In Japan, the rise of the house husband redraws established gender norms
In a country where, for generations, a man’s job has taken priority over family life, a push to shift cultural gender roles is underway as the government struggles with a stubbornly low birth rate
Shuichi was 30 years old and working as a systems engineer at a technology company in the Japanese capital of Tokyo when he was diagnosed with sarcoidosis, an inflammatory disease that triggers growths in the body’s major organs. He had been married for a year and, given that his illness left him bedridden most days and unable to work, he did what he thought was the honourable thing and offered his wife, Kiyoko, a divorce.
“She reprimanded me and said, ‘I will go out to work and earn. You can stay at home and take care of yourself,’” he remembers. At the time, this was unheard of. It was the early 2000s, still very much the Japan of suited salarymen crowding onto trains with their briefcases; women had only been able to pursue careers for about a decade. (Before Japan enacted its Equal Employment Opportunity Law, in 1986, women were often barred from entering career-track jobs.)
Even if gender norms had not dictated that men should work and women should look after homes and children, a working woman would not have been able to afford to support her spouse, let alone any kids, with the low-paid administrative work or teaching jobs that were available to her.
By 2001, when Kiyoko had taken on the breadwinner role, more opportunities had opened up for women, but the idea of a man being a house husband was still outside the mainstream. Men would work gruelling 12- to 13-hour days while women would either stay at home with the children or work lower-paid jobs.
At his tech job, Shuichi regularly worked 120 hours of overtime a month. He did not have children at the time, and the colleagues who did rarely saw them. The situation had been almost the same during Shuichi’s own childhood: his father, a businessman, was often absent. Kiyoko had had a similar relationship with her salaryman father. Back then, fathers were familiar strangers in a family’s home.
The transition wasn’t easy when Shuichi first became a house husband. His wife had been working as a graphic designer, and she set herself on a path towards promotions and higher pay. At home, Shuichi felt the scrutiny of everyone around him if he went out to the grocery store during the day. So he dressed up.
“For a long time, when I felt well enough to go out I would put on my suit, even just to go to the store or do the dishes,” he says.