The (Gendered) Disconnect between Relationship Goals and Experiences

In the Japan of the 1980s, life was structured around stable male work, with the patriarchal nuclear family as the foundation of social life, supported by the male breadwinner. In turn, the female was in charge of the affective care of the breadwinning male. The shift to precarity has undermined these structures on the surface; yet in reality, the same expectations linger, leading to double bind in freeter (un and underemployed youth) relationships, as evinced by Cook in her work on freeter relationships and intimacy. According to her, women are invested in making the practices of intimacy they desire a reality in their relationships with freeter males and will end the relationship if their expectations or not met, while male freeters are more likely to “slip” back into traditional roles by framing themselves as [failed] breadwinners, and thus ascribe responsibility for the failure or inevitable end of a relationship to social or economic forces, and not a personal failure to compromise (Cook 38).

Thus, Cook interprets the causation of the temporariness in relationships differently depending on the gender of the party analyzed. The male freeters fall victim to traditional cultural ascriptions while at the same time their economic horizons are precluded by the temporary nature of their work, and both factors lead to their failure to provide intimacy. On the other hand, some women who are in temporary relationships with male freeters (temporary because compromise on intimacy is not possible) are making an active choice—a choice, according to Cook, which is meant to ward off social pressure to marry (Cook 47). Thus, though the explanations differ on the surface, in effect they are more similar than different, as the root cause of temporariness is, in the end, patriarchal, capitalistic gender roles.

Similar themes of casual sex, deteriorating families and open, problematic relationships surface in Japanese films such as The Youth in Fury and All About Lily Chou-Chou alongside temporary work, economic difficulties, and a withdrawal from mainstream society that seems less purposeful than a repurposed necessity—the youth scorning what they were denied. Coupled with drug usage and prostitution, they create heady cocktails of deviancy, yet panic over such behaviors, as discussed previously, ignores contributing economic, class, and gender factors.

Finally, the reception of Japanese doramas and the recent popularity of certain Korean dramas which highlight idealized monogamous relationships between stable couples suggests that the ‘precarious’ relationship is not a default choice, but rather one of necessity, and that the TV audience still yearns for what is construed as the normal, stable, relationship. Of course, this is complicated by the role media plays in producing audience preference. Thus, women are faced with a double bind: the (produced) desire for a normal, stable, correctly societally reproducing heterosexual marriage clashes with the self-development, self-empowerment discourse; neoliberalism, in making women responsible for themselves, can also be its own undoing.

Works Cited:

Cook, Emma E. "Intimate expectations and practices: freeter relationships in contemporary Japan." Asian Anthropology 13.1 (2014): 36-51.