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Family at the Margins: State, Welfare and Well-being in Japan

The articles in this special section address the stakes for welfare and well-being when normative ideas surrounding family intersect with state policy and practice in Japan. The central argument motivating this section as a whole is that, in Japan, divergences from normative family ideals often result in social marginalization. While this statement is arguably more or less true in other places as well, these collected studies explore the culturally and historically specific ways that social marginalization in Japan is variously suffered, challenged, and sometimes transformed, all the while attending to the local and temporal specificities of these experiences. Contributors, trained in anthropology, history, religious studies, and literature, develop an interdisciplinary conversation examining the broader stakes of family affiliations and disaffiliations in historical and contemporary Japan. Together we examine what happens when kinship and social networks, bureaucratic family policies, and customary concepts of family exacerbate the social marginalization of vulnerable populations, or trouble people’s desire to be recognized as worthy of care and respect. Japan’s welfare system is often described as the ‘Japanese-style welfare society’, where social welfare has historically been the responsibility of family, community, and company rather than the state. Scholarship on historical and contemporary Japanese family practices and policies has long highlighted the interconnectedness of elements of the Japanese state with intimate spheres of everyday life, what Sheldon Garon calls a ‘powerful pattern of governance in which the state has historically intervened to shape how ordinary Japanese thought and behaved’. Others have remarked on the ways post-Meiji Restoration public discourses frame Japanese state forms and family ideologies as mutually reinforcing. For instance, after the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and through Japan’s colonial movements in East Asia, state discourse often focused on the notion of a nation as a ‘family-state’ headed by the emperor, a designation that made obedience to the government into a moral concern and solidified a patriarchal system of obedience. By shaping the ways corporate groups defined themselves in relation to the rest of society, the Meiji government expanded the demands it could make of families in service of the nation. Nihonjinron discourses of Japaneseness, positing the strength of ‘traditional’ family and community networks, have long undergirded policy and public discourse framings