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P ermitted and Prohibited Desires Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan Anne Allison • .. WestviewPress A Dnmum of HarperCol linsPubltshers Japanese Mothers and Obentos: The Lunch Box as Ideological State Apparatus Japanese nursery school children, going off to school for the first time, carry with them a boxed lunch (obent6) prepared by their mothers at home. Customarily these obent6 are highly crafted elaborations: a multitude of miniportions artistically de- signed and precisely ar ran ged in a container that is sturdy and cute. Mothers tend to expend inordinate time and attention on these obent6 in ef forts both to please their children and to affirm that they are good mothers. Children at nursery school are taught they must consume their entire meal according to school rituals. Packing food in an obent6 is an everyday practice of Japanese. Obent6 are sold at train stations, catered for special meals, carried to work, and sold as fast food. Adoption of the obent6 at the nursery school level may seem only natural to Japanese and unremarkable to outsiders, but I argue in this chapter that the obent6 is invested with a gendered state ideology. Overseen by the authorities of the nursery school institution, which is linked to, if not directly monitored by, the state, the practice of the obent6 situates the producer as a woman and mother and the consumer as a child of a mother and a student of a school. Food in this con- text is neither casual nor arbitrary. Eaten quickly in its entirety by the student, the obent6 must be fashioned by the mother so as to expedite this chore for the child. Both mother and child are being watched, judged, and constructed; and it is only through their joint effort that the goal can be accomplished. I use Louis Althusser's concept of the ideological state apparatuses (1971) to frame my argument, briefly describing how food is coded as a cultural and aes- thetic apparatus in Japan and what authority the state holds over schools in Japanese society. Thus situating the parameters within which the obent6 is regu- lated and structured in the nursery school setting, I will examine the practice both of making and eating obent6 within the context of one nursery school in Tokyo . As an anthropologist and mother of a child who attended this school for fifteen 81

82 .. Japanese Mothers and Obentos months, I base my analysis on my observations; discussions with other mothers; daily conversations and an interview with my son's teacher; exam ination of obento magazines and cookbooks; participation in school rituals, outings, and Mother's Association meetings; and the multifarious experiences of my son and myself as we faced the obento process every day. Although obentos as a routine, task, and art form of nursery school culture are embedded with ideological and gendered meanings that the state indirectly ma- nipulates, the manipulation is neither total nor totally coercive. Pleasure and cre- ativity for both mother and child are also products of the obento process. Cultural Ritual and State Ideology As anthropologists have long understood, not only are the worlds we inhabit sym- bolically constructed, but also our cultural symbols are endowed with, or have the potential for, power. How we see reality, in other words, is how we live it So the con- ventions by which we recognize our universe are also those by which all of us as- sume our place and behavior within that universe. Culture is, in this sense, doubly o constructive: constructing both the world for people and people for specific worlds. The fact that culture is not necessarily innocent and power, not n eces sa rily transparent has been revealed by much theoretical work conducted both inside and outside the discipline of anthropology. The scholarship of the neo-Marxist Louis Althusser (1971), for example, has encouraged the conceptualization of power as a force that operates in ways that are subtle, disguised, and accepted as everyday social practice. Althusser differentiated between two major structures of power in modern capitalist societies. The first he called (repressive) state appara- tuses (SAs), institutions, such as the law and police, that are sanctioned by a repres- sive state to wield and manage power through the threat of force (1971:143-145). Contrasted with this is a second structure of power-the ideological state ap- paratuses (ISAs). These are institutions that have some overt function other than political or administrative: mass media, education, health and welfare, for exam - ple. More numerous, disparate, and functionally polymorphous than the SAs, the ISAs exert power not primarily through repression but through ideology. De- signed and accepted as having another purpose--to educate (the school system), entertain (film industry), or inform (news media)-the ISA serve not only their stated objective but also an unstated one, that of indoctrinating people into seeing the world a certain way and accepting certain identities as their own within that world (Althusser 1971:143-147). Although both structures of power operate simultaneously and in complemen- tarity, the ISAs, according to Althusser, are the more influential of the two in cap- Japanese Mothers and Obentos .. 83 italist societies. Disguised and screened by another operation, the power of ideol- ogy in an ISA can be both more far reaching and insidious than an SXs power of coercion. Hidden in the movies we watch, the music we hear, the liquor we drink, the textbooks we read, the ISA is overlooked because it is protected, and its pro- tection-or its alibi (Barthes 1972:109-111)-allows the terms and relations of ideology to spill into and infiltrate our everyday lives. A world of commodities, gender inequalities, and power differentials is seen, therefore, as the natural environment, one that makes sense because it has be- come our experience to live it and accept it. This commonsense acceptance of a particular world is the work of ideology, and it works by concealing the coercive and repressive elements of our everyday routines but also by making those rou- tines of the everyday familiar, desirable, and simply our own. This is the critical element of Althusser's notion of ideological power: Ideology is so potent because it becomes not only ours but us-the terms and machinery by which we structure ourselves and identify who we are. Japanese Food as Cultural Myth The author in one obento magazine, the type of medium-sized publication that, fil led with glossy pictures of obento and ideas and recipes for successfully recreat- ing them, sells in the bookstores across Japan, declares: "The making of the obento is the one most worrisome concern facing the mother of a child going off to school for the first time" (Shufunotomo 1980: inside cover). Another obento journal, this one heftier and packaged in the encyclopedic se- ries of the prolific women's publishing firm Shufunotomo, articulates the same social fact: "First-time obentos are a strain on both parent and child" ("Hajimete no obento wa, oya mo ko mo kinchOshimasu") (Shufunotomo 1981:55). Any outside observer might ask, What is the real source of worry over obento? Is it the food itself or the entrance of the young child into school for the first time? Yet as one looks at a typical child's obent6-a small box packaged with a five- or six-course miniaturized meal whose pieces and parts are artistically and neatly arranged and perfectly cut (see Figures 4.1, 4.2)-would immediately re- veal, no food is "just" food in Japan. What is not so immediately apparent, how- ever, is why a small child with limited appetite and perhaps scant interest in food is the recipient of a meal as elaborate and as elaborately prepared as any made for an entire family or invited guests? Certainly in Japan, much attention is focused on the obento. It is invested with a significance far beyond that of the merely pragmatic, functional one of sustaining a child with nutritional foodstuffs. Since this investment beyond the pragmatic is

84 .. japanese Mothers and Obentos P 1 G u R E 4.1 Example of obentos, signs of maternal love and labor. souRcE: 365 nichi no obento hyakka (Encyclopedia of lunch box for 365 days), 1981 (Tokyo: Shufunotomosha), p. 83 true of any food prepared in Japan, it is helpful to examine culinary codes for food preparation that operate generally in the society before focusing on chil- dren's obento. As has been remarked often about Japanese food, the key element is appear- ance. Food must be organized and reorganized, arranged and rearranged, stylized and restylized, to appear in a design that is visually attractive. Presentation is crit- ical not to the extent that taste and nutrition are displaced, as has been sometimes argued, but to the degree that how food looks is at least as important as how it tastes and how good and sustaining it is for one's body. As Donald Richie points out in his eloquent and informative book A Taste of Japan (1985), presentational style is the guiding principle by which food is pre- pared in Japan, and the style is conditioned by a number of codes. One code is for smallness, separation, and fragmentation. Nothing large is allowed, so al l portions are cut to be bite sized and served in tiny individual dishes.' There is no one big dinner plate with three large portions of vegetable, starch, and meat, as in Ameri- can cuisine. Consequently, the eye is pulled not toward one totalizing center but away to a multiplicity of decentered parts.2 Visually, food is presented according to a structural principle not only of seg- mentation but also of opposition. Foods are broken up or cut up to make con- trasts of color, texture, and shape. Foods are meant to oppose one another and Japanese Mothers and Ob e n t o s .. 85 PIG u RE 4· 2 An obento cookbook lists suggestions for the month of January. This lunch is made out of dried salmon flakes, vegetables, fruit, and rice and is constructed to look like a flower patch. souRcE: 365 n i c h i no obento hyakka (Encyclopedia of lunch box for 365 days), 1981 (Tokyo: Shufunotomosha), p. 103 clash: pink against green, roundish foods against angular ones, smooth substances next to rough ones. This oppositional code operates not only within and between the foods themselves but also between the food and the containers in which they are placed: a circular mound in a square dish, a bland-colored food set against a bright plate, a translucent sweet in a heavily textured bowl (Richie 1985:40-41). The container is as important as what is contained, but it is really the contain- ment that is stressed, that is, how food has been (re)constructed and (re)arranged from nature to appear, in both beauty and freshness, perfectly natural. This styliz- ing of nature is a third code by which presentation is directed; the injunction is not only to retain , as much as possible, the innate naturalness of the ingredients- by shopping daily so food is fresh and leaving much of it either raw or only mini- mally cooked-but also to recreate in prepared food the promise and appearance of the "natural." As Richie writes, "The emphasis is on presentation of the natural rather than the natural itself. It is not what nature has wrought that excites admi- ration but what man has wrought with what nature has wrought"(1985:11). This naturalization of food is rendered in primarily two ways. First, nature is constantly hinted at and appropriated through decorations that serve as sea- sonal reminders, such as a maple leaf in the fal l or a flower in the spring; through

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86 .. Japanese Mothers and ObentOs the food itself, such as in-season fruits and vegetables; and through season- coordinated dishes such as glas sware in the s um m er and heavy pottery in the win- ter. The other device, to some degree the inverse of the first. is to accentuate and perfect the preparation process to such an extent that the food appears not only to be natural but � ore nearly perfect than nature ever could be. This is nature made artificial. Thus, by naturalization, nature is not only taken in by Japanese cuisine but taken over. It is this ability both to appropriate "real" nature (the maple leaf on the tray) and to stamp the human reconstruction of that nature as "natural" that lends Japanese food its potential for cultural and ideological manipulation. It is what Barthes calls a second-order myth (1972:114-117). A second-order myth is cre- ated when a practice, or "language" in Barthes's terms, is taken over by some in- terest or agenda in order to serve a different end. For exam ple, people commonly send roses to lovers and consume wine with dinner; a mother makes a practice of cleaning up after her child. These practices serve individual, pragmatic ends. They constitute a "first order of language," or a "language-object; again in Barthes's terms. A second order of language (or a "metalanguage" or "second-order semio- logical system") is created when the florist who sells roses, the liquor companies who market wine, or conservative politicians who campaign for a gendered divi- sion of labor with women kept at home promote such practices for their own ends. Thus what is practical or individual becomes politicized. As Barthes points out, the primary meaning is never lost. Rather, it remains and stands as an alibi, the cover under which the second, politicized meaning can now hide. Roses sell better, for example, when lovers view them as a vehicle to express love rather than as the means by which a company stays in business. At one level, food is just food in Japan-the medium by which humans sustain their nature and health. Yet Japanese cuisine carries other meanings that in Barthes's terms are mythological. One of these is national identity: Food is appro- priated as a sign of the culture. To be Japanese is to eat Japanese food, as so many Japanese confirm when they travel to other countries and cite the greatest prob- lem they encounter as the absence of "real" Japanese food. Stated the other way around, rice is so symbolically central to Japanese culture that many Japanese say they can never feel ful l until they have consumed their rice at a particular meal or at least once during the day.3 Embedded within this insistence on eating Japanese food; thereby reconfirm- ing and reidentifying one as a member of the culture, are the principles by which Japanese food is customarily prepared: perfection, labor, small distinguishable parts, opposing segments, beauty, and the stamp of nature. Overarching all these more detailed codings are two that guide the making and ideological appropria- tion of the nursery school obento most directly: ( 1) there is an order to the food, a Japanese Mothers and ObentOs .. 87 right way to do things with everything in its place and each place coordinated with every other, and (2) the one who prepares the food takes on the responsibil- ity of producing food to the standards of perfection and exactness that Japanese cuisine demands. Food may not be casual, in other words, and the producer may not be casual in preparing it. In these two rules is a message both about social order and the role gender plays in sustaining and nourishing that order. School, State, and Subjectivity In addition to first- and second-order meanings (food as pragmatic and food as culturally coded), the rituals and routines surrounding obentos in Japanese nurs- ery schools present, I suggest, a third order, manipulation. This order is installed by the school system to socialize children as well as their mothers into the gen- dered roles and subjectivities they are expected to assume in a political order de- sired and directed by the state. In modern capitalist societies such as Japan, the school, according to Althusser, assumes the primary role of ideological state apparatus. A greater segment of the population spends longer hours and more years here than in previous historical periods. Also, education has now taken over from other institutions such as reli- gion the pedagogical function of being the major shaper and inculcator of knowl- edge for the society. Concurrently, as Althusser has pointed out for capitalist modernism (1971:152,156), repression has gradually been replaced by ideology as the prime mechanism for behavior enforcement. We are influenced less by the threat of force and more by the devices that present and inform us of the world we live in and the subjectivities that world demands; thus knowledge and ideol- ogy become fused and education emerges as the apparatus for pedagogical and ideological indoctrination. In practice, as school teaches children how and what to think, it also shapes them for the roles and positions they wil l later assume as adult members of the society. How the social order is organized according to gender, power, labor, and class, in other words, not only is as important as the basics of reading and writing but is transmitted through and embedded in those classroom lessons. Thus knowledge is not only socially constructed but also differentially acquired accord- ing to who one is or will be in the political society one will enter in later years. Precisely what society requires in the way of workers, citizens, and parents will be the condition determining or influencing instruction in the schools. This latter equation, of course, depends on two factors: (I) the agreement or disagreement among different interests concerning what subject positions are de- sirable and (2) the power any particular interest, including the state, has in exerting

88 " Japanese Mothers and Obentos its desires on or through the system of education. In Japan's case, the state wields enormous control over the systematization of education. Through its Ministry of Education (Monbusho), education is centralized and managed by a state bureau- cracy that regulates almost every aspect of the educational process. On any given day, for example, what is taught in every public school follows the same curricu- lum, adheres to the same structure, and is informed by textbooks from the pre- scribed list. Teachers are nationally screened, school boards uniformly appointed (rather than elected), and students institutionally exhorted to obey teachers giv et_ their legal authority (changing in some prefectures these days), for example, to write secret reports (naishinsho) that may obstruct a student's entrance into high school.4 The role of the state in Japanese education is not limited, however, to the exten- sive power granted to the Ministry of Education. Even more powerful is the prin- ciple of the gakureki shakai (literally, academic-record society) by which careers of adults are determined by the schools they attend as youth. A reflection and con- struction of the new economic order of postwar Japan, 5 school attendance has be- come the single most important determinant in who will achieve the most desir- able positions in industry, government, and the professions. School admission is itself based on a single criterion-a system of entrance exams that determines entrance selection-and it is to the end of preparation for exam s that school, even at the nursery school level, is increasingly oriented. Learning to follow directions, doing as one is told, and ganbaru (or working hard, never giving up; Asanuma 1987) are social imperatives that are sanctioned by the state and taught in the schools. Nursery School and Ideological Appropriation of the Obento The nursery school stands outside the structure of compulsory education in Japan. Most nursery schools are private, and although attendance is not compul- sory, a greater proportion of the three- to six-year-old population of Japan at- tends rreschool than in any other industrialized nation (Tobin 1989; Hendry 1986; Boocock 1989). Differentiated from the hoikuen, a preschool institution with longer hours and more like day care than school,6 the y6chien (nursery school) is widely perceived as instructional, not necessarily in a formal curriculum but more in indoctrina� tion to attitudes and structures of Japanese schooling. Children learn less about reading and writing than they do about how to become a Japanese student; and both parts of this formula-Japanese and student-are equally stressed. As Rohlen has written, the "social order is generated" in the nursery school, first and Japanese Mothers and ObentOs .. 89 foremost, by a system of routines (1989:10, 21). Educational routines and rituals are therefore of heightened importance in yochien, for whereas these routines and rituals may be the format through which subjects are taught in higher grades, they are both form and subject in the yochien. Although the state (through Monbusho) has no direct mandate over atten- dance at nursery schools, its influence at this level is nevertheless significant. First, authority over how the yochien is run is in the hands of the Ministry of Educa- tion. Second, most parents and teachers see the yochien as the first step to the sys- tem of compulsory education that starts in the first grade and is closely controlled by MonbushO. The principal of the yochien my son attended, for example, stated that he saw his main duty as preparing children to enter more easily the rigors of public education soon to come. Third, the rules and patterns of group living (shudan seikatsu), a Japane.se social ideal that is reiterated nationwide by political leaders, corporate management, and educators, is first introduced to the child in nursery school? The entry into nursery school marks a transition both away from home and into the "real world," which is generally judged to be difficult, even traumatic, for the Japanese child (Peak 1989). The obent6 is intended to ease a child's discomfi- ture and to allow a child's mother to manufacture something of herself and the home to accompany the child as she or he moves into the potentially threatening outside world. Japanese use the cultural categories of so to and uchi: So to connotes the outside, which in being distanced and other is cold and hostile; and uchi iden- tifies as warm and comfortable what is inside and familiar. The school falls ini- tially, and to some degree perpetually, into a category of soto. What is ultimately the definition and location of uchi, by contrast, is the home, where family and mother reside.8 By producing something from the home, a mother both girds and goads her child to face what is inevitable in the world that lies beyond. This is the mother's role and her gift; by giving of herself and the home (which she both symbolically represents and in reality manages9), she makes the soto of the school more bearable. The obent6 comes to be filled with the meaning of mother and home in a num- ber of ways. The first is by sheer labor. Women spend what seems to be an inordi- nate amount of time on the production of this one item. As an experienced obent6 maker myself, I can attest to the intense attention and energy devoted to this one chore. On the average, mothers spend twenty-five to forty-five minutes every morning cooking, preparing, and assembling the contents of one obent6 for one nursery school child. In addition, the previous day they have planned, shopped, and often organized a supper meal with leftovers in mind for the next day's obent6. Frequently women 10 discuss obent6 ideas with other mothers, scan obent6 cookbooks or magazines for recipes, buy or make objects with which to

90 .. Japanese Mothers and Obentos decorate or contain (part of) the obent6, and perhaps make small food portions to freeze and retrieve for future obentos.U Of course, effort alone does not necessarily produce a successful obent6. But apart from the results, casualness is never indulged, and even mothers with children who would eat anything prepared obent6s as elaborate as anyone else's. Such labor is in- tended for the child but also the mother: It is a sign of a woman's commitment as a mother and her inspiring her child to being similarly committed as a student. The obent6 is thus a representation of what the mother is and what the child should be- come. A model for school is inherent to what is a gift and reminder from home. This equation is spelled out more precisely in a nursery school rule: All of the obent6 must be eaten. Though on the face of it, this rule is petty and mundane, it is taken very seriously by nursery school teachers and is one not easily conformed to by very small children. The logic is that it is time for the child to meet certain expectations. One of the main agendas of the nursery school, after all, is to intro- duce and indoctrinate children into the patterns and rigors of Japanese education (Rohlen 1989; Sano 1989; Lewis 1989). And Japanese education, by all accounts, is not about fun (Duke 1986). Learning is hard work with few choices or pleasures. Even obent6s from home stop once the child enters first grade.12 The meals there are institutional: largely bland, unappealing, and prepared with only nutrition in mind. To ease a young- ster into these upcoming (educational, social, disciplinary, culinary) routines, obent6s at yochien are designed to be pleasing and personal. The obent6 is also de- signed, however, as a test for the child. And the double meaning is not uninten- tional. A structure already filled with a signification of mother and home is then emptied to provide a new form, one now also written with the ideological de- mands of being a member of Japanese culture and a viable and successful Japa- nese in the realms of school and later work. The exhortation to consume one's entire obent613 is articulated and enforced by the nursery school teacher. The meal can be made into high drama by, for exam- ple, singing a song; collectively thanking Buddha (in the case of Buddhist nursery schools), one's mother for making the obento, and one's father for providing the means to make the obent6; having two assigned class helpers pour the tea; and eating together until everyone has finished. Also, the teacher examines the chil- dren's obentos, making sure the food is all consumed and encouraging, sometimes scolding, children who are taking too long. Slow eaters do not fare well in this rit- ual because they hold up the other students, who as a peer group also monitor a· child's eating. My son often complained about a child whose slowness over food meant that the others were kept inside (rather than being allowed to play on the playground) for much of the lunch period. Ultimately and officially it is the teacher, however, whose role and authority it is to surveil food consumption and to judge the person consuming food. Her sur- Japanese Mothers and Obentos .. 91 veillance covers both the student and the mother, who in the matter of the obent6 must work together. The child's job is to eat the food and the mother's, to prepare it. Hence, the responsibility and execution of one's task is not only shared but conditioned by the other. My son's teacher would talk with me daily about the progress he was making finishing his obent6s. Although the overt subject of dis- cussion wa � y child, most of what was said was directed to me and entailed what I could do in order to get David to consume his lunch more easily. The intensity of these talks struck me at the time as curious. We had just settled in Japan and David, a highly verbal child, was attending a foreign school in a for- eign language he had not yet mastered; he was the only non-Japanese child in the school. Many of his behaviors during this time were disruptive: For example, he went up and down the line of children during morning exercises, hitting each child on the head. Hamada-sensei, however, chose to discuss the obent6s. I thought that surely David's survival in and adjustment to this environment de- pended much more on other factors, such as learning Japanese. Yet it was the obent6 that was discussed with such detail ("David ate all his peas today, but not a single carrot until I asked him to do so three times") and seriousness that I as- sumed her attention was being misplaced. The manifest reference was to box lunches, but wasn't the latent reference to something else?14 Of course, there was another message for me and my child. It was an injunction to follow directions, obey rules, and accept the authority structures of the school system. And all of these practices were embedded in and inculcated through cer- tain rituals: In the nursery school (as in any school except such nonconventional ones as Waldorf and Montessori) and practically any social or institutional prac- tice in Japan, activity was so heavily ritualized and ritualistic that the very form of ritual took on a meaning and value in and of itself (Rohlen 1989:21, 27-28). Both the school day and school year of the nursery school were organized by these rituals. The day, apart from two free periods, for example, was broken by definite routines-morning exercises, arts and crafts, gym instruction, singing- most of which were named and scheduled. The school year was also segmented into and marked by three annual events-Sports Day (Undokai) in fall, the Win- ter Assembly (Seikatsu Happyokai) in December, and the Dance Festival (Bon Odori) in summer. Energy was galvanized by these rituals, which demanded a de- gree of order as well as a discipline and self-control that non-Japanese would find remarkable. Significantly, David's teacher marked his successful integration into the school system by his mastery not of the language or other cultural skills but of the school's daily routines-walking in line, brushing his teeth after eating, arriving at school early, eagerly participating in greeting and departure ceremonies, and completing all of his obento on time. Not only had he adjusted to the school struc- ture but he had also become accepted by the other children as a member of the

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92 .. Japanese Mothers and ObentOs group. Or restated, what once had been externally enforced now became ideolog- ically desirable; the everyday practices had moved from being alien to familiar to him, that is, from being someone else's to being his own. My American child had to become, in some sense, Japanese, and where his teacher recognized this Japa- neseness was in the daily routines such as finishing his obent6. The lesson learned early, which David learned as well, is that not adhering to routines such as com- pleting one's obent6 on time leads to not only admonishment from the teacher but, more importantly, rejection from the other students. The nursery school system differentiates between the child who does and the child who does not manage the multifarious and constant rituals of nursery school. And for those who don't manage, there is a penalty the child learns to ei- ther avoid or wish to avoid. Seeking the acceptance of his peers, the student devel- ops the aptitude, willingness, and, in the case of my son-whose outspokenness and individuality were the characteristics most noted in this cultur e--- -eve n the desire to conform to the highly ordered and structured practices of nursery school life. As Althusser ( 1971) wrote about ideology, the mechanism works when and because ideas about the world and particular roles in that world that serve other (social, political, economic, state) agendas become familiar and one's own. Rohlen makes a similar point, that what is taught and learned in nursery school is social order. Called shudan seikatsu, or group life. it means organization into a group where a person's role is determined by group membership and not "the assumption of choice and rational self-interest" (1989:30). A child learns, in nursery school, to be with others, think like others, and act in tandem with others. This lesson is taught primarily through the precision and constancy of basic routines: "Order is shaped gradually by the repeated practice of selected daily tasks ... that socialize the chil- dren to high degrees of neatness and uniformity" (Rohlen 1989:21). Yet a fe eling of coercive ness is rarely experienced by the child when three principles of nursery school instruction are in place: (1) school routines are made "desirable and pleas- ant" (30), (2) the teacher disguises her authority by trying to make the group the voice and unit of authority, and (3) the regimentation of the school is maintained through an attitude of"intimacy" with the students on the part of the teachers � d administrators (30). In short, when the desires and routines of the school are made into the desires and routines of the child, they are made acceptable. Mothering as Gendered Ideological State Apparatus The rituals surrounding the obent6's consumption in the school determine what ideological meanings the obent6 transmits to the child. The process of production within the home, by contrast, organizes its somewhat different ideological pack- Japanese Mothers and ObentOs .. 93 age for the mother. The two sets of meanings are intertwined, but the mother is faced with different expectations in the preparation of the obent6 than the child is in its consumption. At a pragmatic level, the child must simply eat the lunch, whereas the mother's job is far more complicated. The onus for her is getting the child to consume what she has made, and the general attitude is that this is far more the mothe � esponsibility at this transitional stage than the child's. Much of what ts written, advised, and discussed about the obento has the ex- plicit aim of helping the mother prepare food that the child will eat. One maga- zine advises: "The first day of taking obento is a worrisome thing for both mother and boku [child].15 Put in easy-to-eat foods that your child likes and is already used to, and prepare this food in small portions" (Shufunotomo 1980:28). Filled with recipes, pictures, and ideas, the magazine heads each page with "helpful" hints: • Easy-to-eat is step one. • Next is being able to consume the obent6 without leaving anything behind. • Make it in such a way that the child can become proficient in the use of chop- sticks. • Decorate and fil l it with cute dreams (kawairashiyume). • For older classes (nenchOgumi), make obento fil led with variety. • Once they've become used to it, balance foods your child likes with those they dislike. • For kids who hate vegetables ... • For kids who hate fish .. . • For kids who hate meat ... (Shufunotomo: 28-53). A number of principles are laced throughout cookbooks and other magazines devoted to obent6, the obento guidelines i ssued by the school and sent home in the school flier every two weeks, and the words of Japanese mothers and teachers dis- cussing obent6: ( 1) food should be cut for easy manipulation with fingers or chopsticks, (child-size) spoons and forks, skewers, or toothpicks; (2) portions should be kept small so the obent6 can be consumed quickly and without any left- overs; (3) food that a child does not yet like should be eventually added so as to remove fussiness (sukikirai) in food habits; (4) the obent6 should be pretty, cute, and visually changeable by presenting the food attractively and by adding non- food objects such as silver paper, foil, toothpick flags, paper napkins, cute hand- kerchiefs, and variously shaped containers for portions and sauces (see Figure 4.3); and (5) obent6s should contain related items made as much as possible by the mother's own hands, including the obento bag (obent6bukuro) in which the obento is contained.

94 .. Japanese Mothers and Obentos P 1 G u R E 4. 3 S t o r e s seU a wide range of obento paraphernalia. souRcE: 365 nichi no obento hyakka (Encyclopedia oflunch box for 365 days), 1981 (Tokyo: Shufunotomosha), p. 114 The strictures propounded by publications seem to be endless. In practice I found that visual appeal was stressed by the mothers. By contrast, the directive to use obent6 as a training pro ces s- -a dding new foods and getting older children to use chopsticks and learn to tie the furoshiki16-was emphasized by those judging the obent6 at the school. Where these two sets of concerns met was, of course, in Japanese Mothers and Obentos .. 95 the child's success or failure in finishing the obent6. In my experience, the obent6 was ultimately judged based on this outcome and the mother's role in it. The aestheticization of the obento is by far its most intriguing aspect for a cul- tural anthropologist. Aesthetic categories and codes that operate generally for Japanese cuisine are applied, though adjusted, to the nursery school format. Sub- stances are many � t petite, kept segmented and opposed, and manipulated in- tensively to achieve an appearance that often changes or disguises the food. As a mother insisted to me, the creation of a bear out of miniature hamburgers and rice or a flower from an apple or peach is meant to sustain a child's interest in the underlying food. Yet my child, at least, rarely noticed or appreciated the art I had so laboriously contrived. As for other children, I observed that even for those who ate with no obvious "fussinesses," mothers' efforts to create food as style contin- ued al l year long. Thus much of a woman's labor over obent6 stems from some agenda other than that of getting the child to eat an entire lunch. The latter is certainly a considera- tion, and it is the rationale as well as cover for women being scrutinized by the school's authority figure-the teacher. Yet two other factors are important. One is that the obento is but one aspect of the far more expansive and continuous com- mitment a mother is expected to make for and to her child. Kyoiku mama (educa- tion mother) is the term given to a mother who execu tes her responsibility to oversee and manage the education of her children with excessive vigor. And yet this excess is not only demanded by the state even at the level of the nursery school; it is conventionally practiced by mothers. Mothers who manage the home and children, often in virtual absence of a husband and father, are considered the factor that may make or break a child as she or he advances toward that pivotal point, the entrance examinations.17 In this sense, just as the obent6 is meant as a device to assist a child in the strug- gles of first adjusting to school, the mother is generally perceived as being the sup- port, goad, and cushion for the child. She wil l perform endless and multiple tasks to assist in her child's study: sharpen pencils and make midnight snacks as the child studies, study in order to better verse herself in subjects her child is weak in, make inquiries as to what school is most appropriate for her child, and consult with her child's teachers. If the child succeeds, a mother is complimented; if the child fails, a mother feels guilty. Thus at the nursery school level, the mother starts her own preparation for this upcoming role. Yet the jobs and energies demanded of a nursery school mother are, in themselves, surprisingly consuming. Just as the mother of an entering stu- dent is given a book listing all the preentry tasks she must complete-for exam- ple, making various bags and containers, affixing labels to all clothes in precisely the right place and with the size exactly right-she will be continually expected thereafter to attend Mother's Association meetings, accompany children on field

96 .. Japanese Mothers and ObentOs trips, wash the indoor clothes and shoes of her child every week, add required items to a child's bag on a day's notice, and be generally available. Few mothers at the school my son attended could afford to work even part-time or temporary jobs. Those women who did tended either to keep their outside work a secret or to be reprimanded by a teacher for insufficient devotion to their child. (See Figure 4.4.) Motherhood, in other words, is institutionalized through the child's school and such routines as making the obento as a full-time, stay-at-home job.18 The second factor in a woman's devotion to overelaborating her child's lunch- box is that her experience in doing thus becomes a part of her and a statement, in some sense, of who she is. Marx writes that labor is the most "essential" aspect of our species and that we are defined by what we produce (Marx and Engels 1970:71-76). An obento, therefore, is not only a gift or test for a child but a repre- sentation and product of the woman herself. Of course, these ideologically con- verge, as has been stated already, but I would also suggest that there is a potential disjoining. I sensed that the women were laboring for themselves apart from the school agenda regarding the obento. Or stated alternatively, in the role of domestic manager, mother, and wife that females in Japan are highly pressured and encour- aged to assume there is, besides the endless and onerous responsibilities, also an opportunity for play. Significantly, women find play and creativity not outside their social roles but within them. Saying this is not to deny the constraints and surveillance under which Japa- nese women labor at their obentos. Like their children at school, they are watched by not only the teacher but each other and perfect what they create, partially at least, so as to be confirmed as good and dut iful mothers in the eyes of other mothers. The enthusiasm with which they absorb this task, then, is like my son's acceptance and internalization of the nursery school routines; no longer enforced from outside, the task becomes adopted as one's own. The making of the obent6 is, I would thus argue, a double-edged sword for women. By relishing its creation (for al l the intense labor expended, only once or twice did I hear a mother voice any complaint about this task), a woman is en- sconcing herself in the ritualization and subjectivity (subjection) of being a mother in Japan. She is alienated in the sense that others dictate, surveil, and manage her work. On the flip side, however, it is precisely through this work that the woman expresses, ident ifies, and constitutes herself. As Althusser pointed out, ideology can never be totally abolished (1971:170), which is true in the elabora- tions that women work on "natural" food, producing an obento that is creative and, to some degree, a fulfilling and personal statement. Minami-san, an informant, revealed how both restrictive and pleasurable the daily rituals of motherhood can be. The mother of two children-one aged three and one a nursery school student-Minami-san had been a professional opera � it f.ftt'. ·•JitJ�-t',. H�-:-�-:-t?:rrt. 11i"'' P 1 G u R B 4. 4 An ad for Kewpie mayonnaise that reads, "Always together, cute Kewpie." The image is of a working woman who should be carrying a "cute" child with her. Thus her role as mother continues even into the workplace. This ideology of the continuous mother is also expressed in children who "ca r ry " their mothers everywhere, for example, to school with the mother-prepared obento. souRCE: 365 nichi no obento hyakka (Encyclopedia oflunch box for 365 days), 1981 (Tokyo: Shufunotomosha), back cover 97

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98 .. Japanese Mothers and ObentOs singer before marrying at the relatively late age of thirty-two. Now her daily schedule was organized by routines associated with her child's nursery school- for example, making the obento, taking her daughter to school and picking her up, attending Mother's Association meetings, arranging daily play dates, and keeping the school uniform dean. Minami-san wished to return to singing if only on a part-time basis, but she said that the demands of motherhood, particularly those imposed by her child's attendance at nursery school, frustrated this desire. Secret- ing only minutes out of any day to practice, Minami-san missed singing and told me that being a mother in Japan means being a mother to the exclusion of almost anything else. 19 Despite this frustration, however, Minami-san did not behave like a frustrated woman. Rather she devoted to her mothering an energy, creativity, and intelli- gence I found to be standard in the Japanese mothers I knew. She planned special outings for her children at least two or thre e times a week, organized games that she knew they would like and that would teach them cognitive skills, created her own stories and designed costumes for afternoon play, and shopped daily for the meals she prepared with her childrens' favorite foods in mind. Minami-san told me often that she wished she could sing more, but never did she complain about her children, the chores of child-raising, or being a mother. And her attentiveness was exemplified most fully in her obentos. No two were ever alike, each had at least four or five portions, and she kept trying out new ideas for both new foods and new designs. She took pride as well as pleasure in her obento handicraft, but although Minami-san's obento creativity was impressive, it wasn't unusual. Examples of such obent6 creations from an obento magazine include (1) donut obento: two donuts, two w ieners cut to look like a worm, two cut pieces of apple, two small cheese rolls, one hard-boiled egg made to look like a rabbit with leaf ears and pickle eyes and set in an aluminum muffin tin, cute paper napkin added; (2) w iener doll obento: a bed of rice with two doll creations made out of wiener parts (each doll consists of eight pieces for hat, hai.r, head, arms, body, legs), a line of pink ginger, a line of green parsley, paper flag of France added; (3) vegetable flower and tulip obento: a bed of rice laced with chopped hard-boiled egg, three tulip flowers made out of cut wieners with spinach precisely arranged as stem and leaves, a fruit salad with two raisins, three cooked peaches, three pieces of cooked apple; (4) sweetheart doll obento: in a two-sectioned obento box there are fou.r rice balls on one side, each with a different center, on the other side are two dolls made of quail's eggs for heads, eyes and mouth added, bodies of cucumber, arranged as if lying down with two raw carrots for the pillow, covers made of one flower--cut cooked carrot, two pieces of ham, pieces of cooked spinach, and with different colored plastic skewers holding the dolls together (Shufunotomo 1980:27, 30). (See Figu.re 4.5 for more exam ples of creative obentos.) 99 p 1 G u R B 4. 5 T h i s page from an obento magazine shows four ideas for making obent6s that appeal to kids. soURCE: Obent6 50 0 sen (500 selections oflunch box), 1987 (Tokyo: Shufunotomosha), p. 63

100 .. Japanese Mothers and Obentos The impulse to work and rework nature in these obentos is most obvious per- haps in the strategies used to transform, shape, and disguise foods. Every mother I knew came up with her own repertoire of such techniques, and every obent6 mag- azine or cookbook I examined offered a special section on these devices (see Fig- ure 4.6). It is important to keep in mind that these are treated as only embellish- ments added to parts of an obent6 composed of many parts. The following is a list from one magazine: lemon pieces made into butterflies, hard-boiled eggs made into daruma (popular Japanese legendary figure of a monk without his eyes; eyes are added to daruma figures when a person reaches her or his goal), sausage cut into flowers, a hard-boiled egg decorated as a baby, an apple piece cut into a leaf, a radish flaked into a flower, a cucumber cut like a flower, mikan (nectarine orange) pieces arranged into a basket, a boat with a sail made from a cucumber, skewered sausage, radish shaped like a mushroom, a quail egg flaked into a cherry, twisted mikan piece, sausage cut to become a crab, a patterned cucumber, a ribboned car- rot, a flowered tomato, cabbage leaf flower, a potato cut to be a worm, a carrot de- signed as a red shoe, an apple cut to simulate a pineapple (Shufunotomo 1980: 57-60). Nature is not only transformed but also supplemented by store-bought or mother-made objects that are precisely arranged in the obent6. The former come from an entire industry and commodification of the obent6 process: complete racks or sections in stores selling obento boxes, additional small containers, obento bags, cups, chopstick and utensil containers (all these with various cute characters or designs on the front), cloth and paper napkins, foil, aluminum tins, colored ribbon or string, plastic skewers, toothpicks with paper flags, and paper dividers. Mothers are encouraged and praised for making some of these themselves: obent6 bags, napkins, and handkerchiefs with appliqued designs or the child's name em- broidered. These supplements to the food, the arrangement of the food, and the obent6 box's dividing walls (removable and adjustable) furnish the order of the obent6. Everything appears crisp and neat with each part kept in its own place: two tiny hamburgers set firmly atop a bed of rice, vegetables in a separate com- partment in the box, fruit arranged in a muffin tin. How the specific forms of obent6 artistry-for example, a wiener cut to look like a worm and set within a muffin tin-are encoded symbolically is a fascinating subject. Limited here by space, however, I wil l only offer initial suggestions. Ar- ranging food into a scene recognizable by the child was an ideal mentioned by many mothers and cookbooks. Animals, human beings, and other food forms (making a pineapple out of an apple, for example) predominate, perhaps for no other reason than that they are familiar to children and easily produced by moth- ers. Mothers I knew created animals and faces in supper meals and obent6 made for other outings, yet their impulse to do this seemed not only heightened in the 101 F 1 G u R E 4. 6 An obento cookbook shows strategies for reimagining food: ribboned carrots, sausages made into crabs or worms, an apple designed into a pineapple, a flower- tomato, carrots converted into a pair ofshoes. souRcE: Obento 500 sen (500 selections oflunch box), 1987 (Tokyo: Shufunotomosha), p. 59

obento that were sent to school but also played down in food prepared _for other age groups. Consiste nt in Japanese cooking gener ally, as stated earlier , are the dual princi- ples of manipu lation and order. Food is manip ulated into some other form than what it assumes either naturally or upon being cooked: Lines are put into mashed potatoes, carrots are flaked, wieners are twisted and sliced. Also, food is ordered by human rather than by natural principles; everyth ing must have neat bound- aries and be placed precisel y so those bounda ries do not merge. These two struc- tures are the ones most important in shaping the nursery school obento as well, and the realistic imager y is primarily a means by which the codes of manipulat ion and order are learned by and made pleasura ble for the child. The simulac rum of a pineapple recreated from an apple is therefore less about seeing the pineapple in an apple (a particul ar form) and more about reconstr ucting the apple into some- thing else (the process of transfo rmation). The intense labor, manage ment, comm odificatio n, and attentiv eness that goes into the making of an obento lace it, however, w ith many and various meanings. Overarch ing all is the potential to aesthetic ize a certain social order, a social order that is coded (in cultural and culinary terms) as Japanese . Not only is a mother making food more palatable to her nursery school child, she is creating food as a more aesthetic and pleasing social structu re. The obento's message, then, is that the world is constr ucted very prec isel y and that the role of any single Japanese in that world must be carried out with the same degree of precision. Product ion is demand ing; and the producer must both keep within the borders of her or his role and work hard . The message is also that women, not men, both sustain a child through food and constitute the ideologi cal support of the culture that this food embeds . No Japanese man I spoke with had or desired the experie nce of making a nursery school obento even once, and few were more than periphe rally engaged in their childre n's education. The male is assigned a position in the outside world where he labors at a job for money and is expected to be primarily identified by and commi tted to his place of work. 20 Helping in the manage ment of the home and in raising children has not become an obvious male concern or interest in Japan, even as more and more women enter what was previously the male domain of work. Females have remaine d as the center of the home, and this message too is explicitly transm itted in both the product ion and consu mption of entirely female produc ed obento. The state accrues benefits from this arrange ment . Childre n depend to a high degree on the labor women devote to their mothering , and women are pressured to perform as well as take pleasure in such routine materna l tasks as making the obento. Both effects are encour aged and promo ted by instituti onal features of the Japanese Mothers and Obentos .. 103 . d 1 · all gu ided at even the h il state run and at least I eo ogtc y educational system, eav y d di . . £labor is firmly set in place. Labor nursery school level. Thus a gendere V IS io d n h o d or king is more extractable . ali d to be compliant an ar w ' from males, soct . ze almost all domestic and familial management. when they have WIVes to rely on fo � I b (they are increasingly forced to enter And females become a source o� c eap :n �� ding those vast sums incurred in ed- the labor market t�y dome � ti � costs, . d ties keep them from taking any but ucating children) because therr omestic u low paying, part-time jobs . th operate w ithin the ideological state ap- Hence not only do females, as mo ers, . fficially with the nursery school, paratus of Japan's school system that starts semt t o unto themselves. Motherhood .deological state appar a us h they also operate as an I gh hild at home and school and throug . d 1 king throu c ren is state I eo ogy wor b - th t a child carries from home to . . d I bor such as the o ento, a b . mother-tmp n nte a ' . f Japanese education as emg th t World War II conceptiOn o . school. Hence e pos - d f gender differentiation does not, m . d d mocratic with no agen a o 1 d egalitanan an e d .th. h cultural practices as culinary sty e an . d Conceale WI m sue h . practice, stan up. . . h . h what position and be a V Ior an child-focused mothering is a . world � t ew ; ::: natomy she or he was born with . adult will assume has everything to o WI t. If motherhood is not only h I am left with one queston. . At the end, owever, b d by it into a conduit for ideologt- d . ulated by the state ut rna e . . surveiled an mantp b th political order by redestgnmg cal indoctrination, could not women su �� d e ho upon reading this chapter, obent6? I asked this qu : stion of a Jap :::; m � e ; er : a d been conventional in most recalled her own expenences. Tho � d b to that did not conform to the pre- other respects, she had made her c th ren b o e:z . p i e and rarely artist ic lines of . S oted that e astc, stm , vailing conventions. awa n . . which she was generally raised. She was these obent6 resembled the prmct � les . by d all ed a margm · to think for her- t«· stas a grrl' an was ow �: treated as a person, no JU ' d who has created a life 10r · all ·ndepe n ent woman self. Today she is an exceptiOn y I h h roeland and parents. She loves . th U .t d States away from er o d herself m e m e ' . . f th 1 · obent6 her mother rna e d b h · newly appreciative o e P am . Japanese foo ' ut s e IS d.d t k ep her culturally or ideologt- for her as a child. The obento fed her but I . no e cally attached. For this, Sawa says today, she lS glad.

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188 • Notes up commute to school on public transportation in such urban centers as Tokyo and Osaka. Vast numbers of]apanese children also attend juku (or other supplemental school- ing such as yobikO) after school, particularly for the one or two years preceding entrance exams, taken (at the least and latest) upon entering high school. 37. This is not to say that there is no monitoring, either legal or social, of sexual ly explicit materials. What Kimoto (1983) cal ls a system of"self control" (jishuldset) operates, accord- ing to him, at four levels: Recommendations (to ban or at least label certain publications with a red slip indicating their unsuitability for readers under eighteen years of age) are made to the publishers by (1} the police department, (2) local self-governing bodies (jidzitai}, and (3) certain employee associations. Further, (4) the publishers take certain measures (for ex- ample, set ting up their own ethics committees) to monitor themselves. How efficacious all this monitoring is, however, is questionable. Labeling certain materials as sexually explicit often increases rather than decreases their sales, for exam ple, and large companies often avoid publishing erotica themselves only to do so under the operation of a smaller firm they have purchased. For more discussion of monitoring and censorship se e Chapter 7. 38. Gekiga, created in the 1960s, was a genre of comics whose storytelling was consid- ered more dramatic. 39. Sato argues further that the presence of a porno culture in Japan is the direct result of strict controls over the sexuality of Japanese youth (from teens to early twenties). Japa- nese ofthese ages must study so hard that they have no outlet for their pent-up sexuality. 40. How hyperpresent and constantly enforced these values are in a work-group s itua- tion has often been written about. Se e, for example, the accounts of Thomas Rohlen (1974) and Dor inne Kondo (1990}, who describe specific practices in which, for example, fellow workers were made to expose weaknesses, emotions, and personal histor ies as a de- vice to solidify work relations. See also my work on hostess clubs ( 1994), where I make the same point about parties of men who sing, flirt, get drunk, and joke with one another as a means of building ningenkankei (social relations). 41. I deal so extensively with this i ssue of matricentric families and the resentments as well as dependencies they create in males (as sons as well as fathers-husbands) elsewhere that I devote little space to it here. For my analysis of mother-son relationships in light of how they affect practices, representations, and fantasies of sexuality, see especially Chap- ters 2 and 6. For an elaboration on the nitty-gritty of mother-child relationships, see Chap- ters 4 and 5. I take it as a given in this chapter that the rage inspiring the attacks on women in ero manga stems mainly from the resentment boys feel at being so dependent on their mothers. I also take it as a given that such violence is a convenient and familiar vehicle for expressing a multiplicity of other frustrat ions whose sources lie elsewhere. 42. Labien 12(December):l-38. The comic is entitled "Maia, Daisanwa/Aigan" (Maia, the Third Story of a Pet). 43. Nongenital sex also resonates with pregenital sex, the type of sexuality a child can express with his mother. 44. For discussion of meanings associated with female breasts, see Chapter I; for simi- lar discussion regarding female genitals, see Chapter 7. 45. Mothers may not only encourage a relationship of dependence but also use that re- lationship to discipline their children into regimens of study. Being forced to perform ·by Notes • 189 means of a mother's devotedness and "love," children often react with feelings of rage or ambivalence that have multiple expressions, including real acts of violence against moth- ers. The latter, in fact, are a far more common form of domestic violence than parents abusing children. C H A P T E R 4 I. As Dorinne Kondo bas pointed out, however, these cuisinal principles may be condi- tioned by factors of both clas s and circumstance. Her shitamachi (more traditional area in Tokyo) informants, for exam ple, adhered only casually to this coding, and other Japanese she knew followed them more carefully when preparing food for guests rather than family and when eating outside rather than inside the home (Kondo 1990:61-62}. 2. Rice is often, ifnot always, included in a meal; it may substantially as well as symbol- ically constitute the core of the meal. When served at a table it is put in a large pot or elec- tric r icemaker and spooned into a bowl, stil l no bigger than the many other containers from which a person eats. In an obento, rice may be in one, perhaps the largest, section of a multisectioned obent6, box, yet it will be arran ged and served with a variety of other foods. In a sense rice provides the syntactic and substantial center to a meal, yet the presentation of the food rarely emphasizes this core. The rice bowl is refilled rather than heaped, as in the preformed obent6 box, and rice is often embroidered, supplemented, or covered with other foods. 3. Japanese until recently both have endured a high price for rice at home and resisted Amer ican attempts to export rice to'Japan in order to stay domestically self-sufficient in this national food qua cultural symbol. And for a long time, rice was the only foodstuff in which Japanese maintained self-sufficient production. 4. The primary sources on education I use here are Horio ( 1988), Duke ( 1986), Rohlen (1983), and Cummings (1980}. 5. Ne ither the state's role in overseeing education nor a system ofstandardized tests is a new development in post-World War II Japan. What is new is the national standardiza- tion of tests and the intensified role the state has thus assumed in overseeing them. See Dore (1965) and Horio (1988). 6. Boocock (1989) differs from Tobin (1989) on this point and asserts that the institu- tional differences are insignificant. Her essay on the preschool system in Japan describes extensively how both y6chien and hoikuen are administered (yochien are under the author- ity of the MonbushO and hoikuen are under the authority of the Kose ish6--Ministry of Health and Welfare) and bow both feed into the larger system of education. She empha- sizes diversity: Though certain trends are common among preschools, differences in teach- ing styles and philosophies are plentiful as well. 7. According to Rohlen (1989}, families are incapable of indoctr inating the child into this social pattern of shadan seikatsu by their very structure and particularly by the rela- tionship (of indulgence and dependence) between mother and child. For this reaso n and the importance placed on group structures in Japan, the nursery school's primary objec- tive, argues Roblen, is teaching children how to assimilate into groups. For further discus- sion of this point see also Peak (1989), Lewis (1989}, and Sano (1989) and the entire issue

190 .. Notes of the Journal of Japanese Studies ( vol. 15, no. I) that is devoted to Japanese preschool edu- cation. These articles, including Boocock's, are published in this issue. 8. For a succinct anthropological discussion of these concepts see Hendry (1987: 39-41). For an architectural study o( Japan's management and organization of space in terms of such cultural categories as uchi and soto, see Greenbie (1988). 9. Endless stud ies, reports, surveys, and narratives document the close tie betwe en women and home, domesticity and femininity, in Japan. A recent international survey conducted for a Japanese housing construction firm, for exam ple, polled working wives in three cities, finding that 97 percent (of those polled) in Tokyo prepared breakfast for their families almost daily (compared with 43 percent in New York and 34 percent in London); 70 percent shopped for groceries on a daily basis (3 percent in New York, 14 percent in London); and only 22 percent had husbands who assisted or were willing to assist with housework (62 percent in New York, 77 percent in London) (quoted in "Burdens of Working Wives," 1991). For a recen t anthropological study of Japanese housewives in English, see Imamura (1987), in Japanese "Josei no Genzai to Mirai" (1985), Mirais hakai (1979), and Ohirasori no SeifukenkyUkai ( 1980). 10. My comments pertain directly, of course, to only the women I observed, inter- viewed, and interacted with at the one private nursery school serving middle-class famil ies in urban Tokyo. The profusion ofobento-related materials in the press plus the revelations made to me by Japanese and observations made by other researchers in Japan (see, for ex- ample, Tobin (1989) and FaUows (1990)), however, substantiate this discus sion among women as a more general phenomenon. II. To illustrate this preoccupation and conscientiousness: During the time when my son was not eating aU his obento, many mothers gave me suggestions, one mother lent me a magaz ine, his teacher gave me a ful l set of obentc'1 cookbooks (one per season), and an- other mother gave me a set of smaU, frozen food portions she had made in advance for fu- ture obentos. 12. My son's teacher, Hamada-sensei, cited this explicitly as one of the reasons the obento was such an important training device for nursery school children. "Once they be- come ichinensei [first-graders] they'D be faced with a variety of fo od, prepared without elaboration or much spice, and will need to eat it within a delimited time period." 13. An anonymous reviewer of this chapter questioned whether such emphasis placed on consumption of food in nursery school leads to food problems and anxieties in later years . Although I have heard that anorexia is a phenomenon now in Japan, I question its connec- tion to nursery school obentc'1s. Much of the meaning ofthe latter, as I interpret it, has to do with the interface and connection between production and consumption, and its gender linkage comes from the production end (mothers making it) rather than the co nsum ption end (children eating it). Hence although control is taught through food, it is not a control linked primarily to females or bodily appearance, as anorexia may tend to be in U.S. culture. 14. Fujita (1989) argues, from her experience as a working mother of a day-care (hoikuen) child, that the substance of these daily talks between teacher and mother is in- tentionaUy ins ignificant. Her interpretation is that the mother is not to be overly involved in or too informed about school matters. Notes .. 191 15. Boku is a personal pronoun that males in Japan use as a familiar reference to them- selves. Those in close relationships with males-mothers, for exampl e-can use boku in the third person to refer to their sons. Its reference in this context is telling. 16. In the upper third grade of the nursery school ( nenchOgumi class; children aged five to six) my son attended, children were ordered to br ing their obento with chopsticks and not forks and spoons (considered easier to use) and in the traditional furoshiki (piece of cloth that wraps items inside and is double tied to close it) instead of the easier-to-manage obento bags with dra�trings. Both furoshiki and chopsticks (o-hashr) are considered tradi- tionaUy Japanese, an d'th eir use marks not only greater effort and skil ls on the part of the children but their enculturation into being Japanese. 17. For the mother's role in the education of her child see, for example, White (1987). For an analysis by a Japanese of the intense dependence created and cultivated in a child on the mother more generaUy, see Doi (1971). For Japanese sources on the mother-child relationship and the ideology (some say pathology) ofJapanese motherhood, see Yama- mura (1971), Kawai (1976), Kyutoku (1981), SOrifu Seihonentaisaku Honbunhen (1981), Kadesbob6 Shinsha (1981). Fujita's account (1989) of the ideology of motherhood at the nursery school level is particularly interesting and relevant in this connection. 18. Women are entering the labor market in increasing numbers, yet the proportion to do so for part-time work (legally constituting as much as thirty-five hours per week but without the benefits accorded to full-time workers) has also increased. The choice of part- time over ful l-time employment has much to do with a woman's simultaneous and almost total responsibility for the domestic realm ("Josei no Gensai to Mirai" 1985; se e also Kondo 1990). 19. As Fujita points out ( 1989:72-79), working mothers are treated as a separate category ofmothers, and nonworking mothers are expected, by definition, to be mothers ful l time. 20. Nakane's much quoted text on Japanese society states this male position in struc- turalist terms (1970). Though dated, see also Vogel (1963) and Rohlen (1974) for descrip- tions of the social roles for middle-clas s, urban Japanese males. For a succinct recent dis- cussion of gender roles within the family, see Lock ( 1990). C H A P T E R 5 1. Compulsory education stops at ninth grade; all students who go on to high school take entrance exatns . 2. For a cr itique of this pr inciple, particularly from the perspective of the damage it wreaks upon children, se e Horio (1988). 3. NHK is also the national (go vernm ent sponsored) television station. 4. The appellations "sensei" and "san" are used when referring to people one knows personaUy. Thus I do not use "sensei" here. 5. Boocock (1989) and Tobin (1989) describe some of the differences, both real and perceived, between nursery schools and day-care centers (hoikuen). Because entrance into the latter is determined by local municipal offices on the basis of a mother's work outside the home (Boocock states that the determination is made on the basis of need, but our