Taichi, Yamato, Parentification and Japan's Lost Decade
Okay. You might have noticed, I am recently talking about Japanese economics, and about adultism, and about child abuse. And it is partially because recently I have fallen down another rabbit hole through some circumstances. I will explain later.
To get everyone on the same page if you have not participated in this conversation before: in Digimon Adventure there is the whole noticable thing with some characters - most notably Taichi, and Yamato - that they are clearly parentified and are performing tasks that you would expect from an adult. This is not unique to Digimon. It happened in Ojamajo Doremi as well, and other kid shows like this. We do see the children suffer from this, but it usually gets framed as a thing that the children have to overcome. And now I know why.
What actually happens in the Show(s)?
Okay, let's quickly go over a couple of examples. Mainly from Digimon, but also two Magical Girls.
First in Digimon Adventure we have Taichi and Yamato. Both of them are older brothers to a sibling who is three younger than them. Taichi has both parents. His father is working some sort of office job. He works long hours and often comes home drunk during the night. The mother is not working, but she is often absent as well. Several times it is mentioned that she is with relatives, though the exact identity is never named. Taichi is left alone with his younger sister as early as when he was seven and Hikari was a toddler. He cooks for her and takes care of other things. There is a particular flashback we get in Adventure later, telling us about how when they were that young Hikari was sick, and Taichi, still no older than 8, took her outside to play, which ended up with her condition worsening to a level where she ended in the hospital. Their parents punished Taichi for this. Nowhere does the series acknowledge that Taichi at this age should not have been alone with his sick sister for that long.
Yamato and Takeru meanwhile have divorced parents. Yamato lives with his father, Takeru with the mother. We see that Yamato often is taking care of chores and cooking for his father, being in many ways the mom in the household and fullfilling that role. During the show he is 10 or 11.
Yamato also parallels a character from Digimon's sister show at the time: Ojamajo Doremi. Here we have another character of divorced parents. Aiko. In her case we actually go into the reason of the divorce. Aiko's mother is a nurse, and she refused to give up her job to be a full stay at home mom. It was originally decided that Aiko would stay with her mother after the divorce. But Aiko - at the time being about 5 or 6 - got worried that her father could not take care of himself. So she decided to stay with her father. Her mother allowed this and has fallen out of contact with her. Her father is working as a cab driver. He often struggles to make ends meet. Aiko is meanwhile doing all the household chores. She cooks. She cleans. She irons his clothes. She is 8 years old in the first season. There are a handful of episodes that do critique that her father relies on her too much. But all in all, the situation exists to show how good of a kid Aiko is.
Back to Digimon. We also have Juri in Digimon Tamers. Her father owns a pub, and she is helping out, either by working in the pub or by taking care of her younger half-brother, when both her father and her step mother are busy working. She never got a chance to properly work through the loss of her mother.
And lastly there is Love from Fresh PreCure. Both her parents work, as her father is not earning quite enough, as he chose passion over good pay. This leaves Love often managing chores, and often taking care of dinner at home. It also is part of the reason why she tends to overextend herself in terms of taking care of others.
And before we engage with all this, we are going to talk about Japan's economic crisis. You probably have heard that some time in the 90s, Japan had a big economic crisis, and then did not really recover from that. And if you are like me three weeks ago, that was the extent of your knowledge: the Japanese economy boomed after the end of WWII, and then it went bust.
The context is important though. Japan after the war did get the strong economy by being technology forward, but also by having this very weird relationship to how work and employment were supposed to work. The concept of Lifetime Employment was very common. Basically: you went to school, did good in school, then you got hired by a company, and would work for that company for the rest of your life on good pay. Companies who fired employees for anything other than really heinous things were seen as bad companies. Companies who did not pay living wages (that was outside of the creative industries, because of course those were exploitative) while their CEOs had good pay were seen as bad companies.
Of course this generally was an idea applied to men. Men worked and had an income that would afford them a home for their family. Women were supposed to be married by age 25.
The thing was: the economy was actually working rather well. And the USA hated this. Sure, the USA was partially what created this context (you know, the After War period and stuff), but when Japan became such a major player they really were shitting their pants, because: what if a non-white culture overtakes them? What if a non-white culture becomes the dominant culture on the world? Oh heavens, imagine!
And this lead to the Plaza Accords. Made between Japan, the US and some European countries in 1985. It was meant to regulate international trade, to allow the other countries to still compete with Japan. And then... it worked too well. Partially because of some bad calls being made by the Japanese government in regards to - now say it with me - deregulating the financial market, especially in regards to housing loans.
This was not like the 2008 US crisis, but in some ways similar. Basically there were cheap loans, both for companies and people buying houses. And the idea was that houses could only increase in value. Spoiler alert: they did not.
And here was where the Japanese way of dealing with challenges kinda kicked them in the butt. Because the Japanese banks did not want to destroy small companies - it was seen as bad policy. But this kept a bunch of failing companies alive for a while, while also stopping new - potentially more viable - companies from being created. The Japanese banks kept loaning money to a bunch of companies that were failing slowly due to the way the money were borrowed. And the lack of new companies - because you can only lend out so much money - created an environment with a lack of new jobs.
Sure, this was not quite as heavily felt given that there was the demographic decline. And still... by the early 90s it started to show, and it got worse over the course of the 90s. There were not enough new jobs, and people now entering the workforce often did not get that lifetime employment opening. And even if they did, often enough the pay was no longer enough to feed a family. This was part of the reason why less and less people got married (men believing they should not marry if they could not feed a family, but also women not wanting to marry if they were expected to handle household chores AND a job). And it was also part of the reason why another thing happened.
Let me get back to one of my favorite topics: bitching about how the nuclear family unit is unnatural to homo sapiens and a horrible way to raise children.
Chances are, all you know about Japan, is that it is fairly conservative of a place. You probably have heard how much sexism is a problem. And how queer marriage is not allowed at large. And how trans people can only bureaucratically transition once they had bottom surgery. And how disabled people are marginalized. And all of this is true.
But also Japan actually hung onto some ideas of raising children communally, and preferring multi-generational households for way longer than the west. In the US the nuclear family was largely invented in the 1950s. Japan hung onto the multi-generational household way into the 80s. In many cases families lived with grandparents and other relatives in one home. And yes, this partially also burdened mothers on one hand, by making them responsible for the older relatives. But at the same time it also allowed for there to be more adults to be responsible for children.
And then there were the walkable communities. And this is the part that especially for Americans probably is strange. But: a lot of Japanese towns and even cities were organized around several walkable centers. For cities this was often a specific walkable neighborhood, featuring a lot of family owned small stores and restaurants. The shotengai (商店街). You probably have seen this in a bunch of anime. The entire Pandamon neighborhood in Beatbreak is this, and it is brought up in a lot of anime.
The general idea is quite simple: the government protected family owned businesses over bigger companies and shopping centers, and meanwhile those neighborhoods were just safe places where kids were just roaming around, everyone knew everyone, and there was a lot of community happening there.
Kids could be unsupervised, because they actually never were truly unsupervised. Everyone knew the names of the kids. The kids were safe and if anything happened taken care of.
This is also why you see in so many Japanese media really young kids run errands. Because this is just assumed. And, yes, there also is the general thing that children in Japan are still very much seen as fully fledged people - at times to a good ending, and at times to a bad.
But this brings me back to those anime kids - and the lack of acknowledgement.
The Reliable Child Archetype
Now, imagine you are a young family in Japan in the 90s. Suddenly the money is tight. Your family might need to move to the city because it is where you can more reliably find a job. This also means that you can no longer live in a multigenerational household, because right now the housing market is in shambles and you just cannot afford a big home in the big city where your relatives can move in.
So, the father works. Likely in an office. He is likely a salaryman. Japanese office culture says that you cannot go home before your boss, and if your boss wants you to go drinking with him after work, than that is what you do. Of course. So often the father is only ever home to sleep, because he literally cannot not go drinking with the boss.
Your wife might now also have to work at least part-time. And if not, she might still be held accountable for taking care of older family members, who might still be living in a suburban or rural area, making her commute between your home in the city, and the rural living of your family.
But at your home, there is also work that needs to be done. Chores. Cooking.
But hey, children are basically tiny adults, right? So it is just natural that you expect your children to do this. The oldest first. And this is the birth of the しっかりした子, the reliable child. The reliable child is a good natured child, who is taking care of chores without complaining. Who cooks for you, and possibly their younger siblings. Like a good member of the productive society, they put themselves after the well-being of others, especially their family. This is not something to be seen as bad. It is indeed something that Japanese society at large is proud of. Our children can help out and shoulder the burdens. Our children are capable.
And this is what gets us characters like Taichi, Yamato, and Aiko. Especially Aiko feels strange when you watch the show, because Ojamajo Doremi does seem to be so keenly aware of the troubles of children. Yet, while the show does criticize the father for too heavily relying on her, it does never say that he should not rely on her at all. No. It clearly says that it is good and admirable that she is cooking and doing the chores. And more than once she also learns the lesson that this is to be expected of her.
The same is with Taichi and Yamato. The series never sees a problem with their roles in their respective families. No, it is a challenge for them to grow from, rather than a case where possibly adults should be responsible.
After reading through Japanese papers on this topic, I am actually very certain on what is happening with the Yagami family. They constantly live in buildings that were explicitly built to allow young families to migrate to the city. The grandparents are very likely still around but either living in the outer edges of the city, or even rural. Yagami Yuuko will be expected as a daughter and daughter in law to commute out there to take care of those grandparents and other older relatives. Which is why she is often gone the whole day. As the oldest child Taichi will be expected to take care of everything. And he does. He is a responsible child.
Which also makes Digimon Tamers and Fresh PreCure stand out here. Because both shows actually do something similar: they call back onto the shotengai (in Fresh PreCure this is very clear, as literally the entire show takes place within the bounds of a shotengai, while for Tamers Takato's and Juri's families both have businesses within a shotengai) and the idea of communal child raising, while also explicitly calling out the parents who fail their children.
Which is actually quite interesting. Konaka in general is a writer who has to his credit called out the weird relation Japan has to children a bunch of times in his writing.
Meanwhile Fresh PreCure is interesting because, well... It was written by Maekawa, who also was one of the two lead writers on Digimon Adventure 02. And I also gotta say. While 02 never fully called out the concept as heavily as Fresh PreCure or Tamers did, it had at least some commentary on the Reliable Child archetype. Osamu was a Reliable Child. So is Ken. And meanwhile a large chunk of the 02 kids are actively younger siblings - which I think was actually intended to show those dynamics play out from a different perspective.
The Specter of the Lost Decade
Something I keep thinking about is, how a lot of those specific cultural contexts - especially back then - were never fully explained to audiences. Because anime were still made primarily with a Japanese audience in mind. And much like American shows do not explain suburbia, these things were not explained in anime back then. But as someone who has looked in from the outside.
For the anime I grew up with the Lost Decade and economic ruin is haunting the narratives. I mean, a bunch of series that were fairly beloved were almost entirely the result of that context. But even the fairly normal shows like Digimon, or Ojamajo Doremi, or Precure later on were kinda haunted by the consequences of this. And it is... interesting, to say the least.
Eh, well, tagging @firedragon1321 and @seventeenlovesthree for the Taichi love and context.
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