Tokyo Medical University Scandal and a Broken Social Contract

Image from https://twitter.com/BFJNews/status/1026697347856838656

Even if you don’t usually follow Japanese news, you’ll have no doubt read about the Tokyo Medical University scandal by now. In summary, women were outperforming men on the entrance examination, so the university began docking the scores of all female applicants in order to maintain a male majority in both the program and in the profession. The sexism of all this has quite rightly attracted indignation from around the world. However, I haven’t yet seen anything insightful written about the further ramifications of entrance exam tampering. Not only were all women’s scores reduced, but the scores of some male candidates were inflated in exchange for (or the anticipation of) monetary donations from their parents. Men who had failed the test and returned to try again the following year had their scores decreased.

Sexism is par for the course in Japan, sadly. I think if the case only involved women facing higher hurdles to enter medicine the outrage would blow over fairly quickly. What will not blow over is the knowledge that entrance examinations are not the objective measure the social contract requires them to be. That is earth shattering.

In order to pass entrance examinations, children and young people attend cram schools (juku) or other forms of tutoring. It’s a sector worth tens of billions of US dollars. Families make enormous sacrifices to pay for it. A teacher I worked with estimated that it cost her about US$400,000 to get her son through the exams for a mid-level university (starting from elementary school). When I went to register my pregnancy at city hall I was given an information booklet about creating a savings plan for the foetus’s juku. Family life (and size) is organised around juku. Most middle-class Japanese kids don’t do chores. Their job is to study, and the family does what it has to do in order to support that. It’s kind of the foundation of the later stages of childhood.

Because if you pass the exam to get into a good school and then a good university, you’re set for life.

That’s the deal. That’s the social contract.

Now we know that has been broken.

In some ways, it was the last really strong contract that was left. It used to be, you got a job with a company and you’d be employed for life. You spent all your time working, and moved all over the country away from you family at a week’s notice, but you endured that because you were safe for life. That deal is gone. The top end of the contract was broken and we’ve had decades of upheaval and national soul searching about it.

The bottom end of the same ladder was still strong though, we thought. You might not be employed for life, but if you study hard you can pass the exam. Pass the exam and your status as a graduate from a good school means you will get the best of the jobs that are out there.

The whole ladder is gone now.

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The Things I Love About Japan are the Reasons Tiger Needs to Leave

I ran into an elderly neighbour at the bus stop the other day. He was on his way to a junior high school reunion. "We're in our seventies now though," he said, "so there might only be twelve or fifteen of us." My first though was how wonderful that was. Can you imagine in your seventies still being in touch with that many people from when you were thirteen?! And for most of you to still be living in the same town? I imagined them all, the 74 year olds calling the 76 year olds "sempai". The class clown will still be the one cracking jokes, the smart kid will still be the one everyone asks for advice... and there my second thought hit. These things, the things I love about Japan, are the reasons we have to get Tiger out of here. Because he was the weird kid, and so he will forever be the weird kid.
When he first came to live with us he had never been to a friend's house to play, or had a friend over. Play dates are too hard to organise if you are running an orphanage with a hundred kids, I guess. We worked on social skills intensively for a while and he's fine now, but after a few bumpy visits word got around that he was weird and kids stopped coming over to play. He'd never ridden in a car (the orphanage had a bus, of course) and raved to the other kids about these amazing buttons that made the widows open. The other kids laughed; it was like he came from another planet. First exclusion, then bullying. You wouldn't pick him from a group of "regular" kids these days, but it doesn't matter. His role has been determined. We've sent him to Scouts and he's in a sports club not affiliated with school, but neither has been the source of socialisation we'd hoped for. Everything here is centered on school life, and the scouts never hang out once the meetings are over.
School. I love love love Japanese preschools and elementary schools (junior high I feel is 80% focused on crushing kids' souls, on the other hand). I'm still learning a lot about the system, however, and one thing I am learning is that the system has no safety net for kids who are too far outside 'normal'. Our local school has been accommodating and creative, but we're at the end of the options available within the system and at this point it would be hard to describe our situation as anything other than "the system has given up on our child". It turns out not to be an uncommon situation:

Sayoko and her husband, both Japanese, are the parents of an eighth-grader with autism. The family recently returned to Japan after spending five years in the U.S. During his time abroad, their son was able to transition from special education to a mainstream classroom, where he was a straight-A student in his last year and had teachers enthusiastically recommending college in the future.
Despite this stellar record, his autism and its attendant issues with communication mean that Sayako’s son would land squarely back in the “special education” track in the Japanese system. He is currently attending international school, where is he in a mainstream classroom but receives little tangible support for his autism.
“In the Japanese system we are told that even many highly educated, ‘high-functioning’ persons with disabilities can’t get jobs, so it is better for them to attend a vocational high school and gain employment under the ‘disabled persons’ scheme,” Sayoko says, referring to the quota system that exists at big companies. “This idea is instilled into parents of children with disabilities right from elementary school. The path ahead for our son is far from clear.”

The irony of leaving Japan before we're ready because that's what the only Japanese member of our family needs is not lost on us, but that's where we are right now.

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Breastfeeding in Japan (the Good)

Sakura and Breastfeeding

 This disclaimer applies to everything I ever write, really, but I'm going to make a special point of restating it here~ these are my experiences, and do not necessarily reflect the situation for others or in other parts of Japan. With breastfeeding in particular, I think my experiences in a rural area with a relatively high birthrate may be very different to the situation a tourist may encounter in Tokyo, for example.

Cricket is fast approaching three months old. In that time I have nursed him on a train, in several parks, in an onsen, in a PTA meeting and during a Buddhist service in a 450 year old temple. Not only have I had no problems whatsoever, if he gets the least bit restless when I am out with him I can guarantee that within a few seconds an old lady will appear with one hand squeezing my breast and telling me to hurry up and get it into the baby quick-snap! Everyone I have encountered has had a very positive attitude towards breastfeeding, and the facilities available just about everywhere are fantastic:

One of several small "private" feeding rooms in a department store. The pillow is provided.

A nursing lounge in the same department store. This one has room for a pram and picture books for older children to read while waiting for their younger sibling to finish nursing. There are twice-weekly lactation classes offered here for free.

Although the best baby care facilities seem to be on the kids' stuff floor of department stores, all major shops or government offices have them. Even the garage where we had our brakes done recently had a big comfy nursing lounge. The other thing I am really loving about the baby care facilities in Japan is that they are offered to men, as well. Men's toilets come with changing tables, there is always a gender free toilet with a changing table too, and some large department stores have "daddy care" and "mummy care" rooms. In the mummy rooms you can breastfeed freely, while I guess the advantage of the daddy care rooms is that guys don't need to feel as self-conscious (on one occasion when I met a dad by himself in a baby care room he was quickly mobbed by curious mums who wanted to check out his diaper changing technique and tell him how great he was, which I am guessing would get old very quickly).

Lovely clean changing tables and nappy vending machines

Feeding chairs for toddlers, hot water and microwave, and pamphlets on various services for young families

In terms of social acceptance, facilities and general ease, I think Japan is awesome for breastfeeding. Getting established in the first week after birth was another story though, and I'll write about that in part 2.

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Fatherhood, Ikumen and Japan's Single Dads

Image from Kobe Ikumen Blog

I've had this post sitting as a draft for nearly a year now, intending to write some detailed commentary around the links, but I'm just going to admit defeat and post it as-is. Sadly I don't have time to flesh it out as much as I'd like to.

First, this is probably the dominant image of fatherhood in Japan- the absent bread winner:

http://www.incultureparent.com/2013/09/the-estranged-japanese-dad/

Perhaps the deep gender chasm is to blame. In Kaori Shoji’s article “Ensnared in the office, dads increasingly remote,” she describes the enduring stereotype of the Japanese husband and dad. His principal, if not only, role is to work and provide for the family.

As for Japanese Moms, they were taught by their own mothers that once a woman was married and ensconced in parenthood, it was better that her husband was tassha de rusu (alive, well and absent from the home).

Motherhood changes the lives of Japanese women completely. Once they have kids, they are no longer “woman” or “wife” but “mother,” and that invariably affects marital relations. It is not surprising that Japan ranks lowest in terms of sexual frequency. Moreover, Kaori Shoji writes:

For Japanese parents, too many hours spent in each other’s company invariably led to relationship analysis and the surfacing of discontent. To maintain peace in the household, better to limit things to the innocuous, like a simple exchange of greetings.

So estranged are the dads from the family that when my husband once asked his daughter’s friends what their dads did and where they worked, they did not have the faintest idea. I think it is not fair for women to complain (not that Japanese women do; quite the opposite, they rarely talk about their problems almost to the extent that they seem to be leading perfect lives) about bearing the bulk of childcare when they assume that their husbands know absolutely nothing about childrearing and childcare and cannot be entrusted with the kids for more than short periods of time. Who can blame the husbands when they eventually come to believe that they are ill-equipped to care for their own kids? Some men reason they will just spend time and bond with their kids when they are older. Sometimes, that time never comes.

Active Father Level 5: You're fine to talk about poo while eating! Source

However, I don't believe that this is the model of family that a majority of either men or women want. The "ikumen" (active fatherhood) movement has received government support and there are magazines, organisations and of course TV specials dedicated to this new generation of fathers. The barrier is not men's unwillingness to perform child-caring activities or a lack of interest in their children; it's the work culture. For example, although the law permits paternity leave few fathers take it, in a friend's case not even one day in order to be there for his child's birth. It can be hard to understand from the outside, but in Japanese workplaces labour laws are basically meaningless. I've literally seen co-workers "clock out" before working another (unpaid) four or five hours in order to cover their employer from liability for excessive overtime. Entitlements might look nice on paper, but the company culture is what makes the ultimate difference. Nippon Life Insurance is working towards a father-friendly culture in a meaningful way:

http://www.japantoday.com/category/careers/view/nippon-life-insurance-to-provide-childcare-leave-to-all-male-employees

Currently, Nippon Life Insurance Company has about 7,700 male employees. Among them, 280 were eligible for taking childcare leave as of the end of May, Tokyo Shimbun reported. However, so far, only 5% of them actually took the week off. Starting this month, the company’s human resources department said it is checking those who haven’t taken the childcare leave and will encourage them to do so before it expires. 

http://educationinjapan.wordpress.com/2013/05/24/are-you-an-ikumen

Fathers we interviewed say the contradiction comes not so much from a true desire to be at work but rather from the pressure to be a “Japanese workaholic.” …In addition, most contemporary fathers expressed great enjoyment being in the physical presence of their children and family. One father summed it up succinctly: “We are not like our fathers–I never saw my father in the house. We WANT to be involved, but our work situations make it difficult. We can’t just leave when we want to and expect everyone to understand.” 

I actually doubt very much that "our fathers" were much different, just less able to express these feelings. I know many grandfathers who are heavily involved in caring for their grandchildren and who say things like "when my kids were little I had to work all the time and I never got to enjoy this. I never took my son to the park to play catch, but now I can do it for my grandson."

Still, no matter what gains are being made in active fatherhood for married men, single fathers face enormous hardship. Until 2010 the single parent welfare provisions were literally "single mother" provisions, with no financial assistance for men at all.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/06/01/national/npo-fathering-japan-shows-men-better-dads/#.U_bOT2NIpsI

Another amendment to the law in 2010 provided for a child-rearing allowance for single-father families, rather than just single-mother families. This shed light on the growing problem of poverty in single-parent households.
His passion for supporting fathers comes from his bitter memories of childhood.
“I didn’t like my own father, who was a negative example to me, so I wanted to become the complete opposite, and become a role model,” Ando said in a recent interview, adding that this strong yearning triggered him to set up the NPO.
Ando, 51, said he had no fond memories of his family when he was young because his late father bossed his mother around. Living in that kind of environment left a huge emotional scar, he said.

Even now there are areas of discrimination against certain kinds of single parents, for example those who have never been married:
http://blog.japantimes.co.jp/yen-for-living/government-says-all-single-parents-not-created-equal/

According to Shiho Kawai, herself a single mother and a member of the Chuo Ward assembly in Tokyo, part of the problem is that single mothers who have never married do not readily want to admit their situation because of the social stigma — which is reinforced by laws such as the widow’s exemption. Kawai told Tokyo Shimbun that last fall she proposed that Chuo Ward also deem single mothers who had never been married eligible for the exemption, but the proposal was met with a “dull response.”

Eighty-three percent of single mothers in Japan work, the highest portion among developed countries, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Their annual pay is also among the lowest in the world. According to welfare ministry statistics, the average income, including the child allowance, for widowed mothers is ¥2.56 million, for divorced mothers ¥1.76 million, and for single mothers who have never married ¥1.6 million.
The reason the latter is so low is that most single mothers who’ve never married are very young, but in any case they don’t get the exemption that other single mothers get. In essence, the government is telling them it would be better if they married the guy who knocked them up, though in the end they can really marry anyone. It doesn’t matter who.
The support group Single Mothers Forum tells of one member who was married and got divorced. Later, she had a child by a man she didn’t marry, but she still qualifies for the widow’s exemption because she was married in the past, even if it wasn’t to the father of her child.

http://kwbrow2.wordpress.com/category/single-fathers

Over the next few years, he was active in an online community of single parents where he dispensed legal advice about divorce. One day in 2008, a man contacted him for guidance. He said he was unable to juggle child-rearing and his demanding job, so he quit. But he couldn’t find another job because prospective employers didn’t think a single dad with a toddler was a safe bet. When he contacted Katayama, he had used up his savings and was getting evicted from his apartment.
His dilemma: Should he kill only himself? Or would it make more sense to take his child along with him?
Katayama stayed up all night on the phone talking him out of suicide and explaining how to get help. He was outraged that this man had not been given a break and felt that not only were the unsympathetic companies to blame but also that society itself had let him down.
“That was the trigger,” he said. “It made me realize that we need support for single fathers in Japan.”

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/08/20/national/social-issues/single-fathers-emerge-shadows/#.U_bLkWNIpsI

The number of single-parent families is on the rise in Japan, along with the growing number of divorces.
According to the internal affairs ministry, 204,000 families were headed by a single father in 2010, up sharply from 166,000 in 2005.
But there were only 90,000 cases in which the children were living exclusively with their father, in a household with no other relatives such as grandparents.
Single fathers fly under the radar compared to single mothers, who are still more common.
Single fathers also, on average, earn more than single mothers, who tend to struggle more financially as a result. A traditionally patriarchal society also discourages fathers from opening up about their problems, and getting help.
Though they might make more money, single fathers must contend with the attitude of employers who view them as the main breadwinner and free from child-rearing duties. Often expected to put in longer hours, they are burdened both at work and at home, making it hard to strike a good work-life balance.
However, a recent law revision highlights how the situation is gradually changing.
Since 2010, single fathers, like single mothers, have been eligible for child-rearing subsidies offered to low-income earners.
Akemi Morita, professor and dean of the sociology department at Toyo University in Tokyo’s Bunkyo Ward, said isolation is the biggest problem facing single fathers.
Society is not yet set up to allow working men to get fully involved in child rearing, and support services for working fathers and their families are few and far between, according to Morita.
“Issues for single fathers include gaining more support from employers. Single-father families, like any other families with challenges (for example, families with a child with special needs), should be given special considerations, such as flexibility in working hours according to their circumstances. For example, they should be able to work flexible hours to leave time to tend to the child, or easily take time off work when the child falls ill,” said Morita.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2012/08/12/commentary/new-breed-of-single-fathers-should-be-a-model-for-men-across-japan/#.U_bLn2NIpsI

Matsuo had to give up his job as foreman on construction sites due to the demanding hours. At times he was at the end of his tether.
“I even thought,” he confessed, “that I would drive my car into the sea and kill us all."

There is a great deal more research on, interest in and concern for single mothers in Japan than for single fathers. This may be natural, considering both the number and the lesser income of the former. The average income of a single father is ¥4.2 million a year. The average for single mothers is only a little more than half that, at ¥2.13 million. Welfare payments for single parents are means tested, however. Consequently, single mothers benefit from more substantial government aid than single fathers.
“The government doesn’t realize the mental pressure that single fathers are under due to the stagnating economy and the pressure on them to put raising their children ahead of their careers,” reported the Sankei Shimbun on Jan. 12, 2011. “If a child suddenly falls ill, a single mother gets much more consideration from a workplace than a single father.”

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The Grappler

Image by Angie Muldowney

I’m adding a new tag to the blog, “Tales from the Trenches”. As I mentioned in this post (aka whinge) about all the “volunteer” and committee stuff I have to do, I end up at a lot of random meetings, some of which can be quite entertaining. Today I’m sharing a story from a cult meeting (I know I promised ages ago to explain how I came to accidentally join a cult, but you’ll have to wait a little longer sorry).

During a cult meeting, a young mother expressed concern that her two year old son was behaving violently towards his big brother, and asked for advice. A more experienced mother spoke up to share the story of her youngest. He was always getting into fights, wrestling other children to the ground and hitting them. By the tender age of four he had earned the nick-name “The Grappler” and was known as such by the entire neighbourhood. His mother spent many hours worrying about his behaviour. Then he started school. Many Japanese elementary schools keep some sort of small animals like rabbits or chickens. A school in my area has a very sad looking dog. In previous years monkeys were popular but they (thankfully) seem to have fallen out of favour these days. The school The Grappler attended was a rural school, and instead of fluffy bunnies they had a belligerent billy goat all the first graders were terrified of. On the first day of school The Grappler walked right up to the goat, grabbed his horns and wrestled him to the ground, winning fame and popularity for the entirety of his elementary school years. And so, his mother concluded, even violent traits can be positive in the right context.

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Butt Stickers and Drop Bears

I heard rumors from other mothers in Japan, whispers in dark corridors. The school will give you a sticker, they said, and you have to attack it to your kid's bum. Not just anywhere, actually over the anus. I laughed, at first, assuming the bum sticker was the mothering-in-Japan equivalent of drop bears. You know drop bears, the fearsome scourge of tourists to Australia?

All Australians know about drop bears, and if you hole an Aussie up in an Irish pub anywhere in the world (we always seem to be in Irish pubs, I don't really know why) and ask they will doubtless regale you with horrific tales. The rest of the world is so convinced of the deadly nature of all things Australian that the drop bear story goes unchallenged for more often then you might think in these cynical days of instant snopes-ing.

It turns out, the bum sticker test isn't an exaggeration. You really have to do it. Twice, actually, to confirm the results. For really little kids the stickers may be left on overnight. My 8 year old just had to have it "applied" then "removed" immediately. Note the passive verbs. Put more actively, he had to spread his cheeks while squatting and I had to stick the clear round sticker of doom in place then peel it off again. And here was I, thinking that adopting an older child had cleverly let me off all parent-child'sbum interactions. This year, grade three, is the last year we have to do it, so there's that I suppose.

So why? Why is the Kewpie Mayonnaise cupid squatting for a sticker? It's a test for worms, and the kids have to get the all-clear before they are allowed in the school pool. The worms emerge during the night to lay eggs around the anus, so the sticker either applied overnight or immediately on waking is supposed to catch them poking their little heads out. Personally my vote would be prophylactic worming tablets (it works for the dogs...), but then, what do I know. I'm still telling people about my near miss with a drop bear.

*No photo credits for the "deadly Australia" pictures sorry, I just have no way of figuring out where any of them originally came from m(__)m

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Common Sense in Child Welfare (Personal Observations)

Remember this?

Obviously common sense is culturally encoded, not actually common. One of the most interesting things for me about living in different cultures is observing the differences in "common" sense, the things that are so taken for granted that no one thinks to explain them. When it comes to parenting, "common" sense varies so wildly even within the same culture that it's hard to draw comparisons, but in the case of the officially patrolled boundaries of parenting (for example, at what age children can legally be left home alone, whether or not "spanking" is considered abuse) we can more easily draw some very general comparisons. Slightly less reliably, the advice and concerns social workers express can be another indication. I want to talk about some things that have surprised me about the way our social workers and other support people have approached our adoption experience. I'm not criticizing any of these differences, even if I sound a little cynical; in some cases I prefer the Japanese approach and in some cases I have been left scratching my head, but I am very grateful for all of the support we have received.

Co-Sleeping and Family Baths

When we were matched with an eight year old, one of my first thoughts was sadness that co-sleeping would probably not be an option. In Australia (AKA AusOMGPEDOPHILEStralia) having an eight year old sleeping in the same bed as foster parents would be unthinkable. Yet, contrary to my assumptions, we were expected to co-sleep. As it turned out, co-sleeping really really wasn't for us. After a sleepless few months we gradually transitioned first from sleeping in the same room but different beds to then sleeping in separate rooms. This really bothers the social workers and gets brought up every single time we have a visit, and was even included in the report submitted to the courts for the adoption application. They have ascribed it to "cultural difference" despite me saying that I have no cultural objection, I just really don't enjoy getting kicked in the face and feel that I am a better parent after sleeping than I am when sleep-deprived. Almost a year in, when speaking to a psychologist about self-harming issues yesterday I was told "it's probably because you make him sleep alone". Although not sleeping together seemed to be the most upsetting, they were also quite displeased that we don't take baths together. We somewhat redeemed ourselves by making periodic trips to onsen together, but it still gets brought up from time to time. It's funny that our failure to do two things Australian social workers would absolutely black list us for doing (and possibly have us arrested for) earns such displeasure.

Eating

There is a huge emphasis on eating. For the first three months pretty much all anyone asked Tiger was "do you like your mama's cooking?" When I expressed concerns about some violent incidents and talk of suicide I was asked "is he eating? If so, there's nothing to worry about." The courts asked me to provide example menus. The bento I made for his school picnics were described in detail by the teachers to the social workers and feature in our documentation. The psychiatrist asks every month about his appetite but never about his drawings, what he has been saying, how his relationships with friends are or any of the other questions I was expecting.

I got good marks though ;)

Self-Harm and Suicide

I have tried not to violate Tiger's privacy on this blog, so I wont go into any details, but to me for a child to self harm or talk about suicide should always raise red flags, and especially if the child is already "high risk" in other ways. Yet, these issues have never been addressed in depth or treated with the seriousness I expected they would deserve.

Violence and Discipline

 No one, from social workers to psychologists to the court, has ever asked us if we use physical discipline (we don't). It's very common and not illegal here, so it may not really be surprising that no one has asked, but given that everyone is aware that he is a challenging child I was expecting some kind of advice on or scrutiny of how we handle discipline. On one occasion Tiger told his teacher that I had given him a blood nose. She mentioned it in passing and excepted my explanation* without making a big deal of it... which was a relief for me but also quite troubling objectively. If he were being abused and had opened up to a teacher he probably wouldn't have bothered mentioning it again after that response. Likewise, despite having been on the receiving end of violence from Tiger, in one case I was actually meeting with a social worker with this bite mark on my arm:

 I wasn't offered any advice or support for keeping myself safe.

*It's actually quite funny, Tiger probably has a brilliant career as a lawyer ahead of him... We were arguing about something or other (whether gumboots were necessary on a rainy day, I think) and he got a blood nose. He is prone to them and gets them quite often. At the time he told me it was my fault and I asked how on earth that was the case when I was standing at the other end of the hall. "You're so annoying my blood-pressure increased and that caused the nose-bleed" he replied.

Professional Advice 

The professional advice we have been given from social workers, psychologist and psychiatrist has all been stuff that we took for granted all parents would do. Things like "tell him he is precious" and "tell him how you expect him to behave instead of assuming he knows" or "he may be afraid of abandonment". It is sometimes hard to look sufficiently impressed by these gems of wisdom.

Bullying

Bullying, on the other hand, has been taking enormously seriously. I made the mistake of using the word casually when asking Ms Smiles to intercede in a very minor incident last year and within a couple of hours two teachers and the vice principal were investigating and interviewing. I actually felt bad for the "bully", it had really been a very minor thing. A few weeks ago a boy who occasionally bullies Tiger told the other kids they weren't allowed to play with him. I think it only lasted a day or two and although I kept asking about it Tiger said they had made up and everyone was friends again. I experienced that kind of clique exclusion even within the tiny circle of other home-schooled kids I knew as a child, and it hadn't lasted long so I didn't pursue it further but I did mention it to the psychologist. She physically flinched and immediately started talking notes, saying that something like that she had to inform the school about and discuss with the teacher. Her reaction reflected the emotional gravity of that kind of bullying for kids, rather than dismissing it as "sticks and stones" or "kids will be kids". 

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Poverty in Japan

Image by Denis Bocquet

I rely on some academic sources quite heavily in this, but since I started blogging mainly to escape from the necessity to religiously reference everything I write I hope the guardians of plagiarism will forgive me simply listing those resources at the end instead of acknowledging each instance of citation.

Japan is a wealthy, highly industrialised nation with the second highest life expectancy in the world. It is a land of sleek sky-scrapers and nano-technology where everyone has a white collar job and a pet robot. If we children of the 1980s learned nothing else from Gibson and Techno-Orientalism, it was that Japan=the future, and corporate success.

Which is why I was a little surprised when some of the first people I ever spoke to in Japan were living in cardboard boxes, why I was unprepared for a school staffroom with a single shared PC running Windows '95 (in 2009), and why the first time I was told "school lunch is the only meal some of these kids will eat today" I had trouble grasping exactly what that meant.

38 percent of Japan's population (19.7 million people), live on or below the poverty line.  

Japan is a wealthy country. "The Japanese" are not a wealthy people. Although Japan ranked 9th in the OECD for income inequality (2006), poverty is enormously concentrated on families. After income redistribution (ie, comparing net not gross income) child poverty in Japan surpasses the OECD average. In single parent families the situation is even worse.

Single parent households in which the parent is employed have a poverty rate of 50% (2000 figures) compared to an OECD average of 20%.

The term "working poor" doesn't fully capture the situation I'm talking about here. The ratio of non-full time (casual, part-time or contracted) workers has increased from 19% in 1996 to 30% in 2006. The average hourly wage of part time workers is only 40% that of full time employees, and they are likely to miss out on pension contributions etc, meaning they face a precarious situation when they become unable to continue working.

Check out 2hj.org/english/problem/data.html  for disturbing graphs like this:

If we break these statistics down further by age and gender, we can see some sections of society that are extraordinarily vulnerable.

As reported in The Japan Times

This year’s Global Gender Gap Report ranks Japan at 105th among 136 countries, its worst showing since the WEF started the survey in 2006. Japan ranked 101st last year.

Often lost in commentary about Japan's declining birthrate is that for over a decade a quarter of married women of reproductive age reported that they could not afford to have as many children as they wanted. With the barriers in returning to work after having children I wrote about here, the decision to have a child involves not only the cost of raising that child, it entails to loss of the mother's income for what may be over a decade.

Graph taken from Naohiro Ogawa's work, see reference list at the end of the post

Blogger won't let me embed it, but this short report is really worth watching: http://youtu.be/87C9MyDwA9I

This survey shows 40% of retirees surveyed have a monthly income of just 100,000 yen.

Graph taken from Aya K. Abe's work, see reference list at the end of the post

This post makes some great (but depressing) observations about the lack of public housing, especially in the areas devistated by the tsunami, and how the Tokyo olympics really aren't helping:

According to a recent report on NHK, the city of Koriyama in Fukushima Prefecture has set aside a large tract of land for a new public housing project that was supposed to start construction last August, but no construction company even submitted a bid because the local government set the starting bid too low. Builders looked at the project and assumed they would likely lose money on it, so they didn’t even show up. Throughout the disaster area, there are plans to build more than 27,000 public housing units specifically for disaster victims, and by the end of September only 450 had been built. Right now more than 100,000 people are still living in temporary digs.
Will things change once the tax-inspired housing boom is finished and construction of single-family homes slumps again? Not likely. Tokyo needs those workers to build infrastructure and venues for the 2020 Olympics. The Tokyo government, as well as the central government–who has already expressed is feelings for the poor by recently tightening welfare requirements–is more than willing to pay top yen to get the city ready for the big event, which means other construction projects, those with lower priority, will be neglected, probably until the next decade, at the earliest. And public housing has the lowest priority of all.

This article describes the exploitation of homeless as a disposable workforce in clearing irradiated areas.

Shizuya Nishiyama, 57, says he briefly worked for Shuto clearing rubble. He now sleeps on a cardboard box in Sendai Station. He says he left after a dispute over wages, one of several he has had with construction firms, including two handling decontamination jobs.
Nishiyama's first employer in Sendai offered him $90 a day for his first job clearing tsunami debris. But he was made to pay as much as $50 a day for food and lodging. He also was not paid on the days he was unable to work. On those days, though, he would still be charged for room and board. He decided he was better off living on the street than going into debt.
"We're an easy target for recruiters," Nishiyama said. "We turn up here with all our bags, wheeling them around and we're easy to spot. They say to us, are you looking for work? Are you hungry? And if we haven't eaten, they offer to find us a job."

For what is probably a larger number of people than you may think, this is what daily life looks like.

Sources not cited in text:
Abe, Aya K."Poverty and Social Exclusion of Women in Japan" in Japanese Journal of Social Security Policy, Vol.9, No.1 (March 2012).
Ogawa, Naohiro "Japan's Changing Fertility Mechanisms and its Policy Responses" in Journal of Population Research, Vol. 20, No. 1, 2003.
http://inequalitywatch.eu/spip.php?article58

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8 Insignificant Things About Japan That Please and Annoy Me

Between work, child, dogs and all the usual stuff I haven't had time to dedicate to proper posting lately. So, just for frivolous fun, here are eight completely insignificant things that are annoy and pleasing me about life in Japan lately. There's no discussion of meaningful social issues here, just randomness!

Annoying

Milk only comes in 1 litre cartons. It wouldn't seem like a big issue, but it is really annoying and really wasteful to have to buy three or four individual cartons a week. If you peek behind the counter of a Japanese Starbucks you'll see crate after crate of 1 litre milk cartons... even business can't get larger sizes, it seems. SO MUCH PACKAGING >.<

Pleasing

Eggs have the use by date stamped directly onto them, so if you finish half a pack, buy a new one and set them all together in the fridge there's still no confusion. It's a little thing but quite handy!

Annoying

My neighbourhood recently added two new categories of garbage, bringing it up to nine different ways we have to separate everything, all collected on different days and different frequencies (for example, burnable is twice a week on the same days each time but non-burnable is once a month on a completely random day). I really appreciate the recycling system and I don't even mind separating it into different categories (even though in Australia all the recyclables get collected together from the same bin then sorted at the recycling centre, so I KNOW IT CAN BE DONE). What really annoys me is having to take garbage out every single day and needing a schedule to know what to take out when because it is that frickin' complicated. Also, our garbage is even collected from different street corners depending on what type it is! There is no need for it to be this complicated!

Pleasing

Light switches glow when switched off. Again, a really little thing, but so helpful! No more groping  along the wall in the dark trying to feel for the switch. It's especially helpful in unfamiliar places.

Annoying

School lets out at completely random times with no consistency, and I get the times for the following week each Friday evening. That means if Monday is a "there's randomly no school after lunch today" day, I have literally zero business days notice to figure out child care or try to get time off work. The assumption is that every child has a stay at home mother and/or cohabiting grandparents. This increasingly does not reflect the lived reality, but schools seem disinterested in taking responsibility for kids between set hours.

Pleasing

Although these are horribly environmentally unfriendly, I do really appreciate them from time to time! They are sweat absorbing pads that stick inside your clothes to prevent staining (or visible moisture) and also deodorise. Usually I wear and undershirt, but it is SO hot and sometimes I just want to experience the textures of my nicer blouses without having my underarms hosting their own wet t-shirt contest.

Annoying

The "sender" is listed as gaikoku, overseas.

I posted this on facebook and four or five friends replied with their own... the gaikoku is so generous, sending so many packages! No matter how many times it happens, the use of "gaikoku" to signify the entire rest of the world and the prioritisation of foreignness over any other information (like, for example, the NAME OF THE SENDER) continues to annoy me.

Pleasing

 I love that children do not live a segregated existence here. They go everywhere with their families, and if they get tired they just sleep wherever they happen to be. 

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The Eclectic Others of the Village

Stolen from HERE. The character for mother is literally a pair of breasts turned vertically.

Welcome to the ‘Look At All The Women’ Carnival: Week 3 – ‘The Eclectic Others’ This post was written especially for inclusion in the three-week-long ‘Look At All The Women’ carnival, hosted by Mother’s Milk Books, to celebrate the launch of Cathy Bryant’s new book ‘Look At All The Women’. In this final week of the carnival our participants share their thoughts on the theme ‘The Eclectic Others’ (the third, and final, chapter in Cathy’s new poetry collection). Please read to the end of the post for a full list of carnival participants. 

 In Japanese it is common to refer to everyone using kinship words irrespective of whether they are actual family members or not. All older men are 'grandpa' and all older women are 'grandma'. A running gag in anime is a cheeky young boy incurring the wrath of female characters by calling then 'aunty' instead of 'older sister'. Within families, parents refer to all other family members from the point of view of the youngest child. Fathers call their wives (excuse the hetero-etc-normativity, but in Japan this is how it is) mama and wives call their husband papa. A friend of mine began calling her husband papa while she was still pregnant with their first child. The elder children are called 'big brother' and 'big sister' and only the youngest child is regularly referred to by name.

A couple of years ago I was, without fail, 'older sister'. After we moved into a house in the burbs though, delivery men in particular began calling me 'wife' (a more natural translation would be 'missus'). Then Tiger came along and I became 'mother', or more often the English 'mama'. It's quite surreal for someone not used to the practice to have an elderly doctor refer to her as 'mama'.  So, I'm a mother, お母さん。

I love that my son is growing up an a place where instead of stranger danger, every stranger is his "sister" or "uncle" and "grandma". They aren't just words, either. Walking to school arguing about something or another and the "grandpa" walking the other way stops and says "listen to your mother!" Riding the bus and the "grandma" sitting opposite immediately whips out boiled lollies. Tiger comes home from playing at a friend's house with a guitar made from cardboard and rubber bands; his friend's grandmother taught him how to make it. I am not saying these are essentially Japanese experiences. I am sure they don't happen in big cities where there is little by way of community, and I am sure they happen in close communities all over the world.

There is a strong belief in some sections of the English speaking world that the nuclear family should be an island, that father and mother are the one and only thing a child needs. Yet despite decades of attempts to prove that a family headed by a heterosexual married couple is "best", usually in argument against blended families or same sex parenting or single parenting, the answer research consistently shows is that the best environment is one with an extended support network. Kids who are surrounded by people who care about them thrive. There are times in life, especially in teenage, when you need those "eclectic others", the aunties and cousins and the grandpa who listens patiently. As ex-pat parents we worry about living away from all of our relatives, but the "village" of aunties and grandpas surrounding us reassures us. Three cheers for the eclectic others!

Look At All The Women by Cathy Bryant

Look At All The Women is now available to buy from:
The Mother’s Milk Bookshop (as a paperback and PDF) – we can ship books around the world!
and as a paperback from Amazon.co.uk.
It can also be ordered via your local bookshop.
If you’d like to know more about Mother’s Milk Books — our submission guidelines, who we are and what we do — please find more details here: http://www.mothersmilkbooks.com/ Please take the time to read and comment on the following fab posts submitted by some wonderful women:

‘Heroines and Inspirations’— Cathy Bryant, guest posting at Mother’s Milk Books, shares two powerful, inspiring poems, and how they came into being.

‘Sensitivity’ — Marija Smits shares a poem, with an accompanying image, that gives a glimpse into the inner workings of a highly sensitive person.

Georgie St Clair shares her creative female heroines in her post ‘Creative Others: Mothers Who Have It All’ 

‘The Eclectic Others – Or What Would I Have Been Without You?’ — Kimberly Jamison posts to her blog The Book Word a thank you to the women of literature and history who have been in her life, shaped her life, saved her life and gave her a future.

‘Barbie speaks out’ — Ana Salote at Colouring Outside the Lines shares a platform with feminist icon, Barbie.

‘Her Village’ — An older (much older than most) first time mother, Ellie Stoneley from Mush Brained Ramblings firmly believes in the old African adage that it takes a village to raise a child. To that end she has surrounded her daughter with the love, mischief and inspiration of an extremely eclectic bunch of villagers.

Survivor writes about the inspiring life of La Malinche and her place in Mexican history at Surviving Mexico: Adventures and Disasters.

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Loving Libraries (Flashback Friday)

Some time last year I was at the university discussing my upcoming employment. Since I wasn't actually employed at the time, I didn't have a library access card, but a friend snuck me in with a sneaky swipe of his. Unreasonably afraid of being discovered, I climbed the tiny back stairs instead of going through the main entrance. The staircase was so small I doubt my man's shoulders could have squeezed into the narrow space. The staircase opened into an area I'm used to calling the stacks... books so rarely requested that they are stored out of the way in a less accessible part of the library. The room was dark, with motion sensor lights flicking on slowly row by row as I tip-toed, enjoying the silence after an intense few months of stay-at-home parenting a child who needs constant noise to feel safe. The still air was filled with that special musty smell of old books. I may have cried, a little. There are a few places guaranteed to make me feel at ease: mountains, rivers and libraries. Nowhere really compares to a proper university library, though.

When I was ten, my father started his PhD and he, my younger sister and I lived on and off in an ex-ambulance parked near the university library. Dad fitted out the ambulance with bunk beds, and we showered at the university swimming pool. We had movie nights in the AV section of the library, where the selection of films was geared towards screen studies, meaning that although we weren't allowed to watch Sesame Street, we saw Thelma & Louise and Thelma & Louise. In the day time we lived in the library while dad was studying. We took dolls and built multi-story doll-houses on empty book shelves. We found the children's literature section and read all of it. The library was massive and one day we explored too far and got lost. After walking for what felt like hours Verity started crying and refused to go any further. I piggy-backed her, desperately trying to remember the Dewey Decimal codes near our starting point. Eventually we found a water fountain in a study hall and ran to it like desert explorers finding an oasis. I finally remembered the title of a book I'd seem near dad's desk, entered it into the catalog and despite no experience using a computer, we figured out the location. When we got back, triumphant at the trials and tribulations we had over come, dad hadn't even noticed we'd been gone. Universities in general, and libraries in particular, have been under my skin ever since.

These literate little birds have built a nest in the kanji for "tree". Picture thanks to Furiida.

Of all the emails I've had as a result of this blog, my favorite is from Vincent the librarian, who emailed me with a book recommendation. Because that is the magical power of librarians, guardians of the promised land. They reach out and tell you what you were looking for even before you know it yourself. Or, as he said: "I'm a librarian.  It's what I do.  Then walk off into the sunset." Thank you Vincent! One day I'll get around to writing about the book, Yokohama Yankee: My Family's Five Generations as Outsiders in Japan by Leslie Helm. It's a great read.

This post contains Amazon affiliate links. That means if you click and then buy the item I get a small commission. It does not mean that I am being paid to promote a particular product or opinion. I will only include affiliate links that are directly related to the subject of a post. If you want to know why I have begun including affiliate links you can read about it here.

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Working Mothers, Childcare and Limited Choices

Image by Magdalena Roeseler

Two events this weekend prompted these thoughts. On Saturday I attended a manga research symposium and the post-function dinner and spoke to several women who are career academics about gender issues in Japan. Sunday was my first mothers’ day. 

  

I recently shared Ken’s post on ‘who wears the pants in Japan’, and the content of some of my conversations reflected this perspective. We talked about female friends who had quit their jobs after marriage and how easy their lives were compared to our male friends’ situations. The guys work until late at night every day, while their wives enjoy hobbies and leisurely lunches at fashionable cafés with their friends. This is, of course, a highly classed perspective. Many women in lower income families are simultaneously responsible for 100% of house work and child care but also have to work because their partners’ income is not enough to live on. But among university educated women, this apparently spoiled existence seems common. The novelty probably wears off… at a cub-scout meeting recently a mother told me that after she finishes the housework she just sits alone and wonders what to do with herself. “What do you DO all day?” She asked me, looking a little desperate. Amid all sorts of moral panics about “herbivoremen” and NEETs, freeters and other apparently abhorrent versions of masculinity, few commentators ever mention that perhaps the whole system is just deeply unappealing to many young men. Sure, they may get a nice home they don’t have to take care of, but I’d feel pretty upset if I worked myself to death supporting a partner whose life seemed so much more fulfilling than mine. At a different dinner with a group of women in their sixties I was  saddened to hear them discussing encouraging their husbands to take up golf so that they could get them out of the house all day on Sundays (many Japanese people work six day weeks). “If he’s home I can’t relax” one said, as her friends nodded in agreement, “and I have to cook a full lunch for him. If it’s just me I snack on toast or go to a café.” Retired husbands are sometimes referred to as sodaigomi, over-sized garbage. There is even a name for the psychological distress wives experience when their husbands retire.

Before this starts sounding like some kind of praise for how great a gender segregated work culture is for women, let me elaborate on how this really is not a choice for women. One of the academics I was talking to had completed her PhD in Australia and we were talking about how abnormal it would be for a women in Australia to quit her job because she got married. “In Japan we can choose” she proudly said. She is single, so I can see why it seems that way to her, but when I began explaining the barriers to mothers working in Japan her jaw dropped. Even though I work just three days a week and my son is in school, I have found it extraordinarily frustrating.  If I had a pre-school aged child, I just wouldn’t work unless I had to. The majority of Japanese women I know who take their careers seriously are single and childless.

Maternity leave and day care are out of reach for many women.

According to the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry, 24,825 children across Japan were on waiting lists for authorized nurseries in 2012.
Yet a survey by Hoikuen wo Kangaeru Oyano kai (roughly translated as parents looking into day care group) led by Aki Fukoin, who has been dealing with this issue since the 1980s, found that 55,222 children in 70 municipalities were waiting to be placed in authorized day care centers last year.
The gap reflects how the government defines “children on the waiting list.” The government figure does not count children whose parents declined admission from day care centers that were not of their choosing, or children who were accepted by unauthorized day care facilities that receive government subsidies.

The article continues

Experts cite several reasons behind the shortage of facilities. First, municipalities are generally reluctant to spend money on setting up more nurseries when the increase in senior citizens outpaces that of newborns.
In addition, despite deregulation in 2000 that allowed private companies and nonprofit groups to offer day care services, entering the market has actually been difficult because established facilities want to protect their turf.
“The Social Welfare Corporation (the main provider of authorized day care centers) opposed private operators from entering the market and colluded with local politicians to ensure their applications were rejected,” said Hiromi Yamaguchi, CEO of JP Holdings, the largest private operator of day care facilities.
Thus out of 23,711 government-authorized day care facilities, only 1 percent are currently run by private companies, welfare ministry figures show. But with Abe encouraging municipalities to authorize more company-run day care centers, things may change, Yamaguchi said.

Entering school doesn't aliviate the problems, either. Although either I or my partner are home by the end of the school day most days, we have still gone through a huge amount of hassle in the past month because the school keeps randomly sending our son home early, with sometimes only one day's notice. First we had two weeks of him coming home after lunch because of "home visits" by teachers (all of which were completed in three days, incidentally). Then there were some staff meeting and workshops that couldn't possibly have been held after 3, so again, all the kids were sent home after lunch. On Friday we get a notice listing the next week's return times, so if Monday is a short day I don't even have a single business day's notice to try and organise some kind of care. After burning through leave at a rate of knots, we looked into our school's after school care program. LOL. It's expensive, very few adults are supervising a huge number of kids many of whom have special needs, and there is a waiting list so long we didn't bother registering (thereby contributing to unreliable statistics on waiting lists...)

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/03/17/reference/after-school-clubs-falling-short-as-more-moms-work/#.U3AduVdIoxE

Many working mothers have had to give up their jobs just because they can’t secure spots for their children at such facilities. The problem has become so acute that there is now a term describing difficulties confronting working mothers with first-graders: “shoichi no kabe” (the hurdle of the first grade).
Even students who are fortunate enough to gain admittance to an after-school club benefit for only a limited time. Many clubs — particularly the traditional, publicly funded ones — accept students only through the third grade, meaning that older children often have nowhere to go after school. Many end up staying home alone, often with a TV or computer games as their only companions.
Concern for such kids has recently given rise to another term: “shoyon no kabe,” or the hurdle of the fourth grade.

The article continues:

A survey by the liaison council suggests that the actual number of children on waiting lists might be between 400,000 and 500,000, many more than are officially recognized.
“Of all the working mothers with first- to third-grade children, almost 70 percent of them work over six hours a day, which is considered full time. There are 1.32 million children whose mothers work full time,” said Yutaka Sanada, deputy secretary-general of the council.
“Only 880,000 of those students belong to gakudo clubs, which means that the rest — about 400,000 students — don’t have anyone to look after them after school.”

So what about women who, despite all the hurdles, persist in getting back to work? They face continued discrimination at work and may be labeled devil wives with no shame by wider society:

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-11-01/japan-s-devil-wife-leads-motherhood-work-balance-tussle

“It was like a weekend marriage,” Suzuki, 45, who works at a Japanese telecommunications company, said of the arrangement started 14 years ago. “I had a satisfying job and really wanted to go back to it. In Japanese society, when a woman chooses work instead of staying at home to look after her husband, she’s called a devil wife.”

http://japandailypress.com/citizens-outraged-over-politicians-criticism-of-mothers-calling-for-more-day-care-0124271

Tanaka, 37, said in his post that while “woman power” is necessary to revitalize the economy, he thought that the mothers “had no touch of reserve nor shame.” “What I am saying is don’t force your child-rearing on society from the start. . . . (The mothers) should have the manners enough to say ‘Please help us raise our children,’ ” Tanaka added on his blog, adding that he was not married and had no kids.
A multitude of angry comments flooded the blog, with people expressing sentiments like not wanting to raise their children in a district with a representative like Tanaka and that it is because of people like him that Japan has a low birthrate. Tanaka was not available for comment.

More on the protests by Tokyo mothers at Japan Probe:

The reporters visit the house of a woman who lives in Itabashi ward of Tokyo. She gave birth to a baby a year and one month ago, and was planning to return to full-time work. Unfortunately, she was unable to find a nursery for her child. She applied for five places, and they all turned her down because they were full. Because her maternity leave only lasts until April, she will be forced to abandon her job.
Government-run nursery schools have pretty strict entry requirements. Because of a shortage of such facilities, they give preference to people in the worst financial circumstances. The woman they interview says she has heard about some couples getting divorced so they could have a better chance at passing the entry screening.

For some reason I can't embed it, but this is an interesting clip from a documentary titled "Mothers' Way, Daughters' Choice".


Despite constant talk from politicians and media about the need to both increase women's participation in the workforce and to get the birth rate up to try and do something about the aging population, nothing really changes. On the surface I have a certain amount of envy for women who seem to enjoy such carefree, unburdened lives without ever having to go to work, but it is delusional to see this as a choice. Choice only exists when the odds are not heavily stacked in favour of one option to the exclusion of others.

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