Husband and Wife:
Increasing Privacy and Intimacy

When the ideals of ie were still strong and the bride belonged to the ie and not to her husband, no great value was placed on the privacy of the married couple. In the evenings, if free time were left after the bride finished her work, while others were awake, it was thought improper for the young couple to leave the family circle and retire to their own room, if, indeed, they had a room of their own. This does not mean that husbands and wives had no affectionate relationship; on the contrary, almost like illicit lovers

[9] It may be argued that the same is true of many business organizations. While peer groups have in recent years increased in power, cliques combining older and younger people still remain important. To the extent that such cliques exist, cleavages based strictly on age differences are less likely to become disruptive. It may be said that cliques linking older and younger members are important for maintaining integration in a society of extremely rapid change.

they sometimes took advantage of moments of privacy. Yet on the whole, although emotional distance between husband and wife remains greater than between couples in America, opportunities for closeness have increased. They have more free time to be home alone now than a generation ago, and even if relatives live in the home, it is accepted as perfectly proper for a couple to have a chance to be alone together. The growth of opportunity for privacy is reflected in the courtship period as well as later during the marriage.

The common pattern of courtship in the previous era was for the families to investigate each other and then introduce the couple at a formal meeting (miai ). If the miai went well, the families would proceed with the arrangements for engagement and marriage, but all arrangements would be handled by the family and go-betweens. The young couple would have no further opportunity to meet until the marriage. When people recount their own family's history, however, a sizeable minority of cases do not fit this pattern, either because there was no official miai , or because the couple or their families had known each other before serious arrangement began, or because the couple was given some opportunity to meet alone before marriage. However, even couples which did not have a miai usually had little opportunity to meet before marriage.

In recent years young people's freedom to meet before marriage has increased. It is now considered proper for a girl to have several dates with a boy between the miai and marriage,^[10] but it is still rare to date without an introduction by a close friend or relative who can provide assurance that the other person comes from a respectable family.

Although Mamachi residents believe that love marriages (renai ) are getting to be the same in Japan as in the United States, the amount of freedom given to young people for dating in Mamachi is still very limited. Not only is high-school age considered too young for dating, but too young for any heterosexual interests. Many private high schools prohibit girls from wearing make-up, having permanents, or being on streets with boys. In psychoanalytic terms,

[10] For some statistical information on the frequence of miai (arranged marriage) as opposed to renai (love marriages), cf. Ezra F. Vogel, "The Go-Between in a Developing Society: The Case of the Japanese Marriage Arranger," Human Organization , 1961, 20:112–120.

the Mamachi adolescent in his late teens has not yet resolved his Oedipal attachment to his parents and does not have a reservoir of unattached emotional energy available for falling in love with the first object he sees. As one girl put it, as much as she wants to date and form love relationships, she simply could not imagine the pleasure of suddenly just throwing herself into some boy's arms.

Parents implicitly encourage this caution because they feel it dangerous to give young people the opportunity to form love relationships without a solid objective basis in terms of social position, family background, education, and expected future life. Once there is this solid basis, however, it is considered desirable for love to proceed rapidly and for the marriage to be concluded within a few months, because a long courtship can lead to doubts and faultfinding which would interfere with eventual happiness. Besides, the extent of involvement would make it difficult to form a new relationship if the present one were terminated.

In their dating, young people now look for qualities compatible with personal companionship as well as objective qualities of family status, earning capacity of the husband, general good character, reliability, and health. Ambitious girls bent on a career are suspect by most young men. As one young college man said: "We want wives who are smart so that they can understand us, but not too smart." In a previous era, it was considered desirable for a man to marry a naïve, innocent, eighteen- or nineteen-year-old girl. It was thought that by taking such a bride, it would be much easier for the wife to adjust to marriage because she would not have developed hopes which would later lead to disappointment.^[11] Young men nowadays complain that such a bride would be too limiting because she would know so little about the world that it would be impossible to talk with her. The new ideal bride should know enough to converse intelligently with her husband, but not enough to have ambitions for herself that might interfere with marital happiness.

Before marriage, young couples make a determined effort to sound

[11] A girl is expected to be more receptive to her family's wishes than a boy, and evidence from projective tests given in rural Japan bears this out. Hiroshi Wagatsuma and George De Vos, "Attitudes toward Arranged Marriage in Rural Japan," Human Organization , 1962, 21:187–200.

out the views of the partner. Because opportunities for dating are limited, each date takes on great significance. Casual dating with no consideration of marriage is almost unthinkable for a respectable young lady. On dates, most young people try earnestly to set forth their entire philosophy of life, their views about family relations in the modern age, their ambitions and goals, their interests in reading and music. These talks are usually held apart from the families, at a restaurant, a movie, play, or concert.

In the first year of marriage, before children are born, the newly married couple typically continues to go out occasionally. Many girls, however, in dating or early marriage still feel it wise to be reserved in expressing their opinions because they expect to learn and acquire their husband's opinions. Traditionally, the new bride never expressed her own views, fearing that they might not agree with the opinions of her husband's family. She listened to the conversations at her new home and, if she expressed an opinion at all, it would be in agreement with the family. Even today, the Mamachi wife does not feel as well-informed as her husband, and she is reluctant to state her opinion. Between her ignorance of the outside world and the husband's disinterest in the details of her daily life, there are not as many topics of conversation as in many American families.

Paradoxically, although discussion of children is one of the topics about which man and wife talk most enthusiastically, the arrival of children in some ways creates a greater distance in husband-wife relations.^[12] After the baby arrives, the mother devotes herself so completely to the child, that she sometimes neglects the husband. The husband often begins devoting himself more completely to his firm and the company gang. If he comes home late, the Mamachi wife, tired from caring for the baby and more independent than the traditional wife, does not feel she must wait up to talk with the husband. Small children generally take naps in the afternoon and then stay up until almost the time when the parents go to bed so

[12] Although this same tendency is found in American families, it seems more pronounced in Mamachi where the mother devotes herself so completely to the children. Cf. Robert O. Blood and Donald Wolfe, Husbands and Wife , Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1960.

that even if the husband comes home early, the couple has only a few minutes to talk privately in the evening.

The interference of the small child in the privacy of the parents is perhaps best symbolized by the sleeping arrangements and the difficulty this creates for sexual relations between husband and wife. A small baby commonly sleeps between the father and the mother, on the same mat as the mother, while the father sleeps on the next mat. If children are born with no more than two or three years between them, the chances are that at least one child will be sleeping immediately next to the parents from the time the oldest was born until the youngest is several years of age. Compared to American couples, Mamachi couples have intercourse less frequently, and have less fore play and after play. The smaller role of sexual activity in the Mamachi marriage, and the fact that many couples have sexual relations after sleeping for a short period of time, would appear related to the couple's relative lack of privacy and intimacy.^[13]

[13] A comparison of Shinozaki's Japanese sample of 635 persons in and near Tokyo in 1950 with the data from Kinsey's studies, completed in 1949, point up some of these contrasts in sexual behavior. Nobuo Shinozaki, "Report on Sexual Life of Japanese," No. 11, The Institute of Population Problems, Welfare Ministry, Tokyo, Japan, July 1957. Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, Paul H. Gebhard, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female , Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Company, 1953. In the Japanese sample, 29 percent have intercourse after a brief period of sleep. Although the age groupings on frequency of sexual intercourse of married couples are not precisely the same, the following chart indicates the trend of the difference (Shinozaki, p. 16; Kinsey, p. 77);

In the Japanese sample, 39.9 percent reported no fore play and after play connected with intercourse. In sharp contrast, all of the American sample reported fore play. In the American sample, 99.4 percent reported kissing, and more than 90 percent reported genital stimulation of male and female and breast stimulation of thefemale. Even the 60 percent of Japanese who did engage in fore play averaged less time than the American sample (Kinsey, p. 364; Shinozaki, pp. 20 f.):

The deep repressions of sexual desire before marriage make it difficult for most young wives to enjoy sexual activity soon after marriage.^[14] Most middle-aged ladies say they were completely ignorant about sex until the day of marriage when their mother or the marriage go-between gave them a brief explanation, and perhaps a picture or two illustrating sexual activity. Many recall vividly the rude shock they felt the first time they experienced sexual relations, and they remember having regarded sexual activity as an unpleasant part of their duties in satisfying the wishes of their husband. Before prostitution was abolished in 1958, a sizeable number of wives favored the continuance of legalized prostitution, on the grounds that their husbands needed some outlets and that they would be less demanding at home if they had an outside outlet. Some of the middle-aged women who feared sexual relations in their earlier days of marriage, now admit enjoying it. Younger wives have the benefit of sex education in schools, have much more opportunity to become affectionate with their husbands either before or shortly after marriage, and have begun to enjoy sexual activity earlier in their marriage. But newly wedded women still do have difficulty overcoming their repression of sexual interests, and it is still con-

[14] The following is the stage at which wives first had feelings of satisfaction in intercourse (Shinozaki, op. cit., p. 23; in percent):

sidered somewhat embarrassing for a young wife to admit to her friends that she enjoys sexual activity.

The Mamachi salary-man's wife, being tied to the home and the children, has neither the interest nor the opportunity to engage in extramarital affairs.^[15] Traditionally, it was expected that before marriage a young man would visit a house of prostitution so he would know how to take the lead in sexual relations with his wife. The man, being older, more worldly, and more experienced at the time of marriage, did not suffer from the same sexual inhibitions as his wife. Although increasingly the young salary man's first sexual experience is with his wife, he still tends to be less inhibited toward sexual pleasures than she.

Although the problems of overcoming the wife's reluctance and of having privacy once children are born inhibit sexual intimacy between husband and wife, fear of pregnancy does not. Couples are increasingly using contraceptives,^[16] and others have no compunctions about using abortion should the wife become impregnated. Because of the widespread acceptance of contraceptive and abortion, there is no need to resort to abstinence as a means of birth control.

Despite the wife's inhibitions and the distance created by the birth of a child, the husband-wife relationship has attained a degree of privacy and intimacy unequaled by any relationship between the husband and other women. Even if the husband has friends among bar girls or office girls, they supplement the husband-wife relationship instead of replacing it. The relationship with the wife is viewed as permanent, and relationships with other women as temporary. The man ordinarily expects that a girl at the office will work there only a few years and will then leave to get married herself; and the relationship with bar girls is generally not an exclusive one. The bar girl is expected to wait on many people and carry on conversations with many men. Although she tries to encourage

[15] This accords with Shinozaki's findings. "As regards wives, almost no one has the experience of intercourse with men other than their consorts except women who have remarried." Shinozaki, op. cit., p. 26.

[16] A Mainichi survey found that 48.8 percent of salary men now use contraceptives, compared to 31 percent of farmers or fishermen, 34.7 percent of laborers, 37.1 percent of workers in factories and business establishments, and 48.9 percent of independent entrepreneurs.

steady customers, she must avoid getting so preoccupied with any one person that this interferes with taking care of other customers. The man also often regularly visits several bar girls, and even if he does not have several at one time, he changes from one to another. In some ways the bar girl's relationship with a man is hardly even a personal relationship. She takes little interest in him personally, and the pressures of her job set sharp limits on the intimacy she can have with any one person.

Although at times the husband may prefer the bar girl's worldliness, charm, and flattery to his wife's pressures and demands, the bar girl, typically, has a lower-class background and neither understands nor shares his fundamental attitudes in the same way his wife does. Although the husband may turn to a bar girl for entertainment and sympathy after his daily work, in any real difficulty he turns to his wife because her loyalty to him is much deeper than any bar girl's.

What a husband looks for from a bar girl or office girl is the attention, the charm, and the pleasure, the fun without the responsibility. Though the wife can provide some charm and attention, she is so concerned about the home and so preoccupied with the children, that she cannot give her husband the relaxed joking that permits him to escape his worries. To the contrary, the typical wife is always using her techniques to get the husband to bring home more money for her and the children. Because the wife can do little to increase the income of the home except by coaxing the husband, she tends to concentrate her pressure on him. Finally she has difficulty completely relaxing with her husband because he has superior authority, and because he does not fully share the intricacies of her world. For this reason and because the wife often exerts subtle pressures to get him to accept more responsibilities at home and because he is aware of the inconveniences he causes her, the husband is not always completely comfortable at home. If a man wants fun without responsibilities, he can get it from bar girls, but he ordinarily does not expect it from his wife.

The search for fun without responsibility may at times lead to intensive even though temporary attachments. Because these affect the relationship with the wife, and because they may affect how completely the husband fulfills his responsibilities to her, the wife

is usually upset by strong outside attachments. The husband-wife relationship is sufficiently close so that the wife is sensitive to slight changes in the husband's moods, and, to some extent, she feels she has failed if the husband's relationship with an outside woman becomes too close. Yet the husband's and wife's spheres are sufficiently separate that the husband may derive some pleasures from relationships with outside women without fearing their interference. The husband's relationship with other women need not have any effect on the wife's limited social sphere. Because they rarely go out together and because their friends are separate, it is possible for the husband to have affairs with bar girls or office girls without this having a direct effect on the wife's social activities. As long as the husband is meeting his responsibilities at home, the wife usually tries to overlook his activities away from home.