THE NOSTALGIC APPEAL OF SAZAE-SAN

 

       I often keep my daughter company watching cartoons on TV. Sunday night is time for Sazae-sun. This series features the doings of housewife Sazae, her husband Masuo, and their son Tara-chan, who live together with Sazae’s parents, the Isonos, and her younger brother and sister. Another favorite of ours is Chibi Muruko-chan (Little Maruko) about a girl and her family-mother, father, sister, and paternal grandparents.
        Sakura Momoko, the creator of Little Maruko, belongs to almost the same generation as I do. Since Maruko was modeled on Ms. Sakura’s own childhood, the school scenes and the atmosphere of the town evoke a great deal of nostalgia in me. They capture a sense of the sixties and early seventies down to the minutest detail.
        Sazae-san, whose devotees have put out volumes of research, has been running for so many years that its sense of a particular era has become a little blurred. Things that appear in the Isono household sometimes seem strangely up-to-date when one considers that the original comic strip was first published in 1946. On the whole, though, Sazae-san retains a strong flavor of the fifties and sixties.
        There are many fans of both Same-sun and Chibi Marikochan among the college students I teach. When I ask them why they enjoy these shows, they tell me, “I miss families like that they seem like real families.” Sometimes they add, “You don’t often see that kind of family these days.’’ This reply strikes me as puzzling: why do my students feel nostalgia for an era before they were born? What do families from the sixties mean to them?
One point we should note about both cartoon series is that the families they portray consist of three generations living together. We will look into the reasons for this in this chapter. Before exploring these questions, let us briefly review our findings so far. In chapters 1 and 2 we looked at the origins of the housewife prior to World War 11, and traced the trend which led to a majority of women taking on this role full-time during the era of high economic growth-a trend which, as you will recall, was eventually reversed. In chapter 3 we saw that the postwar decline in the birthrate took place in two stages, with an intervening period of stability from about 1955 to 1975. Thus, in areas related to both women and children, we traced the emergence after the war of a stable structure which was maintained for an extended period of time before eventually breaking down again. This is the
structure I have named “the Postwar Family System.” Both Sazae san and Chibi Maruko-chan are set in exactly the era when this structure was firmly in place and the postwar family boasted an unshakable stability.

FROM THE IE TO THE NUCLEAR FAMILY 

       We will examine the Postwar Family System in detail in chapter 5. But first, let us pause to consider a more familiar explanation of postwar changes in the family. We are accustomed to hearing these changes described primarily in terms of liberation from the traditional ie system together with a movement toward the nuclear family. Where do these two issues fit into the picture we have seen so far? Can the postwar history of the family be viewed as a process of transition from the ie to the nuclear family? A brief outline of the ie system may be in order here. Though often translated as “family,” the ie is closer in concept to the English term “household,” and closer still to the German Haus or the French maison. The basic unit of traditional social organization in Japan, the ie is a corporate body which owns household property, carries on a family business, and emphasizes the continuity of the family line and family business over generations. This institution became established among the aristocratic and warrior classes a thousand years ago, and among the peasant class around the eighteenth century. Unlike the Chinese jia, the ie system is not purely patrilineal, since the headship may be inherited by an adopted son or son-in-law-a feature which is considered characteristic of the Japanese ie.
    In the terminology of family systems, the ie consists of a stem family, that is, only one of the children continues to live with the parents after marriage. In this respect it differs from the nuclear family system, seen for example in Britain and the United States, where all of the children set up independent households, and also from the joint family system typically seen in China and India, where all male children continue to live with their parents after marriage. In the ie, the one child who remains in the parental home (preferably a son, if there is one) succeeds to the headship of the corporate body. The typical ie system is today seen chiefly among farmers and practitioners of traditional arts and crafts. At the opposite pole of the postwar history of the family is the nuclear family. This was originally a technical term used by social anthropologists and family sociologists. In its technical sense, the nuclear family is an indivisible unit which, like an atom, can either exist alone or combine with other such units to form various types of family. As defined by the anthropologist George P. Murdock in 1949, it denotes a family unit that consists of a father, mother, and unmarried children. In popular usage, however, the term is often loosely applied to what specialists would call a “nuclear family household,” that is, a single nuclear family existing on its own, living apart from other kin.
        When we speak of “the nuclearization of the family”-a piece of jargon from modernization theory which has become particularly well-established in Japan-we are actually referring to an increase in the number of nuclear family households. In technical terms, nuclearization of the family can be defined as an increase in the ratio of nuclear family households to total ordinary households. This ratio did indeed increase in Japan during the 1960s, and its rise is often said to represent a wholesale conversion of the ratio of nuclear family households (right-hand scale) - ie to the nuclear family. However, this interpretation should not simply be accepted at face value.
        To understand why not, we need to refer to figure 4-1. The line at the top of this graph shows the changing ratio of nuclear family households. It is noticeable that, despite all the attention paid to the nuclearization of the family at the time, the rise in this ratio during the high-growth era was not especially great. The ratio of nuclear family households was 59.6 percent in 1955, and 63.9 percent in 1975-a rise of barely 4.3 percentage points in two decades.
        The bar graph in the lower part of figure 4-1, which plots actual numbers of households instead of their ratios to the total number, reveals a hidden catch in the concept of nuclearization. True, nuclear family households have shown a steady increase, numerically as well as proportionally, from the 1960s to the present. But the graph shows another very significant fact: their rise has not been offset by a decline in the “households with other kin,” which consist mainly of extended families.  If the ie had been replaced by the nuclear family, As we are told, we would expect to see a drop in the number of extended family households.  But while  their relative weight has decreased as the total number of households has risen (due to the  increase in nuclear family and single-person households), their actual numbers have remained constant.  In other words, nearly all of the old ie have had successors who continued to live with their parents after marriage, maintaining the continuity of these extended family households.

A FOND FAREWELL TO THE EXTENDED FAMILY
 
The term “nuclearization of the family” is thus misleading. It gives the impression that all of the existing ie, with three generations under one roof, were fragmented during the era of high growth. But this is at odds with the facts. There is, however, a very simple but convincing explanation for the data we have seen: in the generations in which nuclearization is said to have taken place, families contained many siblings. Thus, there were many youngcr sons and daughters who were free to leave their parents’ household, since under the stem family system only the eldest son and his wife were expected to remain. In the postwar exodus from rural areas, large numbers of these non-successor siblings created nuclear families of their own in the cities. Nuclearization progressed for demographic reasons, without posing any need to change the residential rules of the ie system.
        The non-successor siblings were in secure in the knowledge that their eldest brother had stayed at home to ensure continuity of their original family line. They also understood that if anything should happen to their brother, one of them would have to move back home. Moreover, they carried with them a vague sense that, after all, a real family was one like their brother’s in the country, one which included Grandpa and Grandma together with one’s own spouse and children. The 1960s were the golden age of the television shows known as “home dramas,” and the images presented by these shows give us some interesting insights into the contemporary audience’s cherished notions of the family.4 For a few years at the beginning of the sixties, sitcoms imported from America were popular. Japanese viewers are said to have been very attracted by the image these sitcoms presented, which typically featured an idealized nuclear family with an understanding father at its center, as in Father Knows Best.
    Yet the home dramas made in Japan very soon took a different tack. The year of the Tokyo Olympics, 1964, was also a bumper year for home dramas; among the shows that debuted were Shichinin no Mago (Seven grandchildren) and Tadaima juichinin (Right now there are eleven of us). From then on, depictions of large, three-generational families became staple home-drama fare. Another feature that dates from this time was the abundance of scenes of the family circle gathered around the meal table-prompting an alternative name for the genre, “mealtime dramas.”
    The mere size of the TV families does not necessarily mean that these were full-fledged ie. The programs of this era typically downplayed the less heartwarming aspects of the traditional system, such as the father’s authority and the subservient position of the daughter-in-law. The result was big, happy families enveloped in a warm glow of mutual love. The shows had fashioned their image of the ideal family by neatly meshing two quite disparate elements: the form of the ie system and the content of the postwar, democratic nuclear family. The home-drama audience was able to watch this inherently flawed image without being troubled by its internal contradictions, because the audience itself was made up of people who had created nuclear families for demographic reasons, without rejecting the ie system in principle.
    Perhaps the real secret of Sazae-san’s immense success lies in the ingenious device the show used to link to contradictory ideals of the family in a seamless way: that is, the fact that the young couple and their child live with Sazae’s parents, rather than with her husband Masuo’s. Although this has always been far less common statistically than living with the husband’s parents, it was probably the only way in which the producers could portray the joys of extended-family living while leaving out the thorniest aspect of the ie’s traditional relationships, namely, the rivalry between the wife and her mother-in-law. (Recently, it seems, the program has even given the language a new phrase, “the Masuosan phenomenon,’’ referring to the trend toward co-residence with the wife’s parents which appeared in the 1980s, as we will see in chapter 9.)
    Although the majority of families in the 1960s were nuclear, the extended family still held a special place in their hearts, as the popularity of Sazae-san and the home dramas indicates. This is not to suggest that prewar attitudes had been carried over intact. The members of nuclear families liked their newfound freedom from the confines of the ie system. But in fact they had never been forced to make a clean break with that system. It would have taken considerable courage for an only son, or the son who was expected to inherit the household, to leave the parental home; he would have had to justify his decision, and his parents would probably have opposed it. However, very few of the people who formed nuclear families in this era would have encountered such opposition. As arrangements had already been made for one sibling to live with their parents, they were, in effect, “spares.” They formed their nuclear families by chance, so to speak, and were able to enjoy a more democratic style of family living as a result, while the traditional values of the ie system continued to exist in the background of their lives. Thus, in my view, the 1960s were characterized by nuclearization of the family without a serious break being made with the ie system.
 

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