Once more on Japan

There were some interesting responses to my post on Japan. If you recall, there is an aversion to relationships and to sex amongst a surprisingly large number of young Japanese. My speculative answer to this (writing as an outsider) is that the underlying problem is one of individualisation.

That might seem an unusual answer as the Japanese are better known for conformism and for upholding a communal identity than they are for going it alone.

I'll begin briefly with terminology. I hold "individuality" to be a good thing, as something that reflects the natural impulse that humans have toward a creative unfolding of self. But "individualisation" I hold to be one of the worst things, as perhaps the very thing that traditionalists are most set against.

Individualisation means that even when people live in families or nations that they seek their fulfilment not together but separately, as discrete individuals. A society might, for instance, have begun with a strong culture of family life, in which people found their life together as a family rewarding, and felt closely bonded to each other, and sought rewards and fulfilments in life through their roles within the family. Individualisation would mean that this culture of family life grew weaker, to the point that the family had less purchase on people and meant less to them, so that they instead sought their fulfilment alone as individuals outside of the family, even if they still lived under the same roof.

Individualisation can come about through the influence of value systems (for instance, through theories about personal freedom or the expression of individuality). But it can also come about when the framework of a society no longer fits together well - and it's my theory that this might have happened in Japan.

As I mentioned in my first post, when I lived in Japan my male work colleagues had a punishing lifestyle that meant that they were rarely home during the week. They were all absentee fathers, at least until the weekend. I suspect that this lifestyle required strong beliefs in masculinity and in national identity to be sustained ("this is what Japanese men do"); similarly their wives must have acted from a sense of what was expected from their own role.

But the cracks have now appeared. For some younger Japanese men, masculinity is something that appears oppressive, rather than fulfilling; similarly there are young Japanese women who prefer the idea of remaining an independent single girl to marriage. For many young Japanese the bar was set too high.

How else can individualisation be fostered? If marriage is delayed for too long, then individuals face a dilemma. If you're a man, for instance, and you're not expected to marry until you're 35, then it becomes difficult to look to family and to family roles for your fulfilment in life; you have to think, instead, of how you can seek fulfilment outside of such relationships.

Maybe too there's a problem if there is an excessive sexualisation of very young women. If young men at a critical point in their development observe the women around them being very casual in their sexual mores, then it will be more difficult for them to imagine a commitment to intimacy with such women.

What a society needs to do is to understand what it is that draws family life apart (in the direction of individualisation) and what it is that brings it closer together. I'm not sure that there is a very honest attempt to do this in the modern world. In most of the articles I've read about Japan the preferred solution is to better integrate women into the workforce, but this is part of a drive to utilise women as a labour resource and to promote female independence rather than a serious reflection on how to uphold a culture of family life.

What's going wrong in Japan?

You might have seen the most recent reports about the aversion that many young Japanese men and women have toward each other and to sex.

Recent studies in Japan have found that about a quarter of Japanese people now have no interest in a romantic relationship and it is projected that 40% of young Japanese women will never have children. One study found that nearly half of Japanese women aged 16 to 24 were not interested in or despised sex.

The question is why. The newspaper articles I've seen mostly take the easy way out and blame men for old-fashioned attitudes toward women. It's true that if you have a society in which men are brought up to be traditional, and women to be feminist, that you're likely to have incompatible expectations between men and women. But the evidence I've seen is that Japanese men are, if anything, rejecting the masculine ethos of the past rather than clinging to it.

I'm not exactly sure from this distance why Japanese men and women have turned so much from each other, but I can throw in some possibilities.

When I lived in Japan I was struck by the lifestyle of my male colleagues. They were married men in their 20s and 30s. They would stay at work until about 7.00pm, then play mahjong, then get something to eat, then play pachinko, get home at 11.00pm, get served supper by their wives, go to bed at midnight and then get up at 6.00am the next day to start the process over. They were proud of this punishing schedule.

It's not a lifestyle that's likely to hold together a culture of family life. It seems that the younger generation of Japanese men are unenthusiastic about it, and it's hard to blame the women for not finding it fulfilling.

It's ironic that Japan is known for a corporate culture, when such a male lifestyle was likely to bring about individualisation, by which I mean a sense that men and women are to lead separate lives and to find their fulfilment separately from each other.

It doesn't help that the Japanese have apparently divorced sex from marriage to a greater degree than elsewhere. Supposedly it is more common in Japan for wives to begin to shut down marital relations some years into the marriage, and there is something of a culture of porn and paid sex in Japan.

It seems too that young Japanese women have picked up an independent career girl lifestyle that is familiar to us here as well:

I meet Eri Tomita, 32, over Saturday morning coffee in the smart Tokyo district of Ebisu. Tomita has a job she loves in the human resources department of a French-owned bank. A fluent French speaker with two university degrees, she avoids romantic attachments so she can focus on work. "A boyfriend proposed to me three years ago. I turned him down when I realised I cared more about my job. After that, I lost interest in dating. It became awkward when the question of the future came up."

Tomita sometimes has one-night stands with men she meets in bars, but she says sex is not a priority, either.

If I'm correct in this, then what are the solutions?  A society has to be careful to allow men to fulfil a masculine role not only at work but also within the family home. Competition at work to provide for a family is good, but the bar shouldn't be raised too high, to the point that men have to give everything to the breadwinning role. If there is no chance to give the best of yourself in a relationship with your wife and children, then can we be surprised if family life falls away?

The drift toward individualisation has to be combated. This means, amongst other things, creating a culture in which sexual fulfilment is found within a marriage rather than outside of it. It means finding a high value in marital love and parental love - higher than the value of shopping or travel or work routines.