Marriage in Japan Why people get married? There would be many reasons; to save money, to escape from loneliness, to have a better life, and so on. But in most case people marry for love. Though it is almost always true, a married life is different between in the western culture and in Japan.
A marriage in modern western culture is based on mutuality and companionship. In Western there is a tendency to be independent. Most college graduates live apart from their family and find an apartment near the working place. They have learned how to survive in single and marriage is an optional.
However, a person in Japan who graduates from a college and has a job still lives with ones family until one gets married, which means one keeps the parent-child relationship. Therefore it is hard for a Japanese man to learn to be independent. After he gets married, he now relies on his bride for having foods, doing laundry, and many other things. Takeo Doi explains it with the term of amae that means the seeking or causing of oneself to be loved, nurtured, and indulged.
He says it is an active attempt to make oneself into a passive love object. One reason why a man continues depending on someone else is that he has been witnessed what his parents have been done and now he considers himself as a head of his own family. In case of woman, it is difficult to keep her job after the marriage, because she needs to take care of her child, which is considered to be a wifes job. She has to do everything else except making money for the family, which makes her dependent on her husband who has the economic power.
However in western culture, it is natural for both partners to have their own jobs and to be responsible for every single household job after marriage. Until recently it has been true in Japan but now it is changing. More women have their jobs rather than prepare to be a bride after the graduate. They dont need to get married if they dont want to.
It has also become common not to have many children and some couples dont have a child at all. A younger bride could decide to divorce her husband if she wants to because she has a chance to get an economic independence easily nowadays. Everything becomes more and more westernized, but male chauvinism has not been changed rapidly. Even though Japanese people become more liberalized, the unchanged living pattern, living with parents until the marriage, keeps their behavior same: depending on someone who can take care of.
Though Japanese people justify amae and teishu kampaku by explain these are the ways of manifestation of love in marriage, it is not suitable to an independent adult. Unless Japanese people find out solve it, the problems related to marriage would increase continuously.
