Divorce in Japan: Family, Gender, and the State, 1600-2000.

Vol. 14 No.10 (October 2004), pp.776-779

DIVORCE IN JAPAN: FAMILY, GENDER, AND THE STATE, 1600-2000, by Harald Fuess. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 248pp. Cloth $45.00. ISBN: 0-8047-4357-6.

Reviewed by Leonard J. Schoppa, Department of Politics, University of Virginia. Email: schoppa@virginia.edu.

One might presume “divorce in Japan from 1600-2000” to be a narrow and specialized topic, something only a scholar of Japanese history would find interesting. In Harald Fuess’s hands, however, the topic becomes an opportunity for him to lead us in an exploration of the changing nature of marriage and gender roles in Japan, the effects of economic institutions (like dowries and labor markets) on family structures, and the impact of an evolving legal system. Although Fuess is an historian, his analysis speaks to political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and economists.

The starting point for the book is the puzzling u-shaped historical pattern of Japanese divorce rates. Prior to 1900, Japan’s divorce rate was extremely high. In 1879 in the capital city of Tokyo, 8,667 women married while 4,203 divorced (p.102). In some rural areas, 40 percent of marriages were dissolved by divorce (p.58). The official divorce rate for the nation as a whole reached a level of more than 3 divorces per 1,000 people in the 1880s (p.3), a figure that was much higher than divorce rates that prevailed in Europe and North America at that time and is higher than those that are recorded today in Canada, Australia, and Denmark. The first half of Fuess’s book addresses the question presented by these data: why were divorce rates so high in Japan?

The story becomes even more interesting, however, when you consider what happened to Japanese divorce rates during the 20th Century. Japan’s rate fell steeply after 1898 and continued falling steadily until the 1960s when it reached a record low level of 0.73 per 1,000—a figure far below those that prevailed in Europe and North America at that time. It then began rising through the 1960s and 1970s and accelerated upward in the past decade, reaching a level of 2.3 divorces per 1,000 in 2002 (p.145)—roughly on par with the level of divorce in France. After periods of unusually high divorce before 1900 and unusually low divorce in the first decades after World War II, Japan has finally found itself with a “normal” rate of divorce.

The fall and rise of Japanese divorce rates during the 20th century provides Fuess with additional puzzles to explore. Why did the rate fall sharply after 1898? Did the fall result from the adoption of a new civil code in that year? And why did rates begin rising again in the 1960s? Much of the work done by economists and sociologists of marriage has focused on the secular rise in divorce rates in Europe and North America over the last several decades. Fuess proposes that we [*777] should be able to learn more about the causes of divorce by examining Japan’s record of high, falling, and rising divorce rates.

In exploring the reasons for Japan’s high rate of divorce before 1900, Fuess looks at a number of theories growing out of the literature on law and economics. Perhaps the rate was high because local customs required only small dowries and provided (in most places and under most conditions) for the return of the dowry after divorce. With such low penalties for exit from marriage, no wonder so many couples divorced.

Fuess provides an exhaustive review of dowry and divorce customs, drawing on an 1875 survey of local marriage and divorce norms compiled by the Meiji government in order to provide the background it needed to draft a new civil code. Dowries were indeed small, typically consisting of several items of clothing wrapped in a piece of cloth. While women from wealthier families sometimes brought land, money, and other valuables into their marriages, “popular customs of divorce strongly affirmed the right of the divorced wife to receive her dowry back” (p.82), and this return was designed to be “a facilitator of remarriage” (p.90).

Fuess carefully considers the possibility that the economic incentives created by these institutions gave rise to the high divorce rates of that era, but he ultimately rejects this explanation in favor of a cultural one. Dowry customs with low costs of exit from marriage AND high divorce rates, he argues, both reflected the Japanese population’s relaxed attitudes toward marriage and divorce. Marriage was not sacred and divorce was not immoral: “what humans had voluntarily united, humans could voluntarily dissolve. A failed marriage was a mismatch between spouses and/or their families, not a personal moral failure” (p.98).

The main evidence Fuess presents in favor of his explanation is the age distribution of divorce. At the end of the 19th century, almost half of all divorces took place within the first two years of marriage and involved men and women in their early twenties (pp.73, 123). Marriage was seen as a trial and error process: “spousal compatibility was tested through cohabitation or marriage, and if the test was unsuccessful, separation or divorce ensued” (p.72). If the low costs of exit were driving divorce patterns, one would not expect such a pronounced pattern since the costs of divorcing in later years were not significantly greater than those of divorcing in the first two years of marriage.

Fuess offers a parallel explanation for the fall of divorce rates after 1898. Once again he considers the possibility that this decline was caused by changes in the legal and economic barriers to exit. Perhaps the new civil code adopted in that very year made exit from marriage much more difficult and costly and thereby forced divorce rates down. Indeed, he notes, the timing of the sudden drop in the number of divorces—with the annual number of cases falling from 124,075 to 66,417 in just two years—suggests the legal code may have effected “one of history’s greatest moments of social engineering” (p.3).

Similarly, the decline could be due to the prevalence of much larger dowries [*778] (p.140) and the introduction of new marriage rituals in which couples declared their fidelity in public in very expensive ceremonies. In a comment that appears to directly support an economic explanation for divorce, one observer of trends in the 1930s contrasted the popularity of elaborate marriage rituals at major shrines in his day with the much lower costs of marriage in the past. In his youth, he recalled, “one could get married for five yen. That is why divorce was so frequent; for five yen you could go to a restaurant, visit a whorehouse, or get married. As a result one broke up marriages without much thought. Now, however, so much money goes into them that one thinks a long time before getting a divorce” (p.139).

As in his explication of the high divorce rates of the late 19th century, however, Fuess dismisses these straightforward legal and economic explanations for the fall in divorce rates. He disputes the effects of the changes in the legal regime, first, by carefully examining divorce statistics during the transitional period and attributing part of the sharp decline in the first two years of the system to changes in the definition of marriage, the household registration system, and the definition of divorce. Prior to the reform, some of those who were listed as “divorced” were WIDOWS whose relations with the deceased husband’s family were dissolved. Afterward, such cases were not recorded in the divorce statistics.

Second, he finds the restrictions placed on legally adjudicated “court” divorces in the 1898 civil code (e.g. men could not force wives who were innocent of adultery or any other fault to accept divorce) to be a poor explanation for the fall in divorce rates since the number of legally adjudicated divorces was so small. Before the reform, just 0.002 percent of divorces were contested before magistrates (p.5) while after the reform, the share of contested divorces never exceeded one percent of the total. Most cases of divorce, both before and after the reform, were settled through “mutual consent” in a process that merely required that the two spouses and their families register the divorce. With so little change in the legal framework governing this “no fault” type of divorce, Fuess finds it difficult to attribute the sharp fall in divorce rates to the new provisions for adjudicated divorce.

Finally, he finds it difficult to attribute the sustained and gradual fall in divorce rates in the years between 1900 and 1960 to the 1898 civil code because no further legal reforms were introduced in succeeding years. While the economic trends he describes (larger dowries and more expensive weddings) emerged concurrently with the gradual fall in divorce rates, Fuess again argues that rather than viewing these economic institutions as the causes of the decline in divorce, we should see BOTH as a reflection of new popular attitudes which held marriage to be much more important (not something to be tried and discarded) and which increasingly regarded divorce as a “shameful” act (p.143). Women brought more wealth into marriages in the form of dowries, families spent much more on wedding rituals, AND couples chose not to divorce because everyone valued marriage much more than they had in the past. [*779]

As an historian, Fuess is content to rely largely on this narrative account to make the case for his cultural explanation of Japan’s falling divorce rate, but social scientists looking for evidence in the data can find it, once again, in his discussion (earlier in the book) of the changing age distribution of divorce. In the late 19th century, divorce rates for those in their early twenties were three times as high as those for individuals in their late thirties and forties. By 1935, in contrast, men and women were divorcing at a steady rate from their twenties into their forties (p.123). The fall in Japanese divorce rates over this period can thus be attributed primarily to the decline in divorces among recently-wed couples, a process Fuess attributes to a shift in popular attitudes from one that accepted a “trial and error” approach to marriage to one that saw marriage as something to be taken more seriously. A focus on legal barriers, dowries, and expensive wedding rituals cannot account for the fact that the bulk of the adjustment in behavior was concentrated among young couples.

DIVORCE IN JAPAN has much more to recommend it. I found Chapter 5, focusing on the early Meiji deliberations over how to treat marriage and divorce in the new “modern” civil code to be particularly interesting. In this chapter and in the later section touching on legal reforms under the United States Occupation, Fuess emphasizes the continuities in customs and legal rules across the great divides of Japanese history, the Meiji Restoration and the defeat in World War II. Throughout, Japan has preferred to treat marriage and divorce as private acts, allowing the vast majority of couples to work out arrangements on their own without the involvement of the courts. This is an argument that challenges the conventional wisdom in historical scholarship on the family in modern Japan, which has emphasized the powerful impact of the state.

Fuess also has a great deal to say about the gender implications of Japan’s divorce customs and laws, though I have not focused on these arguments in this review. Suffice it to say that he is sensitive to that fact that a policy of benign neglect toward divorce by “mutual consent” has frequently worked against women, who have often been forced to accept economically disadvantageous divorces by husbands who have much greater resources at their disposal. Nevertheless, Fuess does not accept the standard view that Japanese divorce customs have always victimized women. He emphasizes how dowry return and attitudes that did not devalue women who had lost their virginity gave women in unhappy marriages a second chance at a more attractive match.