Honor Network: Modern life takes its toll.

Greetings!

Welcome back.

Japan is an island, but it isn't Paradise now-a-days. The overworked Japanese people are paying the price for their meteoric rise to economic dominance. And while they heroically continue to hold on to their Yamato Damashii, the populace is showing signs of strain. The forces of globalization, feminization, and cut-throat economic competition are beginning to take their toll.

Consider this entry from The Mai-Nichi Shimbum:

Moral decline sees increase in child abuse, mothers sleeping with sons

Sachie says she sometimes gets her daughter to check up on the e-mail
her husband has been sending from his mobile phone.

"If it's one of the kids, they can ask him if they can borrow his mobile phone and he'll lend it to them without suspecting anything," the 33-year-old housewife tells Josei Jishin (3/18). "I then get the kids to check up and see whether he's been getting e-mail from any strange women. I've caught him playing around on me three times already."

Last month's arrest of a woman accused of sending her teen-age
daughter out to steal items she wanted for herself (Mom orders girl to steal) has highlighted the growing number of Japanese women who, as Sachie does, use their children like little slaves to get what they want, even occasionally bending the law while doing so.

"A neighbor of mine started going out with this really young guy after she'd been through a divorce," Satoe tells Josei Jishin. "I don't know what happened, but the guy she was seeing is now dating her daughter. I think the neighbor is forcing the girl to go out on dates with the guy to save him the embarrassment of being seen with a much older woman. She's 37 and the guy's in his early 20s, but the daughter is only 14. What's more, some people have seen the boyfriend and the daughter going into a love hotel together."

Another woman even jeopardized her young daughter's health.

"She asked her first-grader daughter to run an errand
for her. That day, the daughter had a cold and a really high fever. She told the
girl she could buy some of her favorite candies and then told me that it would
be good for the kid to get used to talking to adults," Chika says. "I know she's
the only one of our friends who's married, but I think she was probably going
too far..."

But wait! There's more:

"These women act on a similar mentality to those who abuse their kids
physically. There seems to be a polarization of types of mothers these days,
meaning kids are either spoiled rotten or turned into little tools. In either
case, this treatment arises because the mothers aren't yet mature parents. It
leaves awful mental scars on kids. Mothers shouldn't do these sorts of things,"
Nomura tells Josei Jishin.

Shizuo Machisawa, head of the Mental Health Laboratory, cautions that selfish mothers could actually be a sign of a greater breakdown in society.

"In the past, mothers and fathers were close, and below them were the children. Now, mothers are close to their kids and fathers are shoved into the outer. In sexless marriages, it's common to find the mother sleeping with her son while her husband has to sleep in the son's empty bed. Mothers' morals are declining," Machisawa tells Josei Jishin. "A society of declining morality is a society lacking fatherhood. Fathers have to be returned to families. Mothers who force their kids to steal or sell sex or whatever are showing their lack of parental maturity. As far as the kids go, this is a form of mental abuse dished out by their mothers."

Couldn't agree more. Women can be very good at abusing their children, when the counterbalance that their husbands provide is lacking.

Japanese society is caught in the vicious vice-grips of Americanization (read: Foreign movements to eradicate all that is traditional and patriarchal in Japanese culture) and unrelenting pressure to maintain the world's second largest economy.

Japanese men work an extreme amount of hours. In the 1980's, men worked 50 hours per week; and six day weeks are the norm for most. I am quite sure that men work much longer now, simply to keep up with the demands of the global marketplace.

With so much time and effort being donated to the corporation (for a pittance, I might add, as most Japanese workers are not paid in proportion to the time they dedicate to their companies), there is no way that a Japanese husband is able to guide and unify his family, something he has been responsible for for over 2000 years.

The Japanese husband is the head of the family, and also its chief priest. Indeed, it has been argued that the Patriarchal family structure grew out of this duty of the man to be the leader of his ancestral cult.




(Lafcadio Hearn, otherwise known as Koizumi Yakumo)

As we read from Japan, An Attempt at Interpretation by Lafcadio Hearn:

In all patriarchal societies with a settled civilization, there is evolved,
out of the worship of ancestors, a Religion of Filial Piety. Filial piety still
remains the supreme virtue among civilized peoples possessing an ancestor-cult.

. . . By filial piety must not be understood, however, what is commonly
signified by the English term,--the devotion of children to parents. We must
understand the word "piety" rather in its classic meaning, as the pietas of the
early Romans,--that is to say, as the religious sense of household duty.

Reverence for the dead, as well as the sentiment of duty towards the living; the affection of children to parents, and. the affection of parents to children; the mutual duties of husband and wife; the duties likewise of sons-in-law and daughters-in-law to the family as a body; the duties of servant to master, and of master to dependent,--all these were included under the term.

The family itself was a religion; the ancestral home a temple. And so we find the family and the home to be in Japan, even at the present day. Filial piety in Japan does not mean only the duty of children to parents and grandparents: it means still more, the cult of the ancestors, reverential service to the dead, the gratitude of the present to the past, and the conduct of the individual in relation

{p. 49}

to the entire household. Hirata therefore declared that all virtues derived from the worship of ancestors; and his words, as translated by Sir Ernest Satow, deserve particular attention:--

"It is the duty of a subject to be diligent in worshipping his ancestors, whose minister he should consider himself to be. The custom of adoption arose from the natural desire of having some one to perform sacrifices; and this desire ought not to be rendered of no avail by neglect. Devotion to the memory of ancestors is the mainspring of all virtues. No one who discharges his duty to then will ever be disrespectful to the gods or to his living parents. Such a man also will be faithful to his prince, loyal to his friends, and kind and gentle to his wife and children. For
the essence of this devotion is indeed filial piety."

This idea of respect and reverence for ancestors and elders, while extremely strong in Japanese culture, is also to be found in Western thought.

Consider the Greeks and their ancestor worship, and take a look at this excerpt from the Torah (law) of Moses:

Honor your father and your mother
(Exodus 20:12, Deuteronomy 5:16)

Fear your mother and your father
(Leviticus 19:3)

In essence, the demands placed upon the Japanese man, as well as upon Men across the world, do not allow us to perform our functions as priests, teachers, law-givers, and judges. Nay, an independent, intact household has too much power to resist the encroachment of both the State and those who desire to consolidate their power over We the "masses".

Better that Men outsource their personal power to others.

On top of this, consider the fact that rabid feminists have taken it upon themselves to destroy the little power that the average male has left. As I have said repeatedly, the patriarchal order was on life support; the feminists took advantage of its weakness, and pulled the plug[a][b].

All in all, it seems to me that Japan is a victim of her own amazing economic success, in addition to being subjected to mind molding by unsympathetic foreign ideologies. And she is suffering greatly as a result.

But she's a tough old gal... I don't think its time for the fat lady to start singing just yet.

More on this in future Honor Network installments!

Kumogakure.