The Japanese Family in Transition: From the Professional Housewife Ideal to the Dilemmas of Choice

A humanely rendered and often poignant exploration of the place of the professional housewife in Japan over the past half-century. Vogel’s study examines the still salient but rapidly waning influence of the post-War sengyō shufu ideal in Japanese society. Drawing on decades of professional and personal interactions with a group of Japanese women and their respective families, Vogel reveals the considerable variation in individual experiences and divergent household trajectories that are often elided under the label, ‘middle class.’. . . The result is an accessibly written monograph that resonates with contemporary studies of Japanese women and family life, while reflecting the rewards and challenges of long ethnographic engagement.

Fifty years after the publication of the classic Japan’s New Middle Class, Suzanne Vogel has produced a memorable sequel that focuses not on the salarymen but on their wives. It is a warm and engaging portrait of the changes as well as the continuities in Japanese family life.

Suzanne Vogel is perfectly placed to offer an important and unique perspective on the changing role of Japanese women. Her compelling portrait of the everyday triumphs and frustrations of Japan’s postwar ‘professional’ housewives offers an important new lens for understanding how the postwar ideal of the ‘perfect household’ and maintaining appearances contributes to the new manifestations of psychological stress we see today.

Suzanne Vogel writes in refreshingly clean prose with a remarkably deft handling of history and context: family, gender, work patterns, and the shift in labor relations and the economy. The book is smart and timely. And I like the take-away message–that there is something that people and the government can do.

Suzanne Vogel’s The Japanese Family in Transition: From the Professional Housewife Ideal to the Dilemmas of Choice is a warm, readable book based on her decades-long relationships with six families from suburban Tokyo. . . .[T]his is an engaging book that many will enjoy reading and find deeply resonant. It is written for a generalist audience and would make a good addition to a course on changing gender roles in Japan or on Japanese society at mid-century.

The author offers a rich social, cultural and historical context for the concept of the family. For example, readers are made aware that the employment of a live-in maid was once popular among the urban middle class, and the development of the rice-cooker changed the housewife’s daily routine. . . .[T]he stories of the women are written in a deeply personal manner likely to prompt reflection on the part of the reader.

The Japanese Family in Transition focuses on the good wives and wise mothers of three of the families featured in Japan’s New Middle Class, and is . . . unfailingly interesting. Most of Vogel’s observations about her subjects–not least that they are different from one another–ring true [in her] skillful and unadorned observation.

This book is likely to become a standard reference–even a classic–among scholars and students of postwar Japanese social and cultural life. Written toward the end of the author’s long and distinguished career as a Harvard psychotherapist and student of Japan (in close alliance with her former husband, the highly regarded Harvard professor Ezra Vogel), her book displays compassion, deep analysis, sensitivity, and humane wisdom not only about Japanese families, but also about Americans interacting with Japanese. The book is organized around three case studies, each with a quite different story to tell in contrast to the others, with very close family and anecdotal details that lead the reader to think of them not as subjects of case studies so much as personal acquaintances. The Vogel’s son Steven, a distinguished scholar of Japanese studies at Berkeley, helped his mother with the editing and preparation for an English-language edition. The writing is clear–often even charming–and accessible to readers without much background in Japanese language and culture, although the book will work best for those with some familiarity with the Japanese language and culture in the past sixty years. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.