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A greeting from Ryoko and Lin! (125K)
The Relationship and Responsibilities between Husband and Wife in Japan and China
Ryoko Sakurai and LinCheng Li
ISALC, Lewis and Clark College
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The Relationship and Responsibilities between Husband and Wife in Japan and China
Ryoko Sakurai and LinCheng Li
Our countries, Japan and China, lie very close and we have exchanged our culture, such as food written characters and religion since ancient times. (Actually Japan has absorbed Chinese culture for a long time). At first, we thought that most of the things are similar between Japan and China because of our geographical and historical factors, but the more we compare our cultures, the more we can find differences among us. So, now we want to compare both our cultural differences and similarities with a focus on our differences.
Both in Japan and China, nowadays couples start their new life living together, in other words, they live only two people, but the responsibility to take care of their family is different. Chinese couples, if they are the oldest children in their family, have an obligation to take care of, not only both of their parents, but also other family members like their sisters and brothers. In Japan, in most cases, only the wife has responsibility to take care of her husband's parents. Moreover, although Japanese couples, depending on the time and circumstances, such as when the husband has to work in another city, do not care if they have to live apart, Chinese couples always live together except on a rare occasion.
In both cultures, the husband plays an important role in the family. There seems to be a kind of bias in both cultures that husbands should get a better job and salary than the wife does. Also in Japan, still some husbands want their wives to stay at home and take care of them and their children and want to support their family by themselves as the former generations did. Although generally husbands are the breadwinners of the family in both countries, wives contribute to their family economy by working full-time or part-time. Most of the Chinese wives work full-time jobs, not only to support their family, but also to fulfill their husband's expectations. On the other hand, many Japanese wives work as part-time workers, both to come up to their husbands' expectations as well as to earn money. Even though husbands in both cultures have similar position in each family, they have totally different money arrangements. In general, husbands in both cultures usually give the money to their wives to manage. While in Japan, sometimes the wife and husband have different bank accounts and keep their money separately, in China couples usually put their money together. This is one reason for serious conflict among Chinese couples when they get divorced. In both counrtries, husbands have great power economically, but wives manage the family budget.
Both in Japan and China, wives tend to do more housework than husbands do. In Japan, nowadays it is said that young husbands are more willing to help their wives with housework and cooking than before because of women's recent remarkable participation in the workplace. However, overwhelmingly, the wives keep house more than the husbands do. This happens in two-income families as well as in families in which only husbands support their family. That is, there is still a bias in our mind that men should work outside and women do housework at home. In China, sometimes taking charge of responsibilities for housework causes fights between young couples because husbands focus on getting a better job and making a good salary and do not want to do housework, and wives have to take care of the housework more, even though many wives work as full-time workers. However, Chinese husbands do more housework than Japanese do, and this may be because more Chinese wives have full-time jobs outside the house more often than Japanese wives do. Even if they are a two -income family, generally wives do more housework than husbands in both China and Japan. Moreover, if the wife is solely a housewife, in most cases, her husband does not help her at all with the housework in either country. Although young husbands tend to help their wives more, compared with former generations, it is clear that wives still do most of the housework in both of the countries.
Though our counties are very close in many ways, we have many small differences about culture and it is very interesting for us to compare the tiny differences between us. However, basically our cultures consist of male dominated societies. In other words, husbands have more power than wives in both Japan and China do, even if our societies have changed and, at present, women have more power than women did in the past.
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