Family Life in Japan and Germany: Challenges for a Gender-Sensitive Family Policy

297 Pages·2019·10.608 MB·English

by  Uta Meier-Gräwe, Miyoko Motozawa, Annette Schad-Seifert

Uta Meier-Gräwe · Miyoko Motozawa
Annette Schad-Seifert Editors
Family Life in Japan
and Germany
Challenges for a
Gender-Sensitive Family Policy
Family Life in Japan and Germany
Uta Meier-Gräwe · Miyoko Motozawa ·
Annette Schad-Seifert
Editors
Family Life in Japan
and Germany
Challenges for a
Gender-Sensitive Family Policy
Editors
Uta Meier-Gräwe Miyoko Motozawa
Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen Tsukuba University of Technology
Gießen, Germany Osaka, Japan
Annette Schad-Seifert
Heinrich-Heine Universität
Düsseldorf, Germany
ISBN 978-3-658-26637-0 ISBN 978-3-658-26638-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-26638-7
Springer VS
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Acknowledgements
This book is the result of a series of conferences on general family policy in Japan
and Germany, which have taken place at several institutions in Japan and Germany
over more than a decade. The editors are grateful to the universities they are or
have been affiliated with, as they have either supported or hosted the conferences
and projects related to the subject of this book. These are the Justus Liebig
University Gießen, the University of Tsukuba, and the Heinrich Heine University
Düsseldorf. The editors would also like to thank the German Research Foundation
(DFG) for its generous financial support; the production of this book was funded
by the DFG’s Eugen and Ilse Siebold Award in recognition of Professor Miyoko
Motozawa’s outstanding contributions to the scientific exchange between Japan
and Germany. Many other research institutions have supported the project in terms
of financial funding or academic guidance. The editors are particularly grateful to
the Japan Foundation, the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy
in Munich, the German-Japanese Centre Berlin, and the German Institute for
Japanese Studies in Tokyo. The editors would like to thank all the authors of this
book for participating in this project and contributing their research results to this
edition.
Finally, many thanks are also due to the student research assistant team at the
Japanese Studies Department of Heinrich Heine University, especially Ezgi Bilke,
Julia Heinrich, and Andrej Preradovic, for their efficiency as well as their excellent
copyediting and translations.

The editors, November 2018.
Table of Contents

Uta Meier-Gräwe, Miyoko Motozawa, Annette Schad-Seifert
Introduction .......................................................................................................... 1

Historical Context and Current Situation of Family Life and Institutional
Changes
Miyoko Motozawa
Family Policy in Japan: General Policies for the Family in an Aging Society
with a Declining Birth Rate ................................................................................ 19
Hans Bertram
From the Skeptical to the Overburdened Generation .......................................... 37

Family Policy in Germany: Impact on Social Conditions of Precarity and
Risks
Eva Maria Hohnerlein
Addressing Poverty Risks of Lone Mothers in Germany: Social Law
Framework and Labour Market Integration ........................................................ 65

Uta Meier-Gräwe
Collaboration of Local Partners: Networking and Community Orientation ....... 91
Uta Meier-Gräwe
Day-To-Day Work. Why We Need to Reorganise it Within Society and
Distribute it Fairly by Gender ........................................................................... 107

Family Policy in Japan: Structural Reforms and Their Effectiveness
Barbara Holthus
Infrastructural Family Policy in Japan: Parental Evaluation ............................. 135

Annette Schad-Seifert
Womenomics: A Model for a New Family Policy in Japan? ............................ 157
VIII Table of Contents
Masako Ishii-Kuntz
Japanese Child Caring Men (Ikumen) and Achieving Work-Life Balance ....... 177

Chie Maekoya
Current Situation of Domestic Violence in Japan ............................................. 199

Germany and Japan in Comparison: Similarities and Differences of
Welfare Institutions
Yoko Tanaka
End of the Housewife Paradigm? The Comparative Development of Work-
Family Models in Germany and Japan ............................................................. 219

Steffen Heinrich
The Politics of Balancing Flexibility and Equality: A Comparison of Recent
Equal Pay Reforms in Germany and Japan ....................................................... 267

Authors ............................................................................................................. 295
Introduction
Uta Meier-Gräwe, Miyoko Motozawa, Annette Schad-Seifert
Since the early 1990s, the governments of both Germany and Japan have been
paying more attention to the phenomenon of low fertility as well as the social and
economic factors that result from it. Clearly, fundamental changes in the family as
a social institution brought about this shift, and the Japanese and German
governments had to respond to the growing diversity of family life as well as the
problems that families with children came to face at the beginning of the 21st
century. It has become apparent that the normative ideal of the post-war middle-
class family, which sociologists like Talcott Parsons or René König once
propagated, is no longer applicable to the realities of today’s families (König
1974a and 1974b; Parsons 1965). Both scholars anticipated the ideal of an isolated
nuclear family consisting of a man and a woman living with their biological
children in a permanent, sexually exclusive first marriage. In this model, the
marriage founded on love achieves its culmination through parenthood. König
spoke of marriage as an “incomplete family” to emphasize that “family” is on
one’s mind when marrying. In 1989, German family sociologist Rosemarie Nave-
Herz further pointed out that family is accordingly created or expanded via
marriage (Nave-Herz 1989: 3).
Given the falling fertility rates and increase in childlessness in Germany and
Japan, this terminology is no longer valid. Already at the beginning of the 1990s,
the feminist Japanese sociologist Chizuko Ueno took up the issue of family
transformation and unconventional family models (Ueno 1994, 2009).
Meanwhile, it would take German family research until the end of the 1990s to
reach the conclusion that the connection between marriage and family has “no
place” in a contemporary definition of family (Lenz 2003: 487).
The modern family was characterized by the male breadwinner model, which
implies that the husband works full-time all day long, while the wife stays at home
to take care of the household and their children. In pre-modern society, parenting
was in no way the mother’s exclusive domain, but rather a secondary by-product
of growing up in a domestic household and work community consisting of family
members as well as people with no blood kinship. With the transition to an
industrial society however, the socialization function regarding one’s offspring
became the ideal type and “actual” function of a family. Within the discourse of
family research, this form of raising children has not simply been regarded as one
among many options; instead, it was used to define what a “proper” family should
be.
© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019
U. Meier-Gräwe et al. (Eds), Family Life in Japan and Germany,
h ttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-26638-7_1
2 Uta Meier-Gräwe, Miyoko Motozawa, Annette Schad-Seifert
The conceptually narrow view on the ideal of the middle-class family has other
aspects that show that the multiplicity of family life and development can hardly
be decoded using the instruments provided by mainstream research from the latter
half of the 20th century. As Lenz emphasizes, the premise that a family consists of
at least three people contains certain biologist presumptions, as these people are
usually assumed to be the biological father and mother along with their own child
(or children) (Lenz 2003: 489). But in 2014 in Germany, there were already 41,000
same-sex couples living in a registered civil partnership, with an estimated 16,000
children. This number is expected to increase in the next few years. A resolution
by the German Bundestag from June 30th, 2017 paved the way for a new law that
will allow same-sex couples to marry and adopt children. Although same-sex
marriage is not recognized in Japan, LGBT families with children exist in Japan
as well. As of 2018, nine cities and city wards have legalized same-sex
partnerships (pātonāshippu sensei seido) (Japan Times 04/07/2018).
Even though the definitions of “incomplete family = single parents with
child(ren)” and “complete family = parental couple with child(ren)” is no longer
appropriate in political discourse, the implied minimal size of a family (namely a
father, mother, and child) systematically stigmatizes the family form of single
parents with child(ren). Essentially, they are not considered to be a family by
definition. This view ignores alternative family models along with the specific
problems that single parents face. Thus, this terminology is an ill-suited means for
advancing meaningful understandings. Instead, defining a family as a group
consisting of two adults and at least one child casts a negative light on a form of
life that needs urgent support in both Germany and Japan. Around 1.6 million
single parents are living with their minor children in Germany today. While the
proportion of families with children in Germany has been going down for years,
the number of single parents has kept increasing, and single parents now constitute
about a fifth of all families with minor children. Nine out of ten of these single
parents are women. While the at-risk-of-poverty rate of couples with two children
in Germany is only at 10.1 percent, that rate is more than three times higher for
single parents and their children (Statistisches Bundesamt 2016). In Japan, the
national average of single parent households (female-headed and male-headed) is
6.67 percent, with the highest rates in the prefectures of Kochi, Hokkaido, and
Miyazaki (more than 10 percent) (Statistics Japan 2018). According to Japan’s
Health Ministry statistics, child poverty among single-parent families has reached
55 percent (Washington Post 28/05/2017). Taking all households into account, 16
percent of Japanese children live below the poverty line.
Equating family with household does not help to understand what family is
about. For a long time, family research has assumed that family members live
together in one household and keep house together. While this assumption is true
for the most part, it ignores the fact that familial solidarity is not tied to living in
one household together. Various intergenerational support services are still offered
by family members, even when the children have left their parents’ home. It has
Introduction 3
been empirically documented that “family life” currently exceeds the boundaries
of a nuclear family household and that relationships between the generations
remain close.
A look at German official statistics also shows that household statistics fail to
give an adequate impression of family constellations (cf. Bien and Marbach 1991:
4). Children that live on college campuses but visit their parents twice a week are
not considered as household members. Neither are grandparents that live in the
same house but keep their own household while supporting the young family in a
variety of ways. Empirically valid status analyses regarding network relations
between family members across generations make clear that they are, generally
speaking, part of a tight web of family and kinship relations. Bertram coined the
term “multi-local multigenerational family” to describe this correlation, thereby
contradicting the long-established concept of the “isolated urban nuclear family”
in family sociology (Bertram 2000).
A typical feature of the modern family is a clear border between inside and
outside, private and public, family and work. Family became the embodiment of
intimacy, a harmonious counterpoint to the cold and impersonal outside world
closed off from the circumstances and issues inherent to family life. It is almost
impossible to maintain this definition given the progress of digitalization in
Germany and Japan as well as the potential opportunities of the labor market,
which offer more flexible working conditions that may improve compatibility
between family and work. The borders between work and private life are eroding.
Therefore, the German expert commission on the Second Gender Equality Report
demands substantial political regulations such as the introduction of a law that
would give employees the right to adjust working hours according to their
individual needs (Expert Commission on the Second Gender Equality Report
2017).
In striving to positively acknowledge and analyze the social services that
families deliver, mainstream family research in both countries has overlooked the
“dark sides” of family for decades (Goodman 2012; Lenz 2003: 487). Domestic
violence against women and children, as well as the proper empirical and scientific
conceptualization of these issues, have been almost entirely absent in German and
Japanese family research. Lenz points out that such topics remained ignored even
after the first shelters for battered women and children were established in
Germany in the middle of the 1970s (ibid.). The topic of growing poverty among
parents and children has also been neglected until now due to the focus on the
established middle-class family (Matsumoto 2010).
“Labor of love”: The Systematic Trivialization of Female Care Work and its
Consequences
Within the middle-class family concept, the principle of the Fordist division of
labor and specialization characteristic of industrial society was transferred to the