Page 93 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

80 Nightmare Japan

women in the government’, and despite the fact that ‘women have also
recently gained much clout outside the home’, females ‘at university and
management level in Japan are still paltry compared to the west’ (Bornoff
2002: 61).
Despite traditionalist voices bemoaning the collapse of the pre-war
‘extended family’ and ideological shifts that seemingly privilege ‘egoism’
(a distorted mode of ‘individualism’) over the triumvirate of ‘family,
community, and the nation’ (Makino 2005: para 7), marriage and
reproduction have ceased to represent a ‘woman’s sole option’ (Ueno
1994: 38). Thus, re-imaginings of the Japanese family have consistently
accompanied the frequently extreme economic transitions occurring in
Japan over the last half-century, including its ‘miraculous’ economic
recovery and subsequent recession. In numerous instances, the family has
steadily ‘become a micro-corporation’ in which ‘[f]athers have been
known to sacrifice their families to their business, and a recent trend is
that mothers spend a great deal of time in the office or at night school and
children do so with their classmates in private “after-schools” (juku)’
(Kogawa 2005: para 8). In other instances, financial pressures and the
spread of feminism have combined to lessen the stigma surrounding
divorce, though single mothers continue to struggle against patriarchal
authority in the form of destructive prejudices and restrictive legislation.
As Sonya Salamon reports, when it comes to employment practices,
employers are frequently ill-disposed toward married women, and even
more so towards mothers. As a substantial consequence of a divorce rate
that has been on the rise since the end of World War II, single mothers
experience descrimination on an even wider scale, leading at least one
major sociological inquiry to recognise that single mothers constitute
what is quickly becoming a form of ‘invisible poverty in Japan’ (1986:
133). What’s more, Salamon’s study illustrates that this ‘intergenerational
poverty’ not only ‘formed within a nexus of capitalism’ that necessitates
certain familial reconfigurations, but also reflects the presence of
profound ‘problems’ embedded deep within both contemporary and so-
called ‘traditional’ Japanese ‘societal structures’ (133).
As is often the case in transforming capitalist cultures, the
aforementioned post-war shifts in economic and, by extension, familial