I was lucky. I didn’t have a Japanese mother. My mother had four boys. She had a job. She had my father to deal with. She had her hands full. With my mother juggling the various contradictory roles imposed on women by Western society, I had the freedom to develop more or less as I wanted to, and passed through the Sturm und Drang of adolescence without too many hang-ups about the female sex. Any hang-ups I do have are entirely of my own making. They weren’t spoon-fed to me by a domineering mother when I was too young to resist.

One reason Japan is a male-dominated society is because most Japanese men have a problem relating to women properly. This is why the male business phalanx is so tight-knit. It also explains why Japanese men, once they get out of the house first thing in the morning, are so reluctant to return until the last train at night. If women got into positions of power in Japan, the middle-aged businessman you see confidently strutting around hailing a cab to a business meeting or a hostess bar would turn into gibbering nervous wrecks.

This whole unbalanced society — from the drunks on the last train to the ridiculous caricatures of women called hostesses to the lonely housewives slowly going dotty over their morose, “fatherless” kids — all goes back to one source: the Japanese mother.

The main reason that Japanese males’ attitudes to the fairer sex are so cluttered with complexes is because their own mothers had nothing else to do but bring up baby. Like breaking a butterfly on a wheel, childbearing in Japan is a case of too much energy for the job. Even before the patter of tiny feet is heard on the straw mats, there’s a good chance that the prospective mother has been spending years stuck at home waiting for her husband to come home every night, damming up her energies.

She’s honed her cooking skills to a razor-sharp edge. She’s developed exotic methods of cleaning, like flossing the tatami mats. She’s even revived a few Edo-period arts and crafts. But, whatever she does, being a housewife does nothing to stop her stewing in her own juices, building up immense reservoirs of energy.

Finally the big day arrives. The new mother returns home with her little wet bundle, and a million gigawatts of maternal energy are crackling through her veins. Papa goes off to work. The door closes. For the first time, she’s left all alone with the little stranger: Kaboooom! Kersplat!

Girls fare better; they tend to like intense one-to-one relationships. But boys crave independence. Little Hiroshi-kun doesn’t know it yet as his diapers get changed for the ninth time in half an hour, but he craves independence, too. Fat chance!

From now on, his life will have one central, dominating, all-encompassing fact: Mother. Wherever he goes, whatever he thinks, whatever he does, Mother — all-seeing, all-knowing, the alpha and the omega — will be there spoiling him, scolding him, nagging him; picketing PTA meetings; spoiling, scalding, and nagging his teachers; checking up on his friends, spying on him, telling him what to think, what to eat, what to wear, how to stand, how to sit, how to blink; sometimes wheedling and purring, sometimes shrieking and shouting — carpet-bombing his psyche from a great height, while also dive-bombing it.

It wouldn’t have been so bad a generation ago. After a couple of years of being cocooned and coddled in the flaming ball of maternal energy, reinforcements would have arrived in the shape of siblings to share the boy’s doleful fate and spread the load. But little Hiroshi, unfortunately, is destined to be an only child. For years ahead, his putative life has already been mapped out, planned down to each diaper change and toilet break. He’s running on schedule from now on or he ain’t running at all.

Each hour has to be accounted for: music school from the age of 2, kindergarten from the age of 4, elementary school from the age of 6, and up through children’s English lessons, junior high school, senior high school, juku and, of course, the endless Dantean caverns of Exam Hell.

Deprived of a real life of her own, Hiroshi’s mother is unwittingly taking her frustrations out on her ill-starred offspring. After years of subtle and blatant psychological broiling, Hiroshi proves he’s a bright boy: he passes and fails the right combination of university exams to ensure he is accepted by a college as far away as possible from the maternal furnace.

As his sobbing parent sees him off at the station, and the train disappears into the distance, his sense of guilt mixes with his newfound sense of freedom. The tugging in his gut means that he has finally cut the umbilical cord. Like Norman Bates, he is at last free from the Mother of all mothers. But is he?

Latest 15 of 44 Total Comments Show All

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  Betting at 08:15 AM JST - 1st June

  "As a poster stated, "mama's boys" are in a lot of Western cultures. The author must have just stepped off the plane at Narita and thinks he discovered something that's unique only to Japan. (rollyes).".

  You will find the same dysfunction all over the world Rom3, but this type of dysfunctionality can be more pronounced in Japan. Some of the stuff I'Ve seen in Japan at friend's house and what my male friends have said about their wives has been truly mind-boggling.

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  VOR at 09:05 AM JST - 1st June

  while i have my differences with the author's premise that J-mothering ruins boys, i tend to agree with the underlying point that the over-mothering j-boys receive turn them into neurotic empty suits later on in life.

  where i diverge from the author is placing the blame solely on the j-mom. i contend the absence of a father or the lack of fathering in any boys life will produce in most cases an unhealthy male adult.

  The more domineering and overprotective the mother coupled against the degree of father involvement in the child's life are the determining factors how well a j-boy makes his way through life as an adult.

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  am1301 at 11:37 AM JST - 1st June

  I take it CB Liddell here hasn't done any real research into this. Not the first crappy article he has written.

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  Triumvere at 12:02 PM JST - 1st June

  This peice is on par with the absurd political commentary they had last time.

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  laconic at 10:55 PM JST - 1st June

  I know the other mothers in my kids kindergarden fairly well and I TOTALLY AGREE with the writer of this article. On a daily basis I listen to them complain that their sons (at 5 years old) are starting to want to sleep alone but the mothers think they are still too young! They give in to their childs every whim and actively discourage the kids from having anything to do with dad on the weekend. It makes me wonder about what kind of adults they are going to turn out to be. Well done Mr Liddell

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  UnagiDon at 12:35 AM JST - 2nd June

  Calling this article garbage would be an insult to trash everywhere.

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  Graywolf0813 at 03:33 AM JST - 2nd June

  I think Mr Liddell should stick with cartoons and do more homework on the Japanese culture ' So arrogant and insensitive to say that he was lucky he was not raised by a Japanese mother ' When he mentions "being spoon fed and a domineering mother" Is he telling me that the Japanese woman is not like the rest of the mother's around the world ' You want to see spoon fed and domineering just take a look at the Queen of England '

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  realist at 01:57 PM JST - 2nd June

  Im sorry but I also disagree with most of this article. The write is obviously unaware of the true nature of Japanese society. Japanese women are strong, yes, and many Japanese men have a "mazaa konpurekkusu" yes, but there are other social reasons, too. Japanese boys are overly spoilt by their mothers, and often physically abused by their fathers, hence the "jishin, kaminari, kaji oyaji" four worst fears of the Japanese. The result is a potent concoction which produces the childish, manga and school girl fantasy - obsessed mindset of the modern Japanese salaryman. That is often why so many of them retreat into their rooms and become housebound "hikikomori" victims, and that is also why so many of them become perverts on trains and stealers of women`s undergarments.

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  carlosgodoy1 at 02:09 PM JST - 2nd June

  Every year a NEW GAIJIN comes here and writes another insightful (read: crap) article much like this one. (TOKYO JOURNAL, TOKYO WEEKENDER, GAIJIN POT posters). Long-term residents may agree with me here?

  I find it really telling that as a group of writers (the writing community in Japan) the articles have not really progressed, still blaming all of Japan's men's behavior on their mothers, and not on... Japanese men themselves.

  Move over, Mr. Liddel: We've heard all this before. And by better writers, expressing more humility.

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  frontandcentre at 10:02 AM JST - 3rd June

  All the ingredients of another Liddell 'classic' - shoot at those easy targets, slap on the arrogance, indulge your vocabulary, then claim your readers' responses prove your point and that since no-one is nearly as intelligent as you are, you are being 'misunderstood'.

  Excuse me while I crawl onto dry land for the first time...

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  Spidey at 01:37 PM JST - 3rd June

  where i diverge from the author is placing the blame solely on the j-mom. i contend the absence of a father or the lack of fathering in any boys life will produce in most cases an unhealthy male adult.

  The more domineering and overprotective the mother coupled against the degree of father involvement in the child's life are the determining factors how well a j-boy makes his way through life as an adult.

  I couldn't agree more.

  Posters here are taking the easy way out and jumping on the "bash the author" bandwagon due to their own lack of ability to come up with a half-way decent response.

  People here should think more and spew less.

  Well said, VOR

  S

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  dammit at 03:04 PM JST - 3rd June

  spoiling, scalding, and nagging his teachers;

  I sure as hell hope that's a mistype!

  Anyhow, surely most of these grotty salarymen - whether warped by their mothers or not - are a bit too old to be a product of a modern phenomenon? The situation described, although exaggerated for humor, is too recent to be to blame. Most salarymens' mothers would have had more than one child, and they would also have lived with the parents - whether his or hers. The older the salaryman, the more likely it is that his mother had to do some sort of work to help make ends meet - things weren't all rosy after WWII, and I'm sure they weren't too great during the war either.

  No, the "reluctant husband and father" stereotype must have appeared before the "mother-of-one" stereotyped here, although whether he's the cause is impossible for me to guess.

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  Fair dinkum! at 04:38 PM JST - 3rd June

  Ummm.... is this an attempt at justifying the profound emotional immaturity and instability of most Japanese males?

  It hasn't worked!

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  DanManjt at 12:53 AM JST - 6th June

  I have mixed feelings about this thread.

  I notice that few of you have taken the time to substantially address the issues Mr. Liddel crudely raises. Normally, I think it valuable to engage such pieces because this crude slam on Japanese men and society takes place within a larger, important, conflict. The conflict is between the familiar tradition of Western chauvinism and the newer Western belief that all civilizations and cultures are equal, equally good, and therefore beyond reproach. Rather than engage and disarm Mr. Littell, many of you seem more than happy to simply condemn him and dismiss inane ideas.

  However, the Left’s smug certainty of multiculturalism just as much a threat to rational discourse and, ultimately, the public good as the Right’s ethno-centrism.

  Case and point, Japanese have problems. They are, lest you forget, humans. Japan suffers wide social problem of absentee fathers, bored and neurotic housewives, spoiled/neglected children, teenage delinquency, and on and on. In many ways these social problems are typical of advanced industrial societies, and in many other ways their expression are unique to Japan.

  It does us and Japan no favors to use these typical social problems as a mallet against Japan, as Mr. Liddell’s and his ilk are wont to. Y'all got to read "Japanese really are forever young", by Mr. Liddell, from November 19, 2005,

  http://archive.japantoday.com/jp/comment/864)

  Equally so, it does us and Japan no favors to wrap yourself in the soothing gauze of multicuralism and pretend that because Japan is different that you have no reason to judge the social problems.

  There are real problems here in the way that for far too many, the old story holds about the sacred bond between mother and son and the woman who got in the way, y'know, the man's wife.

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  an531 at 04:54 AM JST - 4th July

  Yes! Just because you are outside the culture does not mean you have no worthwhile observations. De Tocqueville had published some excellent observations about the fledgling US culture, many of which ring true even 200 years later - and he was from France.

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