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The Japanese Family: Touch, Intimacy and Feeling

2015; Oxford University Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ssjj/jyv023

1468-2680

Kathryn E. Goldfarb,

Globalization and Cultural Identity

In The Japanese Family: Touch, Intimacy and Feeling, Diana Adis Tahhan’s research questions emerge out of a sustained encounter with difference: the fact that expressions of intimacy in Tahhan’s own native Australia (particularly through hugs and kisses) differ from expressions of intimacy in Japan. Tahhan highlights a significant puzzle involving how parenting practices in Japan change as children grow older. Relationships between Japanese parents (particularly mothers) and very young children are rooted in bodily forms of intimacy, such as ‘bodily endearment’, ‘prolonged physical proximity’, and ‘skinship’, often understood as ‘intimacy through touch’ (p. 11). However, these practices seem to cease around age five. Tahhan’s objective is to examine the reasons for this cessation and the ways parent–child intimacy is expressed in the absence of what she calls ‘visible’ types of touch. In elucidating the general absence of physical intimacy within families, Tahhan notes that Japanese people often mobilize nihonjinron-style explications of Japanese uniqueness, specifically through explanatory models like the ideas of ittaikan (feelings of one body), ishin denshin (heart to heart communication), and isshin dōtai (one body and mind), all of which posit particularly Japanese ways of communication that do not require physical or verbal expression (p. 10). People in Japan tend to refer to these modes of communication without explaining how, exactly, non-physical and non-verbal communication is made possible. Tahhan explores throughout the book how typically Japanese practices, like co-sleeping and co-bathing, create a ‘relational space and tangible connection that develops in parent–child relationships that is not just felt in the body’ (p. 11), a concept that Tahhan calls ‘touching at depth’. Her book represents an ambitious project to examine the daily practices that constitute familial intimacy without continued physical contact between family members.