The Grand Narrative

( Source: publish9(아홉시) )

Now it’s bad enough just being a woman in South Korea, let alone one living with her husband and his parents, so when one reads that a recent study reveals that their Japanese counterparts are more than three times more likely to have a heart attack than those just living with their husbands – in a country famous for very low rates of heart problems overall – then it seems reasonable to suppose that the Japanese study has great relevance to Korea, and that a knowledge of Korean family life can reliably inform our interpretation of it.

Or does it? This is the question that has occupied me for past nine days, and for readers by definition interested in Korean social issues, it is much less abstract and pedantic than perhaps it first sounds. Let me explain.

As a Korea Studies geek and a blogger, normally I wouldn’t think twice about finding any similarities between (almost) any aspect of Japanese and Korean society, the wealth of English-language material on the former (albeit mostly on pornography and pop-culture) and the relative dearth of it on the latter compelling me to stress them simply for the sake of having something, nay anything to work with. But seriously though, while it would be professional suicide for Korean academics to publicly acknowledge this, the huge Japanese role in the development of literally both the modern Korean state and the economy has naturally left enduring legacies, and as a big proponent of the Marxian concept of base and superstructure – basically that much of a society’s oft-claimed timeless and enduring culture (one aspect of the superstructure) changes pretty damn quickly once economic structures or modes of production change (the base) – too, then it stands to reason that with still broadly similar economic structures centered around horizontal and vertically-integrated conglomerates known as keiretsu and chaebol respectively, then much about daily life in both societies – workplace culture, working hours, drinking-culture, male-breadwinner based welfare systems, gender divisions between work and the home, and so on – is also very similar, and it wouldn’t take much reading of just this blog alone to find that this indeed the case.

(Don’t be put off by the reference to Marxism: it’s just a long-winded way of saying that I think economic factors trump culture more often than most people realize, although if you are interested in the whole sociological “convergence” versus “divergence” debate that that echoes, basically about whether capitalism will inherently make, say, Korean society more and more resemble other Western societies over time, see here and here for more on the theory and a practical example of that)

With that background then, there is always a danger of taking similarities as a given. And particularly in this case, where the authors of the study point out that:

One of the overwhelming things that stands out is that it doesn’t matter for Japanese men what the living arrangements are…they’re immune from stresses in the home.

And from which Samhita of the Feministing blog argues:

The article feigns surprise in finding out that men don’t have these same health problems, but fails to make the obvious conclusion that women get inordinate amounts of pressure from their in-laws to live up to certain expectations that increases stress in their lives. Many women are choosing not to get married or have as many children in Japan, but the culture of expectation around how women should act in the home seems resilient. I wonder if a similar correlation can be made with women that are living with their in-laws in the states?

Had I read the original article myself first, and not found it via Feministing instead, then I probably would have come to much the same conclusion myself, as in Korea at least an eldest son traditionally remained at home with his parents after marriage, and it is true that his new wife would be not only be expected to rapidly produce a son but also immediately assume most of the burden of housework and increasingly their own care, all under the very watchful eye of her new mother-in-law (albeit not literally for the first activity, but certainly with very minimal concepts of the couple’s privacy). Naturally, the ensuing potential for domestic tension and conflict make such living arrangements a staple of Korean dramas for decades, one such playing at the moment being You are My Destiny (너는 내 운명, but not to be confused with the 2005 movie of almost the exact same name) starring the decidedly unhappy-looking bride Yoona (윤아) below (source) of the teenage girl-group Girls’ Generation (소녀시대). Having said that, just like the traditional houses with single rooms built around a communal courtyard that many of these dramas are set in – despite being virtually absent in Korea in real life today – one can’t help but assume that women’s disdain for eldest sons on this basis and the virtually complete nuclearization of the Korean family means that these living arrangements are increasingly rare in practice, which begs the question of why dramatizations of them remain so popular even today.

I will discuss the (related) heavily formulaic nature of Korean dramas in another post in January, but, writing a week ago, I thought that based on my own experience (of colleagues and friends’ marriages that is!), that the primary reason lay in the fact that married couples living separately to their parents has not withered a degree of parents’ and parents-in-laws’ involvement and intrusiveness in many of their marriages that most Westerners would still find quite shocking, and hence the exaggerated situations of dramas still definitely strike a chord amongst married couples and those of marriageable age. If anything, the combination of Korea’s small size and improvement in Korea’s transport and communications infrastructure in recent decades has made this even more possible and likely over time (note that even as recently as the 1970s that a move to Seoul might entail not seeing parents and siblings in the countryside for many years, let alone friends who moved elsewhere in the country; see this book), and which is one strong counter-argument to the convergence hypothesis that I mentioned earlier.

Being the Korea Studies Guru™ that I am, normally I would not have deigned to go on and find some hard statistics to confirm or deny those trends, as regardless of their precise numbers it seems reasonable to suppose that living in such living arrangements would be very stressful for married women. But I’d completely forgotten my original reaction to the post at Feministing: finding the site in general to be rather dogmatic and intellectually lazy, its authors often providing no more evidence of, say, an advertisement’s alleged sexism than the mere fact that they have deemed it worthy of mention there, then my first plan for this post was to gloat join other commenters that reacted to Samhita relying on them to do all her thinking for her by overwhelmingly questioning the assumptions she made and providing some evidence from biological anthropology to challenge them. But then while typing it, I was forced to admit that I would have come to much the same conclusion from the study that she did like I said, and so her receiving the critiques that she did – and I could have – prompted the last nine day’s deep reflection on my own preconceptions and academic baggage.

Hence I did do my homework for a change, and now with statistics in hand, I can say that those points of mine are still generally true, but while Korea and Japan are indeed demographically more similar to each other than, say, the US, there are important differences between the two that justify devoting a new Part Two entirely to them (and the biological anthropology angle will make up Part Three).  Which begs the question of why, despite those differences, did I read almost exactly the same about Japanese dramas and their relationship to extended families in my copy of Yoshio Sugimoto’s brilliant An Introduction to Japanese Society (2003),  albeit much more eloquently and succinctly than myself (he does get paid for it after all). While I’m not going to claim that great minds think alike or anything like that (I think you can find much the same in the Korea, Taiwan, China and Japan Lonely Planet travel guides too), clearly there was some commonality that I’m missing…which just so happened to be *cough* the whole religious basis to those patriarchal family-systems.

In my defense, while I’m normally loath to admit my weaknesses, it’s true that as an atheist then East Asian philosophies and religions and are naturally not my strong point, and when one constantly reads in the literature that Korea is the most Confucian country in the world, and “more Confucian than China”, then one can be forgiven for sometimes forgetting that Neo-Confucianism (alas, not “Confucianism” really) actually still has strong influences on other East Asian societies too. Hence for the for the past ten years or so I’ve actually been under the distinct impression that Japan largely lacked the Neo-Confuciansim that such extended family structures were based on, and this turns out to be quite incorrect, as revealed to me personally by Robert Smith in his chapter “The Japanese (Confucian) Family: The Traditon from the Bottom Up” in Tu Wei-Ming (ed.), Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity: Moral Education and Economic Culture in Japan and the Four Mini-Dragons (1996), and who aims to show:

…that it is impossible to advance a plausible argument that the Japanese family today is Confucian in the strict sense. It is equally impossible to argue that it has been completely purged of the effects of attempts by the authorities to structure it in terms of selected Confucian principles. (p. 157)

Some selected excerpts to make up the remainder of this post then, first on why I had that impression that I did. Please forgive me if there’s rather a lot of them, and apologies to any Japan-based readers readers who started saying “Well…Duh!” to the computer screen a while ago, but hopefully they’ll still be helpful for any readers like myself that aren’t/weren’t as familiar with Japanese social history as they thought they were:

I have asked a hopelessly unrepresentative sample of Japanese colleagues, acquaintances, and friends whether contemporary Japanese think of themselves or their families as Confucian. The spontaneous answer is a resounding no, often supplemented by a dismissive reference to the conservative, reactionary, or feudal (a favorite term of opprobrium in Japan) character of its teachings. The implication is that one’s grandfather or great-grandfather may have been taught Confucian ethics and might even have internalized them, but in 1945 the Japanese consigned Confucianism to the dustbin of history. (p. 157)

…

There is one obvious difference between the role of Confucianism in China and Japan, where is has always been only one of many competing ideologies, philosophies and ethical systems, and never, as in China, “a way of life encompassing the ultimate standards for Chinese social and political order.” (158)

And the Japanese tend to underplay the Confucian influence in their own society because:

Japanese Confucianism started as a cultural ideology serving the needs of the Tokugawa Bakufu (or Shōgun, or Army Commander)….Although for a time Confucianism had been discredited along with everything else associated with the shogunate, it gained currency again with the consolidation of conservative power in the late 1920s and 1930s. (p. 158-9).

( “Samurai and Coffee” by Delphines; Source above: unknown )

The latter of which was the decade when:

…Japanese society was being reduced at the hands of fanatics to its most stifling condition of oppressive irrationalism [and] in which the ideals of the Japanese educational world were closer to those of its Togukawa past than at any time since 1870….Is it any wonder that today’s Japanese, if they have thought about it at all, are likely to view Confucianism in a negative light? (p. 159, my emphasis)

Now, why the influence of Confucianism on the Japanese and particularly the Japanese family remains pervasive nevertheless:

Were the Japanese ever Confucianists in, say, the same sense as the Koreans? No one claims that they were. Nevertheless, there are many ways in which the Confucianist concern with hierarchical relationships and its emphasis on harmonious families as the basis for harmonious states seems to have influenced Japanese society. Be that as it may, it is just as likely that the Japanese selectively utilized Confucian teachings to reaffirm and strengthen characteristics of their society, which was deeply rooted in the pre-Confucian past.

Presumably one of the domains in which Confucianism did not simply reinforce and justify older social practices is the treatment of women, for it is widely argued that they enjoyed a far more favorable position in Japanese society before the introducton of Confucianism. It may well be, however, that the decline of women’s status in Japan actually began with the popularization of Buddhism. (pp. 160-1, my emphasis)

Finally:

The question is not whether Confucianism is a religion. It is rather: Does Confucianism, broadly defined (or, perhaps better, undefined) have anything at all to do with religion in Japan?

…

The “rules” by which religions are tacitly expected to operate in Japan are, more than anything else, Confucian. As so often in Japan, Confucianism plays the role of a moral and ethical substratum that, its preconditions being met, allows a harmless surface diversity. Indeed, one could argue, as many have, that these principles go back beyond Confucian influences on early Japan to the values inherent in ancient clan structures and an agricultural society with their demands for loyalty and cooperative effort; Confucianism did not so much crate as articulate the values by which Japanese society works.

…

Virtually all religions that have endured in Japan have adapted external forms agreeable to the patriarchal family model and have made their peace with the state. (p. 171, my emphasis)

At this point, a more thorough blogger than myself would be quite a rare find probably move onto those passages where Smith discusses that latent Confucianism within Japanese families (and the education system) more specifically, but I think that readers can reasonably extrapolate those from the big picture that I have provided rather than requiring me to provide those too. Ergo, Japanese families are indeed (Neo) Confucianist, and I’m especially glad that demonstrating that gave me a legitimate opportunity to get stuck into my recently purchased copy of Tu-Wei Ming’s book. But while 2500 words is a rather short post (for me), given the long time this one took and that Confucianism, Demographics and Biological Anthropology are much more discreet subjects than what I normally blog about, I’ll wisely end this post here!

( Yay, I finally finished it! )

Update, 1 January

Although they’re not really related to the topic at hand, the questions of a) to what extent the US could be described as a “Christian country” and b) whether Confucianism is a religion or not came up in the comments, and are interesting in their own right(s). And while  I’m usually reluctant (really) to type out literally entire pages from books here, Robert Smith does answer both much better than I could:

To what extent has the Japanese family ever been Confucian, and to what extent is it today? Would that the question could be so easily answered. Even the most casual survey of the vicissitudes of Confucianism in Japan suggests the need for caution. Indeed, I was tempted to indicate just how cautious one must be by titling this essay either “Confucianism Is in the Eye of the Beholder” or “Confucian Is as Confucian Does.” That is to say, how Confucianism is described, the praises sung of it, the importance assigned to it, and the terms by which it is denounced are all very strongly colored by the historical period in which the assessments are made, the position in the social hierarchy of the person expressing the opinion, and – not least in recent times – the age and gender of those who views they are.

I hasten to add that in these respects Confucianism seems to me rather like all other philosophical, ethical, and/or religious systems of whatever time or place. An example, drawn from personal experience with one such system, involves one of the myriad subcategories of the southern United States brand of Protestantism. Fifty years ago its construction of Christianity was a finely crafted one that had no place for Catholics, who were thought of as idolaters, or for Quakers, of whom few had ever heard. Depending on the particular church and the position of its minister on the issue, it was not always entirely clear that Methodists and Presbyterians were Christian either.

Be that as it may, did my relatives and neighbors think that they themselves led Christian lives? Of course they did, or tried to. Were it to be pointed out that someone had committed some “unchristian” act, the usual explanations were that all are conceived and born in sin, that it all happened before the miscreant had found God – or perhaps it was because Christ had found him. It is all now too far in the past for me to recall the full inventory of shifting grounds on which our neighbors and relatives took their unshakable Christian stands. Would they have agreed – and do they still – that the United States is a “Christian country”? Of course. They have never doubted it….Yet I wager that in the course of conducting interviews on the subject, you could collect scores of definitions – some of them flatly contradictory – of just what the term “a Christian country” might mean. There is bound to be some overlap, to be sure, but no consensus. Are we then to conclude that the United States is not a Christian country? I think not. But I submit that consensus on the religious and ethical dimensions of Christianity is not much more likely to be achieved than agreement as to precisely what Confucianism might be and whether the Japanese family is a Confucian institution.

It is possible, of course, that I am looking in the wrong place for an authoritative definition, and would be better advised to seek it among the philosophers, the theologians, the ethicists, or the intellectual historians. My reading of the relevant sources, however, strongly suggests that consensus at the tip is even more difficult to achieve than at the bottom. In any event, my anthropological training predisposes me to start at ground level. (pp. 155-157)

I’m not so sure about that last point myself…