Patriarchy by the Book

In commenting on Fumi’s visit to Yasuko’s family, I noted the absence of Yasuko’s father, the head of the Sugimoto household: “unseen, unnamed, and unmentioned.” Now, at last, we catch a glimpse of him, albeit an exceedingly brief one, in a single panel in the chapter set at Kazusa’s wedding (SBF, 2:94). However, though seen, he remains unnamed and unmentioned.

Determining the intent of an author is always tricky. Still, this omission may be deliberate on Takako Shimura’s part, her version of the “curious incident of the dog in the night-time”—significant not for what is said or shown but rather for what is not. The creators of the Sweet Blue Flowers anime adaptation added an extra scene to humanize Yasuko’s father: before the wedding, he sits on his back porch, sighs, and looks to the heavens as if he were a father in an Ozu film, mourning the loss of his daughter.¹

I believe this violates the intent of the manga. In the context of everything else we know about the Sugimoto family and the evolving themes of the manga, this particular father is not supposed to be a character with emotions and an inner life. The Sugimoto sisters have a father, here he is, but he is not integral in any way to the plot, and hence we need know nothing more about him.

He is simply embodying a role, that of the family patriarch. More specifically, he is an entry in a book, the person listed as the “first registrant,” the de facto head of the Sugimoto family, in the household register (koseki) maintained by the Japanese state. The koseki lists the other family members after him, in a representation of the family’s age-based hierarchy: his wife Chie, “eldest daughter” Shinako, “second daughter” Kazusa, “third daughter” Kuri, and “fourth daughter” Yasuko.

Although precursors to the koseki system existed for many centuries, the koseki in its present form originated in the desire of Meiji-era governments to bring the entire Japanese population under their purview. The koseki system, as established in 1871 and revised and elaborated in 1898, enforced as normative an ideal patrilineal family. In this ideal family, a male head of household presided over a multi-generational family consisting of his wife, his unmarried daughters, his sons and their wives, their children in turn, and so on—replicating in miniature the Japanese “family nation” ruled over by the emperor.²

The postwar reforms imposed by the occupation authorities included a constitution that ostensibly treats the Japanese people as individuals. To accompany that change, the koseki system was reformed to eliminate its patrilineal character, at least in theory. The postwar period also saw several administrative and legal changes made to accommodate evolving family structures and practices, including divorces, intermarriage between Japanese nationals and foreign nationals, and the use of assisted reproductive technologies.³

However, in practice, the “reformed” koseki still reflects the patriarchal and heteronormative ideal of a nuclear family headed by a husband with a wife and one or more legitimate biological children.

For example, consider the (only) context in which we see Sugimoto père: he leads Kazusa down the aisle before her being wed to Mr. Kagami. In Anglo-American parlance, he is “giving the bride away,” a phrase that implies that men own women and that in marriage that ownership is transferred to other men. Under the Meiji-era koseki system, this transfer would have been made literal by Kazusa’s name being removed from the Sugimoto register and added to that of the Kagami household, headed by Mr. Kagami or his father or grandfather (if one of them were still alive).

The postwar koseki system is ostensibly more egalitarian and less patriarchal. Instead of Kazusa being transferred from the Sugimoto register to the Kagami register, she and Mr. Kagami would together leave their previous household registers and enter themselves into a new register corresponding to their newly-formed nuclear family. However, one of them would still be required to be the “first registrant,” whose family name would become the name on the koseki. If they followed typical practice, this would be Mr. Kagami.⁴

If Kazusa wished to continue to use the Sugimoto family name, she would encounter a significant obstacle: which name she uses is not simply a matter between her as an individual and the Japanese state. The logic of the koseki dictates that she must enter herself into some register, she and her husband must register together as a household unit, and the household registration must be made under only one family name. She could retain her original family name by not registering her marriage with Mr. Kagami (in effect, entering into a common-law marriage). However, their children might then not be considered legitimate. One couple endured a lengthy legal battle over precisely this issue.⁵

The Japanese state forces everyone into the Procrustean bed of the koseki and has been willing to adjust its dimensions only slightly, slowly, and grudgingly. Likewise, Japanese society has come to identify the household as defined in the koseki with the concept of family itself: to be in a family means being registered together in the koseki and not being registered together means not being a family. We can see this especially in the case of LGBTQ individuals.

Consider, for example, Shuichi Nitori, the transgender protagonist of Shimura’s Wandering Son. If she were to transition in accordance with Japanese law, she would be forced off the Nitori koseki and required to register herself separately—in effect, severing her from her family of birth.⁶

Some have justified this according to the logic of the koseki. If Shuichi’s sister Maho were younger than Shuichi (instead of one year older), after Shuichi’s transition there would be two “eldest daughters” on the Nitori koseki. The claim is that the state needs “to prevent such confusing koseki entries.” However, this logic is not applied in other cases more aligned with patriarchal norms—for example, the case of a man who marries and has a daughter with one woman, divorces her and remarries, and then has another daughter with his second wife, all the while acting as the “head” of his register. Here the koseki also contains two “eldest daughter” entries, but the state does not care.⁷

Consider also Fumi and Akira, should their relationship ever progress to becoming life partners. Japanese law does not explicitly prohibit two women from marrying each other, but the logic of the koseki is again deployed against them: when two people marry and start their own register, one must designate as the husband and one as the wife. In combination with ambiguous wording in the Japanese Constitution and other aspects of Japanese law relating to gender, this fact has heretofore provided the justification for Japanese judges to reject marriage equality.⁸

One way to work around this restriction is for the older person to adopt the younger, as Nobuko Yoshiya did her partner Chiyo Monma. This allows them to access some of the benefits usually denied to unmarried couples, such as access to insurance and the ability to make medical decisions for each other. However, such arrangements can be contested by the partners’ families.⁹ They also promote the idea of an age-based hierarchy in relationships, an idea that Sweet Blue Flowers implicitly (and, at times, explicitly) opposes.

It’s true that men also can be harmed by the koseki system. Witness the case of the man rejected by his biological father, who refused to acknowledge the existence of his son in the koseki. Living outside the system and unable even to attend public school, the man was released from legal limbo only at age 36 upon his father’s death and the successful conclusion of a subsequent legal proceeding.¹⁰

But it’s clear that the system in which Kazusa is embedded (along with all the other women of Sweet Blue Flowers) is ultimately of men, by men, and for men. (In the story mentioned above, the man’s mother and her household register were irrelevant in establishing his legal existence.) In entering into a relationship, Fumi and Akira would be living outside the law, or more precisely trapped by rules and regulations that, for the most part, refuse to recognize their lives except in the context of their relationships to men.

The typical “schoolgirl yuri” work slides over this reality in its quest to portray a fantasy world of female relationships in which men are invisible. Though Sweet Blue Flowers has the outward form of schoolgirl yuri, like a Jane Austen novel it hints at a deeper and darker reality beneath its allegedly frivolous surface.

I previously likened Yasuko’s father to another absent father, Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park, who spends much of the story away at his plantation on the Caribbean island of Antigua. In that novel, after the demure heroine Fanny Price is reproved by others for being “too silent in the evening circle,” she says of Sir Thomas, “Did not you hear me ask him about the slave-trade last night?”¹¹

It is but one sentence in a very long novel. Still, in combination with a reader’s knowledge of early nineteenth-century British society, it speaks volumes about the socioeconomic system that supports the aristocracy into which Fanny will ultimately marry. Whether Shimura intended this or not, to someone like myself with at least a superficial knowledge of contemporary Japanese society, Sweet Blue Flowers similarly says a great deal with a single image.