Japan's full-time housewives, gentle as the spring breeze, obedient as small animals, send their husbands out every morning, and the husband takes the briefcase after work and asks whether to eat first or take a bath first.
This is the impression that most Japanese people have when they mention full-time housewives in Japan. In Japan, housewives are actually a profession, and the Japanese word is "squatter".
"The Spring of the Yard Farmer" tells us that the full-time housewife's annual unpaid labor time is 2199 hours, the annual salary of the housewife is equivalent to 3.041 million yen, and the housewife is 365 days a year without annual leave.
Careful, exquisite, professional, not only able to run the family, but also have a lot of spare time, control the absolute head of the husband's monthly salary, and occasionally go to drink afternoon tea... There are thousands of "legends" about japanese full-time housewives, but in the end, I am afraid that only the housewives themselves know it.
1 Versatile and exquisite housewife
There is a kimono mother moe in Japan, formerly a maiko in Kyoto, and her husband who runs a restaurant stays at home to take care of the family after marriage, she has to get up at 5:30 every day to wash clothes, make up, prepare baby food for her daughter, drink a cup of coffee of her own at 8 o'clock, and then she also has to prepare her husband's breakfast, go to the supermarket to buy, go to the dry cleaner to get clothes, do housework, cook, etc., and work until her husband returns at 9:30, and then eats with her husband.
Bringing a child alone is a big challenge, moe get up at half past five, maybe 11:30 to go to bed. In the middle, I also squeezed out time and friends to go out to dinner. Many comments said that if you get up at half past five, you have to take your children to do housework during the day, and it is impossible to survive without taking time to make up for sleep in the middle, this mother rotates like this every day, and her makeup is not chaotic, her breath is calm, and her skills are visible.
In fact, Japan's full-time housewives, in addition to doing bento, doing housework, taking care of children, many people also have their own another "craft", cooking, storage, handicraft are included, if one of the specialties is particularly outstanding, but also for their own economic income.
For example, the moe mentioned earlier, she has her own YouTube channel kimoo mom, and usually appears with her daughter sutan to teach netizens how to make Japanese food.
And the housewife Inarim is a food blogger and handicraft master with 70,000+ fans on the ins, because the children like to be picky eaters, so she made the food into the form of a story, her biscuits are not only food, but a piece of art full of childlike fun.
A casual search on the Internet shows that there are many video submissions about the daily schedule of Japanese housewives, most of which are concise and exquisite, full of Japanese texture, and the impression of "housewives" at home is not at all on the side.
In the filter of the camera, the Japanese housewives seem to be freed from the shackles of housework, and their work is more like doing a special job, and the professional beauty is fascinating.
2 Is the operator of the family, but also himself
However, with the change of the times and the improvement of the cost of living, the identity and image of full-time housewives are also quietly changing. Their image as accessories to the care of the family is gradually decreasing, and with it is "to live their own style".
Japanese housewife Ishibashi Miko married at the age of 26, became a full-time housewife after marriage, she got up at 5 o'clock every day, her husband went to work at 7 o'clock, at 6:50 a.m., while many office workers were still sleeping, she had already dealt with all the housework in the morning, and also made breakfast for her son and husband.
But outside of the housewife, Ishibashi has another identity, and she and her mother run a cosmetics company together.
Ishibashi miyako worked in the previous company for four and a half years before getting married, because she did not have much nostalgia for her previous work, and her life after marriage was also very pleasant, her female consciousness began after her children went to elementary school, and she was busy taking care of her children's lives every day, which made her start to think about what she really wanted to do.
She spent ten years studying psychology, doing housework at home Monday through Friday, going to school on weekends, and she felt that the time she had left for herself was very important, to have time alone, to travel, to go to art galleries.
When asked what the company's future development is, she bluntly said that the current Japan is a society with fewer children and older children, so the company's vision cannot be limited to Japan. She is a funny woman, in the program interview can take the initiative to adjust the atmosphere of the scene, talking about the company's fist products, Japan's changes in recent years is also the head of the way, full-time housewife is only one of her identities, and she can also have many possibilities.
According to the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare in 2019, the current japanese full-time housewife's household accounts for only about 30% of all households, which is a low number, which may mean that the very traditional Japanese family form in "Crayon Shin-chan" and "Cherry Pills" is changing. In contrast, the proportion of dual-career families has been rising since 1980.
In the street survey, when asked "would you like to be a housewife", only the two women interviewed at the beginning voted in favor, and the women in the back either "still want to continue to work" or took a neutral position "It depends on the situation of the other party".
In another street survey, most of the girls said that they didn't want to be housewives when they got married, and wanted to work to earn money and do what they liked. For men to "pretend to be dead" and do not do housework, most girls also make it clear that boys should still share some, and should not throw all the tasks of housework to girls, if they do not do it, they will have a good talk with each other.
3 Is "good wife and good mother" an imported product?
Women in Japan were originally very powerful, not always listening to men, and in the past era, they lived more freely and more egotistically.
Kyoto University professor Emiko Ochiai, a well-known scholar of family history and gender studies in Japan, said that the divorce rate of marriage in the Edo period was comparable to that of the United States today, and not all people chose to marry.
Professor Ochiai once went to the Osumi Peninsula in Kagoshima to interview, and one of her interviewers was a 100-year-old grandmother, who had been married twice, had a child, and the child was not from any husband, but was born with someone else's husband in the middle of the two marriages, because that life was romantic, so she was willing to stay together even if we could only be together for three days. This story may be able to change the impression that some Japanese women have been meek and respectful from ancient times to the present.
The question is, since the japanese women in the past were not as old-fashioned as we think, where did the image of "good wife and mother" come from?
It turned out that in the Meiji era, there was an Enlightenment thinker named Nakamura Masayoshi in Japan, and when he went to England, he saw that the local children were educated by their mothers, so he thought that this was a way to cultivate a smart and powerful citizen, so after he returned to Japan, he began to promote the idea of "good wife and good mother". "Full-time housewife" is a combination of the idea of "virtuous wife and good mother" and the Confucian view of "male outside the female protagonist".
4 Housewives are awakening, but housewife society is not
In today's Japanese society, the image of the traditional ideal woman is being shaken and broken. More and more women need to reconcile work and family, and this is not an easy task.
"To live is to experience the flow of time, each of us has a limited time, we should all think about how our time is allocated." Men now have a lot of time of their own, but women have almost no time, because even if the time spent working is shortened, women's time is still used to take care of the family. Being able to be alone and think about something about yourself. Emiko Ochiai said.
Jun Tsutomu, a sociologist at Ritsumeikan University in Japan, also cited a set of data in his article "Why Japan Can't Get Out of the Full-Time Housewife Society" to confirm why he believes that Japan is a traditional society of full-time housewives even in the face of an increase in dual-career families.
First, he argues that the statistical criteria for calling a "dual-career family" are watery, and that a husband who works full-time, even if the wife works only one hour a week, would be recognized as a "dual-career family."
Second, he narrowed the figures down to nuclear households with children with wives between the ages of 25 and 34, a segment in which husbands and wives work full-time at only 17.9 percent.
Third, he believes that with the working conditions of Japanese companies, if the husband and wife are both full-time at the same time, it will become very, very difficult to take care of the family, so it is necessary to have a person stay at home. Not to mention the situation of transfer or overtime overtime, both of which are not uncommon in the Japanese workplace.
In this situation, there is a kind of separation among housewives. The full-time housewives who are always exquisite in front of people, their husbands either run a company or a restaurant, and it is enough to cover the expenses of the whole family, so that these housewives can live gracefully and calmly while taking care of the family.
And more housewives may not have broken away from the confines of traditional realization, they are busy in front of the family ledger, and may even have to suffer from the blank eyes of others even buying a potato salad in the supermarket.
In the middle of busyness and self-realization, how to live as delicately as possible is perhaps the most important question for Japanese housewives today.
Source:
1. "Thirteen Journeys" "Japanese housewives who ride the wind and waves have hidden corners in their hearts" / Tencent News
2. "A Daily Day for a Stay-at-Home Mom in Japan" / youtube
3. "Are Japanese Girls Willing to Be Full-Time Housewives"/YouTube
4. Why Can't Japan Get Out of a Full-time Housewife Society?/president japan