Japanese family, 1950s.
I hear that argument a lot. The basic gist is that if we copied the Japanese in regard to gun control, we'd achieve the same results.
Which leads to this, which I've touched on before briefly. But I'm touching on it again here, as I happened to look at this for another reason. But that made it obvious, really.
You can't look at a country's laws and their results without considering a country's culture.
Japan does indeed have a low murder rate in general. It has a high suicide rate, however, which is another topic.
Setting aside self murder, which we really ought not to do as it figures into any realistic analysis of violence and Japan, what else might contribute to that low Japanese murder rate?*
Japan's out of wedlock birth rate is darned near 0.
98% of the Japanese births are legitimate, a word we hardly even use anymore in a society where 30% to 60% are not.
Why does that matter?
Well it matters as Japanese children are raised inside of highly stable family environments.
Indeed, they are stable. There are 1.68 divorces per 1,000 people in Japan. The rate in the United States is double that, at 3.2 per 1000. And in the US that doesn't include the number of couples that would have been regarded as having common law marriages in earlier eras. I.e, our divorce rate doesn't include couples that aren't married but which cohabitate and then "split up" even though such couples often have children.
Indeed, the contrast between Japan and the United States here is monumental. The Japanese do not have examples of men living with women in which there are children of prior relationships. They don't even have very many examples of "blended families" in which there's been more than one marriage and children by more than one marriage in a household. Where that occurs it tends to be because a prior spouse died.
To add to that, and remember this is a thread on what's going on in Japan, not an argument that we adopt everything Japanese, being a single parent in Japan really sucks.
The Japanese don't approve of children being born out of wedlock and they don't approve of the women who find themselves in that situation. They don't even really approve of the children.
Given all of this, in spite of statistics you may see on other things, the Japanese get married and stay married, and have their kids when they're married. In the rare instances of the opposite, and they are extremely rare, the mother and child are reduced to poverty.
Japanese marriage, moreover, is really traditional in terms of structure. This has evolved enormously over the years as, ironically in this context, the Japanese moved towards "Western" marriage in the 20th Century. After World War Two, Western marriage really took off greatly in Japan. This has evolved to such an extent that the majority of Japanese today are married in Christian ceremonies even though less than 1% of the Japanese are Christians. This has actually resulted in a phrase in Japan of being "born Shinto, married Christian, and dying Buddhist". That's a joke, of course, but like a lot of jokes, it has a big element of truth to it.
Part of that evolution towards Westernism in marriage has been a real cementing of the traditional Western marriage in Japan in terms of its structure. Japanese culture places a strong emphasis on the domestic role of women and women's role in that regard is seen as central. Women in Japanese society are the primary managers of home economics in the true economic and even Greek original meaning of the word in a fashion that's similar to that of some Mediterranean cultures traditionally.
Japanese women do work outside of the home, but after they are married that number declines enormously. Most married women in Japan do not work. Most women who work in Japan are intentionally doing so only until they are married. Japanese women earn around 40% less than men. The workforce is strongly, by culture, divided into male and female roles, recent examples to the contrary notwithstanding. You may see a cute video of a Japanese female tank commander, but there aren't very darned many of them.
Prior to the Meji period, Japanese marriages were arranged and economic. During the Meji period this was attacked at a high level in order to try to Westernize the culture, but certain aspects of the old practices remained for a very long time. Included in that was that Japan had a strict expectation that married women were to be chaste but had no such expectation of the same for men. This lead to the dual explotivie Japanese occupations of the geisha and the prostitute, which are not at all the same. Professional prostitution was widespread and highly tolerated.** As a female profession it was common up until after World War Two when its ongoing nature was frowned upon and seen, moreover, as non Western.
While that's gone, it has left remnants in that men are strongly dominant in society outside of the household, where the opposite is absolutely the case. Women rule in the household. Indeed, marriages between the Japanese and non Japanese are very rare and rarely successful in part for this reason.*** Japanese women have really strong expectations of husbands and expect to absolutely rule in the home. Western men who have come to accept the "partnership" concept are accordingly in for a rough surprise with a Japanese spouse. Conversely, Western men just don't live up to the expectations of Japanese women.
Be that as it may, as noted, men are strongly dominant outside of the home where women's are regarded as a temporary presence and are treated that way. Beyond that, while the Japanese as a culture are really admirably chaste, the old history of concubinage and male dominance in the society has caused Japan to have a really massive post World War Two pornography industry which is openly tolerated in ways it never would be in Western society and which goes beyond exploitation of women. Indeed, not only has this found expression in all the conventional mediums in Japan, but in others that are somewhat rarer in the West. For example, while the "superhero" genre of cartoon in the United States is wildly male and juvenile, including in its portrayal of women, a popular cartoon in Japan, at least at one time, was "Rape Man", who committed that act upon women with an attitude. The popular Japanese genres of cartoons today are moreover wildly pornorgraphic in thier depictiosn of women and even in the milder forms common in the West they feature grossly exaggerated female forms for obvious reasons. Therefore, an aspects of Japanese society is a male attitude that's condescending and explotivie to women outside of marriage in an abstract way. They don't act that way in their personal moral conduct, but they're obviously focused on it otherwise. While pornography and pornification of Western culture has become vast, it isn't at the really creepy Japanese level (creepiness being relative in this example).
Along with this, the Japanese are what some like to call homogeneous and others like to call xenophobic or even racist in the extreme. The Japanese regard their own culture as superior to others and they don't want it mixing with yours.**** They want Japan for the Japanese and they don't want you marrying into a Japanese family. The one American male I know who did that found that his Japanese in laws flat out disowned their daughter as a result of such a marriage. The Japanese are, therefore, related to each other by a blood in a way that Americans are not and can't even conceive of. Outside of Hokkaido in the far north, and Okinawa to the south, the Japanese are effectively cousins in a way that very few cultures in the world are.*****
So there you have the Japanese example, for good and ill.
And note we stated for good and, not or, ill. There are parts of this, including the racist and xenophobic elements that would cause most of us to rightly recoil.
Notably in all of it, the Japanese have copied a major Western, Christian, cultural feature, monogamous life time marriages with a Christian view of sexual morality in marriage and a blisteringly traditional view of people's roles in that marriage. That singular cultural adoption probably explains more than anything else why Japan has a low, low homicide rate. All of Japan's children, almost, are raised by their mother and father. Almost every Japanse marriage survives until the death of one member of the couple. Every husband is expected to work outside of the home. Every wife is expected to rule the household and have that be her primary focus. Everyone marries somebody who is from the same culture and has the same expectations.
Not all of this picture is pretty, in our view from the West. Japanese men are dominant in the workplace in way that they aren't here and haven't been for decades. Japanese women rule in the household in a way that most Westerners and Northern Europeans would find shocking. The Japanese are really admirably chaste in conduct but have an extremely objectified view of women outside of the home, even if it is very rarely acted upon.
All of which may be besides the point, as to us, or maybe, in part, not.
And the part that might not be is the core of the family example. The Japanese have tight families and, frankly, are sort of a tight family. There's a lesson in that, and it doesn't have anything to do with laws or regulations. We aren't going to copy all of that example by any means, but the part of it that they copied from us is perhaps something that we ought to ponder to some degree.
_________________________________________________________________________________
*Indeed, this seems to completely escape those who cite Japan as an example of low rates of violent death. Japan has a lot of violent death, its just that it tends to be self directed, which isn't any better of societal result than a lot of murders.
**The expectation that rules didn't apply to men was such that the Imperial Japanese Army enslaved large numbers of women as "comfort women" to act as involuntary prostitutes for Japanese soldiers during World War Two. Only very recently has there been acknowledgement of wrongdoing by Japan for this act.
Notably here, "comfort women" were not Japanese. To the extent they were Japanese subjects, they tended to be Koreans, whom the Japanese looked down upon as a lesser race. They weren't limited to Koreans, however, and included women forced into prostitution in other areas that the Japanese conquered during World War Two.
***The only era in which significant numbers of Japanese women married non Japanese men was after World War Two when it was briefly common. There's a cultural aspect of this that has gone unexplained but at least one historian has theorized that this occurred as a form of Japanese female protest at men having let the culture down by losing the war.
****Japan's culture is, moreover, unique. Americans tend to view all Asian cultures as more or less the same, but Japan's is distinctly different and has been isolated for the most part for over a millenia. There have been cultural insertions in the form of religious and philosophical thought, such as in the form of Buddhism and Confucianism early on, which managed to come in from China, along with Chinese written characters (but not language), and more recently many Western cultural elements, but overall Japan retains a unique Japanese character.
*****There are a few others, of course. In European terms, the Finns and the Icelanders also are in this category, and the Icelanders, which are a very small nationality, even more so.
No comments:
Post a Comment