implemented very different kinds of corporate reforms. Where Noritoshi drew from his own hardships as a father to encourage his subordinates to pursue chores and childcare proactively (for their own health and happiness as well as their spouses’), Tomohiro framed his cost cutting measures and emphasis on efficiency (which led to some firings) as a way of freeing up time to be spent with loved ones.

For managers like Keiichi, managing work-life balance meant embracing an understanding of

“life” that extended beyond a strictly conceptualized labour of reproduction. Time off for video games and other forms of leisure were just as legitimate as childcare in his eyes. In each of these cases, my interlocutors described a causative relation between their experience in the home with their managerial decisions.

In sum, the fathering movement challenges us to rethink the analytic utility of the distinction between hegemonic and subordinate masculinity (Connell 1995). As anthropologists investigate the rapid proliferation of “new” masculinities across the globe, I argued that approaches that resist the nebulous evaluation of “change” or the endless expansion of masculine typologies are a necessity. While the divide between hegemonic salaryman masculinity and subordinate ikumen masculinity was a strong and salient one in the field, looking to the way the state, the fathering movement, and my interlocutors strategically employed these identities calls into question the stability of their dialectic relationship. Rather than view the current debate around fatherhood in Japan as a competition or oscillation between two paradigms of masculinity, I asked how and why the categories of “salarymen” and “ikumen” were invoked, questioned, embraced, or employed to critique contemporary social and economic conditions in

Japan.

This dissertation also built on the work of anthropologists dedicated to the study of gender and kinship that have argued that the cordoning off of kinship in the domestic sphere has 332 occluded its continued influence on economic and political institutions (see McKinnon and

Cannell 2013; Collier and Yanagisako 1987). Fathering is not only a rich example of how kinship— and fatherhood specifically—continues to structure life in “modern” societies (and indeed, as I have argued, is central to notions of “modernity” itself): it also illustrates the way kinship can “undo” the very domaining that makes its separation from the economic and the political seem plausible. While the fathering movement’s pedagogy is based on a biological distinction between father and mother, man and woman, fathering as a practice is consciously about the subversive performance of gender. In this sense, the practice of fathering denaturalizes

“motherhood” and “fatherhood”, an “undoing” of gender (Butler 2004) through the negotiation, redivision, and doing of gendered acts of care. Furthermore, fathering as a practice is able to translate from the home to the community, workplace, and nation, inviting a collapsing of the division between these domains in the process. If we are concerned with fatherhood only as it relates to formal kin relations (such as those recognized through blood, medical technology, or in law) or idiomatic kin relations (Lazar 2018), then we risk overlooking how fatherhood opens new ways of relating to others. The fathering movement addresses relationality through fatherhood with a striking frankness. While members of the fathering movement may not view each other, their community members, or their co-workers as “kin”, they are taught to stage their interactions with each of these parties from their position “as fathers”.

Finally, this work is dedicated to capturing, through ethnography, the lives and beliefs of men as fathers. Though paternity has long been a subject of anthropological interest, research projects of this scale concerned with fatherhood remain scarce. My aim here was not only to unpack the prescriptive element of the fathering movement’s and the state’s intervention into the ongoing discussion around the nature of fatherhood in Japan, but to understand the diverse histories, experiences, and motivations of my interlocutors that ultimately determined the form 333 the practice of fathering actually took. Fathering is produced through an ongoing dialogue between experts and law makers, activists and business owners, fathers and mothers. This dissertation provides a snap shot of this dialogue. As I described in Chapter 2 and 3, in the relatively short time that has passed since I undertook this project the fathering movement has undergone a metamorphosis as it closed out the ikumen boom. Perhaps, as Tetsuya Ando predicted, the fathering movement will eventually dissipate. However, as the fathers of his generation begin to welcome grandchildren, and Hideyo’s (see Chapter 6) cohort shift from diapers and bottles to grade school and PTA meetings, new fathers will enter the movement as they seek out guidance and support. As the fathering movement begins to represent members of multiple generations, the potential for yet another reimagining of its purpose could yet unfold.

334

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