Introduction to special section: ‘Gender, family and work in the 21^st century: Challenges and transformations’

Introduction

It is with great pleasure that I introduce three of the papers which developed from a panel I organized at the 2019 Society for East Asian Anthropology conference, held at Waseda University’s Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies. The 2019 presentations were among several in the double panel, ‘Gender, Family and Work in the 21^st Century: Challenges and Transformations,‘ where scholars from Japan, Hong Kong, Europe and North America came together to share their latest research on changes in Japan’s gender regime in the current era. Two of the papers, by Vincent Mirza and Glenda Roberts and Hiroko Costantini, are based on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, while the third is Allison Alexy’s annotated translation of the prominent sociologist Itō Kimio’s theoretical work on masculinity in crisis. His work explains a social phenomenon that surely informs the state of gender relations we see today in Japan, as well as globally.

We are in an era of transformations in society’s structures – from changes in industry which necessitate technological expertise rather than physical abilities, or in the case of services, technological expertise plus emotional labor, or the skill to facilitate smooth personal relations and provide care. R.W. Connell (1993) was a pioneer in theorizing this transformation and noting its impact on masculinity in the West. Itō’s observations stem from Japanese society in the post-War era, which has gone from an industrial-based, highly rigidly gendered social structure to a more service-based and high-tech society. Moreover, Japan has suffered a long-lasting economic recession, which led to employment policies that shook the stability of the salaryman status and introduced neoliberal market reforms. The opening up to the world economy may also have been a factor. Salaries have flat-lined over these years. At the same time, as these structural changes were taking place, ideational changes were also being introduced and gradually embraced in government policy circles. Notions of gender equality and women’s rights to participate equally in employment were codified into law. And women began to take advantage of these opportunities. All this has challenged the previous gender regime, leading to the “crisis” in masculinity that Itō observes. In his analysis, Japan’s society has yet to fully acknowledge this problem, which is apparently at the root of the slow progress he observes toward gender equality.

We can see clearly from Mirza’s paper how these transformations in employment have affected young unmarried women’s career and family choices. Caught between a neoliberal ideology of self-realization and autonomy and the realities of a labor regime that still valorizes a breadwinner mode of work, young women strategize to find meaning in both spheres of family and work. Through Mirza’s closely detailed analysis we can understand women cautiously navigating through the still very much extant moral discourses of women as procreators, wives and mothers on the one hand, and newer discourses that emphasize autonomy, as well as contributions to society which include workforce participation, on the other.

The desires for autonomy and freedom from constraint, the desires for work that is meaningful – these themes are also very much present in the narratives of the married urban professionals that Roberts and Costantini interviewed in their comparative research on the work, family and care nexus in Paris and Tokyo. When we began the comparison, we had no clear idea of what the outcome would be. After all, France had a significant head start on implementing government policies for family support that encouraged women to not see employment and family as either/or propositions. Yet through our research, we came to understand that while there are many points where the two societies diverge, there was a strong commonality in the societal notion that women are the primary caregivers. Women in both societies challenged ingrained ideologies in seeking to attain well-being for themselves and their families. And in both societies, some men appeared puzzled as to why their wives ended up with a greater share of the care burden, all the while admitting that they themselves felt compelled to concentrate on their work. As Itō suggested in his paper, men “do not properly realize that they actually depend on surrounding support to lead their lives.” Women, however, are most certainly aware of this, and their awareness leads them to very different choices from those of their mothers’ generation.

We held the SEAA conference in August of 2019, just a few short months before the COVID pandemic upended our lives. As the research presented in these papers is based on pre-pandemic conditions, it does not address the transformations in workplace and family that occurred during this time period, nor how people’s long-term thinking about work and family may have been affected by lockdowns, remote work, online education, inabilities to maintain close contact with family and friends, and the loss of loved ones and acquaintances. This remains for future research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).