The divorce rate in Japan has been rising steadily for
decades. In fact, the Ministry of Health and Welfare reports
225,000 divorce cases in 1997, for a divorce rate of 1.8 per one
thousand people (Kawanishi, 1998). However, I do not believe that
Japanese attitudes toward divorce have also improved because my
experiences as a child of a divorced family have shown me only
negative impressions about divorce. For the sake of the well
being of the children of divorced families, Japan need to change
their attitudes towards divorce.
In this essay, I will investigate the problem of Japanese
attitudes toward divorce with comparing divorce situations in
Japan and America to show how Japan can be more flexible towards
divorce. My parents divorced when I was three years old. I still
remember that my mother told my brother and me that we should
forget our father and that we were going to have a new life in a
new place from now on. However, I couldn't understand why we
should live apart from our father, and I also couldn't
understand why my mother looked so sad. Although something tragic
was happening to me, as a three-year-old girl, I was just excited
getting on the airplane, which would take us to a new
place.
Since then, I have been brought up in Okinawa, which is my
mother's home-prefecture. As I grew up, my memory of my
father gradually faded, and I came to think that it was natural
that there was no father in my family. However, people around me
didn't think so. My neighbors and my relatives felt sorry for
me, and they always told me that I was a poor fatherless child. I
felt uncomfortable when people talked to my like this. These
people made me sadder, and their negative stereotypes about
divorce used to make me feel ashamed of my family. In this way,
my childhood memories gave me bad impressions of
divorce.
I used to think that divorced families were always
disadvantaged socially, economically, and educationally. In fact,
the average annual income of divorced woman with children is
under two million yen, including support from welfare programs
and relatives, while that for divorced men is 4.67 million yen
(Kawanishi, 1998). However, this idea completely changed when I
lived in America at the age of eighteen.
In the United States, divorce seemed to be accepted by most
people because I saw a lot of children whose parents were
divorced. Moreover, I saw many friends who live with their
stepfamilies, which is very unusual in Japan. This experience
influenced my idea, and I started to wonder why divorce is more
accepted in American society than in Japan. There seem to be
three differences between Japanese society and American
society.
- The first is that marriage in American society is more likely to depend on
romantic love, while many long-time married couples
in Japan depend not on love but honne
and tatemae (real intentions and formal
position).
- Second, divorced women are more accepted by society in the United States.
For example, American women can more easily reenter
the work force after having children than Japanese
women can.
- A third difference is that most unhappy Japanese couples stay married for
the sake of their children, following the wisdom
in the proverb, Ko wa kasugai (Children
hold a marriage together) (Kawanishi, 1998). However,
in the United States most people seem to think
that unhappy marriages cause unhappy lives for
both parents and children.
My opinion is that Japanese society should have a more
flexible attitude toward divorce. Although the increasing
Japanese divorcing rate suggests that divorce is becoming more
acceptable for Japanese people, the majority of people still have
strong negative stereotypes about divorce. Japanese need to
realize that divorce may sometimes causes happy lives for both
parents and children. Since the end of World War II, Japan has
made dramatic economic progress, and because of improvements in
working conditions, job markets, and economic freedom Japan is a
easier place for most people to live than before the War.
However, many of these changes have been rather superficial and
some basic attitudes such divorce have not changed. Without
fundamental changes of mind in Japanese society, negative
impressions about divorce will permanently remain.
by Maiko Fukushima
References
Yamashita, K. (1986, October/December). Divorce, Japanese
style. Japan Quarterly, (33), 416-420.
Kawanishi, Y. (1998, July/September). Breaking up still hard
to do. Japan Quarterly, 45(3), 84-89.
Hanson, L. T., Mclanahan, S. S., & Thomson, E. (1998).
Windows on divorce: Before and after. Social science
research, (27), 329-349.
Namida, A. Watashi wa kou miru: Namida shiki keiyakukon no
susume. [I see it as this: a good way of marriage in the
manner of Namida.] In Wish [Online]. Available: http://wish.shizuokanet.ne.jp./wings/wingshata.html
(1999, November 20).
