I Forget I’m Alive
On The Secrets of Mariko
On the surface, the Japanese middle class seems an exemplification of social development. Middle class families in Japan enjoy relative economic prosperity, low crime rates, and one of the most highly regarded primary educational systems in the world. Forces of nature, however, are conservative: there can be no gain without a loss. The Japanese are no exception in this regard. In return for a highly productive workforce and well-educated children, they seem to have sacrificed some measure of their personal agency, such that they wrestle with the very concept at times. Mariko’s family, as portrayed in Elizabeth Bumiller’s The Secrets of Mariko, fits this archetype too well for their own good.
Mariko, as the motive power of the Tanaka household, employs her physical energy toward its dutiful maintenance. Mariko packs everyone’s lunches, readies her children for their school days, and, as necessary, drags her not infrequently hung-over husband out of bed so he can arrive to work punctually. Little mention is made in Bumiller’s account of any thankfulness on the part of Mariko’s children, and least of all from her husband. They merely expect, via an entitlement provided them by the norms of the Japanese culture, that Mariko will do all of these things as often and to whatever degree as is necessary.
Takeshi, the family’s primary breadwinner, similarly paces the thankless motions expected of him by his family, by his countrymen, and by himself. Rising in the morning for a long commute, as is typical, Takeshi carries on the machinations of an automaton built to ensure the productivity of his team, of his company, and of his Japan. Even if his two decades of this service have earned him a managerial role, he is expected to gain motivation not from any personal success, but by the success of the enterprises of which he is a replaceable piece.
The Takana children comprise an indicative cross-section of middle-class school-aged children. Shunsune, the oldest child, holds on his shoulders the expectations pursuant to being his parents’ first-born. He is to bear the standard of academic excellence, to enter the best schools for which he can qualify, and to receive some level of university education. To that end, as with a growing proportion of Japanese students, Shunsune studies not only at his school but also in a cram school, preparing specifically to negotiate increasingly difficult entrance exams. Shunsune appears to rely on his natural brightness, such that, even though he attends the cram classes, he studies minimally and passes the exams. Chiaki, the only girl, is just as beholden to the hierarchy of schools and their entrance exams as her older brother. Like other teenagers perhaps deriving something from American youth, she also butts heads with her mother, complaining that Mariko orders her around all the time. This, interestingly enough, is the same charge Mariko leveled at her own mother, Ito, in her own youth.
While Shunsune and Chiaki also take part in the juku, or cram schools, a practical necessity in a competitive pedagogical environment, Mariko has at least initially decided to keep her youngest, the boy Ken-chan, out of these schools. The pressures borne by children attending these schools, which have students working as many as 20 hours beyond the already rigorous and demanding public school system, give Mariko pause. Undoubtedly, much as middle-class Japanese parents want to motivate their children and provide for their eventual prosperity, many of them, like Mariko, also realize that such educational practices deprive students of some of the necessary chaos and nonlinearity they need to form their own unique personalities.
This issue sits between the people and their society, a friction growing more pronounced as juku examinations become arbitrarily harder and the Japanese economy finds its eventual peak, and recession. Despite the fact that the Meiji restoration included dissolution of the Confucian caste system, social systems require more than dicta and regulations to find true change. Relatively little time passed between the Meiji emperor was restored to power and the Japanese were in the full thrust of an industrialization, not only of their businesses, but of their citizenry. Social memory is resilient, and it seems no stretch at all to see that much of the history of strict hierarchy found natural purchase in the development of the Japanese government and people in the early 20th century. Thus, notwithstanding an allowance for personal agency and choice, the Japanese people keep an uneasy intimacy with their new pecking order.
Yet, the human psyche is not so easily, nor completely, strapped to an assembly line; tension between the ideal of this society and the personal needs of its citizens is also inevitable. Takeshi leaves early for work, stays late, and almost compulsorily joins coworkers, clients, and friends for drinking after work. Working five or six days a week, absent the household for as many as 18 hours a day, the Japanese middle-class father is for many of their family members a ghostly acquaintance, seen infrequently. Further, as Ken-chan admits when he says that he doesn’t tell his father anything (”Mommy tells him what I said.”), what time fathers do spend in the vicinity of their families isn’t spent terribly closely, figuratively. Perhaps if the Japanese placed greater importance on the role of a father beyond winning bread, this might change. As it stands, it is simply the status quo.
Similarly, Mariko, the dutiful head-of-household, finds this duty onerous and stifling at times. Even though she sometimes justifies hers as the better life, compared to Takeshi’s, given that she manages the purse and is able (rather, required) to spend time with her children on a daily basis, still Mariko wants for more, for a personhood, not merely motherhood. Few options are provided that don’t require her to tacitly break rules. She attends the “raunchy” Asakusa Sanja Matsuri, a festival held, ironically, in a neighborhood to which the Tokugawa Shogunate banished the “seedier” side of human social enterprise, e.g. brothels and the kabuki theaters; the irony falls on the fact that, just as with brothels and escapist drama, history shows us that the messiness of human caprice and self-absorption will always find ground on which to spill. Under the press of social expectations, middle-class women are, in growing numbers, finding their urges to explore, to play, to frolic, to live messily simply irresistible.
Each, it turns out, has also taken to bed another from outside the marriage. This suggests that marriage, as a mostly ordinary, practical affair, however statistically it might dominate Japanese adult relations, is just as vulnerable to unrequited needs as its institutionalization elsewhere, e.g. in the United States. Just as Desperate Housewives seeks to raise a funhouse mirror to the American middle class, so, too, does Tokyo Love Story let the Japanese middle class woman vicariously investigate her station in Japan, and, tangentially, as a woman in the world.
Shunsune, for his part, finds a similar, if lower-key, outlet for his disaffection for his place in Japanese society. Despite what amounts practically to a requirement to attend juku, Shunsune rarely studies any more than he feels absolutely necessary to pass his exams. Often, prior to entering Waseda Commercial high school, this meant studying only the night before. He aspires to be an accountant in charge of his own firm, but just the same doesn’t wish to work hard for his money. Industriousness, being the stereotypical hallmark of Japanese prosperity, does not find its epitome in Shunsune.
Chiaki’s aspirations include specific expectations of her social status, defined loosely as not growing up to be like her mother. This finds expression in her secrecy, her defiance against her mother’s nagging and nosiness, and a wish to work and not get married nor have children. In the Japan of the late 20th/early 21st centuries, as their vaunted prosperity begins to normalize, and as yet more of Western, and especially American, thought and popular culture makes its way onto the islands, youth, and, probably, especially adolescent and teenage girls, seemed to find less security in the perfunctory mantel of their mothers’ roles.
These middle-class woes aren’t foreign to Americans, in gross terms; but the Japanese, ever the world’s assimilators, whether of Chinese language or Western superfluousness, have found their own idiosyncratic problems, a fusion of their unique history and their relatively recent entry into the world economy. Perhaps they’re trying to make up for opportunities lost during periods of more stringent, and sometimes lethal, xenophobia. Perhaps they sought to distill the utility of capitalism and democracy, and recast it such that they could also maintain a practical connection to the spiritual and philosophical underpinnings they inherited. Perhaps it is some of each, combined with a kind of passive/aggressive fascination with those very things they hold at arms’ length: the emotional elements of their lives and those of their families, and all that is not Japanese. Compound this with the population density of so small but so ambitious an island nation, and there is little surprise that, as far as the Japanese have come, is as far as they have yet to go.
It’s hard to make such an assessment without sounding condescending. Rather, while fulfilling a university requirement, I’ve learned just how myopic and condescending was my mind’s Japan before entering this quarter. I knew, of course, that there had to have been more to the Samurai, to the hyperboles of productivity and dogged intellect; but the branding of Japan as a collection of such caricatures is intentional. Propaganda takes advantage of accidental attention, the only sort of attention left after getting through the waking day.
This is a commentary on the Japan of at least a decade ago, though. I’m curious to see what, if anything, has changed in those intervening years. Do you know?
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