Rethinking Japan Vol 2 by Adriana Boscaro Franco Gatti Massimo Raveri

Author:Adriana Boscaro, Franco Gatti, Massimo Raveri [Adriana Boscaro, Franco Gatti, Massimo Raveri]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780904404791
Google: vHh0DwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 1995-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

MID-LIFE AND THE MIDDLE-CLASS WOMAN

‘It’s the forty-year-olds you have to worry about, they have nothing to do but perfect their game.’ Comment by a young woman, member of a Kyoto tennis club, 1984.

In 1940 the average age at death of Japanese women was 49.6 years, just seven years after their average youngest child entered school for the first time (Foreign Press Centre of Japan 1977), whereas in 1983 life expectancy for Japanese women was 79.78 years (Keizai Koho Centre 1984). It is not surprising, therefore, that there was little concern about menopause until relatively recently, and the term that is used to express this concept was created at the turn of the century under the influence of German medicine. It is probably fair to say that an interest in the symptomatology of menopause is largely a post-war phenomenon, although one or two physicians, whose work is clearly indebted to German writing on the topic, took up the subject in the pre-war years (Yamada 1927; Furuya 1940).

Not only are virtually all Japanese women living through what has now come to be described as middle age, but the present generation of urban 45 to 55-year-olds are the first post-war group of women to reach this stage in the life-cycle who will for the most part live out their days in a two-person household with their husband. Whereas the average household size in the 1940s was 4.98, in 1980 it had changed to 3.33 (Fukutake 1982:124). This particular group of women, who were raised before and during the war, were usually steeped in traditional values as children, but they have taken part in the rapid transformation of their society into one in which there is a constant debate about individualism, and where urbanization has changed from its earlier ‘village-like’ model (Dore 1958), into one in which there are more metropolis-like centres characteristic of Gesellschaft (Fukutake 1982).

Today’s housewives are the first generation of women who have no obvious role once they become middle-aged: their extended family tasks as conveyer of a cultural traditon, minder of children, extra farm-hand or store-minder no longer exist. As younger women their community involvement was in all probability limited to PTA work. Imamura’s research shows that women at this mid-life stage see themselves as ‘shut in’ and experience problems of isolation: ‘They feel their usefulness to society is gone, through no fault of their own, and they blame society’ (Imamura 1987:87). Housewives expect under these circumstances to have physical problems:

My family doctor told me to take up another hobby when I went to see him complaining about headaches. He said it was my menopause and that I needed to do something with my time. I’m tired of flower arranging and tea ceremony – that’s for young girls who have to catch a husband. I tried doing water colours for a time.… My life has no purpose. My sole job is to look after my husband but he’s never at home and anyway we just avoid talking to each other.

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