Abstract
Sechiyama Kaku, “a man concerned about gender equality” as the author calls himself, originally published his book in Japanese in 1996. He focuses on understandings and practices of patriarchy in Japan, Korea, China, and Taiwan with a firm command of all these Asian languages. Patriarchy is not about masculinity but about a particular gender division of household labor into a productive (male) and reproductive (female) part of the population. The book’s key concern is to understand changes in gender and social inequalities with a focus on married women. “Patriarchy” then serves as the theoretical framework to explain historical and regional variations in the institution of the non-breadwinning housewife mother. He divides the book into three parts, first are two general chapters, the second part consist of two detailed chapters on Japan as a baseline for comparison with the third part devoted to the other East Asian countries (about 200 pages).
Patriarchy (and its Japanese rendition kafuchōsei) is the term of reference Sechiyama derives from a synthesis of Weberian thought and Japanese feminist thinkers like Ueno Chizuko. In his introductory chapter, he defines it as “relationships and norms characterized by a gender-based allocation of set roles and a distribution of power that places men in a superior position” (p. 19). According to the author, societies with the least patriarchy would be those societies with the smallest gender gaps in lifetime employment patterns and slightest income differentials such as the United States and Scandinavian countries. Superiority in a structural sense is that male income provides them with more social power and prestige to the extent that, for example, male/female sex ratios at birth in some East Asian societies show a strong preference for male children. In the second chapter, he traces the emergence of the social institution of the “modern housewife” to the industrial revolution that enabled a gendered division of labor in nuclear families, which he then discusses via non-Asian examples of capitalist and socialist societies.
Two chapters on Japan treat the housewife in historical and contemporary dimensions. The well-known Japanese slogan of “the good wife and wise mother” propagating the “separate but equal spheres” ideal also caught on in China and Korea. In all these Confucian-inspired East Asian societies, it thus meant a social elevation of women with emphasis on their reproductive roles in the service of the state. In today’s Japan, urban lifestyles are especially conducive to the prevalence of full-time housewives, which are more likely to exist, the higher the husband’s income level. International studies show the time spent on housework done by Japanese women to be fairly extensive, as it is considered “service of love” not labor. As sociologists have done before him, he criticizes Japanese women throughout his book for excessive emotional attachment to their children and rather weak conjugal affection. In short, motherhood takes a supreme social importance—adult men, the patriarchs, provide the paycheck their wives then spend. What sounds like a stereotype, he documents through various surveys.
Nevertheless, it is in Korea (South and North) where motherhood is most pronounced as is a household division of labor by gender. While these general findings will not come as much of a surprise, the chapters contain interesting insights. Economic development and social structure such as how pronounced Korean age gradations help built large hierarchical economic and political organizations as well as how the spread of traditional elite yangban values and their high esteem for intellectuals may lead to exceptionally intensive and long levels of schooling in both Koreas and high university attendance rates in the South. North Korea, notoriously difficult to study through statistics, he explores through gender ideology. The key variable becomes the maintenance of power of the Kim family. The personal leadership cult with its emphasis on the bloodline of successors caused shifts in visions of gender from socialist working females to a family-centered femininity. Despite all economic mismanagement, the government succeeded with its family-state ideology in uniting the country under the leadership of the Kim family and destroying traditional Korean clan kinship groups, which were revived in the south of the country.
China (Taiwan and Mainland) are discussed in separate chapters. Taiwan is linked to social and cultural pattern of Southern China but what is most illuminating is to contrast it to South Korea—a mid-sized country, which has also seen rapid economic growth in the last decades. Taiwan had seen the influx of defeated mainlanders after the war but was spared a civil war like Korea, so income disparities were less pronounced. Its market-centered economy consists of many small and mid-sized businesses in the computer sector. While the overall female labor force participation rate is comparable to Korea, there are different groups of women working: in Taiwan, young mothers are more likely to work, while older women do so more frequently in Korea. High levels of education increase the propensity for female careers in Taiwan, whereas such women are more likely to become housewives in Korea. There are also some visible gender contrasts between North Korean and Chinese forms of communism. China in its socialist high days went so far as to clothe its population as unisex workers, North Korea even then insisted on a sharply sex-differentiated look. As China went through a transition to link it more to the world economy, state enterprises often fired female workers before restructuring men. With rising urban affluence, housewives are now also more common in China.
Chapter 9 discusses the changes in East Asia in the last twenty years. The precipitous decline in the birthrate and a steep rise in divorce had not been imaginable to the extent it occurred across the board but especially in Taiwan and South Korea. Most East Asian countries are now predicted to turn from aging to aged societies in the next decade but significant differences are visible in the attitude and practices toward work in old age. In Japan, which has the longest longevity, the highest percentage of older people want to work (and not only because they need the income) whereas in the Chinese cultural regions it reflects poorly on the descendants if parents have to work in old age. By contrast, diverging attitudes to motherhood and work lead to different female employment patterns during the childbearing years: mothers in Taiwan are the most likely to continue working while relying on the extended family for childcare, Japanese mothers will more often withdraw from the labor market at marriage and after childbirth, while Korean mothers do not only resign but may stay full-time housewives until their children have successfully entered college. According to the author, social norms, what one may call “culture,” are a key explanatory variable for different gendered work arrangements within families, as these are more pronounced among Koreans, whether they live in South Korea, in North Korea, or in the Korean minority in China. Contrary to what would be expected of a country with socialist ideological roots, North Korea is not emphasizing female wage work contributions but motherhood to raise many children—to serve in the army or to marry soldiers.
Overall, the book should be most interesting to scholars and students interested in comparative gender and labor with a focus on East Asian societies. It is a comprehensive Asian survey that so far no individual scholar has attempted using a single framework at that level of informational depth. What should be especially fascinating for an English-language readership are some of the core debates of Japanese feminism that he engages with at the end of the book. By transferring the “significant other” in the debate from distant “egalitarian” Scandinavia or “progressive” United States to Japan’s neighbors, he shows how Japanese sociologist are increasingly accepting a new more integrated regional social and intellectual space. No longer united by concepts of Confucianism, if they ever were, the common problems of Capitalism, even in societies invoking communist or communitarian ideals, are affecting them all leading to different choices depending on local family structures and traditional norms. So one may argue that the key intent of the book is to overcome a culture of capitalism that leads to gender inequalities within middle-class families without exacerbating the social and regional division of labor in East Asia by which the “liberation” of better situated wives is sometimes achieved through the outsourcing of childcare and housework not only to institutions but also to either collateral family members or female migrant labor. He has no confidence in capitalist solutions to capitalist problems and so in a long Japanese feminist tradition is calling for an interventionist state to “right” the “wrongs” by changing economic incentives and social norms of collective behavior in Japan and by implication elsewhere.