REVIEWS
“Intimate Disconnections offers an extraordinarily rich account of changing expectations for marriage, intimacy, and relationality in contemporary Japan. Alexy’s deeply empathetic analysis of divorce is destined to enrich our empirical understanding of this globally increasingly common life decision and its legal, economic, and emotional consequences.”
— Hirokazu Miyazaki, Northwestern University
“This is a rich ethnographic study about increasing divorce in Japan, public discourses on later-life divorce (jukunen rikon), and popular images of divorced women’s empowerment that Alexy explores in depth. This accessible and carefully crafted book will be an important addition to the fields of cultural anthropology and gender studies, with Alexy’s nuanced depiction of gender dynamics, the labor market, and socioeconomic structures in contemporary Japan.”
— Akiko Takeyama, University of Kansas
"A panorama of Japanese mores and attitudes toward marriage, many of them in flux as people negotiate dependences and self-interest. . . . Japan isn’t known as a model for marital romance, a sentiment that is reflected in Intimate Disconnections. But in the spirit of anthropology that aims to explain without judgment or prescription, Alexy’s book helps understand a society moving away from equating marriage with normalcy."
— Japan Times
"I strongly recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in understanding the current marriage and divorce landscape in Japan... the book also includes excellent insights into the legal, economic, and labour realities in contemporary Japan, providing a useful overview of shifts over the past two decades."
— New Voices in Japanese Studies
"In Intimate Disconnections, cultural anthropologist Allison Alexy paints an exceptionally nuanced picture of the performance of divorce in early twenty-first century Japan based on several years of participant observational fieldwork, during which she was able to conduct many interviews... Alexy’s interpretation is original and goes beyond the usual simplistic explanations in terms of general dissatisfactions with or ambivalence toward traditional ideals of masculinity and femininity."
— Monumenta Nipponica
"Intimate Disconnections is a fascinating study of not just how marriages end through divorce, but the place of discourses about divorce on intimate practices. The strength of Alexy's work lies in her stories, particularly of older men and women, working out the anxieties and fall outs of what later life-divorces foreclose and/or open."
— PoLAR
"Intimate Disconnections provides fascinating insight into the troubles of Japanese marriages, gleaned by Alexy over meals or drinks, in one-on-one interviews, and during small group counseling sessions and discussions. . . . The author’s sensitive handling of these intimate, often painful, stories helps us understand the challenges of divorce and the shifting ground of intimacy in marriages during the economic transformations of the last several decades."
— Journal of Japanese Studies
"Allison Alexy is utterly sensitive to the situations of the women and men she talks with—several of them her personal friends—who did, or are going through, or will divorce. . . She does a lot of the heavy theoretical lifting as well."
— American Ethnologist
"[A] thorough ethnographic and sociological exploration of divorce in Japan. . . . One of the great strengths of this volume is how it brings together clear macrosocial insights with nuanced personal accounts of divorce."
— Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Freedom and Anxiety
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226701004.003.0001
[divorce;Japan;intimacy;neoliberalism;gender;social change;family;marriage]
The introduction begins with examples of two divergent responses to the new possibilities for divorce: a man in his early 60s confessing his anxiety that his wife will soon leave him, and a woman of the same age giddily plotting with her friends about how to divorce her cheating husband. These two people serve as ideal examples to represent the broad, and highly gendered, range of responses to divorce in contemporary Japan. In these fantasies, divorce can signify a vital step toward happiness or a debilitating stab in the back. The introduction situates such divergent responses to the possibility of divorce within broader demographic patterns surrounding shifts in family norms, employment structures, and models for intimacy. Building from extant literature, it makes the case that anthropological attention to divorce is necessary. After outlining the book’s argument, the chapter describes the research methodologies that enabled the trust necessary to gather such personal accounts. The title highlights both the positive and negative aspects of divorce, and this chapter describes how the book will analyze divorce from both perspectives.
1. Japan’s Intimate Political Economy
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226701004.003.0002
[political economy;gender;labor;salaryman;intimacy;marriage]
This chapter analyzes how marital norms and intimate possibilities have shifted in response to a restructured labor market. Thesalaryman—a self-sacrificing workaholic—was a popular symbol for Japan’s postwar economic muscle but recently has become an icon of all that is wrong with Japanese marriages. Stereotypical salarymen worked hard from early morning until late at night and relied on their wives for all domestic needs. In this model for intimacy, although spouses were reliant on each other, they shared few interests or emotional connections. In the recessionary decades since the Japanese economic bubble burst, the salaryman’s primacy has been increasingly challenged in both economic and intimate realms. Downsizing companies now shirk hiring full-time workers in favor of legions of contract workers who can easily be laid off. Simultaneously, the Japanese divorce rate’s increase is driven by people ending marriages that conform to the intimate ideals popular a generation before. Marital guidebooks and support groups implore spouses to retire those models for domestic intimacy, and people idealize intimacies based on emotional connections and shared activities.During Japan’s postwar recovery, the intimate political economy dramatically shaped expectations and opportunities within heterosexual marriages; now it shapes how people decide to divorce.
2. Tips to Avoid Divorce
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226701004.003.0003
[communication;advice;dependence;amae;neoliberal;marital problems;risk;romance]
This chapter describes common tips to avoid divorce in order to analyze the characteristics of marriages that are no longer deemed healthy, good, or attractive. It is framed around two tips that seem simple but nevertheless radically challenge family norms. First, spouses are recommended not to call each other “mother” or “father,” a naming practice extremely common in Japan. Second, husbands especially are entreated to begin articulating their appreciation, affection, and, most importantly, love for their wives. Voicing these feelings—saying “I love you” out loud—is touted as a simple solution to marital problems. Contextualizing this advice within broader calls for improved “communication” in marriages, the chapter analyzes these tips as substantial, but contested, revisions of ideal marital forms. Clashing with the marital patterns described in the previous chapter, these suggestions urge spouses to be atypically open with each other, nudging them to walk a fine line between detachment and overdependence. The chapter includes ethnographic examples of people trying to negotiate this delicate balance to argue that despite these tips’ popularity, enacting them proves arduous.
3. Constructing Mutuality
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226701004.003.0004
[law;legal process;mutual divorce (kyogi rikon);negotiation;divorce law;family law]
This chapter examines the legal processes of divorce in Japan to characterize the negotiations and conflicts that occur as people try to agree to divorce. To get legally divorced, both spouses sign a two-page form and submit it to a government office. These divorces are legally labeled “mutual” (kyogi). When a divorcing couple signs and stamps the form, they acknowledge both that they want to be divorced and that they have already agreed to terms. Thus the vast majority of divorces in Japan appear to be uninvolved with the legal system. However, many protracted negotiations occur as a spouse who wants to divorce attempts to convince the other to agree to it, often by promising material property or forgoing any financial demands. Such negotiations occur in divorces that are eventually legally registered“mutual.” This chapter exposes what this legal terminology obscures to argue that divorces appearing to occur with no influence from family law are in fact fundamentally shaped by legal categories and ideologies.
4. Families Together and Apart
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226701004.003.0005
[family;custody;kinship;law;joint custody;sole custody;children;parenting]
This chapter explores how changing ideals of parenting, and in particular fathering, are impacting relationships between parents and children after divorce. All dynamics of post-divorce kinship begin from the legal fact that there is no joint custody in Japan. Throughout the postwar, rates of custody being granted to mothers have steadily increased and currently stand at about 80 percent. Moreover sole legal custody is coupled with a strong cultural belief that a “clean break” can benefit children because it is psychologically less damaging to have no contact with one parent than to shuttle between two households. However there is a growing movement, organized mostly by noncustodial fathers, to “reform” Japanese family law and popularize a joint custody option. This chapter focuses on both people who experienced a “clean break” divorce and those who are increasingly calling that disconnection into question. It argues that although there are no requirements for shared custody, a substantial minority of families sustain de facto joint custody. Demonstrating contested, shifting ideals of familial bonds, these attempts to share custody highlight desires to redress the disconnection divorce produces and to create connected families, even when they bring legal risks.
5. The Costs of Divorce
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226701004.003.0006
[stigma;poverty;gender;economic inequality;employment;social class;batsu (X)]
This chapter begins by analyzing the stigma implicit in the common slang term that describes divorced people as those with“one X” or“one strike” (batsu ichi). In the last twenty years, the long-standing stigma around divorce in Japan has become tightly wrapped with poverty. As in other cultural contexts, divorce often decreases the standards of living of women in particular. In Japan, amidst popular awareness of increasing economic inequalities, divorce exacerbates and extends poverty in highly gendered patterns. This chapter focuses on the lives of women to provide a portrait of lived realities following divorce. Many of these women actively sought divorce and remain happy with that decision, although their lives after divorce can tumble quickly into poverty or walk a precarious line near it. The chapter argues that contrary to popular images of divorce as evidence of women’s ascendance and men’s enervation, the lived realities of divorce leave women worse off by many measures.
6. Bonds of Disconnection
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226701004.003.0007
[bonds;social ties;muen shakai;gender;recovery;friendship;support groups;romance]
This chapter analyzes and refutes popular assumptions that divorce isolates so completely that it leaves peopledesperately alone. Amidst popular discourse about the new lack of “social bonds” (muen shakai), divorce seems to be the most obvious instantiation of these trends: people intentionally breaking bonds they had previously held. While divorce can bring loneliness and disconnection, it also enables new bonds that would have been otherwise impossible or inconceivable. Rather than merely isolating individuals, divorce catalyzes “bonds of disconnection,” opportunities for new types of connection and relationships emerging precisely because of previous separations. In therapeutic spaces, among groups of friends unified by similar experiences, and in recreational contexts, divorce brings people together and enables them to create enduring social ties. The chapter is organized around a series of extended profiles intended to give the reader a broader sense of how divorce shapes people’s daily lives.
Conclusion: Endings and New Beginnings
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226701004.003.0008
[ending;relationality;connection]
The conclusion situates the book’s ethnographic descriptions within the author's broader claims about the struggles surrounding selfhood, relationality, and intimacy in contemporary Japan. Reminding readers of the diversity of experiences analyzed and the range of people represented, the chapter returns to the book’s main themes to highlight the ways in which independence and connection persist as especially fraught in the current moment. The conclusion reminds readers of the possible benefits and pitfalls of divorce, dismissing any simplistic notions of social collapse, family degradation, or unmitigated female triumph.
