Six years into an era whose name means “beautiful harmony,” the “Reiwa family” as Spa (Oct 15-22) sees it is cracked, splintered.
Well, era names are designed for poetry rather than truth, and families have always had their problems. Do Spa’s thumbnail portraits show us anything new?
Would the “Reiwa family” have surprised Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who wrote in 1873, “All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion?” A lot happens in 150 years, but the tendency is to look to the remote future with hope rather than despair: life will get better, not worse. Spa is apt to take a bleak view of the present. Its verdict seems to be that it has failed us.
Sexual, economic and demographic are the strains besetting families today.
“Shohei Ota” (names in quote marks are pseudonyms) is at 55 a stranger in his own “castle,” as a venerable old proverb tells us home should be. His wife, he says, turned sexless after the birth of their second daughter. Now teenagers, the girls will have nothing to do with him. He admits he’s a difficult character, perhaps suffering from ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. His job, not identified, involves night work, putting his rhythm out of synch with the family’s. Was it hopeless, then? Couldn’t the rift be bridged? Was there nothing he could do?
Desperate, he took a desperate plunge. Stealing into his wife’s smartphone, he contacted her friends: “Ask her why she’s unhappy,” he pleaded: “Ask her what she wants of me.” His wife found out and hit the roof: “Get out! I can’t live with a man who would do such a thing!”
Distraught, he went to live with his mother, in her 80s and living alone, though verging on dementia and suffering constant back pain. He eases her lot, doing the cooking, cleaning and laundry. Nights he lies awake listening to her moan in pain.
His daughters don’t answer his emails. His wife it seems has no more than this to say to him: “You’re living rent-free and spending nothing on food or utilities so you don’t need spending money” – referring to the 4,000 yen a month (sic) she had doled out to him from the family budget. “Days off,” he says, “I find day jobs to give myself a bit of extra income.”
On YouTube lately he found a site promising a course of lectures that “will turn your life around.” It struck a chord. If anyone’s life needs turning around, his does. He sent the 300,000 yen admission fee.
“It’s a tight financial squeeze at best,” says Tsutomu Kataoka, a 57-year-old father of two children whose education costs are strangling him. Public primary and secondary education in Japan is free and yet not. “They both attended the neighborhood public elementary school. But their teachers said public school standards were not high enough and advised they take entrance tests for private high schools.”
It’s a common perception, and private schooling is much in demand among those who can afford it and many who can’t. The children must come first. Knowledge expands and expands, there’s more and more to learn, at greater and greater cost. Their futures are at stake. Supplementary after-school juku lessons are another quasi-requirement to tide kids over gaps in regular school curricula.
Kataoka earns 7 million a year managing a college dormitory. Benefits include rent-free family accommodations at the dorm, plus meals. He’s not poor but not rich either. His son, majoring in languages, was eager to study in the U.S. A parent can say no, but at what ultimate cost to the child? His daughter is off to graduate school next year. “Almost all my income goes into their education,” he says – proudly? ruefully? A little of both no doubt. By the time it’s over it will have cost him 70 million yen, he figures. “And what,” he wonders, “about our old age?”
On that, financial planner Naoko Kuroda offers an intriguing hypothesis: “Excessive spending on children’s education amounts to a sacrifice by the parents of their old age,” she tells Spa. “Or,” she adds, “might it be a (subconscious) plea to the children to look after them in old age?”
Old age en masse is a phenomenon Tolstoy, of course, never knew (though he himself lived to 82). No era has ever known it as the Reiwa era knows it. Manami Shimakage, professional researcher and writer on dementia, recognized early symptoms in her parents-in-law, who lived with her and her husband. She braced for it. Her husband, meanwhile, was curiously blasé. “Don’t worry, they’ll be all right,” he said, and in fact they more or less were. But “far from being reassured,” she tells Spa, “I felt I was being reproached for not doing enough” – professional and family instincts combining, perhaps. It got to the point I was seriously considering divorce.”
It didn’t come to that, death staged a timely intervention, and the marriage was saved. Others, of course, haven’t been and won’t be.
Stresses, strains. Progress seems to multiply them as it multiplies everything else. The word “utopia,” familiar the world over, signifies in Japanese what it signifies everywhere: an ideal island (literal meaning: “no place”) whose happy citizens lead an ideal life of perfect happiness. Everyone knows the word and everyone uses it and everyone seems to forget that the core utopian perfection, as “Utopia” author Thomas More (1478-1535) saw it, was cultivated leisure, fruit of a five-hour work day the only obstacle to which, in More’s view of 16th-century England, was an idle aristocracy that forced endless toil on everyone else. Five centuries later, the aristocrats are gone but leisure is as remote as ever.
© Japan Today
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Old Sausage
A Zen master reading the article commented: "It is what it is, things are as they are". Judgments increase stress in any situation, struggling with a mind clouded by complaints and blame cannot find a solution. The path to a less emotional approach is not easy but can be attained. Count your breaths, and you'll achieve clarity of mind.
piskian
Can I be blatantly honest here?
Grow some balls,and say what you mean to those whom you love.
That's it, that's all.
kohakuebisu
After being stable for years, the birthrate in Japan has ratched down again post Covid as we've seen inflation return with a bang. If the cost of living does affect people's willingness to have kids, it probably does to an extent, this means there are likely families out there who had two or three kids a few years ago without expecting the price of food to double on them. Who started saving to buy a house, and then have seen the cost of housebuilding in Japan jump 30-40%. That's what I might think of as a "Reiwa family".
The stuff in the story, a bloke slaving away for 4000 yen a month pocket money and no appreciation from his family and kids outspending their parent's pockets aren't particularly new.
GBR48
Nobody is happy anymore.
Marriage is expensive and there are no guarantees. Divorce exists for a reason. Get one when you need to and move on.
Never pay a random YouTuber for talking at you. That sort of thing may be grounds for divorce.
Paying for private schooling is also daft. If they are capable, they will fill in the gaps themselves from text books, apprenticeships, working and the net. If they are not capable, you are just wasting your money.
You want to go to uni in America? Get a job, save for it, and you'll end up with a better degree from the work you put in on languages and course material whilst earning. But choose wisely, foreign students are milked for cash and some very expensive degrees are of questionable value. You may be better off bagging a degree in Japan and spending a year in the States (or another English speaking nation), doing a Masters or professional training.
Here's a positive thought to end on. When nobody is happy anymore, governments start wars to avoid being blamed. War will change your perspective. If your kids are alive and intact, you won't worry about much else.
piskian
Empathy only extends so far.
Negative Nancy
What a strange article. It seems like the only thread tying it all together is the consistency of the 'woe is me' attitude in the people featured in it.
A lot of people find themselves in unhappy family situations, especially those whose jobs require unsociable hours etc. While I have my sympathy for them, there has to be a point where they have to let go of their ties and start again. If that guy's wife and children are not giving him any happiness, why didn't he just leave them properly?
Kataoka is earning 7 million and living rent free! Poor old diddums! Private education and sending your children overseas are luxuries. You have to be realistic. If its not within your means, either make the necessary changes, or put the idea out of your head. What is wifey doing? Are the kids doing part time jobs or something to help themselves?
kurisupisu
@ Moonraker
It didn’t happy due to human greed…
kohakuebisu
Yet more evidence of Japanese media cherry picking weird unrepresentative examples that tell us nothing about the general state of "Reiwa families" and the economy. 7m plus free food and housing? If you eliminate most people's biggest costs then yes, you can spend big on education, though less than this extreme example would be advisable. That's if you are prepared to depend on your job for your home, for example.
The bigger issue, which is rarely mentioned, is that life and "rich or poor" is increasingly about what you own, not what your wage is. A rich person is someone with stocks or an inheritance or a house they rent out (i.e., non-work based income), not a person whose salary is just above average for someone with a family of that size.
Moonraker
They have just been replaced by blood-sucking capital. Most of the benefits of productivity increases have gone to it. In the 1970s we really imagined 5 hour days, or fewer, were our future. Why didn't it happen?
sakurasuki
Reiwa? It's more pre-empty nest and post-empty nest family situation in Japan,
where salaryman need to face the actual reality Japanese household inside their household.