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The Asian side of the world - II

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Jean-François Sabouret

Part Three. Constructing theories

For a loving policy: what the meeting between Japan and the west tells us about the couple and love

Jean-Michel Butel

Texte intégral

1January 2013

2Love, sexuality, redefinition of marriage or its predicted dissolution, the modern-day couple is the subject of crucial public debates and demands, as well as statistics and scholarly studies to analyse its every detail. And yet accounts that trace the changes it has undergone—which appear monthly—generally follow a fairly simple pattern of explanations, the repetition of which encourages a cautious stance. Studying the issues of love and the resulting discourses in non-western societies may challenge certain over-repeated facts. Japan is a particularly interesting case, in that it can be analysed in some detail from a wealth of data (historical, demographic, sociological and literary) that enable us to go beyond the modern period and, from the outset, the well-worn issue of the modernization of traditional societies.

  • 1 Jean-Baptiste Chastand, http://emploi.blog.lemonde.fr/2012/11/28/le-couplemeilleur-rempart-contre- (...)

3The western stance appears to me to have been clearly illustrated once again in a recent article published in the online version of Le Monde, in which the author expressed surprise at the strategies consciously devised by French men and women in their search for a partner on the marriage market. The author concluded by regretfully asking, “Does love have any role to play in all this? Clearly there is some doubt…”.1 For the journalist, the issue was clear and of a moral nature: marrying for love is a western advance, indicating a certain degree of social evolution and maturity in relationships between men and women, the transition to a “modern” love economy. Such spontaneous, unselfish, modern love stands in contrast to any idea of a “marriage market’. The existence of strategies, although well substantiated by sociologists, is seen as a social regression to a more barbaric state.

  • 2 De l’amour (et du mariage) en Asie [On love (and marriage) in Asia], no. 1028, 15 July 2010, http: (...)

4This view is also partly shared in countries that are undergoing “modernisation’. Here too, love is touted—ad nauseam—as something new, a sign of modernization and westernization. And while, the most elaborate versions of such affirmations may concede that love did exist “previously’, it is stressed that this is not a justification for marriage, which is founded on more serious, coercive criteria (this type of view can be confirmed, but readers may also consult more disturbing analyses in an issue of Courrier International devoted to the subject2).

5In Japan, there is general consensus, so we are told, on a pell-mell of various historical and sociological constructs: the traditional family is patriarchal; marriages are arranged by parents, often against the wishes of those concerned, who in most cases do not even know each other; women are oppressed, they must give up their jobs upon marrying and devote themselves to looking after their husbands, who in any case are absent, and their children. Let us be quite clear: each of these statements is false, albeit to varying degrees, and the resulting construct must be taken apart (see the the bibliography). Modern forms of love, the couple and marriage began to occupy a central place in the public debate from the final third of the 19th century. Particularly in the 1870s and 1880s—the first draft of the Civil Code, presented by the Frenchman Boissonade in 1888, represented a kind of culmination, discussion focused on “free marriage” (jiyū kekkon), i.e. marriage based on personal choice, monogamy and equal rights, as well as the status of concubines (mekake), the reality of prostitution, adultery and chastity. Let us stop for a moment here. What do these subjects, touched upon by the media of the period and briefly listed here, tell us? The defenders of love were fighting not so much against a “traditional” model but rather against a model being introduced by those in power. Their struggle was not one of modernists against conservatives, but rather of moralists against certain aspects of the modernity that was taking shape. Having arrived later, we perceived what was introduced a century ago to be an ancient form, forgetting that, on the contrary, it was a direct result of modernity and that it was formed at the expense of other models that have continued to coexist and whose re-emergence does not necessarily reflect an increased, or declining, modernization.

6This is confirmed by another, analogous debate on the family model. The modernization of Japan was long considered to have been achieved by the arrival of the nuclear family (kaku kazoku), which supposedly replaced–with varying success and only recently – the traditional multigenerational family (stem family or ie). Emmanuel Todd’s recent work on family systems recounts, with the author’s customary brilliance, the origins of this discourse and its lack of validity. The studies on historical demography conducted in Japan itself (by Hayami Akira, and presented in France by Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux and Emiko Ochiai) attest to the extremely commonplace nature of the nuclear family, including in pre-modern Japan. It is widely accepted today that the stem family, seen as traditional at the end of the Second World War, was largely a modern invention, developed by late 19th-century Japanese jurists on the basis of values that combined both the principles of a tiny section of society that had recently come to power (the samurais) and a very Victorian Anglo-Saxon moralism.

  • 3 “Tradition • Avoir le choix, mais pour quoi faire?” [Tradition • Having a choice, but to do what?] (...)

7Thus, love did indeed exist in Japan before the modern era. Just as there were couples who loved one another and even individuals who decided to live together out of passion, whatever opposition they faced. Literature and poetry testify to this, as does ethnology. In saying this, it is not my intention to argue that modern western love is universal. Each local view of love has its specificities, which have not been studied carefully, research focusing instead on a simplistic opposition of “arranged marriages” (omiai kekkon) and “love marriages” (ren’ai kekkon). While contrasting “arranged marriages” with “love marriages” in this way might appear to be substantiated by statistics, it must be understood that this contrast is not one of practices but rather one of acceptable discourses: there are societies in which only the feelings of the two parties can lead to the formation of of a couple (this is one of the essential conditions introduced by the Catholic Church in the 12th century in order for a marriage to be considered valid); in other societies, this mutual feeling must be endorsed, by the family, a religious institution, the law or ancestors, for example. There are societies in which couples must prove their love for one another, where it is considered immoral for a decision to be motivated by anything other than love, even a matrimonial decision; in yet other societies, personal affinities lead to the mobilization of channels involving third-party intervention (the study of which, however—while fascinating for structuralists—could make one forget the existence of love). The broad contrast established between the west and the rest of the world is undermined by more subtle considerations, in which experiences seemingly mirror each other beyond borders and political divides. To the French blogger at Le Monde, the Indian journalist Lakshmi Chaudhry replied:3

“Conventional wisdom today holds that the sole difference between a love marriage and an arranged marriage is the method of selection. Yet, however you come to choose your spouse, the trials and tribulations of matrimony remain the same. The emotional disconnect and lack of communication are still there. Young people have thus lost their willingness to believe in love. Their search for happiness is guided by a business-like pragmatism.”

  • 4 “Chine • Les jeunes femmes ne sont pas à la noce” [China • It’s no picnic for young women], ibid.)

8To which the Chinese writer Xin Zhoukan4 add:

“With the ever-widening gap between rich and poor and the sudden transformation of social strata, marriage, just like work, has become a way to increase one’s resources. Chinese women currently earn just 75% of that of their male counterparts. Women, who are not treated as equals on the professional market, hope through marriage to achieve a new distribution of wealth.”

9Could making love the foundation of the married couple be the result of a certain economic equality, then, rather than a geographic equality? Might the increasingly precarious nature of today’s societies lead to the disappearance of love as a motivation for marriage, as suggested by the Japanese sociologist Yamada Masahiro in his most recent studies? Arguing passionately for the egalitarian couple united by mutual love, the Meiji-era educator Iwamoto Yoshiharu warned that:

“There are absolutely no equals on earth. We fear our parents; our older brothers and sisters are our superiors; our younger brothers and sisters are smaller than us; we serve our lord; our vassals serve us. True friends are equal, and this equality gives rise for the first time to a feeling of love that is not mingled with fear. That is why we want to be equal to our friends. [But this very desire proves that] there are truly no equals on this earth. In these circumstances, there are only married couples: husbands and wives are the only equals on earth and in heaven, marriage is the only place where it is possible to taste, for the first time, the true friendship [makoto no yūjo] that is befitting between equals. (…) The only place where real communism is practised is the couple, only husbands and wives truly share profit, only husbands and wives, and they alone, share profits and losses equally.”

10Beyond what some might consider a naive fervour, Iwamoto showed just how comparisons between indigenous definitions of love and the romantic ideal seemingly proposed by the western world (in his case a Protestant Anglo-Saxon love from the late 19th century) can encourage a truly loving policy.

Bibliographie

Bibliographical indications

For what is a now classic presentation of marriage strategies, see Jean-Claude Kaufmann, Sociologie du couple, PUF, coll. “Que sais-je”, no 2787, 1993.

For a history of the Japanese family, see Christian Galan and Emmanuel Lozerand, La Famille japonaise moderne, 1868-1926: Discours et débats, Philippe Picquier, 2011.

For the debates on love in Japan, the author’s articles published in the abovementioned book (an english version of which could be find here: «Loving Couples for a Modern Nation: A New Family Model in Late Nineteenth Century Japan», Japan Review, Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyôto, International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken), no 24, 2012, p. 67-84), and his paper presented as part of the panel “An Anthropological Approach to Love and Marriage Relationships in Three Asian Societies” at the 4th Congress of the Asia and Pacific Network, see http://www.reseau-asie.com/colloque/4eme-congres-2011/organisationsociale-rituels/amour-mariage-d-asie/.

For new ideas on changes in the family and the modern nature of the nuclear family, see Emmanuel Todd, L’origine des systèmes familiaux, volume 1, L’Eurasie, Gallimard 2011.

For a recent take on Japanese feminism, see “Naissance d’une revue féministe au Japon: Seitô (1911-1916)”, Ebisu – Etudes japonaises, coordinated by Christine Lévy, no 48, autumn-winter 2012.

For more information on religious practices pertaining the love in Japan: «Réguler la coutume par la coutume – Règles matrimoniales et divinité marieuse du Grand sanctuaire d’Izumo», «La coutume et la norme en Chine et au Japon», Extrême-Orient Extrême-Occident, Paris, Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, no 23, octobre 2001, p. 27-52.□http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/oroc_0754-5010_2001_num_23_23_1133

Notes

1 Jean-Baptiste Chastand, http://emploi.blog.lemonde.fr/2012/11/28/le-couplemeilleur-rempart-contre-le-chomage/, 28 November 2012

2 De l’amour (et du mariage) en Asie [On love (and marriage) in Asia], no. 1028, 15 July 2010, http://www.courrierinternational.com/magazine/2010/1028-de-l-amour-et-du-mariage-en-asie

3 “Tradition • Avoir le choix, mais pour quoi faire?” [Tradition • Having a choice, but to do what?], Courrier international, op. cit.

4 “Chine • Les jeunes femmes ne sont pas à la noce” [China • It’s no picnic for young women], ibid.)

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