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Divorce in Japan: Family, Gender and the State, 1600-2000, by Harald Fuess. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. 248 pp. $45.00, cloth. ISBN: 0-8047-4357-6.
Is it all in the numbers? Do the data on divorce support the contention that the Japanese family is at Red Alert, at extreme risk of dissolution? Or do the same data-and explanatory frames using wide historical context-reveal changes that might indicate flexibility and greater individuality in the families whose coding (not the numbers) doesn't measure up? A new work on divorce in Japan helps to create a more nuanced picture of divorce and its effects in the context of laws, institutions and family dynamics. Fuess' Divorce in Japan is a wonderfully illuminating and subversive treatment. Seamlessly analyzing statistics, giving historical depth and lucid commentary, Fuess places Japan's divorce rate, its dips and rises, in a rich cultural and social context, allowing us a view of family and modernization through the lens of the phenomenon of divorce. The legal and bureaucratic representations of family are weighted in a discussion far from the images of oppressed victimized women and the callous omnipotence of patriarchy.
The Sisyphean task of stereotype-busting is only part of what Fuess manages with deft and trustworthy dismissals of such shibboleths as "where there's a mother-in-law there's cause for divorce" or "love marriage means a deeper commitment." Above all, he gives historical frame to the current rising divorce rate. In the past, as he demonstrates, Japan was called a "rironka shakai (divorce society)" with high rates of marriage dissolution leading Western visitors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to cluck their tongues at the heathenish practice. Further, he shows that the low post-war divorce rates were not the result of "traditional" family stability but related to the increase of attention to family by regulatory agencies making divorce more difficult and of the economic and social pressures to stay married. Without touting "uniqueness" for the Japanese case, Fuess shows that the conditions for divorce in these contexts in Japan have been unusual.
In becoming a "normal, ordinary" society with European-level divorce rates, post-war Japan...