The end of history? Or the beginning of the future?
What's Happening to Family Life?
First Impressions of Family Life in Tokyo
The aspect of culture I will study is about family life and
how they treat each other in the family. I chose this topic because I thought
it was really important. This topic is very important because it is one
of the most common things in daily life that people go through and that
will explain how people are like in that culture. It is very relevant to
daily life and these things are expressed by the culture in a unique way.
I also think that it will be interesting to really figure out how family
life is unique compared to other cultures in Japan. And I think it will
be good to see the cultural change in Tokyo because just from seeing the
difference in my grandparent's family and my family, that the ways people
are treated is becoming different.
A "traditional" form of family life would be that
the family members respected the father most and the father is considered
the head of the family that allows something to be done by one of the family
members. Also elders, even in sisters and brothers,were treated differently
than the younger ones. Their furniture is of Japanese style, for example
tatami mats and traditional wooden chests and kotatsu. Also with bathtubs
where you have to boil water to make it hot water in the tub.
A "modern" form of family life is, for example,
just like my family or anyone else's right now. So, the fathers aren't
as special or important in the family like in the "traditional"
families. Also the women, or the mothers, don't stay just in the household
to do their chores or raise their children, but the mothers go out to work
as well as the husbands do. Also, family members aren't treated differently
that much because of their ages. And for how they live, most families don't
even have kotatsu or wooden chests or tatami mats in their houses. For
example, my family. We only have one kotatsu in my room and we don't even
have rooms that have tatami mats. Our houses are build just like western
houses, just smaller and everything is made of convenience.
In family life, there is no "western" form because
for families to be western, they are either people from the western (which
will not be considered as culture in Tokyo) or a Japanese family living
completely like a western person (which will be really rare because if
you are living in Tokyo, you would have some influence in how you live).
So, as for the "western" form of families in Tokyo, there are
none.
I think that the "modern" form of family life is
mostly seen in Tokyo today. More families are changing in the "modern"
way from the "traditional" way because of several things. The
most important reason is that women are going out to work just like the
men. I can see two reasons why they are starting to work as well as their
husbands. First, is that the family is not able to raise their children
and have a house and live reasonably with only the money that the men earns.
Secondly, women are tired of just staying home and doing the same things
everyday so they start working outside the home like their husbands.
An Assessment of My Work
Before working on my research I thought that family life
in Japan would either be traditional or western. But, of course, there
is no family that is completely like a western person so I thought that
is would be traditional. And I think I wanted it that way; I didn't want
to think that we were so influenced by the western that our originality
would disappear. I was totally forgetting about modern style and believed
that all Japanese people were living in a traditional way. I didn't think
that western customs and celebrations effected family life so much. I thought
we were all celebrating only the holidays that were traditional in Japan.
But as I thought, eating utensils are mainly traditional kind but furniture
and houses are designed like the western. So this is what you would call
'modern.'
Finding information for my research was really hard! Even
though I looked in most of the encyclopedias, I couldn't find any information
that would help me answer my questions. Answering the definition questions
was easy because I found many information about the things that I used
as examples for traditional, modern and western but the broad questions
were really hard! I barely found enough information to answer them. Some
information was generalized which was hard to use to answer my questions.
Some information was not helpful at all. I thought that the measurment
questions would be hard to answer but it turned out that they were the
easiest because it wasn't hard to get the information. It just took time
asking all the people but once you got the answers it was easy. If I could
work on this project again, I would start over with some of the questions
I asked. Some questions didn't really help me to figure out whether traditional
family life is disappearing or not. I would also add more questions that
asked about time, not just how much. But I think my measurement questions
were pretty helpful.
"The end of history? Or the beginning
of the future?" Main Page
Prepared by Nozomi Naoi, from Mr.
Hoover's 8th Grade social studies class on "April 13th, 1998".