Sexual, economic and demographic problems besetting 'Reiwa families'

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