What's in store for growing number of people who cut family ties?

Is the family dead? No. Dying? Maybe.

It is humanity’s oldest, most universal, most venerated institution. Haven or cage, support or oppression, love or hate, normal or warped, it is the family that sees us into the world and the family that sees most of us out of it. What can replace it? Society? Friendship? Solitude? All three are important but none seems an adequate substitute. Why is it dying, then? Maybe it’s not. Maybe that grim conclusion is too much to read into the fact that as of now some 40 percent of all Japanese households are single-occupant. And maybe the women’s weekly Josei Seven (Feb 13) exaggerates the significance of a trend it calls “putting the family away” – or, translating less literally, shucking it off.

The suggestion is of freedom from bondage if not worse, and some families, beyond question, are viperous pits. “Yuka Yamanaka” (a pseudonym) relates her personal horror story. Her parents, gamblers and alcoholics, left their three infant children, Yuka is the eldest, to more or less fend for themselves until early adolescence made them ripe for sexual abuse. They’d bring strangers, young and old, in off the street and have the children bathe with them. “If I refused they’d hurt my little brother and sister.” It went on for years. The younger siblings found jobs, married and moved away. Yuka remained.

Years passed. The parents grew old and needed care. Yuka was the caregiver. Her father, increasingly infirm, was placed in a home. That left her mother, who, flush with her husband’s life insurance benefits, took up gourmet dining and host clubbing. Some people do know how to enjoy life. Four years ago she died of complications from COVID-19. Yuka breathed a sigh of relief. She was 39. Free at last!

But free to do what? Enjoy life herself? She’d never learned how. She was lonely. You’d think loneliness would be an acceptable price to pay for release from such a family. Yuka’s not sure about that. The family is part of you – maybe the worst part, maybe cancerous; even so – gone, it leaves a void. Some freed prisoners miss their fetters. Some healed sufferers miss their pains. There is a perverse streak in all of us. We don’t know what we want, what to do with ourselves.

Extreme cases aside, the family as we know it must evolve. New times no longer suit the old models. The traditional Japanese family had aspects that to any modern mind, Japanese or non-, seem oppressive. Women especially suffered. A new bride became part of her husband’s household. Her part was to obey – her mother-in-law above all, her husband next in line. Obedience was her pride – or was supposed to be. More likely she suffered in proud silence. To nurse your own elderly parents is one thing. To nurse your in-laws, to whom you have neither blood ties nor, in many cases, ties of affection, is something else. 

Tattered remnants of that old Confucian ethic still flap in the wind, in Japan and elsewhere in east Asia. But they can’t last. Sociological and demographic currents flow against them. Women who see no future in marriage are free not to enter it – and don’t. Children are few. The elderly population soars. There is besides, Josei Seven reminds us, poverty – anomalous in the midst of such plenty as gluts us today, but spreading all the same, a marked feature of the so-called kakusa shakai, “gap society,” characterized by outlandish wealth on top and an increasingly grim struggle to make ends meet below. Care of the elderly is simply too much for the family as it and society are currently constituted. Facilities and support services of various kinds spring up to fill the void, simultaneously relieving the family and contributing to its redundance. “Leave your elderly to or with us,” they say in effect. It’s liberating, but decidedly expensive. Research the magazine cites estimates nursing home care for an 82-year-old man to come to a little over a million yen over five years.

Symbol of family continuity down the ages is the grave. What becomes of our bodies after death would seem to matter little, but the old tend to breathe their last with easier minds knowing their graves will be tended by the loving hands of their children and grandchildren – and beyond them theirs. But that too is now impractical. Whatever hopes the dying entertain, the living are simply too busy, or too financially pressed, or living too far away, or indifferent for other reasons – there is no end of reasons or excuses for indifference, if it even needs an excuse. And so burial too, like every other aspect of family life and death, is changing. Josei Seven notes the advent in recent years of the “natural funeral” – remains sent to mingle with earth or sea or air, even launched via balloon into outer space. Why molder in a grave when you can repose beneath cherry trees, merge with the mountains you once climbed, or fertilize the earth, the great mother of us all, enriching her and thereby the world with your remains, that its future may be brighter than present prospects portend.

A natural funeral requires or perpetuates no family. If now 40 percent of Japanese households are single-occupant, will 100 percent be 100 years from now? Will every man and woman be – a famous poet’s assertion to the contrary notwithstanding – an island? Will human beings flourish as such? Maybe in ways we haven’t yet begun to imagine?

© Japan Today