CONTEMPORARY JAPAN: THE JAPANESE FAMILY The Mother-in-Law |
| Although Japanese family roles have changed considerably in the 20th century, aspects of the traditional ie, or “continuing family,” still remain. The Japanese have a saying that even if an extended family does not live together, parents and grandparents should live near enough to carry over a bowl of hot soup. In this video series, Harvard University professors Theodore Bestor and Helen Hardacre describe the enduring importance of traditional family values in Japan. |
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Theodore Bestor :: One of the interesting things about the social dynamics within a traditional household is that perhaps the greatest amount of tension was between the role of the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law. And if you think about it, both of them are people who were not born into that household; they are both strangers to the household. The mother-in-law of course in an earlier generation has had to go through the same process that the daughter-in-law is going through now, in order to become a full-fledged member. And so, in a sense you have two outsiders fighting with one another, or at least struggling with one another, to define their legitimate role within the household. But, even though they aren’t born into the household, they are of course absolutely crucial members of the household. The wife’s role, whether mother-in-law or daughter-in-law, is to be the manager of the household, to in many cases manage the finances of the household and so forth — an incredibly important and pivotal role in keeping the whole family enterprise going. Perhaps the most vivid symbol of this central role of the wife and mother in the household is a rice paddle — in Japanese called a shamoji — a kind of ping-pong-paddle-shaped bamboo implement that a woman would use to stir rice as it’s cooking in a pot, and then would use to scoop cooked rice out into bowls and feed members of the family with. And at the point when a young wife, a daughter-in-law, had reached maturity, had proven herself to be a loyal and productive member of the household, and her mother-in-law was at a point of being willing to fully welcome her into the household, in traditional times they would have a ceremony at which the mother-in-law would ritually pass the rice paddle on to her daughter-in-law, signifying that she was relinquishing control of the household from one generation to the next. |
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