In Japan, the Heir Is No Longer Apparent

In the annals of Japanese samurai history, few names ring with such glittering tradition as the Tokugawa. The powerful clan unified the nation in 1603 after 100 years of rapacious civil war, provided an unbroken string of 15 shogun rulers for nearly three centuries and symbolized the pervasive influence of ie, the male-led family lineage system.

But although the fabled clan still survives, the patriarchal traditions it represents are being shaken by divorce, democracy, economic downsizing and other modern developments.

Just ask Takako Nagaoka, impeccably coiffed and dripping in diamonds--and in the nobility of being a Tokugawa wife for 17 years. After years of tension, triggered by such taboos as the temerity of a mere wife to speak her mind, her marriage to the great-grandson of Japan’s last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, fell apart this year in the first divorce among direct descendants.

The messy affair, which she says involved $10,000 in debt amassed after her husband was downsized out of a job, has tarnished the family’s legendary name. Nagaoka’s custody of the couple’s two sons, and their adoption of her maiden name, has left the Tokugawa with no direct successor.

But her boys don’t care, she says: Products of a new age, they want to succeed via their own efforts, not through the crutch of a famous clan name.

“The values and thinking of the Tokugawa family don’t fit the present era,” said Nagaoka, 42, herself a descendant of the princely Hosokawa clan that produced former Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa. “To them, the honor of the household is more important than an individual’s happiness.”

As go the Tokugawa, so goes Japan. Households in China and Korea still embrace many elements of the Confucian, male-dominated family succession system--holding the eldest son in highest esteem to continue the lineage, perpetuate the family name, inherit the family property and preside over ancestral rites. Under this system, new brides are absorbed into their husbands’ households--often under the eagle eye and steely thumb of mothers-in-law who ensure that the younger woman adopts the way of the clan in everything from cooking styles to laundry methods.

But Japan is leading Asia in spawning economic and social changes that are rapidly weakening this way of life and even paving the way for greater matriarchal sentiments regarding everything from birth to death.

Baby boys are still preferred throughout most of Asia--in South Korea, for instance, experts suspect that an unwanted female fetus is the reason behind many of the 30,000 abortions performed annually. But in Japan, 76% of couples in a 1992 government survey said they prefer a girl--and more women are gobbling up a special gelatin in hopes of conceiving one under selective fertilization treatments offered here.

The preference for girls represents a significant turnabout from 1982, when the majority wanted a boy, and reflects both a desire for daughters to care for parents in old age and the stronger clout of women in Japanese households today, analysts say.

“Fortunately, Japan has become a peaceful country, so women have gained power domestically and socially,” said Rihatsu Iizuka, a Tokyo gynecologist. “Forty years ago, a wife just nodded when her husband said he wanted a boy. But now a husband nods when his wife says she wants a girl.”

No Longer Calling Husbands ‘Master’

The Justice Ministry is fighting to amend civil laws to allow women to keep their own names after marriage, another challenge to ie traditions. Younger women overwhelmingly support the proposal--just as they increasingly reject calling their husbands shujin, or master, in favor of the more neutral otto, or husband. The proposal was killed this year under fierce opposition by Shinto religious groups and conservative members of the Liberal Democratic Party--who argued it would weaken family ties--but backers vow not to give up.

The eldest son’s role in caring for elderly parents also is being shaken as once-powerful economic incentives to do so--inheriting family property--have all but disappeared under postwar laws mandating a democratic disbursement of family assets. An increasing number of parents are living with married daughters instead--the proportion has more than doubled to 26% over the past decade--in part because of the strong mother-daughter bond and because men report far less friction with fathers-in-law than women do with mothers-in-law, the Life Design Research Institute in Tokyo reported in June.

Traditional burial customs are in flux as more women refuse to be buried with their husbands’ ancestors and are seeking after-life liberation in their own graves. Minako Ikezoe is one: The 42-year-old amateur archeologist shocked her husband six years ago by buying her own grave as a gesture of independence from oppressive ie traditions. Her two daughters have declared that they intend to follow in their mother’s footsteps.

Indeed, younger women are the agents of change: Among those in their 30s, 20% desired their own graves compared with 17% who wanted to be buried in their husband’s ancestral tombs, according to a 1994 study by the Life Design Research Institute. But women in their 60s still showed a strong preference for their husband’s tombs.

Questions Over Who Will Tend the Graves

The shrinking number of children per family is raising sticky questions over who will tend family graves and carry on all-important ancestral rites. But a growing number of people don’t seem to particularly care about such matters.

“No big deal,” Nihon University sociologist Hiroaki Shimizu said about his own lack of a male heir. He himself is fuzzy about his ancestral lineage, anyway, and does not expect to burden his two daughters with care of his family tomb, the Buddhist altar in his home or the ancestral mortuary tablets known as ihai. He jokes to his children: “Just put me in an old folks’ home.”

Even those with sons are resigning themselves to seeing their lineage end with their generation--once a terrible specter that provoked fears of ancestral revenge and lonely wanderings in the afterlife.

Take, for instance, the Kawase family of Tokyo. As eldest son, Tsuyoshi, 30, a university instructor in international business law, would have been expected to take over his family’s property, care for his aging parents and father a male heir. His father, 60-year-old Etsuo, is faithfully fulfilling such filial duties, but the son does not necessarily plan to do this.

“Japan used to be a male-dominant society and the oldest son received special treatment,” the younger Kawase said. “That may have been easier for us [men], but the system does not work in modern society anymore.”

Etsuo Kawase says his duties as eldest son were hammered into his head from childhood but neither he nor his wife pressured Tsuyoshi in the same way. Although saddened to contemplate the death of the name of his family--which has a long history as distinguished sake brewers--Etsuo Kawase is matter-of-fact: “Things are changing, and [Tsuyoshi] should not feel obligated to take care of us. It is his life.”

His wife, Shizuko, added that she did not want to burden her son or daughter-in-law with the “unfair or unreasonable” duties she herself is still expected to perform--such as regularly trekking to the distant family estate to take care of her mother-in-law. “I don’t want my son or his wife to go through the same thing,” she said. “So, I’d rather let him live his life the way he wants.”

Less Willingness to Care for Parents

Such parental reluctance to impose on children, along with more independent attitudes among younger Japanese, is transforming old sensibilities of filial piety that once represented a bedrock ie value. Today, younger Japanese show less willingness to care for aging parents than Chinese and even Americans, according to a study last year of high school students in the three nations by the Japan Youth Research Institute.

Japan’s ie system had persisted for centuries among the samurai class, wealthy landowners and successful merchants but was only imposed on the public during the Meiji period of the late 19th century, scholars say.

That’s when Meiji rebels toppled the Tokugawa shogunate and declared a return to the imperial state headed by the emperor--himself an embodiment of the male succession system, having supposedly descended from the goddess Amaterasu in an unbroken line of rulers for 2,600 years.

Before then, Japan had enjoyed a significant degree of cultural and social diversity, especially among the masses, during the Edo period (1603-1867). In some localities, scholars say, the last child or even a daughter succeeded the household and many people were buried individually rather than in ancestral graves.

But Meiji rulers strengthened and expanded the ie system nationwide by imbuing, for instance, the eldest son with all-encompassing power over everything from inheriting family land to approving clan marriages.

That system, however, began crumbling after World War II.

Analysts say two major factors have transformed traditional ie values: postwar democratic laws weakening the eldest son’s privileged status and the rapid change in Japan’s economic structure from farming and family businesses to salaried workers.

In the days when a successor was needed to take over the family farm or business, it made sense to designate the eldest son--giving him the family property in exchange for caring for parents, said Nyokai Matsushima, a Buddhist priest.

But Japan’s rapid industrialization brought a decline in farming--and widespread popular ambitions to join major corporations as white-collar workers instead. As the economic need for a successor diminished, postwar democratic education began transforming public attitudes regarding the role of women and the eldest son in household affairs, analysts say.

Son Is Allowed to Live His Life Freely

Etsuo Kawase, for instance, says he could afford to raise his son to live his life freely because he is a salaried worker who does not need a successor to take over his own business.

Tokyo lawyer Kazue Akita says many of her cases involve family inheritance squabbles as siblings of the eldest son in feisty fashion assert their rights to an equitable piece of the family pie.

Today, Japan is a checkerboard of both lingering tradition and rapid change as old values still persist in such agricultural areas as northern Tohoku and new ones are taking root in Tokyo, Osaka and other urban centers.

Ikezoe, the amateur archeologist, and her family illustrate the coexistence of both old and new.

Ikezoe had tried to be dutiful and adapt to her husband’s family traditions. She, for example, lived with a mother-in-law who criticized everything from her cooking to the way she folded the laundry and hung the socks and who told her that her university education was a waste because her main task was to obey her husband.

But Ikezoe’s patience didn’t last long. After three months, she fled to her own home in the northern Miyagi prefecture until her husband agreed to move his mother out. Since then, Ikezoe has looked for a way to declare her independence from ie traditions.

Under those traditions, “you virtually have to deny your name, your education and culture,” Ikezoe said. “But the idea that a woman’s happiness is her household’s happiness is greatly diminishing, especially among the younger generation.”

Her declaration of independence was the purchase of her own tomb through the Moyai no Kai Assn., which has responded to the growing public desire for individual burial sites by providing them at a fraction of the cost charged by normal Buddhist temples ($1,000 vs. an average $50,000, according to one woman who recently went grave shopping).

Normally, Buddhist temples don’t sell graves to those without descendants--singles or childless couples, for instance--since they rely on donations from them to perform ancestral rites and maintain the grave site.

Dutiful Defender of Traditions

Ikezoe’s older sister, on the other hand, is the model of the dutiful defender of ie traditions. Abandoning her own ambitions to travel the world as a nurse for the Self-Defense Forces, she yielded to her father’s desires and carried on the family name through marriage to a man willing to be adopted into the clan.

Now the sister is passing on those traditions by drilling into her teenage daughter her duty to protect the family grave and care for her aging parents.

“She is doing to her child what was done to her in order to perpetuate the lineage,” Ikezoe said. “I want to stop it. I want my niece to live freely.”

Chiaki Kitada of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.